A Sky Full of Stars Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  A Letter to Benjamin

  Part One: Eric

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  A Brief History Lesson – 2 Years Ago

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  A Brief History Lesson – 18 Months Ago

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  A Brief History Lesson – 8 Months Ago

  Chapter Seven

  Part 2: Bay

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  A Brief History Lesson -6 Months Ago

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three: Benjamin

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Brief History Lesson – 5 Years Ago

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Brief History Lesson – 2 Weeks Ago

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  A SKY FULL OF STARS

  Melissa Josias

  © Melissa Josias 2017

  Melissa Josias has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  Translation rights belong to The Buckman Agency.

  First published 2017 by The Odyssey Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Dedication

  To my parents,

  For everything, literally.

  Acknowledgments

  My first acknowledgement page. How cool is this? I have a small group of people that I must mention. A very big thank you to my parents, who stuck this out with me for so long. This was always the dream, and thank you for keeping me alive while I made it come true.

  Also, my sisters, Shireen and Nicole, who have forever been my biggest supporters and still cheer me on every step of the way. Love you guys.

  *

  To my wonderful agent, Peter Buckman, without whom this would not be possible. You’ve championed me and this book from the very beginning, and I’m eternally grateful for your guidance, support, and determination throughout this entire process. (Also, for graciously tending to my emails when I was feeling nervous, forgotten and slightly hysterical when there were long bouts of silence. I know now that things take time.) You gave me a fighting chance. Thank you for everything.

  *

  Then finally, to anyone who identifies with the lost and broken characters in this book, whose light sometimes is not enough to fend off the darkness. Chin up, even if it trembles. Deep breath, even if it’s shaky. Be brave. You have it in you. I know it.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  A Letter to Benjamin

  Part One: Eric

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  A Brief History Lesson – 2 Years Ago

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  A Brief History Lesson – 18 Months Ago

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  A Brief History Lesson – 8 Months Ago

  Chapter Seven

  Part 2: Bay

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  A Brief History Lesson -6 Months Ago

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three: Benjamin

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Brief History Lesson – 5 Years Ago

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Brief History Lesson – 2 Weeks Ago

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Prologue

  What’s the worst thing you can remember seeing as an eleven-year-old?

  For me, it was watching Morgan Müller propel herself off a freeway bridge straight into the start of rush-hour traffic on a Wednesday afternoon. As you can imagine, she was quite a spectacular sight. I had up until that point never seen anything so jarring, so precise in its intention, and I have never seen anything like it since.

  As with most things, it starts with Benjamin Southey calling out my name while standing out on the slip of pavement that boarded our backyard. We had not yet seen each other that day, since I had stayed home from school to recover from the last bout of flu that had kept me off my feet for almost a week. I was halfway through the stack of books my father had picked out from the public library for my few days at home, but when Ben called out to me like a siren, the backs of my ears prickled like he was blowing his breath onto my neck.

  “Abernathy!”

  There was something mesmeric about the way Ben used his voice, even at age thirteen. He curved his syllables at just the right moment, dominated the inflections to suit the mood. During afternoons at his house, while we ate peanut butter sandwiches his mother had made us, he’d tell me about what happened during rugby practice or math class, using wild hand gestures and making sound effects with his mouth. As an eleven-year-old girl I could have cared less about either of those things, but he was speaking and I could do nothing but listen. This was, in essence, what our friendship was like at the time.

  Back at my own house, I exhaled a hot breath, sat up from my bed, and listened again.

  My name echoed through my window and fell apart letter by letter onto my bedroom carpet. I walked, soft footed, toward the window and snuck a look through the blinds. I found Ben standing on the other side of our back gate, not being able to stand still. He was still wearing his rugby shorts and cleats, and he’d pulled a jersey over his shirt. I watched him pace for a few seconds, wondering whether or not it would be okay to hug him in my state.

  “Abby!” He called out again, this time with more urgency.

  I sped out of my bedroom and through the kitchen, past my older sister reading magazines at the kitchen table, until I reached my best friend in the backyard. I stared at him through the slots of the wooden fence my father had erected several years earlier, when it became apparent that, as a toddler, I liked to wander around the neighbourhood by myself.

  The late afternoon was still bright and the sun had not yet touched my skin.

  “What?” I implored, standing on my tiptoes to reach the latch on the back gate, swinging it open. “What’s the matter?”

  Ben’s face lit up bright, eyes big and mouth open, ready to speak. “You have to come see this. Right now, Abs. Come on.”

  He was holding out his hand to me, an invitation to reveal myself to the day and show the world that I had made it through the night. He had dirt under his fingernails. His left wrist was scratched red.

  I took a small step toward him. “Is it okay if I get my hoodie? I think I might get cold.”

