CHRIS GOT ME HOME BEFORE dawn. It was 5:55 when he parked at his aunt’s house, and he held my hand as he walked with me through the grass, all the way up to my porch.
He kissed me on the cheek, and looked down at his feet as he smiled. In that moment I didn’t care if we got caught.
I crept up the stairs to the second floor as quietly as possible, every tiny creak my steps made sounding like doors slamming. As I passed Mallory’s room, I looked in like always, but Roxie wasn’t there. I tiptoed down the hall and into my bedroom, silently closing the door behind me.
When I turned around, there was Roxie lying at the foot of my bed. I gave her a quick pet and then collapsed. I didn’t bother taking off my clothes or my shoes. I lay on top of the bedspread and watched the daylight beginning to fill my bedroom.
If I closed my eyes, I could still feel his hands on my skin.
I rolled over and buried my face in my pillow, but was unable to stop myself from grinning. My hair spread out around me, and as I breathed in, I realized it smelled like him, smoky and sweet at the same time, like sea salt and clean laundry. I inhaled deeply and held the scent there in my lungs until my chest got stiff and my body forced me to let it out.
I wrapped my arms around my pillow and held on tight.
I didn’t wake up again until noon. When I came downstairs, Mom was sitting in the living room, which was strange. She didn’t normally hang out around the house, what with the risk of having to interact with Dad, and everything.
She had her feet tucked under her on the couch, her hand lazily smoothing Roxie’s head, as she read a magazine. She had pulled her hair up into a ponytail and didn’t have any makeup on at all, and was clad simply in shorts and a tank top. I found myself smiling at her before she saw me standing there. She looked so normal, at ease. I hadn’t seen her like that in a while.
“Morning,” I said, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch.
“Afternoon,” she countered, but then smiled.
“You look nice,” I told her.
She jerked her head back and pulled her eyebrows together, her hand immediately flying to her hair. “I’m a mess!”
“No you’re not. You look very chill.”
“Chill, huh?” She shook her head, then looked at me more closely, squinting as she took in my clothes and my hair. Could she tell I’d been in the back of a car kissing a boy with my shirt off in the middle of the night?
“You look”—she paused, searching for the word—“happy,” she finished, uncertain.
“Really?” I asked, and I knew my voice was too high, too excited.
“Yes,” she answered, but her smile faded quickly and was replaced by a tight, forced curve of the mouth as she looked back down at Roxie. I could practically smell the disappointment coming off her. I’d violated the cardinal rule. Happy wasn’t allowed in our house. In that moment, I would have rather she caught me half-naked in a backseat with a boy’s hands on me.
“Are you hungry?” I asked her. “I’m starving.”
She tilted her head to the side, checking in with her stomach. “A little, I suppose.”
I had my containers from the Green House still sitting in the refrigerator. I took out plates and bowls from the cupboards and arranged the leftovers into two servings. I heated up the ones that needed to be heated, and made them look pretty, like on those TV food shows.
If Dad was home, there was no sign of him, so this would be just a me and Mom thing.
I poured her a glass of the herbal sun tea that she had sitting out on the counter in the giant mason jar dispenser—she’d sworn off Dad’s Luzianne, supposedly for caffeine reasons.
“Okay, Mom,” I called into the hallway. “Lunch.”
She ambled into the kitchen a few seconds later, holding her hip the way she did whenever she’d been sitting too long. Roxie followed behind, sniffing at the air.
“Thank you, honey,” she said, and then cleared her throat, almost as if “honey” had slipped out by accident. “I saw that there were some take-out containers in there.” She glanced at the fridge. “I didn’t know whose they were, though.”
She really would do anything to avoid acknowledging Dad’s existence.
She took a bite of the vegan taco flatbread, and nodded in approval. “So,” she began.
I waited, but I don’t think she had a follow-up.
“Hey, do you remember that time when we all went to the beach?” I asked. “It was like six or seven years ago. We stopped in New Pines and went to that old-fashioned ice cream place?”
Her face went slack and blanched.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
Her fork teetered between her fingers, like she was about to drop it. But then she snapped out of it, blinked her eyes fast a few times, and said, “Sure.” Her voice was tight, controlled, the color rapidly returning to her face. “Why?”
“No—nothing, no reason.” I was inadvertently breaking all the rules. I wished I could roll back time and never have said anything at all. “I just—I went there the other day. With Chris. That’s where the food came from.”
She speared a citrus-glazed brussels sprout and popped it into her mouth—I could hear her teeth scraping against the fork.
“Well, not the ice cream place,” I continued anyway. “But this little vegetarian restaurant we found. There. In New Pines, I mean.”
The way she was staring at me, her eyes suddenly all hard and wide, made me so nervous that I was chopping up my sentences into fragments.
“Oh.” She nodded, but when she said, “That’s nice,” I knew I’d lost her.
I was taking a bite of my tofu lettuce wrap when she stole a glance at me. It had to have only been a second, a fraction of a second.
But it was long enough for me to recognize it.
I knew what her gaze meant because that was the way she always looked at Dad. Like I’d done something to betray her, and now she wasn’t sure if she could trust me anymore. And I had.
I’d used a forbidden word: “we.”
“We,” in reference to a time when Mallory had existed.
She took a sip of her sun tea, and then pressed her napkin to the corners of her mouth. Sitting up straighter, she cleared her throat.
“Maia, I wanted to ask you,” she began.
She was going to bring up the fact that I’d snuck out last night, that I’d come home at dawn. She’d demand to know what I was doing, who I was with, and I’d cave and tell her every last detail—that’s how guilty she made me feel.
