The room is on one side of the warehouse, windowless and grubby. I have a new Smurf key ring clutched in one hand. I’ve gotten a grip on some of the basics now: I’m Angus Farrow, nineteen years old, recent high-school graduate from Clayton, Missouri.
But I can do better than that. I also know why I’m here.
I mean, to get a job and take a stab at independence, obviously, in a real, exciting city. But it’s not just that.
I chose Chicago because I had an overwhelming, absurd, completely unjustifiable blast of intuition. It told me that she’s here.
She? Oh, don’t be dense. You know who I mean. I mean love-of-my-life, girl-of-my-dreams, my particular, personal, extra-twinkly star out of all the billions of stars in the sky. So what if assuming she’s here isn’t logical? I’m stupid and brilliant and nineteen and extremely likely to live forever, and I can go anywhere.
And the way that intuition came to me—it was like a message coming from the past and future at once. So certain, so absolute. As if someone had whispered it straight into my ear. Chicago. She’s out there. Find her, Angus. Claim her love.
I will, I said. I will, I will, I will.
My next stop will be a bookstore, I decide. I need the kinds of books that will impress her when she sees me reading them, sensitive-intellectual books. Because one thing I know for sure about her, she’s very, very smart and probably arty.
There’s a sharp rap on the door, and Carmen swings it open before I have a chance to react. I’ll have to remember to start locking it. “Forgot to give you these, boy-o.”
She’s holding out a couple of boxes, stacked. The one on top is a matchbox, and the bigger blue box beneath has an illustration of stumpy white emergency candles on it.
“I don’t think I need those,” I tell her.
“You do, though. We have lots of problems with the power here. Outages almost every night. Just take them, Gussy.”
Gus wasn’t awful enough for her, I guess.
“Thanks,” I say, and lean over to grab the boxes. For some reason, though, I really don’t want the damned candles. I have to suppress an impulse to shove them back in her face.
Then she’s gone. I drop the candles and the matchbox on the yellow table and hurry to turn the lock before she decides to barge in again.
I sit cross-legged on the mattress and just feel it: her presence wheeling through the city outside this crappy warehouse. She grooves the darkness in my head with orbits of trailing light, and then I don’t even care what I do or don’t remember because I feel so absolutely certain that everything I’m doing is right, that the world is turning just for me and the sky is spinning to snap everything into place, and that my one true love is drinking her coffee right now and watching the sheet of muggy sluggish clouds through a window. She’s wondering why she feels like she misses somebody she’s never met, and whose name she doesn’t know. Misses him intensely.
Don’t worry, I want to tell her. I’m here, I’m coming, and I’ll find you before you know it.
My eyes flutter closed, and I could swear I feel her lips against mine; my kiss is fierce, devouring, while the rush of a river floods my ears. There’s a paddling noise, a roar where wind becomes coursing blood, where blood leaps high to become a scroll of red wind. There’s a river here in Chicago, of course, but I get the feeling that we’re somewhere else, another time and place. As if I’ve always known her, a hundred years and more before either of us was even born. As if that kiss rumbles through decades, rolling so quickly it blurs, circling around her wherever she goes. A sweetness that always rhymes with itself, and that always makes her mine.