A thin layer of snow had fallen and frozen solid while they were inside. Parker hacked at the coat of ice that had glazed over the windows of his Bug while Nina huddled in the front seat. It was freezing in the car, and she pined silently for the heated seats of her SUV.
Parker opened Nina’s door and leaned in. He had an icy residue all over his sleeves.
“Don’t put your purse on the floor,” he said. “Or any stuff.”
“Why?”
“There’s a hole in the floor on that side. Things fall out.”
Nina bent down and examined the floor by her feet and found the source of the wicked draft that was blowing up her skirt.
“She is no pretty, the Roach, but she run like deer,” Parker said. “Like sick deer. Sick deer with limp.”
He closed the door and went back to his scraping. Nina gathered all of her things tightly on her lap.
Parker seemed to be doing an excessively precise job, chiseling away at the ice as if he were sculpting a piece of artwork. He waved hello to Nina periodically and kept checking his watch. Finally he seemed satisfied and got in the car. His hands were almost purple from the cold.
He drove around the school very slowly and then stopped halfway up the main drive in front of the building. Nina looked at him in confusion.
“Why are we stopping?” she asked.
Parker was staring at something in front of them with an exaggeratedly baffled expression. Nina followed his eyes. The mutants sign was down. Now the floodlights were focused on the words NINA ROX.
“Huh,” he said. “I wonder how that happened.”
For a moment Nina was genuinely confused. She wondered who this other Nina was. Then she got it.
“You’re the S thief?” she asked in amazement.
“The what?”
“The guy,” she said, pointing at the sign. “The S thief.”
“Oh. S thief. Because we used to take the S. I get it. Good name.”
“We?”
“There are four of us,” he said. “We operate in secret, under a cloak of darkness.”
He pulled up his coat and peered at her over the collar. Nina looked at her name basking in the light. Now the question was … why? The answer seemed to lie in Parker’s silence.
“It’s really nice,” she said. “I mean, you’ll have to take it down or I’ll be in tons of trouble, but it’s nice….”
Nina started involuntarily pulling on her rings, yanking them up to her knuckles and twisting them hard, like she was trying to unscrew the tips of her fingers.
“Can I just say something?” he asked.
Sure.
He reached out and took her hand, the one that was sore from all the ring twisting. He gently pushed her two rings back down into position and rubbed her knuckles between his fingers. This gesture surprised Nina, and it was so calming that she didn’t even try to stop him.
“Could I kiss you?” he asked.
“Parker …”
“We have a lot in common. You breathe air. I breathe air. You’re the gorgeous and super-talented head of student counsel. I look like I’m twelve and I’m part of a secret society that changes the letters in signs. Or a sign. You’re going to Stanford. I might get into SUNY Purchase. I think it could work.”
“Park …”
“Think of this as one of those free samples you get in the mail. You try it. You don’t like it, you just throw it away.”
“Stop!”
It was too much. Nina felt herself shaking. It wasn’t just the cold, but the cold was amplifying it. She pressed her cheek hard against the cold window and stared down at the Roach’s ancient, grimy dashboard. Parker’s car had that pungent, closed-up smell that Avery’s car had.
“Sorry,” she said quietly.
When Parker didn’t reply, she knew she had to say something. She owed him some kind of explanation.
“I had a boyfriend who is this amazing guy,” she said, balling her hands up tightly. “He really cares about stuff—he’s a serious guy. I trusted him, completely. I wanted to do everything with him. I would have changed where I was going to school for him. Then he just dumped me. Nothing happened. We didn’t fight. I don’t get it.“
Nina was surprised to hear herself almost shouting these last words, but she went on anyway.
“Everything bad that happened this year has been because of dating. Mel and Avery. Me and Steve.”
“I get that,” he said quietly. “I’ve never dated anyone for more than a week or two. And then I’d see whoever it was in the hall. And if she kept walking, or if I kept walking, I knew it was over. Or we’d just IM or something. We’d be like, ‘Um, hey. I don’t want to see you anymore.’ ‘Cool.’ Not the same thing. I shouldn’t even compare.”
“It’s not like Steve did more than that,” Nina said bitterly. “I finally told him he had to call me. So he did. And that’s when he did it. Over the phone. It was so bad….”
Bad hardly described it. She remembered standing in front of her desk, hearing for the first time about the girl with the similar hair—the hair that wasn’t so similar anymore. Hearing Steve, who she thought would do anything to be with her, getting rid of her. The void that seemed to open up in the floor by her desk. The fact that her future seemed like nothing at that second. That the path she’d been following her whole life was just rubbed out. The fear …
She didn’t describe any of that, but she felt in the silence like Parker could see those thoughts, like she was somehow projecting them onto the windshield. She heard him take a few deep breaths, as if preparing to say something, then he would just stop. He was out of jokes for the moment. He put his arm out instead and pried Nina from the window and steered her into his shoulder. She rested there for a moment. It felt right. Parker had come to mean a lot to her. She didn’t have Avery, and she didn’t quite have Mel. But Parker had proven himself over and over again. And now there was the sign, right in front of them— NINA ROX. For once this whole year, it was nice to have someone there. Someone who actually paid attention to her.
“Valentine’s Day sucks,” she mumbled into his coat.
“More than a little.”
Nina pulled herself back up and rubbed her face vigorously with both hands. Parker shivered a bit too. They were both shaking it off.
“You don’t look twelve,” she said.
He shrugged. He seemed to know that she was trying to thank him.
“You want to go?” he said. He was talking quickly now. “Come on. You have to be cold. We should go eat some fat, like a greasy cheeseburger. Something hot and fatty. I want to open a place called Hot and Fatty. I have all these good ideas for restaurants. I want to open one for bulimics called The Fork and Bucket.”
He turned the key in the ignition, but Nina reached over and grabbed a handful of his coat sleeve.
“Wait.”
The Roach coughed once and then gave up the effort of trying to start.
“She listens,” he said quietly. “She likes you.”
In the distance, they could hear a car with a high-end sub-woofer making its bassy, window-rattling way along the road on the other side of the school.
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” she said. “I don’t want anything I can … lose. Know what I mean?”
Nina was only somewhat clear on the point herself, but a look of understanding spread over Parker’s face. Suddenly, everything about Parker was appealing. His smooth chin that came down to a firm, definite point, those bright eyes that had fixed their narrow focus squarely on her.
“I’m not your boyfriend,” he said. “In fact, who are you? How did you get in my car?”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said, really smiling for the first time in weeks.
This was all right. This was good. This wasn’t permanent. This was something she could do right now, and it would all be okay. This was Parker helping her forget Steve.
She unhooked her seat belt and practically fell on him, pressing her lips into his, slipping her hands into the warm space between his coat and his chest. She was laughing—she was making up for a lot of lost time. And Parker grasped her tight, happy to participate in the effort.