Deep in the cave, Trudi crouched on a ledge and watched the darkness coming. Actually, that was wrong. The darkness wasn’t doing anything. The daylight was drawing up, pulling back like curtains rising, revealing the black sky and blacker ocean.
Showtime.
How long have we been here? she wondered vaguely. She was also hungry, vaguely. That made some sense, considering that they’d been here all fucking day.
Don’t go, day, she thought, then expelled the thought like a smoke ring and watched it hover in the air in front of her, framing the two figures at the mouth of the cave. Eddie and the green-eyed girl. Ju.
Don’t go …
At first, when they’d headed up there, Eddie had done lots of pointing and jabbering, hopping around like a yappy little dog happy to have someone new to show things to. Ju had settled again into that weird stand-and-sway thing she did, making no move to corral Eddie. Eventually, the boy bounded away from her side and onto the rocks, scuttling after some stone or crab or shell.
At that moment, Trudi almost leapt to her feet and screamed, Go, kid! Run! But the second she started to move, she forgot why she wanted to. Then her eyes fixed on Ju at the edge of the light, limned like a paper cutout. Shadow puppet. Except so much more beautiful, flexible, and strange than any puppet Trudi had ever seen or made. So much closer to actually alive.
Trudi recognized the strangeness of that idea even as it filled her with pity and, even more strangely, desire. She managed to pretend for a few seconds that the desire was ill-defined, general, confusing. But it was actually fairly explicit: what she apparently wanted to do was slip inside that girl’s shadow and limn her properly.
What the fuck did that even mean?
Trudi didn’t know. But the desire kept her pinned to the rocks as effectively as if she’d been chained there.
Eddie was back, now. He had a crab or rock or shell in his hand, and was holding it up to the last of the light. Ju knelt, sliding her shadow over him. Their heads leaned together, and they whispered to one another. Trudi watched, mesmerized, beset by a confusing feeling. This one wasn’t totally unfamiliar, at least. She’d experienced something like it at Eliana’s swim meets, watching from the stands as her friend stood and chattered with her teammate-friends next to their starting blocks at the edge of the pool. Somehow, even though those kids were all people Trudi knew, their conversations seemed unimaginable at that distance. Like the conversations of teachers in break rooms, glimpsed through frosted-glass windows but never heard, on the other side of a door in their lives, where Trudi could never go.
She would have liked to have gone, just once, to the world where pretty much everyone else seemed to live. So she could know what everyone was actually talking about.
Would have liked to? Why was she thinking that?
As if in answer, Ju’s head swiveled in Trudi’s direction. It didn’t actually turn all the way around, just a little farther than seemed possible or comfortable. Ju looked nothing like an owl awakening, though there was definitely something quicker, more birdlike in her movements as darkness fell.
The green-eyed girl smiled.
Run, Trudi thought, to Eddie, to herself. Instead, she clambered to her feet and shuffled in Ju’s direction. She felt dazed, but almost pleasantly so. She felt alive but trapped in herself, a barnacle torn loose from a perch. The tide she now rode was going to deliver her straight into Ju’s smile.
Reaching the mouth of the cave, she settled on her haunches on the other side of Ju from Eddie.
So Eddie can’t see, she thought. So he won’t have to see.
See what?
After a whole day in the cave, she felt exposed on the rocky cliff-side. Mist rode the sea air, unexpectedly icy. After a few seconds, Trudi realized Ju was shivering. The girl had been shivering all day, but not this hard. With a careful finger, Trudi touched the skin of Ju’s arm, which looked almost as green as her eyes under the cascade of hair. It felt waxy, gossamer. Made of moonlight.
Which is really sunlight, Trudi told herself dreamily, in Raj’s voice, because he was the one she’d had this conversation with. By text, like most of their conversations. She’d never actually heard him say it, yet it was his voice in her head. It’s just sunlight ricocheting off dead rock. Moonlight is as made up as moon men, bitches. As moon cheese!
The thought proved oddly comforting. Or maybe it was just Raj’s imagined voice comforting her.
Ju leaned her head onto Trudi’s shoulder. Instantly, all other thoughts, imagined voices, and sensations fell from Trudi as though dragged off by the same tide that had swept her here. She held still while Ju shivered against her, felt and watched the girl’s hair spilling over her own arms like lava. Except cold.
“Why are you so damn cold?” Trudi murmured.
“I just am.” Ju’s voice came out childlike, full of wonder. “You’re not.”
“I am, actually. A little.”
“You get warmer than this?”
A chilly arm encircled Trudi’s waist like a squid tentacle, and Ju’s face nuzzled deeper into the hollow of her throat. Trudi could feel lips there, and then, finally, after a long time, a whisper of air. Even that was cold. As though in a dream—or current—Trudi felt her own arm lift, start to draw Ju even more closely against her. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her own breath until she hiccoughed violently and her vision exploded with stars.
Ju laughed and wriggled closer. On her other side, Eddie yawned and laid the shells and shards he’d gathered on the rocks. His head sank toward Ju’s lap.
This is it, then, Trudi thought. Right now. “Nnh,” she managed, the words fuzzy and thick on her lips, as though she were spitting out a gag. “Want to … Let’s go back to Hornby Camp.”
It shouldn’t have been possible for Ju to get any closer without climbing inside Trudi. But somehow, she managed, and some part of her, possibly her lips, pressed right at the curve of Trudi’s neck. The pulsing point. What Trudi first took for another shudder turned out to be giggling.
“Hey,” Trudi said, fighting hard now, shoving words from her mouth as though dropping rocks down a fortress wall to repel invaders. “Or. Let’s go to my house. The Stockade, that’s what we call it. I’ll introduce you to Rebecca. And Jess. And Jess’s … guy. Benny. The world’s hairiest man … Also best cook. Hey, Eddie…”
She was running out of words. And Eddie’s head had finished sagging into Ju’s lap. He lay there limp as a sock with no one puppeting.
“Eddie, please. Wake up.”
“Up,” he murmured.
“Don’t go to sleep.”
He was already sleeping, though. Ju’s frozen hand had crawled up Trudi’s back and was sliding now into the kinks of her hair. It will disappear there, Trudi thought, wondering if the tears now welling in her eyes were for herself or for Ju’s hand. They’ll never find it.
Then Ju really kissed her throat. Giggling.
Soft lips, damp-not-wet. Hard teeth, just touching, not biting. Cave wall. Cave kiss.
Trudi curled her fists and closed her eyes.