The stalks sigh back and forth in the wind lazily. I glance up, thinking I won’t be able to see anything at all over the tall stalks and blooming yellow petals, but there it is—my red North Star.
“See? You’re not lost,” he says matter-of-factly. He looks around, as if trying to get his bearings, and then points his flashlight behind me. “I think we go that way.”
“Away from the blinking red light?”
“Yeah, but it should curve inward in a few feet or so.”
“And then?”
Even in the darkness, I can see him smile with those blindingly white teeth. He is golden, all right. He’s perfect, even when he’s not. He can be anyone’s friend in anyone’s clique, so why does he choose to hang around losers like me? “If I told you,” he says between his grin, “it’d be ruining the surprise.”
“Fine, fine.”
The path curves left after a few feet, and then to the right. I don’t want to imagine what else is in the sunflowers with us. Wild animals—snakes, raccoons, bigfoot, children that might just belong to sunflower people . . . aliens.
Well, maybe not aliens.
And then there’s us.
“How do you know where you’re going?” I whisper.
“I’ve done this a hundred times.”
“Yeah but how do you know it’s the right way?”
He gives me one of those of-all-the-questions-to-ask-you-ask-THAT-one looks. “Ingrid Cecelia North,” he says. The syllables roll so easily off his tongue. He motions his head onward and keeps walking. “It’s an abandoned sunflower maze. It hasn’t changed in five years.”
“How do you know it’s been five?”
“Because it closed the year Dad died,” he replies without looking back.
My heart sinks. “Oh . . . I . . . I’m so sorry—”
“It still feels like yesterday, sometimes, you know? I don’t wake up and forget that he’s dead anymore, but sometimes it still surprises me. I just wake up and remember that he’s not here.” He stops at a bend and turns back to look at me. “Thanks, by the way, for back then.”
I blink at him, dumbfounded. “For what?”
His eyebrows furrow. “You don’t remember?”
“Well if you’d be more specific . . . ,” I reply, trying to think back. Billie’s dad died the year before high school. After the funeral, Billie traded his hair dye for a football jersey. He didn’t become less of a friend afterward, but…he changed. His dad was his everything. That, at least, I can understand now. If Grams died, I don’t know who I would be. Grams is my everything—my family, my history, my home.
He scrubs the back of his neck with a sigh, as if debating whether or not to tell me exactly what I did—I sort of hope he does—but he just shakes his head. “C’mon, let’s keep going. It’s a little farther.”
I have to take big strides to keep up with him. “What is?”
“Anywhere.”
It must be this particular slant of moonlight through the sunflowers, but for the first time in the history of ever, the golden boy makes my broken little heart twitch. And flutter.
Oh, bless, it must be LD’s whiskey. It’s still running rampant through me like a very, very bad decision. This entire night was a bad decision, from the cat taco sweater to getting into Billie’s gray Cadillac.
He reaches out his hand again—also a bad idea.
I take it.
The paths, now mostly overgrown with seedlings, are only visible because of the colored markers put up at every bend. But Billie’s never lost. He can make his way through the maze blindfolded, I suspect, having been here so many times he knows it better than his own hand. Traveling through the maze feels like wading through an ocean, pushing golden petals away with each breaststroke.
In a clearing, the old watchtower comes into view. It sits in the middle of the maze, wilting from disuse. A guy used to sit up there and direct people out of the maze—I can almost remember, but not quite.
“Wow,” I finally manage, “talk about a letdown.”
“We’re not there yet,” he insists, and—and begins climbing the tower. Like literally climbing it.
I rush up to the base. He’s already ten feet up, so I can’t very well pull him down. “What the hell are you doing? Have you gone absolutely bonkers? Bless!”
He reaches a spot where he can’t go any higher and looks over to the other pole. He reaches, and dear od my heart stops as he hurtles himself over to another footing, and keeps climbing. Like a monkey.
Like a freaking monkey.
As he nears the top, I begin to wonder—really wonder—what in the world he’s doing. He shimmies up into the watchtower’s roost. “Heads up!” he calls, and a moment later the retractable ladder comes spiraling down. It slams into the ground with a hard thunk. “Climb up!”
I hesitate. “Um, that’s kinda high.”
“And?”
“And if you haven’t noticed, I’m more of a ground type of person.”
He pops his head over the ledge. “Just come on, North, and stop being a baby. You said anywhere.”
Scowling, I pull up my cat taco sleeves and begin the ascent. “I don’t think it means what you think it means,” I mutter to myself.
