UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Just as the sun is setting, Drew shows up pissed. I actually think Drew likes me, but he hasn’t loved sharing Mandy’s attention with me—or with Nadia.
“You didn’t tell me you guys were all getting together,” he says.
“We were rehearsing,” says Peter. “We would have called you, but we figured you’d be bored.”
That’s a blatant lie, but it soothes the savage beast. Drew actually snorts, like an animal blowing off steam. “I would have been bored. I’m so sick of this. Polonius is the lamest character in Shakespeare.”
“It could be fun,” Mandy says. “If you’d let Polonius be funny—”
“See, and I don’t need your opinion about everything.”
Mandy pulls herself up straighter, and I swear the air between them crackles. “I would give you my opinion, Drew, whether I was AD or not. Just like I ask your opinion on things that matter to me. You don’t have to take it, but you should respect me enough to at least listen.”
“Respect you?” Drew says. “You make it sound like you’re my teacher or something.”
“Next you’re going to say, ‘You’re not the boss of me.’”
Peter moves closer to my side. “We should let you guys have some alone time.”
“No!” Mandy whines. “Please stay! He’s making things tense. Before you got here, Drew, we were having a good time.”
“So you want me to leave?”
Mandy doesn’t answer right away. She looks to me, quirks her mouth to the side. Maybe she’s ready.
“Don’t fight,” Peter says. “Or do, but work it out. We’ll go.”
“No, stay,” Drew says. Maybe he realizes that Mandy’s less likely to can him in public. “You guys can entertain each other, can’t you, if we go talk?”
Peter chooses to ignore the suggestive way Drew talks about us “entertaining” each other, so I do too. Drew holds out his hand to Mandy. She takes it, so easily, and lets him lead her up the hill toward the ridge.
Without talking about it, Peter and I walk over to the trampoline. Peter heaves himself up, but I hesitate.
“I won’t bite,” he says.
There’s something about hoisting yourself onto a trampoline. It’s one of those few things that’s always too big for you. It makes me feel like a little kid. There’s plenty of room between Peter and me, and I sit cross-legged beside him, hands folded in my lap.
He tilts his head and studies my hands. “Before I knew what the gloves were for, I kind of liked them. They made you look like a superhero,” he says.
“They made me feel a little bit like one, too, but I think it takes more than gloves.”
Peter lies back, propped up on his elbows.
“No, because so many superheroes hold their power in their hands—if you touch people, maybe you steal their power, or maybe you freeze them to death or give them electric shock.”
I’m laughing. It’s stupid, but I’m laughing.
“I can’t do any of those things.”
“Have you tried?”
“No.”
“What do you think might happen? Aside from the world ending?” He rolls onto his side toward me, getting into it. “Hey, that’s another way you’re like a superhero! You’re super paranoid about the end of the world!”
“It’s coming, Peter, it’s coming soon,” I say in my best doomsday voice, and curl up on my side facing him. I wonder aloud, “Why would anybody want to be a superhero?”
“I don’t know, to fight evil?”
“Okay, I’ll be fighting evil while everybody else around me is making out and having boyfriends.”
We go quiet. Peter shifts to rest the side of his face on his arm. His slightest move makes me wobble.
“This isn’t a superpower,” I say. “It’s more like a super weakness.”
“Well, every superhero’s got her Kryptonite.”
“I hate Kryptonite.”
“No, Kryptonite’s great. See, if Superman didn’t have Kryptonite, he’d be perfect. He’d be too good for the world to sustain.”
“Whatever.”
“No, seriously, think how bad it would be for self-esteem. We’d all be comparing ourselves to that guy—that super guy. How annoying would that be? You want to be perfect?”
“Yes.”
“You want to be annoying like Superman?”
“Yes.”
“No, you don’t.”
He reaches for my ribs.
“Owww! Don’t!”
Peter pulls back sharply and rolls flat on his back, facing up to the darkening sky.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t even think about it.”
“No, I know.”
“That was stupid, Caddie.”
“I’m sorry. It’s dumb.”
“I thought clothes were okay.”
