Lived

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Chapter One

"Eighteen-year-old Zac Bryant was injured in a single-car accident five miles from his family’s Olcott Falls home last night. According to police statements, the circumstances surrounding the crash are unknown, but they do not believe drugs or alcohol to have been involved. Bryant is currently being treated in Sarah Allen Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit. His condition is listed as critical."

The air in my room that August morning was thick and heavy even before the sun came up, stifling and all but dripping with humidity. Outside, the day dawned exactly like an infinite number of days had dawned before it. The birds didn’t know. The trees didn’t know. The people driving on the highway behind my house, ripping into the dawn silence with the hum of their tires and the growl of their engines, they didn’t know. And neither did I. Which is what I keep thinking about now: what a luxury it was to be bored. To honestly think that nothing out of the ordinary would ever have the audacity to happen in my typical, average little life.

I got up that morning. I showered. I turned on my radio, and I got dressed for my summer job at Edna's. And then I knew.

I heard it for the first time on the radio, what happened to you—delivered in the hurried monotone of a newscaster who usually doesn’t have anything to report but traffic jams or sports scores.

At first, I didn’t believe it. They must have messed up the name, or maybe I misheard it. Maybe it was some other Zac Bryant they were talking about, some other boy who wasn’t you. My stomach was twisting with a rock-hard swell of pain, though, like it already knew the truth of what my brain wouldn’t even consider.

I’m not sure how long I stood in front of my mirror after the news report ended, but I know the station switched back to one of the same five interchangeable hip-hop songs they to play twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I brushed my hair, again and again, watching sunlight filter through the leaves outside my window, throwing patterns of light and dark on my reflection. When the phone rang I didn’t even cringe; the noise of it was shrill and sharp, but I pretended it wasn’t there. None of this is real, I assured myself. I was still in bed, in the middle of a nightmare, about to crash into wakefulness. I would roll over, snug in my yellow sheets, and I would promise myself that I wouldn’t ever watch a cop drama before bed again. And you would be fine, in bed yourself, where you would be for hours yet. Your lifeguarding job had ended the week before, after all, and you would be enjoying one of your final mornings of sleeping in before London, before the real world swooped you up and took you away from me.

I had time to imagine a few thousand scenarios before the first hesitant knock came on my door, but mostly I just decided that it must have been you on the phone. You’d heard the same broadcast I had and were too excited to share the stupid, ridiculous, laughable mistake to wait to call at a decent hour.

"Yeah?"

I bet my mother didn’t hear me, because I could barely hear myself. But she came in anyway, her dark hair ruffled from her pillow, her eyes red with sleep.

"Lydia baby," she whispered. I snapped my face away, back to the mirror and to my shadowed reflection, before the trembling hands hanging limp at her sides could fully register. I wouldn’t see it. I wouldn’t believe it. And so it wouldn’t be true. "Mrs. Bryant just called."

"I heard it on the radio." My mother would be smiling now, laughing. "Diana wants to be sure you’re not worried, because it’s a big fucking lie," she would say.

But she didn’t. Her hand was on my back, strong and steady, soothing circles over tense muscles. It was fight or flight time, my body was telling me. The adrenaline burned, like I’d scored a goal. Like I’d won a million dollars. Only not.

"How bad?" Was it me whimpering, or was it her?

"Diana and John want you to come to the hospital so you can say…." My mom didn’t finish her sentence, but I knew what the final word would have been, if she had had the guts: "goodbye." For forever, not until tomorrow or Thanksgiving break. Forever. I could feel it crawling up my spine, that unspoken word, cold and shivery and vicious. It was in my hair, on my fingers, in my mouth.

"That bad."

It was really happening. And I didn’t have any more questions in me.

***

"Come on, Lydia. Please? Pretty please?"

Begging is a God-given talent, I’d always thought. And when the angels were handing it out in heaven, my best friend Angie must have gotten back in line for thirds. She had the magic touch, so much ability at pleading that entire sub-Saharan nations probably couldn’t beg at all, just to make up for her greediness.

"If Nate was a boy worth having, he would come pick you up." We’d had this discussion before, countless times, with maybe a word or two different to keep things interesting. And just like all those other times, stretching back across the endless summer between our sophomore and junior years at Olcott Falls High, I was about to give in. I watched Angie fidgeting above me. She blocked out the last few rays of the dying August sun, casting me in charcoal darkness, and I was sure that I didn’t ever want to fall in love. It was all about the two things that I hated most in the world: being needy, and being messy.

"If Nate was a boy worth having, why would I ever want him?" If Angie hadn’t been my best friend for literally forever—if she hadn’t decked Heather Daniels for picking on me in third grade, if she hadn’t held my hair back when I puked up too much eggnog at her parents’ Christmas party last year, if she hadn’t used her begging abilities for good instead of evil last month when she convinced my mom to buy me a car—I would have told her to get lost. I was comfortable, swinging on the rope hammock spread between the two biggest oak trees in her backyard, and I most definitely didn’t want to drive to Fort Daley, all the way on the other side of town, just so she and Nate could hook up. Again. "And anyway," Angie continued, "it’ll be good for you. School starts in less than a month, and who have you hung out with all summer but me?"

"But we just went to that party. The one at Tanya’s. And boy, did it ever suck." Reaching down with one leg, I kicked the hammock into a steady, slow swing.

"That sucked because you wanted it to, chiquita. Not to mention that it was before school even let out. Don’t you want to know what everyone’s been doing with themselves all summer?"

"If you mean in a ‘did anyone get knocked up or sent to prison’ sort of way, then yes. Sort of." It would probably have been easier to sound serious if I could stop giggling at the desperation in Angie’s stance. Thumbs tucked in the back pockets of her jean skirt, shoulders hunched forward and chin jutting out, she looked like nothing more than a kid begging for a puppy. Or maybe chocolate. "I’ll find out what they’ve been doing in two weeks, anyway," I muttered. "Want to or not, it’ll be back to the snake pit for us."

In a last ditch attempt at solidarity, Angie threw herself into the hammock with me, sending us rocking with wild, imbalanced fervor. "I’ll be your best friend?" We squeezed together, overcompensating for the dizzy swinging, and slid within two inches of permanent brain damage on the green velvet of her parents’ lawn.

When we were six years old, we looked like sisters, Angie and I. I can’t even tell who’s who in some of the pictures on her mom’s mantelpiece, but seeing her now I don’t understand how that could have been. At sixteen, we’re more like different species: She’s curvy. I’m skinny. She’s dainty. I’m tall. She smiles all the time. I hardly ever do.

"But you’re already my best friend." Angie’s elbow was sharp in my ribs.

"Please. Please. Please. And in case you were wondering, I can keep this up all night. Please." So much for the perfect evening of ice cream and USA movies that we’d been planning. Just like always, then and now, Nate Bryant trumped all. I hated the thought of going, of the noisy crowd and the pushy boys and the silly girls. A whole long school year of avoiding those same people stretched out in front of me, and seeking their company during the summer, during my time, was unimaginable.

"You don’t get what it’s like to have a boy like Nate. It makes you hungry for more until you die of wanting him. Die." She was right that I didn’t know what she meant, but I could certainly understand it. Anyone with eyes could. Nate Bryant was a miracle of design—long, elegant limbs, honey golden skin, eyes blue like renaissance heaven, and a dreamy, angel face known for making each and every woman, no matter how old or how young she may have been, imagine what the world would be like with him as her own.

"If it was possible to die of wanting him, the population of this town would be small. Like two: Me and the girl’s gym teacher." I wasn’t telling Angie the truth, but I considered it a kindness. He makes me shiver, that Nate. Also, he makes me want to throw up, in a good way and in a bad way both at the same time: first because he’s such an unimaginable beauty, and second because he’s such an unimaginable jerk. But it’s not as if my opinion would phase him, or that he’d even care that I was alive if I wasn’t a drain on the time he got to spend taking advantage of Angie. "We’re the only women in the world unaffected by his … affectation." Never had an SAT vocab word been put to better use, I congratulated myself.

She kicked at me, her bare legs against mine, purple toenail polish bright in the gathering dusk. "Are you trying to tell me something? Because we both know that the girl’s gym teacher would rather make out with me than with Nate."

I puckered up for her, giggling as I pretended to go in for a kiss. "Oh, Angie. I’m so very glad you’ve finally realized my true feelings." She pushed me away, laughing. The sky above us was moving toward navy, and for a minute I turned away from all the pleading to watch a sea of clouds pass by, orderly and serene.

"So. Are we going?"

Inside I was groaning, but outside I was prepared to be the best best friend in the world. My motives probably weren’t completely wonderful, as they were basically to get her to shut up, but that was another little fact that Angie didn’t know. "When you get your license, you’re going to drive me around whenever I ask, right?" At least I made her promise.

"Of course. To the moon and back, if you want."

"Get in the car, already."

***

We could hear music, roaring loud and bass-heavy, long before we could see the river. The party’s site—the hulking remains of revolutionary war–era Fort Daly and the half-circle of campsites surrounding it—was familiar to both me and Angie. Every summer during elementary school we’d spent a week there at Girl Scout camp, learning how to do super useful, real-word things like make fire from sticks, avoid poison ivy, and stand up to mean middle schoolers who liked to fill sleeping bags with shaving cream.

To no one’s surprise, it was easy to find Nate in the swirl of bodies near the river: he was at its very center, Olcott Falls royalty holding court. Somewhere out there, someone was probably undertaking a sociological study of the typical American teenage girl, and it’s really an inestimable loss to the field that this person wasn’t there to see Angie’s game plan. Before slipping into the crowd, she’d shot me a nervous smile and whispered "I’ll be back." From a distance, she seemed perfectly calm, perfectly nonchalant. But knowing the ultimate goal it was easy to see that Angie’s casual saunter was calculated to lead her straight across Nate’s path. Add a few tigers and a monotonous voice over, and I could have been watching a PBS show. "A willing seductress, the female cruises past her chosen male, decked out in full plumage. Key to the complex mating ritual is her aloof behavior; she engineers the encounter, never hinting at anything less than perfect innocence." Nate had seen Angie, just as she’d planned. And as expected, he looked her up and down approvingly before leaving the group of people gathered around him, mid-sentence, to prowl in her direction. "At last, as nature demands, the male is lured into play, unable to resist the temptation of an available female."

Nate had walked up behind Angie, his steps graceful and delicate, and slipped a hand over her eyes. Along with him came the same old shiver, the same old tingle at the base of my spine, repulsive to my head and intriguing to the rest of me. Like the bride and groom on top of the most spectacular wedding cake the universe had ever seen, Angie and Nate were perfect for each other. I stood away from the crowd, admiring them: him a tall, slender blaze of gold, her small, delicate, and dark with generations of Italian blood. (The good blood, the kind that makes for perfect noses and shiny waves of black hair. Not the kind that I got, useful only if you like hearing middle-aged women say things like, "Someday you’re going to pop out the babies, no problem.")

As always, where Nate was his entourage followed along: a group of boys near our age or a little older, all awkward elbows and clumsy feet. If I was just a fraction more cynical than I actually I am, I’d be willing to swear that Nate kept them around just to remind people how astonishingly, uncannily good looking he actually was. (Not that the years have changed much of anything in this department—these days his followers may work at the Prudential Center in Boston instead of Pizza Putt in Essex, but on the inside they’re still the very same boys.) The newcomers nudged each other, laughing in disbelief as their king ran his free hand slowly and suggestively down Angie’s side, eventually allowing it to come to rest on her hip before tugging her backside against him.