“Inconceivable!” he crows from the top.
He helps me the last few steps because they’re pretty tricky, but by the time I’m up on the landing, I almost don’t care that we’re fifty feet in the air. Almost.
The view is breathtaking. Half a mile of sunflowers stretches out in front of us, slowly fading into the town of Steadfast. First dark, blocky houses, but then brighter ones lit by streetlights. From here I can see down Main Street all the way to the square where a gazebo sits, decorated with strands of lights. Past the square are more houses, and then rising up behind them is my red North Star.
I stare in awe.
“Hey, come sit back here,” Billie’s voice interrupts. I look behind me.
There’s a blanket spread out on the wooden floor, along with a bag of Twizzlers and a Diet Coke. I move to sit down on it so I don’t get splinters in my butt, and he comes to sit beside me.
“Sorry I only had one Coke. I usually come up here alone,” he says apologetically, opening the Diet Coke. “However, sharing Twizzlers straws is optional.”
“Always with your Twizzlers.”
“Some things never change,” he replies, wagging the pack at me.
“I guess not.” I choose one from the bag and put it into the Coke bottle like a straw. “You come up here alone?”
He does the same. “Yeah, when things get too noisy. It’s pretty quiet up here. No one bothers me.” He shrugs. “And I feel closer to Dad up here.”
His dad—the guy who used to watch over the people in the sunflower maze, to keep them from getting lost. He used to be the one up here. A chill prickles my skin, but I rub it away. “Do Micah and LD know about this place?”
“Nah. I mean, you know about as much as the rest of them.” He takes a sip from the bottle and bites off a piece of the straw. “I guess you’re the first one I've brought here.”
I stare down at my Twizzler, rolling it between my thumb and first finger. He waits for me to explain. “I don't get it sometimes. We all call each other best friends, but then why don’t we know this stuff about each other? Will it just be worse after graduation, when people like you don’t have a reason to hang out with people like me anymore?”
He jerks his head toward me like I've slapped him. “What do you mean? You think I’m forcing myself to be friends with you? I—”
“Billie, please stop,” I cut him off. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that if we never sat at the same table in kindergarten, would we all still be friends? Truthfully? Could you picture you—star running back, football scholarship, valedictorian—hanging out with the loner, the weirdo, or the basket case?”
He huffs, frustrated. “What is this, a John Hughes movie? I don’t see any of you like that.”
“You don’t have to. The rest of the world already does.”
He opens his mouth to argue.
“Why did you stop dyeing your hair, Billie? Why did you try out for the football team? You hated football. You hated conformity. What happened to all of your “Avenge Sevenfold” T-shirts? Your studded bracelets? The gages? Remember the gages?”
He tries to say something—anything—but then he closes his mouth. Opens it. Closes it. Like a fish on a dry dock, gasping for the right thing to say. No, maybe not right, maybe just the best. He’s trying to find the best thing to say.
“I…wanted a change,” he finally manages.
“Why?” Maybe if I were different, Micah would see me differently. Maybe Billie had the right idea, changing who he was to fit in. Maybe the trick to life is just filing yourself down, layer by layer, until you fit the mold.
“Ingrid…”
“Never mind, just forget about it. It’s stupid, because it all worked for you, didn’t it? You became popular, you get to leave Steadfast, go somewhere else—see the world. While I . . . I . . .” I remember Grams, curled up in the recliner, the colors from Jeopardy painting her face yellow and orange. “I need to get home. I’m sorry.” Crawling to the edge of the watchtower, I find my footing and start climbing down.
“Wait—North, wait please.” He starts to follow. “I’ll drive you home.”
“I can walk. It’s not far.” It’s the only good thing about Steadfast—everything you could ever want (and some stuff you don’t) is within walking distance. “I just need to go home.”
He looks over the edge, biting his bottom lip like he does when he wants to hide his emotions, and doesn’t follow.
I reach the bottom and set out through the maze, keeping my eyes trained on the blinking red star above me. It’ll lead me where I need to go. To the only place where I really want to be.
It takes me awhile, but I reach the radio station. The spare key’s under the door where Mick always leaves it, and I go inside. It’s four in the morning when I crash onto the red sofa outside the recording booth. Soft rock plays from the night's preset auto shuffle and fills the room with a certain kind of silence that only the Rolling Stones can bring, about not always getting what you want but getting what you need.
And I think, just before I drift off to sleep, what a load of crap that is.