  Benjamin closed the gap between us. His hand found mine. Fingers impatient and clammy. “There’s no time.”

  He pulled me out of the backyard.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  We hurried down the street. Our feet fumbled on the pavement, my shoes making dull slaps on the ground. Ben’s cleats crackled and made sounds my ears were not accustomed to.

  “I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving. Ben!”

  We turned the corner and lost sight of my house. Ben was still holding my hand, as if he didn’t trust that I would follow if he let me go. The truth was that I would have followed him anywhere.

  He wasn’t talking much, which was strange, and the way he was moving so quickly told me that something important was happening, somewhere. As he whisked me through the street, I looked around for signs, for anything that would let me in on his little secret. As we passed, I noticed that a
ll our neighbours had their doors closed, despite the hour and the heat. Did that mean something? Was it terribly unusual for a Wednesday afternoon? Mr. Manuel’s sprinkler was ticking back and forth in his front garden, creating rainbows in mid air. A stray dog ambled lazily across the road, stopping to scratch at fleas by its ear. As far as I could tell, Benjamin and I were the only people outside.

  “Benji, I want to know what’s going on.”

  Benjamin finally stopped. We’d reached the end of our neighbourhood, the lines of houses thinning out slowly this close to the freeway. The district was closed off by ugly, vertical cement columns that needed to be replaced every year. It felt strange to be in this part of the neighbourhood; Benjamin and I never came this way.

  I could hear the cars on the freeway, going this way and that. Tyres on asphalt. Engines roaring. Zoom. Whoosh.

  Ben was peering off toward the road. I blinked through the low hanging sun. I could make out children from our street standing together, lined up with their backs toward us. I recognized a few from school, huddled together at the end of the line. Some of them were still in their school uniforms, white shirts crumpled and loose around their trousers. There were twelve, maybe fifteen of us standing there watching. I could hear faint murmurs, voices low like they were sharing a secret and I was just meant to catch up at some point.

  “What’s everyone looking at?” I asked Ben, looking across the lanes of speeding cars to see if I could find the cause of everyone’s fascination. Ben let go of my hand. The warmth of his fingers dissipated into the air.

  “Look.” He said, pointing toward the overpass bridge that stretched across the highway. His finger was shaking; his hand, his entire arm.

  I traced the trajectory of his finger. I couldn’t see what it was at first; the sun was glowing in my periphery. Then, when I saw her, hanging over the side of the bridge like she was about to take an Olympic dive into a swimming pool, the muscles in my body went incredibly stiff and all the moisture in my mouth disappeared.

  “Who is that?” I asked, squinting to get a better look. “Is that Morgan?” I said, even though she was the only person I knew who had hair that red. It was all I could see, her hair whipping wildly around her face. I thought it looked like the wind was protesting.

  “She’s going to jump.” Ben said, eyes fixed on the girl that we didn’t really know that well, even though she only lived a few houses away from both of us. She was seventeen, practically an adult, but we knew her. We knew her enough.

  “We have to stop her.” I said when I could, when I didn’t think my voice would cower anymore.

  “She’s going to jump.” Ben said again.

  “Someone should do something.”

  “She’s going to jump.”

  I didn’t think that she would. I was eleven. My brain didn’t work that way yet. I had assumed that some kid I hadn’t noticed had run off to find a grown-up and yell that there was a girl on the bridge and that it looked like she was going to jump and would they call for help as soon as they could. Ask them to drive really fast. With the sirens on. We didn’t need this trauma. Hurry.

  No one ran. No one called. We were all just standing there, waiting for her to do it. We collectively held our breaths. We stopped blinking. We became accomplices.

  I wanted her to change her mind. To step back over the ledge, fix her hair, go home. I wanted to walk back home with Benjamin, mad at him for bringing me to witness this, for stealing a part of my innocence even though nothing really happened.

  I wanted it to be a regular Wednesday afternoon, to wait for my father to come home from work, to help my mother heat up our dinner and flick rice grains at my sister’s head while we watched TV.

  But then Morgan did it. It happened really slowly, like in the movies, like time had stood still and our bodies had gotten caught in the inertia. I felt the earth slow, felt gravity loosen its grip on us.

  First, her hands let go of the barrier. Her arms stretched out, incredibly graceful. We all let out one quick gasp. Ben grabbed hold of my hand again. His fingers didn’t feel warm anymore.

  Then, she was in mid air. Only this lasted for five seconds, tops, before she wasn’t anymore. She fell like she’d been anchored to the ground all along.

  The string of children broke, all moving closer to the fenced-off partition to catch a final glimpse of her. Reality snapped back fiercely like an elastic band.

  Chaos ensued. Car hooters blared. Tyres screeched. Metal on metal as drivers tried to avoid hitting the body that fell from the sky.