“Yeah, that’s mostly it. I don’t like not having control. If I choose to touch you on the edge of your sleeve“—I do it, to show I can—”you might suddenly move, but I’m paying attention. I trust myself to react in time. If you touch me—”
“Who knows what I might do?” He’s being playful, but there’s an edge to it. If our places were reversed, I’d feel rejected, maybe even offended, that he didn’t trust me.
“God, Peter, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
He exhales, long and slow . . . “You know I would like to.”
Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it.
“Touch you.” He says it. “If it didn’t freak you out so much, I would really like to touch you.”
The first emerging stars are pinpricks, so far away. They don’t care what’s going on down here on a stupid trampoline between a boy and a girl who can’t touch.
“You know I would never hurt you,” he says. “Not on purpose.”
“No, I know. Not on purpose . . . Peter . . .”
“Don’t say that you’re sorry, okay? I didn’t say that to make you feel bad. I really didn’t. The last thing I want is for you to feel bad.” He turns to his side to face me again. “I just want you to know.”
Peter’s gaze draws me out of myself and into the space between him and me. Underneath us, the trampoline rises and sinks with our breath.
“I like you,” I tell him.
He smiles. “I like you.”
I nod and roll away. I can’t look him in the eyes anymore. It’s too much. My heart’s full of him.
We lie shoulder to shoulder, no more than an inch of air between us. We lift our hands over our heads as high as they can reach, and even though they’re still several inches apart, it almost looks like they’re touching.
“So if not being able to touch people is my super weakness, what do we think is my superpower?” I ask.
“Well, if your weakness is that you can’t touch, it stands to reason that your power is related. Like, if you ever did touch someone, it would be . . .”
“Super?”
“Well, yeah, in a word. I think . . . when you touch someone, it’s like all the best parts of you pour into them.”
“I think that’s part of what I’m scared of,” I say.
“But maybe that’s your power, that you don’t lose anything. You get to give someone else all of that, and you also get to keep it for yourself.”
That sounds so nice.
“I don’t know what I have to give that’s so great, though,” I say.
“Shut up. Now you’re fishing for compliments.”
“I’m not. I just—Peter, why do you even put up with me?”
He props up, leaning over me. The hand holding his weight could slip; he might fall down on me any moment. I inhale sharply, can’t help it. He looks away like he’s thinking, but I also feel like he’s giving me a chance to get used to this closeness.
When he meets my eyes again, I can breathe.
“I like talking to you, Caddie,” he says. “When we talk, I feel like you’re really here with me—like for a minute, I’m the only other person in the world. And I know you won’t talk about what I say or laugh about it after because you get it. I trust you. I like your smile and your laugh”—he brings a finger to the corner of my mouth, so close without touching, and he draws it through the air in a line that follows the line of my lips—“especially when you’re laughing at something I said that nobody else thinks is all that funny.”
He draws his finger down, hovers over my throat . . . “I like watching you work. I like how much you care about making the play good.” Over my heart . . .
Then he moves his hand to the side of my face, millimeters away and so warm. I could tilt my head to the side and meet him. My face burns, blood rushes. It’s like rehearsal, but this time my eyes are locked on his.
“I like what happens,” Peter says, “when we almost touch. There’s all this energy between us, this good feeling. I think that’s your superpower,” he says, “all of this, times a million, when you touch someone.”
In the space between our eyes, Peter and I hold each other so tight. It is almost like touching, almost like Peter described.
I remember to breathe.
When Mandy and Drew make their way down the hill, they’re holding hands and Mandy’s hair is a scandal. She runs a hand through to sort out the tangles and gives me a guilty look.
I shrug. I feel a little scandalous myself.
Drew picks a couple of dead leaves off Mandy’s back and shreds them.
“The happy couple!” says Peter, lifting his arms in a victory “V” overhead.
“Momentarily,” says Mandy. “You’re too distracting,” she says to Drew.
“My specialty,” he says.
“Maybe that’s your superpower,” I say, and Drew crunches his face in confusion.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
I feel Peter’s hand rising behind me as if to touch my back. It hovers there where he catches himself and then drops it again to his side.
A few seconds later, I realize that when I felt Peter’s hand hovering, don’t touch never entered my mind.