"Hey, Hotness." His lips were moist and rosebud pink, pink like Revlon could only manufacture in their best dreams. Pink like that could rule the world.

"Hey," she said. I looked away. This was my cue to disappear, I decided. There are some places where even best friends don’t belong, and the warm circle of Nate Bryant’s arms is definitely one of them.

I turned to walk against the flow of kids swarming past, their big red and green kegger cups held protectively high above the crowd. In the evergreen shadows down the beach, a haphazard bonfire was being lit with a can of gasoline and a box of kitchen matches.

"Lydia, wait." Angie had pulled herself away from Nate and run to my side, tugging down the hem of her skirt where it had ridden with his fumbling. "Come dance with us. It’ll be fun." It had become ritual, this part of our evening: Angie wanting to hang out with Nate, me wanting to do anything but. We’d been best friends for so long that we always started off together even if we knew we’d end up happy on our own, I guess just because we were so used to being Lydia-and-Angie, instead of just one or the other. She had pulled at my hands, drawing me toward where Nate had joined the gaggle of his hero-worshiping hangers-on. Quieter, just for me: "and look how cute Nate’s friends are…."

"Thanks, but no. I’m just going to see who else is around." It’s not that I minded her jumping at the chance to hang out with Nate. He was the Loch Ness monster of boys, after all: precious and sited only rarely. Usually you could stand near a guy’s locker between classes or accidentally borrow his schedule from the file in the guidance office, but everybody in the whole town knew this wouldn’t work with Nate—the charmed, elfish kids in his family had been homeschooled ever since they’d moved here from England during sixth grade. Possibly they didn’t have phones there in London, which would explain why he seemed unable to call Angie of his own accord. Of course, the insane, demento logic of high school girls translated Nate’s laissez faire attitude about relationships from skirt chasing to shy sensitivity, and the ghost of a British accent he cultivated from geeky posing to dramatic worldliness. Spending time with Nate was widely regarded to be what happened to a girl when she had been good in a previous life.

The only thing I worried about as I wandered away from him and Angie was what I would do with myself for the next couple of hours. There were many familiar, and even friendly, faces in the crush of people dancing, drinking, or eating sticky-sweet watermelon by the now blazing bonfire. But I didn’t want to hang out with a single one of them. So I headed blindly off toward the water, where generations of long-dead Vermonters had stood guard against invasion. I could see other people sitting in the long grass between the campsites and the river, the sparks of their cigarettes lighting up the darkening night in twos and threes. Not so far away I had found a fat, erosion-bared tree root sticking out above the edge of the river’s bank, the perfect size for sitting. It was a nice place to be, really, kicking my legs over the brink and watching the last of the day’s faded sunshine skitter across the fast-moving water ten feet below. I was alone in the crowd, far away enough for quiet but close enough to hear them, the people I went to school with—the rustle of their feet, the thunder of their voices. On the opposite bank, shadowy trees bent lazily, mirroring the breeze that was a touch on my skin.

Sooner than I would have liked, the sound of the party grew closer. There was laughter, abrupt and sharp, as if someone had just said something mean. Or dirty. And then there they were, Nate and his boys, shrugging their way downstream. The dark of their clothes in the dark of the night made them look disembodied, like hands and arms and faces floating free of connection.

"That girl she hangs out with is such a waste. Hot as hell, but a waste." It wasn’t Nate, but it sounded like him, as if the owner of that voice was desperate to be exotic and interesting but not inspired enough to think of a way to do it on his own.

All I found myself able to do as their voices got closer was will the earth to swallow me up. My favorite middle-school science teacher had kept a pet chameleon in a cage at the back of his classroom. Most of the girls—even Angie—had been freaked out by it, sitting as far away from the cage as possible and not even looking in its direction. I had always been fascinated by Celeste’s curved back and the mottled, changeable green of her skin. And the night of the party I wanted nothing like I wanted her ability to disappear, to be able to close my eyes and melt away, to change my colors to keep from attention I didn’t want.

But of course, I couldn’t.

"Look who’s here, guys!" This time it was Nate speaking, not his puppet. And before I knew it, he was sitting on the serpentine root next to me, leaning steeply to rest his shoulders on the high-relief bark of the tree it anchored. That boy—the one that it seemed as if someone was always talking about, no matter where I went—was nearly on my lap. I was well into chanting a calming/coolness pep talk in my head before I even realized that I was standing several feet away from him, that I’d involuntarily clamored away, sending a mini-avalanche of rocky dirt tumbling into the river. The Nate boys, four or five of them, had laughed like they might die of Nate’s wit, of the funniness of his joke. I just hoped they couldn’t see the goose bumps blossoming on my bare arms.

"We’re here for a smoke, Lydia. You want? I bet you’d have a much better time tonight if you did." Nate had looked at me. The blue of his eyes were visible even in the dimness, obscured only by long, thick lashes. Girls have swooned for less, but all I really wanted to do was kick him.

Producing a plastic baggie and a wad of rolling paper from his jacket, my best friend’s boyfriend began expertly rolling a joint. He ran his tongue, languid and luscious and knowing, down the length of the paper, his challenging gaze never breaking from mine. When finally done with the show, Nate arched his eyebrows and held the stubby joint out to me. A smile with choirs of angels singing behind it pulled at his lips.

"No thank you." Polite, polite, polite. Geek, geek, geek.

"You sure?" If I had been Angie, I would have been all over it. But I’m not her, and so I just continued to back away. The smell of pot wafting from the party was already overpowering, and it made my head a little spin-y, my knees a little shaky.

We were at a momentary impasse, me standing like prey in spite of my best efforts, and Nate sitting like predator. I would have said something, given a chance. And it would have been smarter than anything Nate ever said in his whole life, clever and biting and defensive without sounding defensive.

But you happened first.

"Jesus, Nate. Leave her alone, would you?" Your annoyed words had risen up from the darkness in front of us, as if the river had a voice. I peered down for my first glimpse of you—all ashy blond hair, slumped shoulders, and worn jeans.

"Whatever, man." The baggie and papers found their way back into Nate’s jacket, and he lit up. The boys—apparently charming enough for some, as a group of freshman girls had begun to mill about—crowded around for drags.

Nate’s attention finally elsewhere, I had scrambled down to the water’s edge, my back unbent, my dignity less so. "Bastard," I growled to myself, wondering what it was about parties that made me feel like the star of a Speilberg movie about phoning home.

I hadn’t noticed you right away, keeping pace with me in the sucking mud of the shore, and your deep rumble of a response made me jump. "Nate’s not that bad, sometimes. But don’t ever let him push you around. He’s used to getting his way."

"Thank you, captain obvious. And by the way, I didn’t let him push me around. I was just getting around to telling him to get lost. But you interrupted." I had stomped extra hard, as I suspected I was lying. "I hate everyone in the world." The only thing I could see was the self-assured grin on Nate’s face as he’d held out the pot, and it made me sulk like I’d never sulked before. Nate knew that I wouldn’t take the roach, just like he knew that the audience would snicker and roll their eyes when I said no.

Slipping along side by side, the two of us had left behind the noise of the party and with it the brightness of the bonfire, the reek of pot. I wasn’t even sure that I’d spoken my last thought aloud, not until I heard your reply. "You don’t hate me."

Looking without looking like I was looking, I had appraised you in the moonlight. You were cuter than you thought, I decided; in spite of being tall and powerfully built you slumped along, curling in on yourself as if you were so used to not being noticed that it had become your preferred state of being.

"That’s because I don’t know you. Give yourself time." You’d laughed then, and I did too. Your laugh was raspy and cozy; I couldn’t help myself.

"My name’s Zac. Zac Bryant." All it took was one word to make obvious what I hadn’t noticed before: The jaw. The hair. The graceful, loping strides that couldn’t be made awkward even by your slouch. It was a body that could easily share a gene pool with my worst nightmare, the boy now nothing more than a pinprick of smoky light a half mile back.

"I’m Lydia Redwing. And I’m sorry." You were probably thinking that I was a brat. I sure was.

"Don’t apologize. I’m his brother, not a blind man. Everyone hates Nate. And loves him, usually at the same time." I waited for you to walk away, or to shove me into the river. To act like Nate. But you didn’t. Instead, you keep your pace steady and even, keeping up effortlessly with my fastest walk.

Away from the few streetlights near the fort, the stars were brighter than I’d ever seen them. Or brighter than I’d ever noticed them, at least. As we walked along, it occurred to me that maybe I’d never actually looked up, that maybe I’d only ever seen the things that were right in front of me.

My shoes were heavy with mud when I finally got frustrated with the weight of them. If anyone could have seen us, we would have been a funny sight—me standing flamingo-style on one leg, fussing with my slippery shoelaces, you resting tentative hands on me for balance. I didn’t want to need the help. But it was nice to have.

"Sorry again." I was the one starting the laugh this time, kicking my shoes back into the indistinguishable darkness of the tree-lined riverbank.

"Don’t apologize for that, either," you had said. "I refused to wear shoes until I was six years old. They seemed pointless, until I stepped on a rusty nail in the backyard. And then they seemed very pointful. To say the least." You took your ancient looking sneakers off with ease, depositing them carefully above the waterline. And we wandered knee-deep into the river, feet sliding on the smooth, rocky bottom once we finally got away from the mud.

"Nothing like Tetanus shots to make a boy change his mind about a thing like that." I don’t know what it was about you, but I liked you instantly, intensely. It was easier to talk to you than it was to talk to even Angie, that first time we met. Maybe it was because you didn’t have my history all stored up in your head, the bad perms, the thick glasses, the physical and mental scars of a lifetime. I guess it’s just easy to be yourself around someone who doesn’t remember that you walked up the aisle during your first communion with your pretty white lace dress tucked deep into your big-girl pantyhose.

We walked on until we weren’t any more—walking, that is. The falling got in the way of it. I’m not sure who went first, but it was definitely a combined effort that brought us both down. I was surprised to find that—even as the world spun unexpectedly around me, realigning itself only when the seat of my jeans began to grind against the river bottom, the current to tug at my clothes—I wasn’t pissed off. Not even a little. I felt silly, and, against all odds, happy. My pants weighed a thousand pounds, dragging me down as I breathed deep, rising up to float on my back.

You had already been swimming out into the broad river, your long, easy strokes carrying you into the center where ghost-thin streamers of fog were raising up off the water. You had disappeared for a minute, leaving the world around me empty except for the choppy, dark water stretching to every horizon.

"Come on out, the water’s fine," you had said. And so, miracle of miracles, I did. I didn’t care what you thought, or that you were Nate’s brother. Paddling out to join you just seemed like the only thing to do, so I did it. Out where you were, the treetop canopy was all but gone, leaving a wide swath of sky uninterrupted above us. My legs, my arms, were prickly with goose bumps, this time from the cold rather than from being too near a boy who should have been in a painting, not in my town.

I had floated beside your quiet bulk, drifting with the current, my hands above my head. The feeling of buoyancy was nice, the delicate, insecure sense of balance. From this angle it was easy to see that you and Nate didn’t look so much alike after all: your features weren’t quite as fine and straight as his, and your teeth were a little crooked.

"I wish I could bring my telescope out here. It’s always too bright to see anything this clear at home." Also, you were a geek. Of all the things I knew about you instantly, this was the primary one. You were wearing a Spam t-shirt, for god’s sake. And had I been a girl like Angie, the telescope comment wouldn’t have gotten you any points, either.

"Do you see those three stars right there? They’re Vega, Deneb, and Altair—the summer triangle." Your raised arm dripped a quiet trickle of water.

