I’M SITTING ON THE BOTTOM STEP leading up to my porch, putting off the moment I have to walk inside my house, when the front door opens. My mother’s voice drifts into the night air, her words so soft that I catch only a few.
“. . . thank you for stopping by . . . needs you right now . . . such a good friend . . .”
Soon, the door closes and footsteps sound above me and I turn around, meeting Alex’s dark eyes.
He makes his way down the stairs and sits next to me.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey. You leaving already?”
“I just came by to give Owen some sheet music for this piece in orchestra and his iPad. He left it at my house last week.” His mouth twists when he speaks, as if he’s swallowing a grimace.
“Where’s your car?” I glance around the driveway again. I was so out of it when Charlie dropped me off, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d totally missed it, bright yellow notwithstanding.
“I walked.”
“You walked? It’s three miles.”
“So?”
He picks at a loose thread on his jeans. Picks and picks until it breaks free in a long, unraveling strand. He flicks it off his finger and onto the sidewalk. I watch him for a few more seconds, wondering why he’s not staying for dinner. He usually eats with us a couple times a week, same as Charlie. They’re an extension of Owen and me, our neighboring stars. But I’m not sure Charlie will ever step foot in my house again. It fills me up slowly, the idea that nothing will ever be the same.
“Are you and Owen fighting?” I ask.
Alex doesn’t move, but the skin around his eyes tightens. “Of course not. I mean, I’m such a good friend, right?”
He pushes himself to his feet and starts to walk away.
“Hey, wait,” I say, standing too. I glance back at my house, the warmth-filled windows, the dinner my parents are probably putting on the table, four place settings all in the right spots. The perfect little family. “You want a ride?”
The porch light hits just shy of his face, and his hands are stuffed into his pockets. Alex has never been easy to read, but I can almost feel something in him bending toward me, just like I am to him.
“Yeah, okay,” he says.
I dig my keys out of my bag and soon we’re closed inside the car I share with Owen, tires squealing as I pull out of the driveway too fast. My house fades out of my rearview and it’s like a tether snapping free. I put the windows down and hold out my free hand, letting the cool night air drizzle through my fingers and hair. Alex does the same, resting his head against the seat, his arm hanging out the window.
Near downtown, Alex’s street comes up on the right and I flick on the blinker, slowing the car to make the turn. Slower . . . slower . . .
Over the console, our gazes lock. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even blink, but the tiniest smile ghosts over his mouth, softening all those tight features he wore at my house. It’s enough to make me accelerate right past his street.
We drive around for a while, content just to listen to music and feel ourselves moving over the earth. When I pull into the parking lot of Orange Street Cemetery, Alex laughs.
“I do have other places I like to go, you know,” he says.
“Really?” I slip my keys from the ignition. “I thought it was all tombstones, all the time, with you.”
He snaps his fingers dramatically. “Dammit, I forgot my violin again.”
I laugh, happy to see the Alex from Glow Galaxy, the Owen-free Alex I’m starting to suspect is the real Alex. Light from the full moon spears through the windows and the silvery beams make his eyes dance.
“Well, it’s not about the tombstones for me,” I say. “It’s about the stories.”
He follows me out of the car, and we walk up the small hill that crests before dipping down into a sort of valley, tombstones almost glowing in the dark. The river shines beyond them, its surface sparkling under the moon.
“Wow,” Alex breathes.
“Yeah. It’s beautiful.”
“In a really creepy sort of way.”
“It’s more gloomy than creepy. Gloomy can be beautiful.”
“You’ve been hanging around Charlie too long.”
I try to laugh at that, but it gets stuck in my throat. Instead, I slide my fingers between his and start down the hill. He doesn’t pull away, just folds his hand around mine, nearly swallowing it.
When we reach the bottom, I unlace our fingers. The feeling of a hand in mine is so familiar, but so different with Alex. It’s intense and scary, and a flare of guilt sparks somewhere in my chest. I step away from him, catching my breath as I read the nearest epitaph.
We wander among the graves for a while, and pretty soon Alex catches on that I’m looking for girls with more than just daughter or mother or wife on their stone.
“Here’s Beautiful friend,” he says, squatting in front of an ancient-looking marker.
I join him, kneeling in the silvery grass. “Naomi Lark, 1899–1920. God, there are so many young women in here.”
He nods, swiping his fingers so gently over the engraved words on the stone, it pulls a knot into my throat.
“I’d like that on my stone someday,” he says, standing up and dusting his hands off. “Beautiful friend. It’s simple, but . . . damn, what a legacy.”
