She launched herself straight at my head, lit the world with her sweet, familiar grin. I caught the flurry of sunburned limbs and wild, summer-light hair, and hugged it close. Little Nat, who never waited for my knock before bursting through the door.
“AMY.” She reared her head backward, still hanging on to my neck. “Did you see it?”
“See what?” I stepped through the front door into the dark, cool living room, and set her on her feet, made a show of studying her face: June’s cheekbones and nose and delicate, arched brows in miniature, set off by fair, freckled skin. Her jaw and chin, still childishly round. Crooked, smiling lips, pink and sticky with glitter gloss. “Hmmm. Let me guess. Your hair is pink? Your eyes are green instead of blue?”
“Aaaaaamyyyyyy. Nooo. Look CLOSER.”
“Oh. My. God.” I put my hands to my face in mock surprise, setting off her giggles. “Nat, are you wearing sparkly lip gloss?”
“She sure is,” Teddy said, appearing in the doorway of his bedroom. “The finest Walmart has to offer.”
His voice flowed over me, winding through my veins as I met his smile. That same smile from the previous night’s bonfire, curving slow and shy at me from across the room. His T-shirt was dark gray and tight across his chest, his hair loose on his shoulders. I couldn’t stop staring.
“Hey, Ames. Long time, no see.”
“Oh definitely. A whole twelve hours.”
“Always time enough to miss you.” His wink sucked the wind from my lungs; the crook of his smile gave it back. “And I always do.”
“Um. Bear?”
Our eyes jerked apart, refocused on Nat’s fidgeting hands and the hesitant furrow of her face.
“What’s up? You okay?”
“I’m okay.” She was quiet for a breath, then exploded in a flurry of bouncing hair and pleading puppy eyes. “Can I come with you? I’ll be good and I won’t complain, and I’ll do whatever you say. Please.”
“It’s fine by me, Bug,” Teddy said, “but Mom said you have to stay in until your room gets clean. I’ll bring you something from town, okay? We won’t be long.”
She slouched off, face scrunched around her sparkly pout. Teddy shook his head and held the door for me, slipped out at my heels. He followed me down the steps to where Ben waited, engine running, music riding out on a wave of air-conditioning and cigarette smoke.
“Finally.” He lowered the music and flicked the cigarette butt onto the driveway as I climbed in the back and Teddy slid into the passenger seat. “You in there jerking it, or what? If you need to finish off real quick, we can wait.”
“Yeah, I’m all set, thanks. I actually started to earlier, but then I pictured your mom and the urge disappeared.”
“I get that,” Ben said. “Same thing happens to me when I picture June, only the opposite.”
“Bet you’re not the only Hansen with that burning thirst. Though he’d have to fish his balls out of Mattie’s purse before he takes the chance.”
“Nah, she keeps those in the wine cellar. Stable temperature, less humidity. Longer shelf life, in case he wants to rub one out sometime in the next decade.”
“Guys, no,” I groaned, as they both burst into laughter. When Ben and Teddy got started on the Your Mom jokes, boundaries were theoretical at best, and mostly nonexistent. This wouldn’t end until one of them caved. “That is like, all the facets of gross.”
“Aw, you’re no fun.” Teddy smirked. “It’s like you don’t even want to hear about your uncle’s dusty old nutsa—”
“Oh my God, shut up—those are your parents. You’re both disgusting.”
“But we’re not wrong, Ames,” Ben cackled. “We have high MILF standards here in River Run. Like everyone in this car wouldn’t dive down on one over the other, no contest.”
“Whoa. Okay, okay, Benny,” Teddy said, ceding victory with a repulsed shudder. “Truce. You win.”
“June’s got that ass is what makes the difference,” Ben continued, unfazed. “Like this one time, she was out here hanging the laundry in these cute little cutoff shorts, and I—”
“WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE. STOP.”
“Guys. Look at that.”
They followed my finger to the porch where Nat stood, clutching the strap of her Descendants purse. She’d swiped on another layer of lip gloss and brushed her hair, swept it back with a ladybug clip from her nervous, hopeful eyes.
“Christ.” Ben met my eyes in the rearview. “She’s not coming with?”
“Teddy told her no.”
“Dude, come on. We can’t leave her here when she got all fixed up.”
Teddy shook his head, rubbing a hand over his face.
“Yeah, I know. I’ll get my ass handed to me later, but whatever.” He crawled between the bucket seats into the back, then leaned over the console and into Ben’s smirk. “But if you mention my mom, I’ll punch you right in the fucking teeth.”
“I would never do that,” Ben huffed. “Unless, of course, I decide I want you to get a little rough, in which case—”
“Goddamn it, Benny, you can’t say that shit around her. She’s just a kid. She doesn’t—”
“Calm down, Theo. I promise I won’t talk about your mom’s sweet ass in front of your sister, okay? God.” He ignored Teddy’s splutters and uncoiled from his seat, leaning his entire body out the window. “Girl, get your butt down into this car before I drive away and leave you here.”
“Really?”
“Don’t make me take my foot off the brake, Natasha.”
Nat squealed down the steps and dove into the car. Ben reached across to help with her seat belt and threw a lurid wink at Teddy as he settled next to me.
“You guys cozy? Maybe Ames can help get your mind off old Auntie Madeleine.”
“JESUS. So much for promises, huh?”
“Devil’s in the details, man. I never said MY mom was off the table.”