I had never cared, not for one single minute in my entire life, what the stars were called. But suddenly, it seemed like something I wanted to know about. "Do you know their names? All of them, I mean?"

"I know some, I guess. And there a lot—the fainter ones—that don’t even have names." You swiped with an impatient hand at wet hair plastered on your face.

"Where are those three? The triangle?" It didn’t even seem cheeky to move toward you, because I really did want to see them, to know for sure that something somewhere was constant and steady and unchanging forever. I had pushed my way through the river, dipping my bare feet down for leverage on its receding bottom.

"Come ’ere." You had whispered it, tentative and faint, like maybe we were in a church. And go there I did, of no effort of my own. You hooked your fingers through my belt loops and pulled, drawing me toward you against the flow of the water.

"The really bright one, that’s Vega—See?" Even though our faces were inches apart, our shoulders just brushing as we lay flat in the embrace of the river, I couldn’t tell where you were pointing. It was a mess, as far as I was concerned: a scattering of diamonds overturned from someone’s jewelry box and spread out in a senseless pattern of bright and dark. But I liked the way you felt, the pressure of you against my side. So I nodded.

"It’s part of Lyra." Silence fell, and I wondered if you felt me shivering. Staying still made the tips of my fingers and my ears go numb, but I didn’t move. "That’s the constellation named for Orpheus’s favorite musical instrument, his lyre. My dad used to tell us how Orpheus was so good at playing it that he could soothe wild animals, even tigers and stuff." Around us, the water rippled. The leaves rustled. The party raged. But they were all on another planet. "When he died his lyre never stopped playing, so the gods put it up in the sky where everybody could see it."

"That’s beautiful." Right then, even if you were a geek, I would have followed you to the ends of the earth if you’d asked.

When Angie first yelled my name a good long time later, I ignored her. If she would just go away, I thought, we’d stay out there forever, until the sun rose and I could see the sandy freckles on the bridge of your nose again.

"Hey," I finally called back.

"To shore?" You had phrased this as a question, even though it really should have been a statement. Maybe if I had said no we really would have stayed out there all night.

"Guess so." You released your hold on my belt loop, then, favoring my hand for the walk back to where Angie stood, impatient on the beach. I’m glad it was dark. Neither of you could see me blushing. And smiling.

"Lydia, are you drunk?" Walking back to the car later, Angie couldn’t wipe the incredulous grin off her face. "And where are your shoes?"

Chapter Two

I kind of expected someone to cry, either me or my mom, but it didn’t happen. From the outside, the only thing that might have looked remarkable about the rest of the morning was how organized we were: as if plans had been made and drills run to prepare for just such a circumstance. By the time my mom was dressed, I had found her purse and cell phone, had dug her keys out of the wicker junk basket by the door. We didn’t say a word in all that time, not even after she realized that my shaky hands were too useless to work the laces on my sneakers. She tied them for me, just like when I was a little girl.

I couldn’t say for sure how we got there, to the big teaching hospital two towns over. All I know is that the ride took at least a hundred lifetimes, all of them spent behind big, slow moving eighteen-wheelers. The creeping traffic had given me time to see each individual wildflower as we passed it by, to appreciate every separate blade of the tall, weedy grass lining the roadway. Out the window, the season’s last Queen Anne’s lace was starting to brown a little at the edges, withering in the buttery, early-morning sunlight.

Nothing seemed quite real, and it wouldn’t until we peeked around an antiseptic corner on the hospital’s third floor to find Nate. He was sitting in a barren waiting room, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. I thought I would vomit when the clatter of our approach made him look up—his burning blue gaze was too hot on my skin, too miserable, too sad. Your brother’s eyes were red and puffy, his always flawless hair ruffled and his mouth a narrow, bitter red gash torn in the white of his face. Nate, who was always doing things to be seen, to make an impression, was sitting in an empty room, crying. I had never believed that he cared about anyone, not really: not Angie or you or the rest of your family. But the way his shoulders shook made me think I’d been wrong all along; the sharp bones of them—visible poking through his t-shirt even from across the room—seemed helpless, like dead tree branches battered by a storm. Your untouchable brother was sitting vigil there in the pale room, salty tears just starting to dry on his cheeks.

Nate’s chair was in the farthest corner of the waiting room, protected from view by thin blinds hanging in the windows that made up most of the room’s inside wall. It was clear he didn’t want to be seen, and the only reason we’d noticed him was my mother’s knowledge of the hospital. Years ago, before I was old enough to come visit, this place was where my grandmother had died.

To Nate’s right was a low, glass-topped table, covered with litter: coffee cups, tissue, a stack of quarters. I looked at the table instead of at him, studying the way even his garbage seemed unlike average people’s. He’d drawn dark, comic-book dragon wings along the curve of a still-steaming cup, so big and so heavy that I could barely see the coffee company’s logo printed beneath them.

My mom went to him, recognizing that face instantly from years of household gossip. It seemed as if Angie’s voice was in the room with us then, echoing forward from seventh or eighth grade, from the years before he’d even noticed she was alive: "Nate is the most beautiful boy in the entire world," she said in my head, in my past. "He’s an angel, but better. He’s real."

Nate had just stared up at my mother, blank-eyed, as she put a hand on his hunched back. She spoke to him softly, in a delicate whisper designed not to startle a frightened animal. "Hi, Nate. I’m Lydia’s mom, Cathy. I’ve heard a lot about you." Then she asked him how he was. Funny, huh? That life goes on even though time seems to stand still. That everyone keeps on breathing, even when maybe they wish they wouldn’t.

"They’re down the hall," He answered the wrong question, sidling away from her. "I just came out here to … get some air." Nate’s eyes shifted from my mother to me, finding my face and then freezing there. Weak beams of sunlight struggled into the room through a set of heavily shaded windows; the stenciled green border running across the beige walls wasn’t quite even. And forty years from now, I’ll be able to close my eyes and see every detail of that room, to feel the quicksand fear in your brother’s eyes and to remember how it pulled me in. I think we might’ve stayed like that forever, if my mother hadn’t spoken—him and me and the sinkhole of fear the between us.

"Are you okay here if we go see what’s going on?" My mother had murmured this, hoping that I wouldn’t hear, hoping to spare Nate the embarrassment of her concern for him. He nodded yes, but she stayed next to him for a second, smoothing her hand along the back of his t-shirt in warm, reassuring circles. I knew just how it must have felt, that touch: She had done the same for me when I hadn’t made the varsity soccer team during my sophomore year of high school, and when I heard about you that morning.

"We’ll be back in a sec," My mother did the talking for the both of us, taking my shoulder and leading me down the wide hallway. I marveled at her grownupness, at how she knew just what to do, what to say.

***

I hadn’t seen you again for the longest time, so long that I was sure you had forgot about me. But Olcott Falls is a small town, after all, and sooner or later we were bound to run into each other again. I might have hoped for better circumstances: good lighting, some of those new clothes my mom had bought me for the first day of school—maybe even that the event would have taken place somewhere other than my local Star Market’s feminine hygiene aisle. But I must stink too much of the real world for even a single fairy-tale moment to dare cross my path. So instead of going how I wanted it to, the next time I saw you went pretty much exactly how I didn’t: The light was most assuredly bad, as it was reflecting off so many plastic-wrapped bags of Kotex with Wings. And I was wearing my grossest, oldest cutoffs, with a Willie Nelson concert t-shirt that was about ten years and 2,000 washings away from being cool.

I had woken up that morning to the sound of my mother singing along with a song playing on the tinny radio in the bathroom. Her crooning had been loud and warbly, and her voice found me even after I burrowed under my pillow to escape from the tortured animal sound of it. I rolled over to peer through one squinted eye at the glowing numbers of my clock radio, doing my best impression of someone who would fall back asleep in no time. It was seven fifty-five a.m. on the first Saturday morning of the new school year, and it seemed to me that child protective services would have something to say about this abuse of my God-given right sleep in.

My mom must have been getting ready for the one Saturday a month she’d had to work at the bank back then, before her promotion to manager. But I was in no mood for sympathy when she arrived at my door a few minutes later.

"Sweet pea?" I groaned to myself, knowing that something was coming. "Sweat pea" only entered her vocabulary when she had a request she knew would annoy me. "Are you awake?"

"No."

"Good, then you’re not too busy for me to tell you that there’s a little grocery list and some money on the kitchen table." I peeked out from under my pillow and saw her standing unevenly in my doorway, one low pump on her foot, the other in her hand. Her shower-wet hair was dripping thin rivulets down the front of her work clothes. "I’m going to be late if I don’t leave," my mom looked down at where her watch should have been, shrugging hopelessly when she realized it wasn’t there, "five minutes ago. I’d really appreciate it if you could pick up those few things if you go out today."

"Fine," I had moaned, rolling over under the weight of my pillow.

By the time I finally managed to peel myself out of my cozy bed, it must have been after noon. Dripping a little from the shower myself, I found the grocery list and headed to the closest store—which is where we met again, this time unprotected by the easy, confessional darkness of nighttime at the river.

I heard you before I saw you that day, a small mercy for which I’m still grateful. Your booming voice, with its curiously audible capital letters, had drifted to me from the next aisle over on the store’s sterile, air-conditioned breeze. "So do we get Tootsie Roll Pops or Blow Pops?" At the sound of you I had stuck in place, a fly in a fatal molasses slick. "I lean toward these," you had continued, a plastic rustle almost obscuring your words. I still don’t understand how someone can make candy selection sound that important; I’ve heard C-SPAN discussions of peace treaties that have carried less weight—and chairs were thrown before the end of the segment.

"I want Blow Pops, because you get to chew gum to chew when you’re done." A second voice had answered you, a smaller, higher pitched one.

"Now see, I don’t think that’s the best idea." More plastic was wrinkling as you spoke, presumably juggling the bags of lollypops in question. "May would flip out about the gum, and everyone would be too busy blowing bubbles to pay attention. Plus, it would definitely wind up in someone’s hair, and so we’d need to get a jar of peanut butter, too."

"But there’s sticky stuff in Tootsie Roll Pops, you know. And May’s going to be mad anyway. Blow Pops, please. Please." Maybe Angie would be given a run for her money in this begging business, after all. The little voice was so desperate and impassioned that even though I was torn between hiding in the nippy frozen food section and putting down the box of tampons I was supposed to be buying to make a run for it, I felt a pull to round the aisle and stand up for whoever it was that was doing the talking.

"Even I can’t argue with that, Tootsie."

You had barely gotten the words out before an interruption came: "Blow pop, Blow Pop, I’m getting Blow Pops."

"Missy, if you grow up to be a cheerleader, I swear to God I’ll kill you myself." I considered what Angie—my never-fail guide to good behavior—would do in this particular situation. She’d put down the extra-absorbents and go talk to you, I decided, and probably use a lollypop to do suggestive things. So, like any sensible girl would have done, I put the tampons back on the shelf and prepared to slink out of the store, preferably unnoticed.

My row was deserted, and in two more steps I would be out. Then in one more step. But, predictably enough, my plan worked in no way, shape, or form. With just one step away from the feminine hygiene shelf, your voice had disappeared into the store’s elevator music soundtrack, and I lost you. You could’ve been anywhere as I shoved my mother’s shopping list in my back pocket and stalked down the aisle toward the distant automatic doors, but I should have guessed that you would be turning the corner just about two seconds after I entered the extravagantly large douche section. (Across from there were the diapers—the jury is still out on which association would have been more horrifying to my sixteen-year-old self.)