I smile at him, but my thoughts are with Charlie and Hannah and me earlier today, how there was a sort of beauty in the three of us huddled and crying on Hannah’s bed, holding one another together. A sort of beauty, but also a sort of ugliness because of why we were there, who I was there for. Because of the undoing I felt going on somewhere underneath my skin, like a constellation being split apart.
“Mr. Prior kicked me out of his house today,” I say.
Alex raises his eyebrows. “You went to see Hannah?”
I nod.
“How . . . how is she?”
I start walking toward the river and Alex follows. I don’t answer for a while—it suddenly seems like such a difficult question. The water rolls over itself, beckoning us closer, the moon glinting off its surface. The scene looks like something out of an old black-and-white movie.
“She’s sad,” I finally say, stopping where the bank dips and the grasses get longer along the river’s edge. “And angry.”
Next to me Alex sighs. “And her dad kicked you out?”
“Yeah. He’s sad and angry too.”
“But you didn’t do anything. Owen’s the one who—”
My eyes connecting with his cut him off. He looks away, but even in the dark, I can see the confusion thick on his face. His hand finds mine and our fingers tangle clumsily in a desperate attempt to grab hold.
We stand there for a few minutes, silent, the dead resting behind us and the pulsing life of the river in front of us. It flows gently, as though it’s trying to make peace of all the chaos. Suddenly, everything feels too heavy. I sink into the grass, my legs folded underneath me.
“Why have we never done this before?” I ask. Alex sits down next to me, resting his elbows on his knees.
“What, frolic through a cemetery? We just did that yesterday.”
I shove his shoulder and he laughs. “I was talking about hanging out.”
“We’ve hung out.”
“Not just us.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know why. We should’ve. We are now, at least.”
I look up at the clear sky. The cemetery is far enough away from downtown Frederick that the stars look like a thousand tiny night-lights plugged into the dark.
Though we’ve known each other forever, taken classes together, performed in the same holiday concerts for years, Alex and I have never belonged to each other, never sought each other out.
And I’ve never felt so desperate to change that, for both of us.
“Tell me something,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Something I don’t know about you.”
He purses his lips, a little smile playing on the edge.
“Oh god,” I say. “Walking around the cemetery with your violin is your only hobby, isn’t it?”
A laugh bursts from his mouth, but he nods. “Found me out.”
A chilly breeze swings in between us and I scoot a little closer to him. “Seriously.”
He sighs. “Seriously? I hate performing.”
“Oh. We’re just talking.”
He nudges my shoulder but then doesn’t move it away. “No. I mean, that’s what I’m telling you. I hate performing, playing the violin in public.”
“Really? But . . . you’re amazing.”
He shrugs. “I like playing, don’t get me wrong. In my room. Or during practices with just the orchestra. But I hate concerts. All those eyes on me while I offer them bits of my soul. It stresses me out.”
“Wow, bits of your soul?” I tease, but I understand what he’s saying. It’s why I’ve never learned to play the guitar or write songs, even though I’ve wanted to since the first time Charlie offered to teach me back in ninth grade. It’s just too much . . . me. Articles for Empower are different—parts of my mind and opinions I need to say because I can’t say so much else. But music . . . it’s raw emotion.
He shrugs. “I go out for first chair because it’s something I feel I should do, you know? I’m at the performing arts school because my parents like the academics there too and it’s good for college transcripts. I’m capable of first chair. Therefore, I do it.”
“What do you want to do?”
He rubs the back of his neck. “Honestly? Study history. Maybe teach it one day. I really love Ms. Cabrero’s class. She has fun with it, you know?”
“For real? Charlie’s mom was a history teacher before she became a principal.”
Immediately, I wish I could take back the comparison. Why am I talking about Charlie right now? Lucky for me, Alex just smiles and nods.
“I like the stories,” he says. “The way one event can influence the next hundreds of years, the way we can just . . . know these lives that were lived and how much we’re changed by them.”
“Wow.”
“That’s the actual reason I come to the cemetery sometimes. I mean, I do like the quiet, but you’re right: it’s about the stories, lives already lived. It makes me feel . . .” He trails off, eyes going distant.
“What? What does it make you feel?”
He locks his eyes with mine. “Brave. Not so alone.”
My throat thickens and all I can do is bobble my head in agreement.
“What about you?” he asks, leaning closer. I could graze his forehead with mine if I moved an inch.
“What about me?”
