Secret Star by Nancy Springer Page B

musician.”
    â€œPlayed piano in a bar.” He said it without a hint of put-down, and she had a kind of flash, almost a vision, of a little boy sitting right under the piano, awash in the music, feeling it, breathing it, and how melodies must have come down like thundershowers, and how big and wonderful that piano-playing daddy must have seemed.
    â€œThen—your mother left him, or he left her—”
    â€œRight. One of those things.”
    â€œAnd—you never saw him again.”
    â€œSince I was five. Right.”
    There were questions she didn’t want to ask, but he heard them in her silence.
    â€œThe way my stepfather was, Tess—it was no damn wonder my father never came to see me.”
    But the father should have been there. He shouldn’t have left his son to a stepfather who beat him. It was illogical that Kam could forgive his father for doing nothing when he blamed his mother for the same thing.
    Kam said, “I’m scared I’m gonna find out he’s dead. Nothing left but a white wooden cross along some roadside, where he drove himself into some ditch, the way he used to drink. But then—I’m scared I’m gonna find him still around, and he just didn’t care.” His voice was going thin. “Dead would be better.”
    So he did think about it.
    They didn’t say much the rest of the way back. She could have told him about Butch, but she never thought of it; Butch wasn’t important. She’d handled him. Far up a hillside she heard a deep-voiced owl crooning, and far down the creek bottom a fox yipped, singing high and thin as a new moon.
    By the time they reached the Mathis place the cloudy sky was starting to lighten from black to rainy gray. At the edge of the backyard Kam faced her.
    â€œKamo,” she whispered, “please stay.”
    In the quicksilver dawn light she could see him looking back at her. For some reason he seemed afraid, as if she could do something to him. Didn’t he know she would never hurt him?
    â€œJust a few more days,” she begged.
    She saw his jaw tighten. But he nodded.
    â€œDon’t go without telling me.”
    He nodded again. It was a promise.
    It rained all that day. Tess got soaking wet hiking to the IGA after school.
    She walked in, and Butch looked straight at her and said, “Bitch.”
    She didn’t care. She was so falling-down tired from being up half the night that she could barely keep moving. She was too tired to do anything about Butch, even if she knew what to do.
    â€œI’ll get you, bitch,” he said to her, low and mean, when nobody was listening. “No slut disses me. I’ll get your snotty ass.”
    All through shift he was like that. During break she couldn’t go outside to get away from him, because it was raining. Yawning, she went up front to look at the Rolling Stone special issue on Crux.
    She was dreaming about Crux wild-haired on a faraway mountaintop, under a shadowy moon, singing rhythm and blues with the wolves, when somebody grabbed her nasty-hard by the arm. “Bitch,” somebody hissed in her ear.
    Tess knew who it was. She yanked her arm out of his grip, whirled around, and caught him by the front of his shirt. All of a sudden she had her energy back and she was blazing mad. She got a fistful of shirt and hauled him close to her face so she could make an impression on him without yelling. “Butch,” she told him very softly and sweetly, “you are being a colossal jerk. Let me alone.”
    He tore away, ripping his shirt. His face had gone clay white. “You are gonna die,” he said, his voice choked as if she had strangled him. His hand shot to his pants pocket.
    Tess heard jeering. Looking in the plate-glass window were half a dozen guys, high-school kids she recognized, Butch’s friends. Butch had been trying to show off in front of them, apparently, and they were yowling and meowing and