But there you were. My palms had been sweaty even before I had realized who it was blurring past at high speed, balanced with both sneakered feet up on the shelf beneath his wire trolley. As is the way of such things, one of the cart’s wheels was broken, and you left a trail of thud-thud-screech-thud in your wake.

At first you didn’t stop, didn’t turn around, and I thought maybe you really had forgotten about me. Or even worse, maybe you’d thought I was hot that day at Fort Daly, and were disappointed with what you found in the cold fluorescent light of day. There’s no denying that I had planned to escape from the store without your notice. Inexplicably, though, that didn’t mean I felt any less miffed at my suspicion that to you I wasn’t worth notice in the first place.

A long, slow-motion second had passed before you cried "About face!" and pushed off with one leg to execute a wide turn, as if your cart was a giant skateboard. And there it was, the deciding moment that turned you from a story about a cute boy that got away to my … well, who knows what you are. Not my boyfriend. My Zac, I guess, a thing that every girl should be lucky enough to have.

The other participant in the great lollypop debate had been sitting in your cart’s child seat: a little girl, her light hair an uncontrolled mess of curls so long they hung almost to her bottom. As you neared, she had turned to me, her pretty face twisted with wary mistrust. Was it possible, I wondered, that she was even more of an ideal specimen of our species than Nate? Her eyes were the color of the blueberries that my mother and I pick every summer at Edgewater’s nursery. And even frozen in miniature it was easy to see that someday her smooth features would be too elegant to appear even in the kind of magazine sold at Star Market, let alone to grace one of its aisles. There could be no doubt that she was your sister, the third and final of the mythical Bryant siblings.

The first twenty seconds or so after you’d come to a screeching halt at my side were fine. I was satisfied with just looking at you, appreciating the chocolate brown of your eyes, and the way you only looked at me sideways, as if you were afraid I might burn your eyes like the sun on a foggy day. But then it had occurred to me that I should probably say something, at which point everything went straight to hell. The silence that settled down around us as I tried to formulate a sentence was thicker than Fort Daly’s canon-proof stone walls.

"Hey." You’d been the one to finally give in and speak, contented with a simple, straightforward greeting. I wondered if you’d forgotten my name.

"Hi," I answered back, sounding easily 95% calmer than I felt. More silence. I’m still not sure how could it have been so easy to hang out with you the night of the party, but so gut-wrenching then. The only thing filling the air between us was an all-piano rendition of an old Mariah Carey song, and we listened for a second. You had shuffled your feet, looking down at the same shoes I remembered from our swim. They were a little scuffed and frayed around the edges, but didn’t seem worse for their mud bath. What had happened to the shoes I’d abandoned that night? Had someone found them, given them a good home? Or were they still lying a fair throw’s distance from the river, waiting for the ever creeping vegetation to cover them over, claim them as its own?

The little girl in your cart snickered to herself, enjoying our obvious discomfort. I’m sure we’d stood like that for all of 3.5 seconds, but it felt like ten years had passed when you finally looked up, a decision written on your face just as plain to see as your freckles.

A grin that was strained a little around the edges had replaced your awkward shyness, as if you had every intention of making the best of the situation, no matter what. "We were just trying to figure out what a bunch of five-year-olds would like better—Blow Pops or Tootsie Roll Pops. What do you think?" You’d said this as if it was an ordinary, everyday question. Like "Could you please pass the salt?" or, "Is that your dog down the block?" If I hadn’t just been eavesdropping on your conversation like a crazy person, I would have thought that…well…that you were a crazy person.

"Personally, I’d go for the Tootsie Rolls," I had answered fast, desperate to keep the silence at bay. As I should have expected, the little girl’s eyes narrowed. She looked as though she’d be happy with chewing on me if she didn’t get her preferred lollypops.

"Maybe we should put these back, Tootsie?" Teasing, you inclined your head toward the cluster of candy bags at the bottom of the trolley. Sensing a strategy failure, the girl gave up making puppy dog eyes at you, and concentrated on making evil eyes at me.

"But, you know. I’m weird. Who likes chocolate, anyway?" Other than every woman on the entire planet, I silently amended.

"I guess we really should keep the Blow Pops then, Tootsie." You had put the little girl’s fears to rest, poking at the knees left bare beneath her overall shorts.

At this, the littlest Bryant declared something of a truce with me, turning her blue gaze to you. "We should. And Tootsie’s not my name."

"Right-o, Tootsie." You were laughing at her a little, and a previously unimagined desire to have a big brother welled up within me—ideally, you or one just like you.

"This is my sister, Melissa Bryant. Missy." But when I was the person you were talking to, I made a mental note to be grateful that you weren’t my brother, after all. There are probably prisons out there for sisters who have thoughts about their brothers like the ones I was having about you.

"Just so you can be sure to pick on him as much as possible while around her," your voice was low, hinting at a conspiracy, "I’ll remind you that Missy’s related to Nate, too." Now it was me you were laughing at, slouching down with your hands in your pockets, checking for my response out of the corner of an eye.

"Shut up, you punk," I had replied, thinking that for once Angie’s response might have overlapped with mine. You just grinned, for real now, and looked at me full on for maybe the first time ever.

If the real world had sportscasters like TV football, here’s where I’ve always thought they would’ve groaned in horror and covered their eyes to spare themselves the sight of what was about to happen. You had made me feel skittish back then, nervous, and your smile made me step backward, a reflex response to your attention. This movement brought me to the end of the aisle, where—stacked in a way obviously designed for ease of collapse—towered a pyramid of pads. With a dull roar reserved for really embarrassing things that you wish would be quiet, the hateful pink bags trembled a little as I bumped them, then shivered for a second before thundering to the floor and skittering everywhere.

"Have you ever wanted to take back thirty seconds or so of your life?" I had asked once the clamor subsided, staring blankly at the scattered mess. I was already humiliated to the point of actual death, so why not go for it and say what I was really thinking?

"You can’t even imagine, Lydia." On the bright side, you remembered my name. On the not-bright side, a group of bystanders was gathering, smiling indulgently at the confusion and waiting to see what would happen. Did Star Market have torture chambers for lawbreakers like us? Missy’s laughter reached a crescendo, and I silently cursed her with a long, awkward adolescence, not entirely unlike my own.

I don’t know why we didn’t just leave, slink out of the store and try to forget what happened. But at the time it had seemed that the only logical thing to do was pick up the lava flow of Kotex bags quickly and quietly, and then look into the possibility of entering the witness protection program. So that’s what we started to do, gathering armloads of the peachy packages and using them to reconstruct the hygienic fort at the end of the aisle. To distract myself from the appalling situation, I planned my new life. I’d ask the FBI, or whoever, if my name could be Claudia. And I’d die my hair red. It didn’t seem that there would be much to miss about Olcott Falls—my mom, Angie, and the really good stationary store on Main Street were the only things I could come up with off the top of my head.

"I think it went like this," you had muttered, gesturing at the pyramid’s half-constructed bottom row with your nose. You didn’t have many other means of communication at that point, as you were holding two economy-sized bags labeled "Overnight" under each arm, and another bag was wedged between your chin and chest.

I must have had some sort of psychotic break at this point, as all I can remember is sitting down on the cold gray-tiled floor and laughing like I’d never laughed before. By the time you finally gave up and joined me, tears were collecting in the corners of my eyes, and I felt like I might split right down the middle from the hilarity of the you and me and the pyramid of doom.

And then, like a magic wand had been waved in one of those fairy tales that won’t ever come true, things started to feel like they’d felt before. Easy, safe. Like being with you feels now. We had leaned together on the floor, ignoring the gawking audience of shoppers, the pell-mell crush of menstrual supplies all around us, and even the rapidly approaching store employee who was staring daggers at us. It didn’t matter—not any of it.

Of course, we were immediately kicked out of the store. Our pictures probably still hang at each one of the cash registers that line the front half of the building, reading "Wanted Dead or Alive" like the posters you always see in black and white cowboy movies. I wouldn’t really know; I haven’t been back to Star Market since.

After the dense air-conditioning of the store, the heat outside felt good on my skin. I was prepared to say goodbye in the parking lot, miragy ripples rising up off the sticky pavement all around us. How much more of this could a girl take, after all? The midday sunlight had made your mop of hair look like a halo, and you were thumbing a new looking set of Volvo keys. Nothing has looked new about my car, or my mother’s, since well before either of you or I was born. All I could think about was how you and your shiny new car and your beautiful family and your childhood in London weren’t in my league. You were from another planet, one where parents didn’t get divorced and light bills didn’t go unpaid until the day before the electricity would be turned off.

Missy sulked as we walked away from the store. "Now we don’t have anything to bring."

"Maybe we could bring a new person to story time instead of candy," you’d answered.

"Maybe." She was eyeing me. I could feel it.

"We’re going to story time at the library," You’d told me, taking your sister’s hand as we crossed two lanes of traffic on the way to our cars. "If you’re not doing anything, maybe you could come. Usually we bring candy, but I think you’d be good in its place." It was ridiculous, how cute you were. It’s as if your face is designed for smiling, and doing it changes you into another person. There’s no slouch in that smile, none of your tentative shyness—just sunshine.

"I don’t know. My mom told me not to go anywhere with strangers. And you’re incredibly strange." On a geek scale of one to ten, that comment easily rated a seventy-two.

"You’ll like it. We’re reading Where the Wild Things Are, my favorite book of all time." Although saying no was definitely a possibility at this point, it would have taken a stronger woman than me to do it. So I went—I got into the plush, leather-seated den of a car you told me your parents had bought you for your sixteenth birthday, and I rode across town with you, singing along to your Radiohead album all the way.

Even though I like books more than I like most people, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d walked up the crumbling stonework steps to Olcott Falls’s tiny public library: the Star Market wasn’t the first local institution to ban me for life. The library had been less my fault, though—I had checked out a book of ghost stories for Angie when she’d gotten her tonsils out in sixth grade, and of course she’d promptly lost it. The whole fiasco had been happily forgotten until just a year earlier, when I’d needed to get research stuff for school through interlibrary loan. I can still remember the clammy guilt I felt as the approximately 800-year-old librarian stared me down with those runny eyes of hers, and her stern words: "You cannot check out any further books until you return the extraordinarily overdue copy of Boo!: 800 Easy Ghost Stories for Girls and Boys you checked out on April 24, 1997." Would she recognize me on sight?

A surprising number of cars were lined up on both sides of the street in front of the crisp, red-brick building. A wedding rehearsal in the adjacent hall, I assumed. Or maybe a Boy Scout Jamboree. The one possibility that I never would have entertained was that the people were there for story time. I had been a kid in this town once, and my recollection of the Man-in-the-Mountain-faced librarian (a spry 750 years old, back then), was not a particularly fond one. Her favorite books to read had starred characters named Dick and Jane, if I recall correctly.

As soon as we entered the dark-paneled children’s room, there was no doubt what the crowd was there for. The room was cluttered with kids around Missy’s age, a few of them sitting on squares of scratchy-looking carpet on the polished hardwood floor, but most of them skipping around in uncontrolled chaos. A circle of parents were clustered around a silver coffee dispenser on the far side of the room, hands wrapped around steaming disposable cups. They came in two varieties, those parents: older looking ones in freshly ironed khakis and designer watches, and exhausted looking moms and dads who couldn’t have been much older than us, all dressed in defeated-looking sweat pants and t-shirts stained with things like spaghetti from a can and grape juice from a box. The only thing that they all had in common were the expressions of guarded concern that flashed across their faces as they turned toward us. For the second time that day, I wanted to be swallowed into the ground, never to be seen by mortal eyes again.

