1st Five Pages May Workshop - Miles

Name: Melissa Miles
Genre: Middle Grade contemporary
Title: Carina of the Southern Sky

If I could remember more about the night Mama got taken away, I wouldn't be so scared all the time. There's only one thing that calms the heart-hammering fear when it crashes over me. I have to find my star in the sky—it's the one constant thing in my life now—forever shimmering up there just waiting for me to claim as my own.  

Then it hit me—right in the middle of my foster parents’ “back to school” pep talk. Even that star wasn’t really mine. It was just as fake as everything else in my life. Fake home. Fake family. Fake everything. I choked on a sob. “Excuse me,” I said. The sound of my chair scraping the floor grated in my ears, but I barely noticed I was moving. 

“Carina,” Jodie called to my back. I didn’t answer. The screen door slammed behind me. I heard Andy’s voice say, “Give her a minute.”

Without a backward glance, I walked far enough to clear the landscaping shrubs and concrete walk before dropping onto the lawn. My head was spinning, and my heart was pounding, but I forced my eyes up to the night sky. What seemed like millions of stars twinkled through drifting clouds. “Hey up there,” I said to the clouds. “I’m drifting too.” 

I blinked back tears remembering all the nights Mama and I had sprawled out in our yard back home and pointed into the dark night, trying to be the first one to holler, "There she is! Carina of the Southern sky!" 

At the thought of her, all the annoying babyish things Mama used to say to me played back in my head. Don't ever ask a woman if she's expecting a baby. Don't lick your fingers when you're eating. For heaven's sake, Carina, don't tell your teacher that you don't have a father. Of course you have a father—he's just not around anymore. Even though I'd been real irritated back when she’d said those things, it didn't make the missing her go away now. Nothing did.

The door creaked open on the porch behind me. "Carina, come on in now. It's getting late. Tomorrow's a big day." 

I didn't move. The clouds had kept me from finding my star. I had to lay my eyes on it before I went back into that crowded house. I just had to.

"Carina, honey. Did you hear me?" 

I knew I couldn't ignore Jodie forever. I took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. "Can I have just a few more minutes?" I squeezed as much polite as I possibly could into my voice. 

"What're you doing out there anyway?" 

I rolled over onto my belly to see Jodie squinting at me in the semi-darkness of the porch light. Her face was dotted with freckles when you looked at her up close, but from here it looked like solid white marble—she almost glowed in the dark. 

"I'm looking for my star, that's all. The one I was named for." There wasn’t any reason to tell her that wasn’t actually possible to see Carina from the Northern Hemisphere. What’re the chances she’d know that, anyway?

Jodie tilted her head to the side and smiled at me. "I guess it's alright. But just for a few more minutes. There's no need in you being tired out for your first day of school tomorrow."

Not trusting my voice to come out steady, I waved to let her know I’d heard. 

When the screen door didn't squeak shut, I sat up and faced the house. Jodie was still standing there on the porch looking out at me. Her marble face had creased into worry lines. 

"I'm fine, I promise. I just need to put my eyes on it once tonight before I have to go to bed. It's this thing I have to calm me down." That part was true. My heart was already feeling like it fit inside my ribs again. 

She paused on the top step. Her face softened. "Just don't be too long, okay?"

"I won't." 

I flattened back out on the grass and tried to figure out where I'd left off. Even with the clouds wandering past, the sky was scattered with more specks of light down here in South Georgia than I'd ever seen in Atlanta. I forced myself to tune out everything else—the chirp of crickets, the dampness of the ground under my back, and even my fear of snakes. 

When I was a little kid, I’d asked Mama to show me the star I’d been named for. She had pointed to the North Star and told me it was Carina, and I’d bought it—hook, line and sinker. I completely believed I was finding my actual star all those nights, until third grade when Billy Prater announced during science that I was wrong. Even then, I’d said, “Shut up, moron!” But Mr. Pridgen told me Billy was actually correct, and asked me to apologize. I did, but I sure didn’t like it. I’d stuck my tongue out at Billy behind the teacher’s back to let him know my apology didn’t count. 

Now, I just pretend The North Star is Carina. I finally found “Carina”—shimmering like she was wiggling on purpose to grab my attention. Here I am! Up here, waiting to calm you down. Even though it made no sense, the knot in my stomach loosened when I saw her sparkling up there in the sky. I wondered if Mama could see the sky too. Maybe we were looking at the same sky—just like we used to. Mama suddenly felt closer to me than she really was. Not fifty miles away locked up in a place where she couldn’t come and take me back home like I knew she wanted to. 

When I walked into the large open kitchen, Jodie winked at me. "Find what you were looking for?" She was wiping down the long wooden table that held all of us for meal times. 

I nodded, afraid to say anything—knowing that I couldn't control the shaky way my voice gets when I'm about to cry. 

She seemed to understand, because she didn't push me to answer like she sometimes does. She just walked right over to me, and gave me a pat on the arm. That's what Jodie does when she doesn't know what else to do. "Maybe you could show me sometime. I'd like to see it."

"See what?" Her son, Greg had been in the middle of watching a cartoon, so I hadn't thought he was even listening. In a house full of kids it's impossible to have a private conversation. That's one of the first things I'd learned when I came here. 

Jodie waved her hand at him. "Nothing for you to worry about, honey." She glanced down at her watch and then back at her son. "Five minutes till bedtime now, y'hear?"

He nodded and focused his eyes back on the screen without another word. 

"Okay, I'll show you sometime," I said.

Jodie's eyes found mine again. They were kind of unfocused at first. Sometimes she got so distracted with all the kids in the house, she'd lose track of who she was talking to and what she'd been talking about. But she must have remembered this time, because she said, "That'll be real nice. What I know about stars would fit in a thimble."