  “Fuck.” Ben muttered, the first time I had ever heard him swear. He tried to move closer to the others, to get a better look, but I refused to let him. I anchored myself to the ground; held onto his hand as tightly as I could.

  “Abby, let me see.”

  “No.”

  They were all looking, standing next to each other with their fingers through the gaps in the fence like prisoners. A boy I didn’t recognise was throwing up in a bush, weak. Someone else yelled to him in Afrikaans, a warning to not get any vomit on his shoes. I turned my back on all of them, closing my eyes, waiting for Benjamin to decide when it was time to go.

  Fireworks were going off in my belly. I felt ruined.

  “We have to go tell someone.” Ben said finally. I opened my eyes. When I turned to look at him, I could see the last moments of a young girl dancing on his eyelashes.

  He made a move to walk, but I stood firm. I dropped his hand.

  “Are you coming?” He asked, using that voice again.

  I took a breath and spoke at the same time. “Why did you come fetch me to see this?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you want me to see it?”

  His eyes moved behind me to the destruction of what had happened. They flickered back to me seconds later. I didn’t want to know what he’d seen. “I don’t know.” His voice shook at the end. He tried to cover it up by scuffing his cleat on the ground and shrugging. “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head at him and shut my eyes tight. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  My mouth tasted like copper, like I’d stuck a five-cent coin under my tongue. Pins and needles marched across my chest. I felt like I had no knees at all.

  I could hear faint sounds coming from the highway: voices and car engines and the wind.

  “Abby?”

  I kept my eyes closed and lowered myself to the ground. “Wait a minute.”

  I felt Benjamin move closer to me. His hand emerged on my elbow. “Abby?”

  I opened my eyes and looked at him. “What?”

  “Don’t be mad, okay?”

  His voice was like syrup, trickling down my shoulder. “Okay.”

  He smiled at me. I felt better. Benjamin lowered himself down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. I let his body warm me, waiting for the fireworks to fizzle out.

  “I’m sorry, Abs.”

  We sat there for maybe a half hour, our backs to where Morgan freed herself of her demons, until the sounds of sirens echoed through our streets, until parents found their children huddled together in the late afternoon sun, having witnessed something terrible.

  Benjamin walked me home afterward, strong and silent, and made sure I was safe behind the back gate before turning to leave for his house. I stood in the backyard to watch him go, but he lingered near the pavement, his thoughts manifesting outside of his body. “Abs?”

  “What?”

  He smiled sadly. “Don’t you think, just for a second there...” he said, as shadows slowly started to creep in between us, “...she actually looked like she was flying?”

  Ben and I never went back to that spot, and for weeks the story of Morgan Müller remained in and around the neighbourhood, like a ghost. For many nights after the incident, I would lie in bed and listen to the sounds of the cars on the freeway and would have nightmares about a girl with red hair after I fell asleep.

  By the time I turned seventeen, I hardly thought about
Morgan anymore. I moved on with my life, never imagining that her suicide would be a harbinger of my own troubles. But during that year, when I was younger than she was when she threw herself off a bridge with children as an audience, on an inconspicuous day while standing in the canned food aisle of a Woolworth’s store, I felt – for the first time in my entire life – inexplicably exhausted from being alive.

  A Letter to Benjamin

  Benjamin Southey

  37 Candlewood Road

  Monte Vista

  7490

  Cape Town

  South Africa

  Benji,

  Please don’t be mad at me for this. I wanted to call you, but I knew if I heard your voice I wouldn’t be brave enough to even speak. This is hard for me. You must know this.

  When it came down to it, everything I owned could be put away into four boxes. For someone who’s been alive for so long, you’d think I’d have accumulated more stuff. Maybe subconsciously I knew that I had to live this way because it would be easier in the end. Four boxes, though. That surprised even me.

  I’m leaving, Ben, because I have to. I truly don’t know how to explain it to you. I’ve tried to convince myself that it would be easier to stay, to carry on pretending that home is where I want to be, but the pain of leaving is less than the pain of staying. I’ve never really felt like I belonged there, like it was where I needed to be. I was almost constantly wishing that I was somewhere else, and I think that alone should say something.

  I know we don’t see the world the same, and you might consider this choice as naive or cowardly. Maybe it is. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve never felt so compelled to do something in my entire life. I’ve been preparing for this for years. It is a must. An absolutely. A cannot not.

  Try to understand that all I want to do is to stop being so goddamn ordinary, to just live for the smallest amount of time I have left. I can count on one hand the times I felt like I truly lived, and none of them even lasted for more than an hour.

  When I was younger, and you know this, I used to dream a lot. I dreamt of sitting on planes and flying to different countries. I dreamt of falling in love. I dreamt of adventure.