"Look who’s here," came a bright voice from the parent cluster’s center. "The kids have been anxious to get started, Zac." The woman who spoke was as unlike the librarian I remembered from my childhood as possible: Her dark mocha skin was set off by a loose-fitting African print dress, and her shoulder length hair was separated into a thousand tiny, braided strands. She looked much younger than my mom.

"We had a little trouble at the grocery store," you explained in a mutter, again drawn to look at your shoes.

"Well I guess you’d better make up for lost time then, and stop them running around like the lost boys." Missy, who had joined the fray as soon as we’d stepped in the door, froze in front of the woman, hands on her tiny hips. "And girls, Melissa. And girls." The librarian placed an affectionate hand on your sister’s shoulder, gently guiding her to one of the empty throw rugs.

I couldn’t help gaping at you. What was this? And then my hand was in yours, and I didn’t much care what was going on. Your grip was easy and enveloping and strong, my hand dwarfed in yours. "I’ll be back."

You had bounded across the room, suddenly the focus of much attention. "I’m afraid there’s no candy today, guys." The kids fawned anyway, smiling up at you from the cross-legged positions they were quickly assuming; the parents frowned from across the room.

"As I was just telling my friend Lydia, this is my favorite book ever." You smiled at me, sitting in a child-sized plastic chair set in front of the carpet squares. Your knees were practically at your chin, but you didn’t seem to notice the awkwardness of it: you were just interested in the book you’d picked up off a nearby table, and in making sure that each and every member of your listeners got a good look at its cover.

You were good. Your own show on PBS good. So good that I bet those kids would have made their parents’ lives hell if they’d been kept home. I stood watching you, breathing in the smells of the building, the dusty old books lining every flat surface, the dark, damp earth of a huge potted fern hanging by the window, and the distant memory of wood polish that framed it all.

"I don’t believe that they’d let someone like that boy around children." The voice was deep and soft, but studiously loud enough to carry to where you sat, settling in to read. You cringed a little, I think, but I doubt anyone else noticed.

"After what he did…. Such a bad influence," another voice whispered back, just loud enough for me to hear. Glancing over my shoulder as you read, I saw the sources of the comments: two older men, hair gray-streaked and clothes polyester, were watching you from just inside the doorway to the library’s adult section.

They were the only ones who were saying anything, but I could see their words echoed in the way most of the parents were standing, stiff and straight, arms tight in at their sides.

"Mr. St. Jacques, Mr. Eldridge! We just got that new Robert Ludlum book in—who gets it first?" The librarian had appeared beside the two men, her whisper well-oiled and easy, like it was something she did all the time. I watched her shepherd them into the other end of the library, her cheer looking a little forced.

Mr. St. Jacques and Mr. Eldridge would certainly have agreed with what my mother really does say, that girls like me should stay away from strangers. The distaste of the old men had made you sound like a serial killer in training, or the brains behind a massive terrorist organization. But watching you make monster faces as you growled your way through the story and hearing complete silence from the enraptured children scattered around the room, I had a hard time believing that anything about you could be less than perfect.

Of course, I found out otherwise soon enough.

I had still been pushing these thoughts around in my head when the librarian came back, making me jump with the surprise of her hand on my elbow. "I’m May, the librarian." She used the whisper again, only this time it came from behind a smile that looked genuine. "And you’re Lydia?"

"I am," I nodded, trying to keep one eye on you and one eye on her.

"Zac’s never brought any friends here before. I’m excited to meet you," she had beamed. "Such a pretty girl that he spends time with."

"We sort of just met. I mean…I was at the grocery store…." Ramble alert, deck five. "And I was actually the reason that he got held up, and so I just sort of came along." Kids were starting to turn in our direction, shooting me nasty looks before their gazes returned, magnet-like, to the energetic storytelling that at the moment found you standing on your little plastic chair, using a ruler as a sword. "I’m not his girlfriend or anything." Somehow, it always seems like I have either too many words or too few, instead of just the right amount.

May looked a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of words leaking out of my mouth, but her smile didn’t budge. "Well, I think you’ve got yourself a good friend in him, even if you did just meet."

"What were they talking about? Those men?" I had shocked myself with the question, because I hadn’t planned on saying anything of the sort. It just happened, but once the words were out there, I was glad it had.

"He hasn’t told you why he comes here?" She had sighed a little, turning from me to watch you. You must have just done something funny, because a wall of laughter rose up all around us. "Ask him."

After two dramatic recitations of Where the Wild Things Are and one of a book about a bull that I didn’t recognize, you had called it a day.

"So was it still worth coming, even without your lollypops?" I had asked Missy as the two of us waited for you to finish entertaining the adoring fans hungry for your attention.

"Yup." Our territorial feud apparently come to a close, she grabbed one of my hands and leaned back on the edges of her heels, resting every ounce of her dead weight on me. Okay. So it was possible that the feud wasn’t really over, but it had definitely morphed into something new.

"Are you coming home with us? You should, because you could see my room." Glad that it was someone else’s turn to ramble, I just shook my head no. "We painted it pink, the whole thing. Pink walls and pink floors and a pink ceiling." To me, the thought of sleeping in a pink room was nauseating. "And I have a pink bedspread and a pink teddy bear…." Missy didn’t seem to mind, though.

You joined us then, sidling up beside me to snatch Missy up and twirl her around, her little feet high up off the ground. "Sorry I ditched you—usually I only do one book, but I felt guilty for being late."

"I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a satisfying rendition of a picture book. What can you do with Shakespeare?" You’d just laughed.

Thinking about what happened next, even all these years later, is still not a fun thing to do. After the parents were gone and May had waved the three of us back out into the hot afternoon, I asked the question that had been nagging in the back of mind my since May first came over to talk to me. "So why do you do this? Back in the day, the librarian always did the reading." You had been buckling Missy into her car seat (all I could think was that rich people really did have everything—including car seats for five-year-olds) while I hovered around, watching your practiced hands at work.

"Did you talk to those guys? The older ones?" For the first time since we’d met, I didn’t like the sound of your voice. Its sharpness made you seem closed off, cautious.

"No, I was just wondering. It’s a pretty weird thing to do, really." I can’t even begin to imagine what you were thinking then, if you were just embarrassed or if you thought I wouldn’t want to hang out with you again if I knew the truth.

"I’m here because I want to be here," you had answered abruptly, shutting Missy’s door with more force than strictly necessary.

When you dropped me off at my car in the Star Market parking lot a few minutes later, I watched you drive away until you disappeared around a corner. I was sure that that was it for us, forever.

Chapter Three

Everything was a blur when we left Nate, as if the whole world was a video tape stuck on fast forward: Doctors and nurses flashed past as we walked, little more than streaks of white or deep green. The paintings that hung at regular intervals down the airless hallway seemed to smear together, a haze of sunflowers and seascapes and moonlight.

We must have passed a dozen glowing Exit signs on our way to the intensive care unit, and after a while each one of them started to seem like a siren song, an invitation to freedom. If I was brave, I could just leave, walk out, be gone. But my mother rested a cool, steady hand on my elbow, as if she could hear my thoughts. Her touch ripped my attention away from the glimmer of escape, but it couldn’t slow the volcanic eruptions of my fast-beating heart. No matter what, it was too late to leave; panic had already begun to circle, a shark close in on a warm trail of blood.

We walked and walked. How could the hospital be so big? You would be dead before we got to you, I realized, numb. Your skin would be cold and you would be empty, and that would be it. Wondering what it would feel like to live without you again made me want to be sick, made my eyes gritty with slivers of sadness.

The intensive care waiting room was so white that it hurt to look at. Between the bright banks of fluorescent lights overhead and the gleaming steel lines of its furniture, everything in the room seemed to shine with its own barely-visible halo. The dazzle of it lived behind my eyelids when I blinked, interrupted only by the curves of three dark forms: your mom, your dad, and Missy.

Your parents sat, stiff and silent, on a pair of chairs near the door, with Missy cross-legged on the floor at their feet. The three of them were almost too still to be real, as if they were actors frozen in time, just the shortest moment before the curtain was to go up. The whole hospital was a stage, I marveled, and had been waiting here my whole life, existing only to be the backdrop for this very play.

Missy was first to notice us, looking up from a coloring book with yellowed pages that she had spread open across a glass and metal coffee table.

"Lydia." When she saw us, your mom stood up and quickly crossed the room to pull me into a warm hug. But I was limp, absent; her embrace was empty. Strange how normal she looked, as if it really were just another day. Her only reason to be at the hospital might have been to visit the florist on the first floor, or maybe to pick up something for one or another of the charities that she works for. I looked and looked, but even up close found no sign that she might have a dying son.

"Cathy," she hugged my mom, too, a hostess wanting to make everyone comfortable, everyone happy, even then. "Zac will be so glad that you’re both here when he wakes up." Your mom always talks with her hands, and they were the one thing that finally gave her away: She’d bitten her nails all the way down to the quick, and they were rimmed with sullen lines of blood. Even if she’s not high maintenance as far as moms go, it was still weird to see her as anything less than the embodiment of relaxed, J.Jill catalog–style perfection.

"Please sit down," your dad encouraged us, sounding and looking worse than your mother: His voice was shaky, his words short and clipped. Two red splotches blossomed on his cheeks, just beneath his eyes, and a faint, stubbly shadow made it obvious that hadn’t shaved before leaving the house. "We haven’t been able to see him yet, but the doctors are saying that he should be ready for visitors soon. That’s why Diana called you, so you could be here when we go in."

This wasn’t really what I wanted to hear. "This was all a big joke, you know. Zac’s going to come popping out from behind that couch over there, and he’s going to think its incredibly funny you actually believed any of this" would have been better. Or maybe even, "It’s just a scratch. We’re waiting for the nurse to get him one of those camouflage Band-Aids that Diana used to buy for Missy."

Instead of sitting with your parents and my mom, the grownups, I joined Missy on the floor, opening the untouched box of crayons at her side. "Nate saw him." She sounded more jealous than worried, as if she were talking about being denied fried dough at the fair or a particularly seductive toy at the mall.

"He was the first to arrive," your mom explained, resuming her mannequin stance next to your dad. "He’d been coming home to help with Zac’s move to school. We got through to his cell phone with the news when he was just outside of town. Apparently things were," long pause, "better when Zac was first brought in."

That must have been why Nate was so different, so afraid; he’d seen what the rest of your family had only imagined. "Zac was just driving around when it happened, late last night." Your dad was talking more to himself than to me. I was desperate to look away, to not see the worry-caused wrinkles on the face of this adult version of you. "He swerved to avoid a moose or a deer, we’re not sure which." As if it mattered, I thought, fending off a crazy giggle at stupidity of it all. If this had happened on any other day in the past year, I would have been in the car with you. But last night I was in my bed, cocooned in untroubled, cotton-soft sleep of a kind I doubt I’ll ever know again.

Missy took the crayons from me and began digging aimless lines across the coloring book’s pages. Whole sheets were missing, I noticed, and the ones that remained were covered with uneven scribbles, as if a much younger kid had been in control of the crayon. For a long time, the only sound was the dull scraping of her aggressive art.

The waiting was the worst part this morning, I think; there was nothing to do, and even if there had been nobody would have been able to concentrate on it. After staring straight ahead for minutes, for hours, your dad had begun to speak again, working hard to sound calm, soothing. "Are you starting to get packed for school? Zac’s been putting off getting ready, and it’s driving Diana wild."

"I have a few days before I really have to get my act together, and today was my last shift for the summer. I’ll pack this weekend," I answered, a little bewildered. Your dad can usually repeat whole conversations word for word weeks later; he remembers everything I’ve ever told him, from the name of my first pet to the college my mom attended in Nebraska. And I’d answered this same question two days ago, sitting at your parents’ dining room table.