“Were you out in the barn for some reason?” she finished. Her eyes were narrowed and squinting, and she was doing this micro head shake, almost like she really wanted me to say no. “I noticed the light had been left on.”
“Um.” I swallowed again. “Yeah, I—I was, actually.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I just—I don’t know—I guess I wanted to look around.”
I wanted to remind her that the barn was always supposed to be a shared space for me and Mallory. That I used to be out there all the time with her. That, technically, I should be allowed in the barn whenever I wanted.
“Well,” she said, clenching her jaw as she nodded. “You just make sure you leave it as you found it.”
“Oh—okay,” I stuttered.
She stood up and tried her best to smile, but it was like her face was cracking, like it was too painful and she could only press her lips together in a straight line. “Thank you for lunch,” she said, like it was a business meeting or something. “I think I might go lie down for a little,” she muttered as she walked away.
As I sat there looking down at the reheated remnants of the happiest meal of my life, the guilt began tugging at my seams—Mom’s words echoing through me like a single thread being pulled.
I’d just finished reboxing up the leftovers once again and placing them back into the fridge when my phone vibrated in my pocket.
It was Chris:
I can’t stop thinking about you
I smiled at the words, and imagined him saying them out loud.
Then he wrote: Please tell me I get to see you today?
• • •
We were lying on the concrete, the sun falling gently onto our skin through the filtered shade of the trees at Bowman’s.
My lips tingled from all the kissing. It had started the second we’d entered the wooded path—kissing while walking, kissing against a tree, kissing while standing on the house’s foundation, and sitting, and then lying, with me on top, then him on top. When we were too exhausted and out of breath to keep kissing, we spread out like when you’re a kid making snow angels, except it wasn’t cold, white snow; it was the warm sun-bleached white of the concrete.
Only our hands were touching.
“This is where we talked for the first time,” I said, my head tipping to the side to look at his face. “I already liked you then.”
“Really?” he said. “ ’Cause it seemed like you were completely annoyed.”
“Don’t you know that was just my cover?”
He looked up at the trees, the blue of the sky punching through the spaces in between the leaves.
“Did you get in trouble for last night?” he asked. “Did they know you were gone?”
I wish. Getting in trouble for sneaking out would have felt a lot better than getting in trouble for remembering, or whatever it was that my mom thought I had done wrong.
I didn’t say that, though; I shook my head. “You?” I asked instead.
“No,” he said. “It would have been worth it if I had, though.”
His fingertips were dancing along the lines of my palm.
It made me remember Mallory, this one night in her bedroom when we were lying side by side on her bed. She held my hand up and traced each line, telling me, “This is your life line. And here, that’s your heart line. Your head line. And your fate line.”
“What about this one?” I asked Mallory, pointing to the longest, deepest line on my hand.
“That’s your sun line,” she said. “It’s all about fame and fortune.”
“Fame?” I scoffed at the idea—Mallory was the one who was going to have all that. “Me?”
“Well, it’s also about scandal,” she told me, making her voice all deep and throaty. And then she threw her head back, laughing.
“What?” Chris asked, his voice snapping me back to the present.
I opened my eyes. I hadn’t realized they were closed.
“What?” I repeated.
“You just laughed,” he told me, smiling.
“I was thinking about last night,” I told him, not a lie exactly.
He nodded, saying, “Mmm.”
“That was pretty scandalous, wasn’t it?”
His cheeks flushed, and he buried his face in my shoulder. “It was,” he agreed, letting his hand rest on my stomach. He lay back, and we switched positions: my head against his shoulder, his arm around me. I was careful of where my hands were. He hadn’t told me so, but I knew from the way he’d pulled back when we were in the car, he didn’t want me touching his torso. I placed my hand low on his stomach, near his hip.
“Yes.” Then with his hand over mine, he moved it gently, up his stomach, so that my fingers were just grazing his lower ribs.
“Okay,” I said. I wanted him to know I understood he was showing me what was okay.
It was quiet for a while, just the sounds of leaves rustling and birds, the occasional muffled rumble of a car passing on the road.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, propping myself up on my elbow so that I could see his face.
He looked up at me and nodded.
“I know you didn’t want to talk about it when I asked you before, but why are you really here?” I said.
The expression on his face changed in the most subtle way—from smooth and relaxed one moment to tight and rigid the next. I could feel him trying to control his breathing—making it slow and steady. I could see him swallow as he calculated what he would say to me. He inhaled deeply, like he was trying to hold the air in his lungs, and just when I thought he was going to begin speaking, he exhaled again.
Finally he cleared his throat, meeting my eyes for only a moment before looking up at the sky again. “Last year, this thing happened at school and it kind of completely fucked up everything in my life.”
I waited.
“I got beat up,” he finally said. “I guess it was pretty bad. I mean, it was three against one.”
“Oh my god,” I breathed.
“I couldn’t go back to school for a while,” he continued. “And then, I don’t know, things just started happening fast. I ended up coming out to my parents, and they just didn’t really get it, so by the time I could go back to school, they wouldn’t let me. They still don’t really get it, I guess.”
“Chris, I’m sorry. Are you—”
“I’m fine now,” he interrupted, locking eyes with me again. “I promise. I barely even think about that anymore.” But he was being too confident, too nonchalant about it; I knew he wasn’t telling me the whole story. I could fill in the blanks. I got the picture.
“I just had to get away from everything for a little while,” he concluded. “That’s all.”
He shrugged like it was nothing, and even though I wanted to ask so many more questions, I just nodded, and tried to conceal the way my hands were trembling, my body unable to contain how angry I was for him.