“Do you like singing? Is that what you want to do?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I do like it. I even love it sometimes, but I feel sort of like you do. The performance part of it is hard for me. That’s why I never go out for concert solos or big roles in the musicals.”
“You should,” he says. “I’ve heard you sing. You’re incredible.”
My stomach flutters. “Well, you’re incredible at violin too. Doesn’t mean that’s what we’re supposed to do. I think you’d make an amazing historian.”
He smiles.
“But,” I go on, “I don’t know what else I’d do.”
“Your Empower articles are really good. What about journalism or writing books or something like that?”
“You read my Empower articles?”
“Every single one since the day you started it.”
“Really? Owen thinks they’re ridiculous, like it’s all this big joke.”
Alex shakes his head. Then he reaches out a hand and smoothes a lock of hair off my cheek. He doesn’t tug on it, or run his finger down its length. Just tucks it behind my ear. Goose bumps break out on my arms and I can’t tell if I like them or not.
“They’re not ridiculous. They’re you, Mara. That one about the double standards and sex last year? I sent it to my sister. She loved it, made all of her friends read it. And everyone in school talked about it for weeks. It was important.”
I just stare at him, tears stinging my eyes.
Because he’s right. Those articles are what I want to say—the words I can say, because I’m too scared and small to say other words. The right words.
“Greta took my place in Empower,” I tell him.
“What? Like, you quit?”
“Not exactly. More like . . . cajoled into leaving.”
“Oh. Wow. Can she do that?”
I shrug. “It was the right thing to do. For now.”
Realization dawns on his face. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He nods and a beat passes before he speaks again. “It’s somebody’s fault, though.” His cheeks and lips twitch, his voice thick and low, and I realize he’s trying not to cry.
My heart feels thin and fragile in my chest, because we both know who that somebody is. I push up to my knees and cut through the few inches between us.
“Alex.” I slide my hands up his arms, his sweater soft and fuzzy under my fingers. He presses his eyes closed and inhales a ragged breath. I grip his shoulders, then move my hands to his neck, then to his face. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m scared and memories threaten to creep in and chew me up, but there’s something I need here. Something that needs me. Something about this feels right, and dammit if I don’t need something to feel right.
He lifts himself to his knees too and his arms come around me, slipping around my waist slowly as if he’s waiting for me to move away. I don’t. Instead, I pull his face to mine until our foreheads touch. Then our noses.
“Are you . . . are you sure?” he whispers, his breath warm over my mouth.
There’s a split second when I’m not, when I remember that my heart is miles away with a dark-haired guitar player and probably always will be. There’s another split second when all of my senses take in his expression, consider the press of his fingers, search for a threat. But I don’t find one, and all of those split seconds taper down to a deep pit of need in my gut.
I kiss him. A single sweep of my lips over his. The light scruff on his cheeks scrapes my skin and makes me crave a smoother face, but it’s also intoxicating. Different. I press my mouth to his, opening his lips with mine. He responds, sighing into my mouth and sliding one hand up to cup the back of my head. Everything starts so gently, but then our kiss grows fevered, desperate, hands in a mad rush for a kind of contact that I’ve almost never let myself have in the past four years unless it was with Charlie. There’s a sadness to this kiss, and that feels right too.
A glow of panic hovers on all of my edges, but it doesn’t sink in. That panic is me, it’s not him, and I really do want this. I want to be able to want it and, more than that, to actually have it. I press myself closer to him and his mouth moves from mine to just below my ear, trailing down my throat and igniting my skin, even with the cool air around us. The flat plane of his chest, the rasp of his jaw over my skin—he feels incredible. I haven’t kissed a guy since sophomore year, when I went out with Mathias Dole for a few months. He was boring and safe, let me pick where we went on dates, let me initiate anything physical between us, which I almost never did. Nothing other than kissing. I haven’t even been out with another guy since.
I was too wrapped up in Charlie by then.
Alex’s hands move up my ribs and some part of me knows I still am. The larger part of me doesn’t care. I made my choice and she let me.
I press my face to his neck, inhaling his smell that reminds me of fall and camping and running. Gradually, our movements slow, our kisses fade, but I’m still curled around him and we stay like that for a long while, kneeling in the grass. My face tucked into his shoulder, his hands smoothing down my back, we create our own little warm pocket in the world. We don’t kiss again. We don’t need to. We just need this.
Here, there is no Owen. No twin brother. There’s not even a Charlie or a Tess. There’s only Alex and me. All of our confusion and hurt melting into comfort.
And for now, that’s enough.