Your parents were so composed that it was easy to believe you weren’t really hurt, that you’d be just fine. Could they be so serene if you were horribly wounded? Wouldn’t they be crying, fighting with the doctor? Aren’t those the things that people do when they’re sad or afraid?

Pretty much the only thing that seemed certain about people in your parents’ position was that they wouldn’t start random conversations about gardening. Except that’s exactly what your mother did: "The shoots from that honeysuckle bush you gave me are growing so well," she began, directing her words toward my mom.

It was your dad who spoke next: "I’m surprised that it’s still alive, by the porch like that. I would have thought there would be too much sunlight."

My mom finally picked up the ball, casting her dark eyes uncertainly in my direction. She wasn’t sure what to do anymore, either. "Well, you know we used to have ours by the driveway when Lydia was younger, but it never really took there. Too bright, I always thought."

After my grandmother died, mom and Aunt Irene had sold her house. Listening to your parents chat on about shade and climate zones and a thousand other things that weren’t even a tiny bit important, I might have been a little girl again, sitting on the floor in Nana’s sunny kitchen the day before her house officially changed hands. They had been cleaning, my mother and Aunt Irene, every day for a week: scrubbing and polishing every inch of the house from ceiling to baseboard, and all for no good reason. Once the sale went through, they both must have known they’d never be inside their childhood home again. And the new owners had elaborate plans to tear the whole place up. So the cleaning was downright stupid; it was a waste of their time. But I can still remember the looks of concentration on their faces as they crawled on hands and knees in the foyer, each armed with a bucket and a rag, and how they didn’t talk during a whole afternoon of floor scouring. It was all a distraction, that cleaning, just like questions they’d already asked and the gardening talk were for your parents. The only things that I can remember from their discussion are the long, fancy plant names: Heliotrope. Sweetbriar. Delphinium.

Later, a doctor came into the waiting room, his presence interrupting the safe, easy camaraderie that had evolved. Even though his blank white uniform blended perfectly into the blank white walls, your parents watched him like a predator, like a savior. From the instant I saw him, though, I knew that the solemn look on his weathered face meant that he would be the former.

"Mrs. Bryant, Mr. Bryant?" Even the scratch of Missy’s crayon stopped, but your parents only stared. They must have known something that I didn’t, even then, and the terror on their faces was enough to send waves of sharp pain thudding along my skull. They were scared, so scared they didn’t want to identify themselves to the doctor. They were afraid of what he might have to say.

"I’d like to speak with the two of you in private, if I could." The doctor had figured out who your parents were through a process of elimination, likely helped along by the looks of panic on their faces. Your parents clasped hands as they walked out of the room with the doctor, your mother leading the way with her long, easy stride.

Before today, all I knew about fear was sharp, fast: A close call on an icy highway. The dizzy moment of realization when something important had been forgotten: an algebra exam, a parking ticket past due. But now I know that fear can be a different creature altogether; it can be insidious and soft, slow and thick like honey. And invisible until you’re suffocating in it. That’s what it was like to watch your parents and the doctor in the hallway, to hear the words they thought were too soft to carry. I wanted to hold my hands over my ears, to hum loud enough to deafen, like I used to do when my parents wanted to talk about Christmas presents in front of me. But I didn’t; I heard it all.

"Your son is young and strong," the doctor said, loud as Fourth of July fireworks, loud as church bells when you’re standing in the steeple. "But even so, his injuries are very serious. To be blunt, the odds are not in his favor."

***

"God, Lydia—just call him already. Moping is so 2001." It was no fault of Angie’s that two weeks into the new school year, nothing much had happened in the drama of Lydia and Zac. Since the last time I’d seen you she’d turned into a veritable Bryant news service, complete with daily updates on the emotional well-being of your dog and status reports on a replacement windshield being installed in your car. I knew very well that her interest in your family wasn’t totally selfless, of course: talking about you meant talking about Nate, her most favorite subject ever.

"It ended up being so weird the last time I saw him, though. It was way more ‘get away kid, you bother me’ than ‘hey baby, let’s form a lasting relationship.’" Angie had probably heard the story of our afternoon at the library fifteen times by then, but I didn’t seem to be telling it right: the central theme, that maybe you didn’t really like me after all, was totally lost on her.

A little sweaty from spanking-new school clothes too warm for the hot September day, I had sat on a counter in the photo lab of our high school’s vocational wing, watching Angie’s deft progress with a roll of film she’d taken over the past weekend. The developing process had seemed more like magic to me than science, her putting long, neatly-wound spaghetti strands of film in various smelly liquids and ending up with perfect, miniature images of places and people looking like they didn’t look anymore, doing things that they’d maybe never do again. The room’s only light source cast her face in red, highlighting the lines of her cheekbones and the loose strands of dark hair working their way free from her messy bun. The walls, ceiling, and floor all around us were painted black, interrupted only by the faint, glow-in-the-dark aura of plastic constellations speckled across them. To my eye, the random patterns and shapes of the fake stars made marginally more sense than the real ones that you’d read so easily.

"And anyway, it wouldn’t exactly set the women’s movement back twenty years if he was the one to call me." As usual, we had the photo lab to ourselves after school that day. I liked hanging out there, even if I wasn’t an Angie-style art girl: it was like being on another planet, one where school wasn’t just fat books and dead frogs that smelled like my mother’s hair after a perm. Everything was topsy-turvy in the vocational wing, where there was carpeting on the floor and kids learned how to do things that might actually be useful at some point in their future lives. Unlike, say, what we were doing in any of my classes.

"Zac’s shy, Lydie. He thinks that you think he’s a creep." After staring at a strip of newly-developed film for long enough to make me wonder if she’d slipped into catatonia, Angie had pulled a sheet of specially-treated photo paper out of a thick, black plastic bag.

"And you know this how?" I asked, even though her answer made me cringe before she opened her mouth.

"Nate told me." The paper placed on one of the bizarre, vaguely torture-chamber-esque pieces of equipment lining the room, Angie pushed a button. White light momentary dazzled, projecting a face onto the paper. It was a negative, a jumbled parody of beauty—skin an unnatural shade of black, hair almost pure white—but I immediately recognized its subject.

"Don’t you two have better things to do than talk about me?" It was annoying to realize that Nate had probably laughed at my bashfulness, my timidity. The kind of girl he liked would never spend weeks rehashing and debating every glance they’d ever shared with him, every word. In retrospect, I’m dazzled that I listened to what Angie was saying that day without having a single clue what she really meant: She and Nate had spent time talking. Not making out, not smoking pot. Talking. Looking back, it’s easy to understand what wasn’t clear then; that fall was a turning point for both of us, for Angie just as much as for me. She had lightning in a bottle, after all, and was clutching it closer to her with every breath.

Angie flicked off the light and the paper was suddenly white again, showing nothing of what had been there only the space of one heartbeat before. "We talk about the things in our lives, and you’re in my life. And Zac’s in Nate’s." Even I couldn’t miss the smug ripple in her tone, like a beauty queen showing off the tiara she’d worked her whole life to earn.

"From what Zac said, I don’t think he and Nate like each other much." Angie shrugged, depositing the exposed photo paper into a gently whirring machine built into the darkroom wall.

"Don’t let all that sibling rivalry bullshit fool you. They’re best friends, even if Nate being preternaturally perfect means that Zac’s got a lot to live up to." I followed Angie through the darkroom’s makeshift revolving door, a black-painted plastic cylinder that looked as if it had been used as a service pipe in a previous life. The main graphic arts classroom was crowded with computers and paste-up tables. Brightly colored silkscreen prints dangled from the ceiling in rows, like so many Tibetan prayer flags.

"Perfect? You must be kidding. Nate’s a delinquent. James Dean, without the charming dead stuff," I scoffed.

"I rue the day I got you Netflix for Christmas." Angie plopped down on a table in front of the developing machine and watched as it spat out her picture, inch by inch. "You know what I mean about Nate. He’s just got something other boys don’t—even Zac." She struggled for words, absently swinging her legs and scratching at her elbow. "With how he looks and the way he’s so confident, it’s like he’s a star, somebody on TV." Angie was right about Nate, of course: He really does glow like nobody else, and he really can charm the fangs off a rattlesnake. But even then I knew that she was wrong about you. Your shine, your specialness, might not be as easy to see as Nate’s. But that doesn’t mean it’s any dimmer.

"Sure, Nate has lots in common with the people on TV. Like being one dimensional." Angie just raised her eyebrows and cast an indulgent smile in my direction. Even with logic on my side, it was obvious that I was fighting a loosing battle.

"Someday you’ll get it," she replied, grabbing her picture just as it finished its cycle in the developer. "See?"

Of course I saw, not having been mercifully blinded at birth. The picture could have been in Rolling Stone. Or Playgirl, if the schoolyard whispers were really true and such a thing actually existed. The frame was full of a very carnivorous looking Nate Bryant, hair ruffled and shirt askew as he crawled toward the camera on all fours, the naughtiest circus attraction ever. Angie had snapped the photo looking out from the headboard of her bed, and it was obvious that Nate was about two inches from snatching the camera and finding other ways to occupy her hands. It was hard to tell where his good looks stopped and the quality of the picture started—God had certainly given him those dramatic, swooping eyebrows, but the picture’s angle was what emphasized them, what polished the real world right off his face.

"Well, Ms. Gifford. What’s this?" The graphic arts teacher, Mr. Rathbone, had crept up behind us, unnoticed. Scrutinizing the picture, which he had taken from an only slightly embarrassed Angie, an annoyed expression flickered across his face. Our right to the photo lab had always been an assumed thing, a privilege earned by Angie’s genuine desire to be there. But it was starting to look like a thing of the past.

His voice cool and distant, Mr. Rathbone began the same critique of Angie’s work that I’ve heard a thousand times before. "Good contrast; good composition. And full of what no one can teach you how to capture—your subject’s feelings are almost palpable for the viewer."

"Thanks." Angie was impatient with the praise. She took the picture back, stared down at it.

Mr. Rathbone sighed, put his hands into two of the countless pockets on his art supply-packed apron. "Why are you not in my graphic arts program? Or enrolled in something the art department offers?" I know that I’m good at things—at soccer, at writing, at figuring out those stupid triangle proofs in geometry. But it would be nice to be like Angie, to just once have someone think that I could do something truly great.

"The Bryn Mawr admissions offers aren’t really that impressed by vocational classes." It was a bratty thing to say, brattier than usual even for Angie. The middle-aged graphic arts teacher and I had both known why she said it, though: there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to be in every art class that our school had to offer. But when you have four sisters, a mother, and two grandmothers who had attended the same snooty liberal arts college, you didn’t get to rock the boat. At least not in her family. "I’ve got all the arts credits I need to be a ‘well-rounded’ graduate. From here on out, it’s all math and science for me."

I felt bad for Angie, even though I would have killed to have a future at a college like that. By junior year I was already well aware that I would spend my entire adult life paying off four years at the cheapest Vermont state college.

"That’s a pity, Ms. Gifford. The art department has things of value to teach, too."

Angie shrugged. "You said yourself I’ve got what can’t be taught."

"I trust that this paper came with you from home?" Mr. Rathbone retorted. "If you’re not in the art department, we can’t have you using its resources."

"Of course," she lied.

***

I had gone to bed early that night, all but shuddering with horror as I set my alarm for five a.m. I was used to the girls’ teams getting the fuzzy end of the lollypop, but it seemed particularly ridiculous that even varsity soccer couldn’t get the field after school instead of before it.

