The Stars Over Bittergate Bay

Chapter 1

1

T he cab driver let out a low whistle, and Sidney opened his eyes as they pulled up to the curb in front of Sidney’s residence.

Kilton House was a century old brick building, currently crawling with co-eds. Never mind that it was a frigid October night. And a Wednesday. Sidney closed his eyes again and barely managed to bite back a groan. He pressed his temple against the cool glass of the window. It had already been a rough day, and he was determined not to let it get any worse.

“Looks like a party,” the cab driver observed.

“Yes.” Sidney sighed as another group of students jostled their way into the house. “It certainly does.”

Sidney paid the driver and then, hands tucked in the pockets of his peacoat, Sidney bowed his head and waded through the crowd into the house. He’d walked out of dinner with his father and brother before the entrees had made it to the table, so the kitchen was his destination. There was a good block of aged cheddar in the shared refrigerator with his name on it. If only he could get there without getting a beer spilled on him.

Music blared out of the Victrola, shaking the photographs of the past rosters of the Holyworth Heroes, the college’s football team. That Sidney had gotten stuck as the Resident Faculty Advisor for this year’s roster seemed like a cosmic joke. One his father had delighted in pointing out.

“You never had much muscle, but Leo was a great quarterback,” his father had said as the breadbasket arrived at their table, clapping Sidney’s brother on the shoulder. “Maybe he could show your boys a few things.” Leo looked apologetic, and had opened his mouth to protest, but Sidney beat him to the punch.

“They’re not ‘my boys,’ Dad. They’re students.”

And maybe it was true that because Sidney was slight and young he blended in with the students, even though he hadn’t been one for several years. The other Resident Faculty Advisors who lived on campus were over-zealous, matronly dorm mothers. Or former college athletes past their prime, trying to relive their glory days by hanging around with freshmen. Sidney was neither. He’d taken the position specifically, almost explicitly, for the stipend and for the dormer room at Kilton House. The take-home pay for an Astronomy lecturer, even at an expensive school like Holyworth, was not really enough to make ends meet.

In the corner of the living room, two students, Charlie Kinsey, an amiable fullback, and Gregor Wambeck, defensive tight end, leaned toward each other whispering, eyes wide at the sight of Sidney. Clearly, the thought that their Resident Faculty Advisor might return home during the party hadn’t occurred to them.

Charlie passed Gregor a lit blunt, and Gregor shoved the whole thing into his pocket with absolutely no subtlety, their eyes fixed on Sidney. Sidney turned away to hide a smirk, the first genuine spark of joy he’d had all night.

Sidney had no interest in spoiling anyone’s fun, but he did have a doctoral dissertation to work on. He didn’t mind festivities, so long as the house stayed reasonably in order, and no one messed with his things.

The crowd in the kitchen he did mind, though. Sidney grit his teeth and began to wind through them, his thoughts already upstairs with his star charts.

The star cluster wouldn’t be up for another hour at least, but he could do some pre-charting. He’d been following it long enough, that predicting its movements was beginning to feel easy. He was hoping to make it the centerpiece of his impending dissertation.

Sidney was of two primary thoughts about his star cluster, which he’d begun to take ownership of when he realized that no other charts or books contained any record of it. The first was that it was a unique discovery and was therefore incredibly exciting. The second was that it shouldn’t exist.

It wasn’t a small cluster. It wasn’t massive. Sydney wasn't even sure if they were stars. But someone should have seen it, and no one else had. This made Sidney even more determined to track it. What was the damn thing? If he hadn’t seen it so regularly, he might have assumed it was a hallucination brought on by stress and lack of a decent meal.

“Hey Professor!” Charlie had managed to shoulder through the crowd in record time and was standing at Sidney’s side like an overgrown golden retriever. “Sorry about all this crowd. Just a little celebration. We beat Rutledge today.”

“As long as no one’s eaten the last of my sourdough there’s not a problem,” Sidney said sincerely.

“Jack and the others went down to the mess to get some more food.” Charlie followed dutifully behind Sidney. Was there a tactful way to ask him to go first and clear a path like some kind of a human cowcatcher? “They’ll be back soon!”

“I just need my bread and cheese and I’ll be fine.” Sidney’s stipend was small, and he wasn’t about to waste his own money on good food that would be devoured in seconds by a horde of drunk football players. He should have taken his sourdough up to his room with him; it was probably already soaking up cheap beer in someone else’s stomach, when it could have been soaking up scotch in his.

“You’re not going upstairs already, are you?” Charlie cajoled. Sidney paused.

Being invited to stay at the party was the most suspicious thing that had happened to him that day, and the day had started with Sidney’s father’s campaign manager calling to ask him to have dinner. Sidney hadn’t spoken to his father since Christmas; the man had forgotten Sidney’s birthday three-months ago, and when Sidney had taken the call, it was really only because he thought his father might have died. The invitation to a steak dinner was suspicious. But Charlie Kinsey asking Sidney to stay at a football party was even moreso.

Sidney narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t bother looking back at Charlie. He continued forward, shooing two sophomore girls out of his way.

