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Your Eyes in Stars

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

I didn't believe anyone was actually afraid of the prison. When kids were little, along with spankings, they'd get warnings they were going to end up there if they didn't behave. But nobody in town really feared the place. That's what I thought.

You saw the prison before you saw the town. It looked like a fort sprawled across eighteen acres on Retribution Hill. It was a small city itself, surrounded by a wall thirty feet high and ringed by guards in sentry boxes at the top. They were ready with high-powered rifles. But after my father became warden, townspeople commented that it seemed more like a prep school than a penitentiary. The black-and-white striped uniforms were changed to light-blue ones. The prison band named The Blues became famous in Cayuta County, often appearing in public at Joyland Park in Cayuta or during local parades down Main Street. More and more people didn't say the prison; it began to be called The Hill.

All the other kids who had fathers or mothers working at the prison went four years to Cayuta High West and took courses like Shop and Motor Repair, Typing and Shorthand. At Cayuta High East, where my brother and I were sent, we learned Latin and geometry, French and English composition. After High West you got a job; after High East you went to college.

Three years before, when we first arrived in Cayuta from Elmira Reformatory, my mother reigned over the wives of guards and groundskeepers like a queen. It took her a while to realize this town was different. Prison people weren't high-class. In this town she wasn't royalty of any kind in the eyes of the community. She was nothing, though she herself had said sometimes she felt like "next to nothing," never missing an opportunity to take a step up.

My dad was not a golfer, and he wasn't a sailor, so we Myrers weren't members of the country club or the yacht club. Oh, that wasn't the only reason we weren't. Both my brother and I realized that, and so did my mother. If my father was aware of it, it didn't faze him.

At High East, my brother, Seth, had no problem getting along since he had a build for both basketball and football. He also had a fan, one of those kids who trailed after him and was the only other person in town besides my mother who cut out of the newspapers all the write-ups about him on the sports page of The Cayuta Advertizer. His name was Richard Nolan, and he was my buddy too. We hung out at lunch, eating our sandwiches in the parking lot or on cold days on the stairs near the gym.

Sometimes when Richard was sick or had to go to the orthodontist in nearby Syracuse, New York, I'd walk down Retribution Hill and eat lunch at home.

I'd tell him, "Mother thinks I won't eat in the cafeteria because the Chi Pis snub me." I called those sorority girls the Cowpies.

"Tell her you're just not gregarious. That's a good word, gregarious."

Richard could always tell you what you were or weren't; he prided himself on being a wordsmith.

Rumor had it that J. J. Joy, president of Chi Theta Pi, had called me "tacky" and fought for a 100-percent blackball of me. She'd said I should have gone to High West with others like me.

Richard blamed her blackball of me on her father's rule that she could not date until she was seventeen.

"It's made her bitter and mean," he said.

Over and over Richard and I would moan to each other: "What's to become of us?" Richard wanted to be a writer, which his father said was "a limpwrist ambition." Seth said limpwrist meant "effeminate," and Richard should ask his father how effeminate he thought Rudyard Kipling was or Jack London. . . . Still, I didn't have a clue what would become of me. Maybe I would end up living with my parents like Marlene Hellman, and everyone talked about it. Everyone called her Mayonnaise and said she would always be a child, even though she worked at the telephone company and was a champion bridge player.

I had just finished writing in my diary: "Suicide would be the answer if it wasn't so hard and painful to do." I didn't really mean it. I hadn't even figured out a way to do it. But it gave me a certain satisfaction to record the thought. Diaries aren't meant for good tidings.

That was the day and the very moment when everything about my boring life would change. This was when my mother called up to me, "Jess? Our neighbor Elisa Stadler is on her way up to your room."

The emphasis was on the last name, Stadler. It was a new name to my mother, and already the sound of it was filled with awe and portent.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Your Eyes in Stars by M. Kerr Copyright © 2006 by M. Kerr. Excerpted by permission.
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