Compared to the noise and crushing mass of bodies at school, my room seemed almost too quiet, too peaceful. But you took care of that, soon enough.

My mom went to bed before me, so I had thought I was safe in pulling Monty, the sad, threadbare teddy I’ve had practically since birth, from his hiding place under my bed. I may not have had a lot of pride, but my seventeenth birthday was just a few months away and it seemed horrific for even my mom to know that I still liked a little quality time with the teddy bear when I could squeeze it in. Curled up in my cozy bed with one arm wrapped around Monty, I was soon asleep.

You would later tell me that you’d started off throwing pebbles at my window before finally getting impatient and knocking, quietly, again and again. These days you’d know not to bother with the quiet business, as stories of camp counselors resorting to cupfuls of cold water to get me up in the morning are legend in my mother’s house. It’s been theorized that I could sleep through marching bands, nuclear holocausts, and maybe even ice ages, but your constant window tapping eventually got the better of me.

At first, I’d thought you were a dream. The sight of your pale face hovering at my window on a school night (or any time, really) seemed too improbable, too bad teen movie, to be believed. I would tell Angie to shut up about you, I decided; it couldn’t be a sign of good mental health that you were showing up in my head even when I was asleep.

"Hey." I may be a vivid dreamer and all, but I didn’t remember any other character in my head looking quite so fleshy. Or sounding so real.

"Zac?" It would be a lie to say that I didn’t doubt your sanity that night. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I also considered the possibility that you were a crazed sociopath looking for innocent girls to lure off into the woods for sacrificing during satanic rituals. I had once seen a late night cable movie on the topic at Angie’s, and it seemed like a pretty awful way to die.

"Nice teddy bear." That was when I knew you were real. If it had been one of those dreams, I would have been naked. And to pack in the most humiliation possible per minute of REM sleep, it would have been taking place in the middle of my freshman year homeroom, which had been chock full of football players. I quickly shoved Monty under the covers.

"What are you doing here? It’s like nighttime—don’t you have a home?" You were really there, really peering in my open window, illuminated only by the watery light of a distant street lamp. The pleasant grogginess of recent sleep had quickly drained away, leaving me feeling about as naked as I would have in the dream.

"I wanted to see if you’d like to come for a drive." Your voice was slow and sleepy, your hair a bushy mess standing straight up in more places than not.

"And if I say no?" I knew right away that I would go. I’m not the kind of girl that good stories happen to every day, but there you were: a human magnet for all things bizarre. You were midnight swims in borderline polluted rivers; you were the klutz in the supermarket, and the booming voice at story time. The only thing that you weren’t was an opportunity I could afford to pass up.

"Then I’d be bummed, and I think your mom would, too." There was the smile, the one I hadn’t even realized I was missing.

Playing back your words in my head, I had realized that there was reason for hysteria buried in them. "What? My mom?"

"I tried her window first, and she pointed me in this direction." Damn one-story houses. Damn them.

"Okay. But did she mention anything about calling the cops?" I had listened for the sound of sirens carrying on the crisp night air, but heard nothing more than the chiming of bells at the big Assembly of God church two blocks away.

"No. But she did say that your curfew is ten on school nights, and that I should call first next time." At the time, I thought that it was bizarre that my mother wasn’t outraged by the strange boy knocking on her window at midnight, looking for me. Maybe she’d been waiting for this all along, I had pondered. Maybe she’d been thinking to herself, "this daughter of mine is never going to be a hot commodity, is she? When I was her age, my father had already spent years chasing boys out from under my window with a shotgun." Not that I could imagine Grandpa James aiming a shotgun at anything but a fisher cat, but my mom was certainly taking this all this in stride. Now, of course, I know her secret: She can’t say no to your easy smile and thoughtless self-confidence any more than I can.

"Are you coming?" It was a Thursday night, and my clock read 12:10. Being cranky and tired for one day wouldn’t mean mass college rejections and a career in food service, I assured myself. It only meant that, for once in my life, I’d be just like everyone else.

"I’ll be out front in one minute," I whispered, suddenly sure my mother could hear every word we’d said through the thin wall between our bedrooms.

"Not exactly stealthy, that going out the front door plan." As you spoke you’d stood up on your tiptoes, looking around my room. I was glad that it was dark, but even if it couldn’t be seen I still knew that the worn carpet was curling up by my closet, that my ceiling was stained yellow in spots from a bad winter and a leaky roof.

"What? Do people walk through walls where you’re from?" It was a reasonable question; your people showed up in the windows of practical strangers at midnight. Why shouldn’t they walk through their walls, too?

"Nope. But we climb through windows." I had liked the devilish glint in your eye almost as much as I liked the unspoken dare in your tone, so I did it. I silently thanked God that my favorite pajamas were a pair of mesh shorts and an Old Navy tee shirt that belonged to my mom in the 90s, and I gracefully exited my room via the window. Or at least that’s how I like to pretend that I remember it. Really, the whole incident involved a fair amount of groaning (stubbing a toe on my chair), grunting (forcing opening the fast-stuck screen window), and whining (realizing that I’d forgotten both my flip-flops and keys inside).

In spite of the unfortunate reality of the situation, it had felt like heaven to race across the damp, cool grass next to you, to stand breathless by your car, waiting for the porch light to snap on, for my mother to charge out of the house and go Mutual of Omaha and protect her young. We stayed there for a long time, just leaning on your icy hood and waiting for something, for anything, to happen. But other than my heartbeat gradually slowing to a rate below medical emergency status, nothing did.

"Let’s run away and join the circus," I had finally whispered, nudging you with one shoulder. It seemed like a good idea, and still does: high school was a drag and college promised to be more of the same. And anyway, what else would I ever need to be happy but you?

"Works for me. I’ve always wanted to be shot out of a cannon." I had liked making you laugh, and the sleepy, boy smell of you that seemed to be everywhere around me.

"I’ll tame the lions. And sell lemonade made with sugar to the people I like, and made with salt to the people I don’t." Out there, the night had a particular sound. It was a mixture of people noises, cars and televisions and humming electrical wires, and animal noises, a chorus of chirping crickets and whatever sound lightning bugs might make as their inside illumination turns on and off.

"Remind me not to accept anything to drink from you. Ever." With the click of a remote, you unlocked your car’s doors and inclined your mop of a head to indicate that I should get in.

"You’d get sugar, silly." So this is what flirting is like, I’d thought to myself. Interesting.

It was a cloudy night, so there were no stars for you to name. We had driven in silence, your fancy car’s windows and moonroof open, the radio blaring. I can’t even count the number times that we’ve done the same thing since, just gotten into your car and driven until we were sick of driving, or until whatever confessional conversation we were having dried up. On those rides I always feel like I can say anything to you, no matter how petty or embarrassing it might sound out in the real world.

That first night, though, I mostly just looked at you. With your attention on the road, I was free to stare, to gape. Each streetlight that flashed past us in the gloomy darkness had brightened your face, allowing me to see the way your hair curled at the nape of your neck and the jagged, white scar that traced its way up the inside of your left arm.

"So listen," you had said, as I cataloged the pale band on your wrist where a watch must normally have been, the faded Dartmouth sweatshirt you were wearing. "I’m sorry for being so weird the last time I saw you. I just don’t like talking about the whole community service mess, especially because it seems like everybody knows about it already." We were leaving the flat, suburban streets of my neighborhood and heading up into the hills along the Vermont-New York border. The streetlights grew further and further apart, finally disappearing altogether. If we kept going the way we were, I knew the road would turn to dirt soon.

"I have no idea what you’re talking about." I wanted to touch you, to wind my fingers through your hair. To kiss the spot where your lower lip curved out above your chin. But another long-standing tradition had started that night: instead of doing those things, even though maybe you wished I would, I just turned away. The houses on the side of the road were hulking and dark, so distantly spaced that the people who lived in them might only know their neighbors as the roar of a snow blower on milky winter mornings, or as the Subaru passing by on the way to the bus stop. If it was brighter, I knew I would see barns in the distance, and fenced-off fields full of red-brown cows.

"Right after I got my car, I was pulled over for speeding. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except I had some stuff in here that I shouldn’t have." Taking a convenient left as you spoke, you had turned to squint at my expression in the darkness. Of course I knew how the story was going to end. I’m a good girl—not a stupid one. "It was a lot of pot. A wicked lot. And it turns out there are some things that there’s no getting out of, even if your dad and the judge assigned to your case happen to be golfing buddies."

Up until that point, I think I’d had a touch of Angie syndrome: I was so busy admiring all the things I liked about you that I didn’t bother to notice anything I wouldn’t. But you came toppling off the pedestal on our first night ride, like you must have known you would. Now I’m glad of it, because the older we get the more I appreciate you just being you around me, and vice versa. We don’t have to put on any shows, or pretend we’re anything that we’re not: you’re the former lawbreaker, and I’m the girl with the teddy bear.

"That was dumb." I had held my arm out the window, liking that I needed to fight the powerful rush of air just to hold my hand steady. Don’t be a mommy, don’t be a mommy, I’d repeated to myself, again and again. I didn’t say much more that night, but what I really wanted to do was yell at you. To force you to see that the real world was completely free of dress rehearsals, and that if you’d screwed up the million gifts you’d been born with your misery would have been your own fault. But I clamed up instead, working hard to install you in my mind’s version of purgatory—a place for falling or rising, not holding steady.

"I ended up getting a fine and having to do sixty hours of community service, but I’m almost glad. The library is fun, and if I hadn’t been pulled over I never would’ve gotten to do story time." I was a little sad to realize that we looping around, heading back toward my house. It seemed inevitable that we’d find my mom sitting on the ivy-shadowed front porch, just waiting to ground me until after graduation.

"But if you’re under eighteen, isn’t that stuff supposed to be a secret? Why were those guys in the library being so nasty about you?" You flinched at the question.

"You know how it is around here. If I was somebody else, maybe the case would have been kept quiet. But everybody in this town knows my family." You didn’t say the rest, but I could fill it in: a town full of working-class people wasn’t about to shed any tears for the flatlanders living in the big house, the one with the real Carrera marble countertops and the two-acre garden that someone else was paid to weed, to water. They liked to believe that you were a bad kid, that no family was immune to trouble.

I could see the driveway light at my house shining from a block away, even though it hadn’t been on when we left. And failing secret agent test number 25 for the evening, you didn’t even bother to click off your high beams as we approached my house, the dashboard clock reading 1:20.

A kiss would have been a nice end to the ride, and back then, before the whole "just friends" thing was set in stone, it seemed possible that you would lean across the passenger seat to touch me with those lips. I liked the thought of it, and sat motionless for a second after you had parked in my driveway. I wished I’d thought to brush my teeth before leaving the house. But even when I finally opened my door a crack, showering us both in pale yellow light, you stayed still.

We’d spent probably eight hours together in our entire lives, but there were already things I would have changed about you if I could: Your lofty, flawed history. Your brother. But I still couldn’t bear to go inside; I didn’t care what you’d done, or even if you’d do it again in the future. I just wanted to stay out there in your car, to feel the cool night air on my face as we sped away into forever. "Did Angie put you up to this?" I mostly questioned you to buy time, to keep you from wondering why I was hovering in your car’s doorway. I wouldn’t kill her if she did make you come, I vowed. Sometimes the ends really do justify the means.