“The stars aren’t going to chart themselves.” Sidney pulled open the door to the fridge and shuffled things around until he could reach his drawer without knocking over the uncovered stockpot of week-old pasta. Relief at discovering his block of cheddar exactly where he left it was somewhat tempered by the further discovery that it was considerably lighter than it had been the day before. Sidney scowled at the cheese in his hand. When he closed the fridge Charlie was still beside him, holding out all that remained of Sidney’s sourdough. Little more than a heel. Damn.

“I was thinking about taking Astronomy next semester,” Charlie said. Sidney blinked at him. What on earth was going on?

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I’ve always been curious about space. What’s up there, you know?”

“What, indeed.” It was a little funny that even though it was utter nonsense, Charlie had hit on the exact same question that had been preoccupying Sidney. Sidney took the sourdough from Charlie’s outstretched hand. “Well, I’ll be teaching a couple of 100 level classes next semester. I’ll be sure to get you on the roster if you’re interested.” And with that, Sidney turned and headed up to his room where he could eat in peace before he climbed up on the roof to chart his stars.

Or he would have if, just as he reached the servant’s stairs in the back corner of the kitchen, a hand as heavy as a honey-baked ham hadn’t landed on his shoulder.

“Wait. Professor—” Sidney whipped around and came up short. Charlie was looming, his frame twice as wide as Sidney’s, his mouth a crumple of worry.

“Charlie, not to be rude, but what the fuck is going on?”

“Nothing!” Charlie said too quickly. Sidney sighed.

“You’re very bad at lying.”

“Stay and have a drink.”

Charlie’s eyes were wide and imploring and Sidney found his own narrowing again, as he pushed his hair back off his forehead and tried to understand what was happening. Was Charlie coming onto him?

Aside from the fact that Sidney was at least six years older than Charlie and they had literally nothing in common aside from the fact that they both lived in the same house, Sidney would never sleep with a student. He valued his shot at tenure too much. A research position was right around the corner, he was certain of it. And life was certainly hard enough as it was without involving anyone else.

“Where’s Jack?” Sidney asked. Jack, the captain of the football team, could generally be relied upon to keep the others in line. His absence and Charlie’s strange attempts at chumminess were almost certainly aligned.

“He’s… around.”

“I thought you said he was at the mess hall?” Sidney said, feeling triumphant and apprehensive both at once. Charlie hesitated and Sidney sighed. “Charlie…”

“He’s upstairs.”

“Upstairs where?”

“Your room.”

Sidney shoved the bread and cheese in his coat pockets and took the back staircase two at a time. Charlie thundered up behind him without offering any further explanation.

Sidney’s room was at the top of the house. The dormer sat on the fifth level, bookended by attic space on both sides, with a northeast facing window and widow’s walk that pointed away from the bright lights of Bainbridge to the southwest. Aside from the Astronomy building, it was, by far, the best place for looking at stars on campus. It was quiet. Even the roaring sounds of the party down below faded away and instead Sidney could hear, from behind his own closed door, the sounds of metal and glass clacking discordantly together.

When Sidney yanked open his bedroom door, he was met with the well-muscled back of Jack Brewer, barely masked behind a straining white button-down shirt. The young man was crouched beside one of his teammates, and they were both hunched over something on Sidney’s floor. Sidney cleared his throat.

“Professor!” Jack spun to face Sidney. They were of a height, though Jack’s musculature made him considerably larger than Sidney. Still, Sidney crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look his most officious.

“Jack, what in the hell is going on?” Jack’s gleaming white smile slid off his face, and his eyes darted over Sidney’s shoulder to Charlie.

“Ah. Well…”

“At the start of semester, I expressly stated that under no circumstances was anyone allowed in my room without my?—”

Sidney pushed past him through the narrow doorway into the room, where a shattered telescope lay in the center of the floor.

“I’m sorry, professor!” Jack was easily keeping pace with Sidney, which was annoying as Sidney was trying very hard to storm off.

“‘Sorry’ doesn’t fix my telescope, Jack,” Sidney snapped, doing his best to push through the crowd, which had somehow thickened in the past ten minutes. Jack managed to get in front of Sidney and began cutting a swath through the party goers.

“They’ve already said they’ll cover the cost.”

“Damn right they will.” Sidney certainly didn’t have the two-hundred dollars a new telescope would cost. And it wasn’t as though he could ask his father for money to make up the difference.

“It’s my fault. I asked them to get?—”

Sidney was fuming and not listening to the explanation he’d already heard once upstairs. But also his rage didn’t matter because the telescope was already broken and if he wanted to chart his stars, which was all he had wanted to do that night in the first place, he didn’t have time to fix it.

Being angry or upset was useless and he didn’t have time for useless things. He would just go back to the Astronomy building and get a new telescope. A cold gust of wind whipped up as Jack opened the front door for Sidney.

“Clear these people out, Jack.” It was as close as Sidney could get to retribution. And really, it was what he should have done in the first place. Jack nodded grimly, as though Sidney had told him it would be pistols at dawn.

“You’ve got it.” It was irritating that he was genuinely sorry. But then, yelling at someone was never as satisfying as Sidney wanted it to be. He was better at storming off. Twice in one night at this point. He wished he could say it was a new record.

But none of that really bore thinking about. Sidney needed to run to get across campus, get a telescope, and get back in time to chart his star cluster. And he needed to eat.

“Do you want to borrow my bike?” Jack offered. Sidney clenched his fist around the heel of sourdough in his pocket.

“Please.”