Page 23 of With Stars in Her Eyes

Courtney

When the bell over the bookstore door jingled, I didn’t look up because I had my driver’s license out on the counter to fill out a form for my car.

After I finished double-checking the numbers I had written out, my attention lifted to find Thea grinning at me.

My heart did a quick do-si-do inside my chest before returning to where it should be.

“You’re back.” Before I could think about it, I came around the desk and grabbed her in a hug.

“I’m back,” she said with a puff of breath that ruffled my hair.

I might have held her for a little too long because I was distracted by how good she smelled. Her sleeveless dress revealed how tan she had gotten at the beach. Spring had come all of a sudden a few days ago, but we were in a characteristic Kansas summer tease with this strange April heat wave.

Sam and I had been working around the clock the last couple weeks to finish a labor-intensive store inventory while the store’s computer systems got a major refresh.

Every spare moment had been spent on a midnight release party for a big-name title.

Because my hours were all over the place, we had only gotten one lunch together since the day we cleaned out the storage space before she left for her trip.

The distraction from feeling her soft skin against mine meant I forgot I was holding my license, which clattered to the ground and slid under a display table. “ Shit .”

Before I could stop her, Thea was on her hands and knees reaching under the table for the laminated card.

“Your name is Courtney Dove ?” Thea quirked an eyebrow at my license. “Cute.”

I grimaced before I could stop myself.

Thea flinched. “Sorry, I should have asked before looking—”

“No, no. It’s okay.” I almost downplayed it. I almost shut down the conversation completely about why hearing the name Dove made my skin crawl a little. But Nic was right. If I liked Thea, I needed to let her in.

Based on how much I missed her when she was gone, I knew what I wanted, and this was a reasonable place to start to “open up” like Nic suggested.

“For the record, my parents insisted they’d never heard of Hole. They did however mainly call me Dove for my entire childhood.”

“They called you Dove? Just Dove?”

“Yep. Because Doves are so meek and quiet and godly.”

“Gross.”

“Quite. Give me one sec.” I tapped out numbers on my laptop and submitted the online form. “Done.”

“Your reading taste is hardly meek.” Thea picked up a book from the featured romance table and then set it back down. It was one of the ones I had loaned her. “This one had me blushing.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m still confused about the logistics in that last scene.” Thea flipped through the pages of the book, then set it down.

“Pirates are very flexible.”

“From all the swashbuckling.”

“Exactly. Swashbuckling .”

“Fuck, I don’t even know what you’re implying that means, but it still sounds so dirty.”

I laughed. But before I could make the flirty reply I wanted to, the BookTots group arrived in a chaos army of strollers and baby carriers for their lunch story time, so I kept the conversation less laced with innuendo.

Thea pulled a bag from my favorite local sandwich place out from her bag. “Any chance you have time? I should have called here first, but I got excited when I saw you walk by outside Squid earlier.”

“It’s actually kind of crazy here today, but—”

“Definitely go eat,” Sam called out from where she was corralling the toddlers and their mothers in the children’s section.

“Darla just punched in, so she can watch the counter during story time. But I think Rhonda’s still on a call with a publisher about an event in the office.

Why don’t you go eat in Thea’s little storage space? ”

I was torn between exasperation and gratefulness at Sam’s low-key meddling, but Thea seemed pleased. “Perfect.” She folded the top of the sandwich bag.

We headed outside, around the building, and up the little stairway.

She unlocked the door and led me around the stacks of boxes to a futon by the window.

“Sorry it’s still a disaster. I’ve been mostly working in there.

” Thea pointed to the door that led to the space that once was the janitor’s closet.

“But I did find this thing at a thrift store on my drive back last weekend.” She sat and patted the seat beside her.

Thea dragged over a box and unwrapped the sandwich. I grabbed my half and then pulled off the peppers and placed them on Thea’s half of the wrapper.

“I’m sorry. I asked for no peppers on half, but I didn’t check it.”

“This is great. If you do that, how would you get your extra peppers?” I grinned. “And I like the little flavoring from it but hate the texture.”