The roar of the engine drowned out Teddy’s profane reply as Ben stomped the gas, peeling out of the driveway and up the lane in a spray of gravel. His foot got heavier the farther we went, and we all but burst from the trees, narrowly missing the postal truck parked in front of the mailboxes. Ben cranked the music louder as the wind rushed in, stealing any possibility of words.
Nat waved to the mailman as we swung past. Before he could lift a hand in return, we were gone.
River Run was nothing if not a decrepit hole in the earth, and in no part of town was that more apparent than the historic district. It sprouted from the soil in a tired slouch of gothic revival homes and empty brownstone storefronts, everything mismatched and trying to look like someplace else. We almost never bothered with it, save for when Ben got a craving for baklava from the one decent coffee shop in twenty miles.
After loading up on sugar and caffeine, we wandered down the cobblestones toward the park, where Ben and Teddy ran for the biggest tree in the place. Usually Nat would be right behind them, but she hung back, settled next to me on the grass, leaned against the trunk as the boys disappeared into the branches above us. Pulled her lip gloss from her purse and rolled it between her hands, frowning at the label.
“Can you help me with this, Amy? I feel like I’m doing it wrong.”
“Didn’t your mom show you how to use it?”
“Yes, but I think she does it wrong too.”
I had to bite back a grin at that; June did apply her makeup with a Kentucky-heavy hand. I unscrewed the wand and dragged it against the rim of the tube, scraping off as much gloss as possible. It was really fucking pink.
“You only need the tiniest bit on the tip of your finger. Like this.” I scooped a dab onto my pinky and spread it thin and even across her lips, dug in my purse for my compact mirror. “See?”
“I love it,” she said, tilting her chin to catch the light, admiring herself from every angle. She watched me tuck away the compact and zipped her gloss back into her purse before tapping her finger on my bag. “Can I see? Please?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I’m not working on anything special right now.”
“Pleeeeeeease? I just want to see them. Just for a second.”
“Fine.” She wasn’t going to stop, so I pulled out my Moleskine. “Don’t wrinkle the pages.”
“These are so good.” Nat browsed through the pages, studied the still-life assignments and thumbnail sketches before handing it back to me with a tiny grin. “Now, let me see the real one.”
Unlike many of my classmates, I didn’t have to worry about my mother tossing my room on the regular, snooping through my things, looking for reasons to pry further into my life. Eleanor Larsen was a lot of things, but not needlessly nosy—her controlling tendencies didn’t extend past monitoring my assignments, public image, and general manners. So as long as I kept my real sketchbook zipped into the inner pocket of my purse, she’d never know how many hours I spent on art unrelated to my formal studies.
Nat, however, was all about going through my stuff. She’d discovered my secret years ago.
“Okay, you can see the real one,” I said with a sigh, glancing into the tree before handing it over. Ben and Teddy were high above us, too far up to peek even if they tried. “The best stuff is toward the front.”
Her giggles turned to squeals as she delved into the pages, delighting in the mandrakes and naiads, the gnomes and harpies and bumpy toads; at her own face on a series of fae folk, tiny and laughing, each with wings formed by the petals of different flowers. At Ben sporting antlers and a forked serpent tongue. I hovered; she glanced up, caught my nervous gaze, her own eyes lit with curiosity, then understanding, and I made a grab for it, but she rolled out of reach, flipping past a big chunk of pages to land somewhere near the back.
Before I could stop her, she was staring at her brother’s face—sketch after sketch of Teddy, born in black and white from every angle. I clenched my jaw as she studied the drawings, steeled against the giggles and taunts I knew were seconds away. The typical teasing words that fell just short of hurtful.
She didn’t laugh, though. She didn’t even smile. Instead, she closed the sketchbook carefully and held it out to me, shifted to lean against my side.
“It looks exactly like him. I wish—never mind.”
“What do you wish, Nat?”
“Nothing. I’m not supposed to.” She scratched the corner of her mouth, frowned at the thin crescent of gloss under her fingernail. “Crap. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Nat.”
“I wish this was your home. I wish you’d come for the summer and stay forever. Bear says I shouldn’t say things like that. He says you’re better off where you are.”
“It’s complicated.” I faltered, the twist of an uncertain half-truth lurking behind every syllable. She picked at a flake of glitter on her finger, head down. Leaned away from my hand on her arm. “Hey. It’s okay. I always come back.”
“Yeah, but one day you won’t. You’ll go, and it’ll be the last time. I won’t ever see you again.” Her slim hand crept over to mine, finger tracing my bones knuckle to wrist and back again. Lingering on the tough, callused edge of my finger. “Bear’s wrong, Amy. You’re better off here.”
I dropped my eyes, a million replies locked behind my lips. Home. The cove and the woods and the bright snake of the river. Grandma and Grandpa, and their unchanging maze of a house, every crack and creak and familiar, worn-smooth surface. Ben. Nat herself. Teddy. Everyone I loved most in the world.
They were the constants. They were the ones left behind at the end of the summer, and they were the ones waiting every time I found my way back. If River Run didn’t qualify as home, nowhere did—but where did that leave me?
A long whoop smashed through my reverie, sent my thoughts scattering. Ben landed next to me, followed by Teddy, who overbalanced, knocking us both over.
We were the same as we’d always been, closer to perfect than anything I knew—steady and real, eyes teary with laughter and the relentless heat of the sun. Forever tangled up in one another.
My boys and me, dreaming breathlessly into the sky.