"Nate’s girlfriend?" I thought it was weird that you were puzzled. My high school included kids from four nearby towns, and still only had three hundred and fifty students, not counting the ones bussed in two or three times a week for vocational programs. Everyone there knew who everyone else hung out with, who had tripped whom to get the best spot in the eighth grade class picture, who had been the first girl to be french kissed in fifth grade. It was exciting that you were fresh, new. "I don’t think I’ve talked to her. Ever."

"Then why?" I asked, letting my nervous gaze travel to the empty porch, lined with my mother’s dark bedroom windows.

You had looked down at your hands, gripping the steering wheel tight, and shrugged. "I guess I was just feeling brave."

That was all I needed to hear. I stayed in place long enough for you to dare looking back up at me, smiling in spite of myself. "I’ll see you later," I replied, meaning it like I’d never meant anything before.

And off I went, prepared to meet the firing squad that turned out to be suspiciously absent. Nervous about climbing back through my window, I had tried the front door even though I was sure it would be locked. The knob turned easily in my hand; the door slid quietly open. My mom was nowhere to be seen as I crept into my room, as I lay down and closed my eyes, as I replayed our ride over and over on the movie screen of my mind.

Chapter Four

I didn’t see you that day, or most of the one after it. Spending hour after hour in the waiting room with your family, I did everything I could to avoid the details, so I can’t tell you why exactly. I wanted to be at the hospital for when you woke up, for when you were awake and smiling and my friend Zac again, not for now, not for when you’re suffering. Instead of listening to the frequent updates on your progress from one white-coated doctor after another, I took trips to the bathroom with Missy and long, slow walks to the hospital’s coffee shop, my feet dragging all the way on the shiny-tiled floor.

When your parents finally sent my mom and I home that first night you spent in the ICU, all I could think about was going back. It made me panic a little, made my throat tight and my palms sweaty, to think that while I was away anything could happen. You could sit up and ask if there was any lime Jello leftover from dinner; you could die. And even though I’ve been with you practically every second of the past year, I wouldn’t be there when it really counted. When your forever was decided, one way or the other. I spent that whole night curled in my bed, watching the red numbers on my clock scroll slowly by.

But when morning finally came and I could finally make the drive back to the hospital, alone this time, because my mom had to work, I still could barely stand to be there. Every time the door to the waiting room opened, every time we heard people running in the hallway, leaving a wall of frantic electronic beeping behind them, I was sure that the worst had happened. The hospital, it turns out, isn’t a great place for imagining the best.

My second day there, I heard more than I wanted to: That your wrist had been snapped when the car rolled, your leg smashed, your whole body bruised. But none of those things, the ones that could be seen on the outside, seemed to matter to the doctors. What they talked to your parents about most was that you were broken on the inside, bleeding under your skin. And it was your head injury that made them lower their voices, made them pull your parents out into the hall for tense, hushed discussions.

I had picked a seat as far from the hallway as I could, way over by the outside wall of the building, but their voices—your parents’ and today’s doctor’s—still carried through the partially open door. The doctor, as always, spoke first. "If the swelling in his brain goes down, we can operate to reduce the pressure."

"And if it doesn’t?" Your mother had answered, a little ripple of fear in her cool, professional tone.

Missy was sitting on the floor at my feet, surrounded by piles of toys gathered up at home the night before, and at I first I thought that she couldn’t hear the conversation. She’d been fixated on your old Game Boy all morning, playing one round of Super Mario after another, but she had flinched at your mom’s words.

Out in the hallway, the doctor’s only response was silence so complete that it made my ears ring. There was a muffled shuffling, and I imagined that it was your mom pulling your dad into a tight, desperate embrace. "God will protect our baby," your dad sounded reassuring, trusting. As if he really believed that God had a say in what happened to you, and that maybe He would decide to make you okay.

I had watched Missy react as if she was a character on TV, watched her face crumple and her little, narrow shoulders start to shake with sobs. I knew what I should have done: scooped her up and held her close until she didn’t feel like crying anymore. But I couldn’t move. I was frozen stiff, a passive observer to your little sister’s misery. On the other side of the room, Nate put down the battered copy of Atlas Shrugged that he’d been reading and got up. I knew immediately that he was going to Missy, and for once I was thankful for him; one of us wouldn’t fail her, at least.

But Missy looked at Nate with her shimmering eyes as he crossed the room, and then back at me. After a moment of indecision she had finally turned, climbing up into my lap and burying her face in my shoulder, her skinny arms snaking around my neck. The warm solidity of her weight was comforting against me, the everyday baby-shampoo smell of her hair soothing.

You know that I’m not so good at the whole nurturing thing: I kill potted plants just by looking at them and manage to alienate strangers before I even get around to speaking. But wrapping my arms around your little sister made me wish that I was different, that I knew what to say and what to do to make her feel better.

"Are you okay, sunshine?" I finally whispered, squeezing Missy tight. There was only one thing in the whole world that I wanted right then more than I wanted my mom to be there to do the same for me. But then again, I’m not sure how comfortable either of us would be with me nestled in your lap.

"I want Zac. Please. I want him right now." I was surprised by how agitated her plea was, and at the hysteria that edged her voice. For the past day and a half, Missy had been stoic, hushed, and still. But I guess that for a while your absence must have felt like a game of hide and seek to her, like something reversible, something temporary. "Please," she begged again, digging her fingers hard into the back of my neck.

"I’m sorry," I whispered. These, the only words that I could force out, sounded inadequate, wan. Missy had just shuddered in my grasp, shaking from the force of the hot tears that were starting to soak through my shirt. For the first time in the past two days, I felt like crying, too. Before, shock had been a protective mist that had served to pad my every movement, my every thought. But now I could feel the shielding barrier of it dissolving all around me, could feel emotions that used to be vague pinpricks of sensation becoming deadly sharp skewers. I won’t cry in front of Nate, I silently promised myself. I won’t break down until I’m in a safe and quiet place far away, because there won’t be any putting me back together once I do.

Nate had stopped moving when Missy came to me, but as I lost my battle for composure and the room started to swim on the other side of my tears, he took two quick steps toward us. The sudden flurry of motion drew my attention to him, but not soon enough to see anything more than the ghost of his compassion slipping away. Before he had time to think about it, Nate’s body had responded to our tears. Maybe he would have sat next to us, rubbed Missy’s back and put his arm around me, directing my head to rest on his shoulder. But his higher functions trumped his instincts, and I saw Nate’s face harden, his eyes go from their normal dreamy blue to icy gray, his beautiful face, his plush lips, pinch tight with anger. And then he was nothing more than a dark streak of motion, skirting fast around the chairs and tables scattered throughout the room. His steps were sharp, clipped, like he couldn’t bear to be there with us for even one more second.

I’ve known your brother for over a year, and known of him since I was eleven years old. And not once in all that time did I imagine he could look like he did as he stormed out of the room, or that he could do more than belittle me. But watching him then, I realized that—with the violence of his movements and with the waves of inexplicable fury rising off him—he could actually scare me.

Nate didn’t say a word when he left, just slammed the door behind him. I was grateful, in a way—at least we wouldn’t have to listen to your parents and the doctor, out there in the hall.

***

I’ll probably be deported from our generation for admitting to this, but I love my job at Edna’s. And not just in a "hooray, paycheck!" sort of way, either. I look forward to my shifts, especially the quiet weeknight ones, and secretly wish that I could spend the rest of my life working at the same place, doing the same thing. I’ve never told this to anyone, not even to you, but I guess you’ve probably figured it out. There are other jobs I could have in our town, better paying ones—waitress at the Riverside Diner, cashier at the Stop and Shop, even assistant in your dad’s home office. But I’d rather stay where I am, with no job title other than the one that Angie has bestowed upon me: the Queen of the Crap.

The battered sign flapping above the store’s entrance might say "antique mall," but everyone in Olcott Falls knows that it’s just there to fool the leaf-peeping, flatlander tourists. Really, Edna’s is nothing more than a glorified yard sale taking up the whole cavernous basement of the oldest commercial block downtown. It’s dingy and dark and full of junk that’s too new to find a home in the classier antique shops on Route 4, but too old and too useless to merit space in even the dustiest back corners of attics belonging to sensible people. The maze of little, windowless rooms is filled up to the point of bursting with albums by the Bay City Rollers, hot pink leather purses with foot-long tassels, and sculptures of the Virgin Mary made out of seashells that still smell like the ocean. My mom thinks that the whole place must be a front for the mob, because there’s no way that Edna makes even close to enough money to keep the place running off the ten or fifteen customers that show up in an average eight-hour shift. Even if she does pay me a measly $5.50 an hour.

I’ve worked there since the summer after Freshman year, and in all that time Angie is the only person I’ve ever known who has come in. I never saw anyone from school, that’s for sure: As far as they’re concerned, if it’s not Wet Seal, it’s not shopping. So imagine my surprise when the Saturday after our late night ride rolled around, and there you were, awkwardly bumping your head on the low ceiling, making the whole store seem like someplace built in miniature scale.

When you came in, I had been sitting at the cluttered counter near the stairs, piles and piles of old picture postcards stacked up all around me. I hadn’t been doing anything productive, of course, just reading the thin, loopy messages that had been written on the cards’ backs in a long litany of years that I couldn’t even begin to imagine: 1922, 1949, 1985. They talked about new babies and family trips to the Grand Canyon and lonely Sunday mornings, and I fully intended to waste the rest of my day looking through them.

But I’d heard you thudding down the stairs, and could tell just from the sound of your footsteps that all bets were off. I had known it was you. Okay. Maybe didn’t know, exactly. But I had hoped so hard that I was sure the sheer force of my will would’ve bent reality, twisted the very fiber of being, just to make it so.

Taking the steps two at a time, you had rattled, clattered, and bumped so loudly and so much that I half expected you to have fallen on the way down, to spill out into the room on your bottom in a cloud of dust and waving limbs. But you had managed a little more grace than that, and arrived at the counter biting back a grin that was struggling to twist up the corners of your mouth. You’d begun as you always began, with a rumbling "hey," and a fleeting moment of direct eye contact immediately followed by many moments of no eye contact at all. Back then you made me want to pinch myself, and still do: no matter what, whether we’re friends or something more, you’ve been my first taste of being in real love, the kind where the person you care about cares about you back.

"Ahoy." Now it was my turn to hide a smile, a feat that I accomplished by moving one of the bigger towers of postcards back into the box I’d been pulling them out of. What happened next surprised me a little bit. I didn’t think about what to say, didn’t plan out every word—only to screw them up on delivery—like I usually did. I just spoke, easily and fluently, like the English language was a tool that I used all the time to communicate with cute, broad-shouldered boys. "If you’re here in hopes of finding some fantastic vintage Rolling Stones shirt, you might as well leave now. We don’t have anything remotely that cool."

"Cool’s not an issue for me, ma’am," you had assured me. "I can find cool things were other people see only junk."

"You’re in the right place then. We’ve got junk that, piled end on end, would reach the moon and back like five-hundred times." It was now officially a verbal volley, and somehow reminded me of the exact moment when I’d learned how to ride my bike in second grade. The whole experience had been a veritable fiasco of frustration, with my dad trying again and again to explain the finer points of the sport. "Just balance," he’d said. "Just go, just pedal. You won’t fall." But of course I did, over and over, until I was bloody and bruised and miserable. It was only after my dad had given up and gone inside to get some Band Aids that it actually happened, that I finally stopped worrying about not knowing how to ride a bike and just rode a bike. There was no trick to it, other than letting my body do what it knew how to do. I had glided thoughtlessly down the smooth-paved street, the suburban breeze sweet and hot on my face, and I felt like I’d finally discovered how to throw off gravity for good, how to almost fly. Being your friend feels like th