“I guess this arrangement works perfectly, then.” Thea dumped half the bag of kettle chips on her half of the wrapper and the other half on mine.

“I guess it sure does.”

After a few bites Thea studied my face. “So what’s the deal with your parents? I feel like all the hints and now the Dove thing I’ve gotten have been just making me want to know more. But I don’t want to pry if it’s too personal or too hard to talk about.”

I straightened my shoulders like an Olympic athlete about to take the plunge off a high dive. “It’s just a long story.”

“I have time… if you want to talk about it. I’m not actually working today. Just had a staff meeting. I’ll just be working on this for the rest of the day.” Thea swept a hand over the piles of boxes.

I organized my potato chips in two piles, whole chips and pieces. “My family’s sort of fucked up. It’s a little embarrassing.”

“Whose isn’t?” Thea frowned. “I don’t mean that in a way to minimize your shit. I just mean… well, you spent a day cleaning out a giant storage closet because I clearly have some baggage from my family.”

My eyes darted over the tall stacks of boxes.

Thea chuckled. “Sorry. Pun not intended.” She seemed to need to do something with her hands, because she reached behind her and took her hair out of a bun and then twisted it back up again.

“I meant that I’m not going to judge you for it, if that’s what’s stopping you.

But sometimes… sometimes I get the feeling someone needs to talk about something.

It happens when I read tarot cards for people.

I used to do that sometimes on the side while I was in college.

Oooh…” Thea lit up like an idea had come to her and gave the mass-market paperback in her pocket a tiny tap. “If it’s easier, pretend it’s a book.”

“What?” I snorted.

“Once upon a time…”

After a long look at Thea, partially getting lost in her chocolate-brown eyes and partially trying to gauge if she was serious, I spoke.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl her parents called Little Dove who might have been pathologically small for her age according to one pediatrician. In Little Dove’s bio years later, they said she could play several instruments before she learned how to read. ”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “That’s what my bio said.” I had no idea whether any of that was true. “She also learned how to pack a suitcase efficiently before she learned how to ride a bike. That part I remember.”

Thea nodded.

“One day, the little girl’s aunt told her she was smarter than either of her parents.

A five-year-old doesn’t really understand what that means, but she still filed the fact away in case she needed it later.

But she always thought about it any time her parents told her there was something she couldn’t do.

” I paused. There were so many memories of dragging my small suitcase and tower of instrument cases through an endless succession of short-term rentals or rooms lent out by church members.

Thea didn’t tell me to hurry up or get to the point. She listened. She also didn’t seem fazed when I needed to avoid eye contact in order to think. My parents had hated it when I avoided eye contact. They said I was either being disrespectful or lying.

“So Luke, Diane, and their Little Dove performed across the US at conferences and revivals and ‘wherever the Spirit led them.’ The Spirit being a convenient euphemism for the large amount of money megachurches in the nineties were willing to spend on putting on a show. The end.”

“What would you tell Little Dove right now if you could tell her something?”

This was not the question I expected.

“What would I tell her?”

Probably something cliché like “Stop being afraid to be yourself. To be Courtney.”

I spent years with everyone around me forgetting my name was Courtney at all, and never acknowledging that the little girl they were controlling had a whole self beneath the costume they were forcing me into.

Little Dove was “discovered” at age eight.

She wore bubblegum-pink dresses and pigtails and released two studio Christian albums and one Christmas compilation with a large gospel record label before she was a teenager.

She had been told the albums went gold but never saw a dime of that money.

The songs hadn’t been hers. That life hadn’t been one she had chosen.

Even in my memories, Dove felt like an automaton, not a person.

Every memory of my overchoreographed performances made something inside me shrivel.

Despite how hard I worked to be what they wanted me to be, reviews called my preteen solo performances stiff, robotic, and uncanny-valley-like.

One reviewer wrote, Despite her obvious prodigious musical talent, anyone at a Dove Starling concert is left wondering if she believes anything she’s singing about.

What worked when she was performing with her parents as a child starts to feel a little stale as she’s approaching womanhood.

There needs to be more maturity there if she’s going to transition her career. I was thirteen.