Mr. Pike?” I guess as we walk. “He builds houses.”
“For a living. Not for someone he loves, and he doesn’t decorate.”
“Well, I don’t hear you throwing out suggestions.”
He clasps his hands behind his back, surveying the road with airy haughtiness. “That’s because I already know the answer.”
I wait for him to tell me what it is.
“Well?”
“No, I think I’ll give you a chance to catch up. See if you can guess correctly.”
I stare at him. He keeps his gaze even, features terse. Almost daring, like he hopes I’ll argue with him some more. “Are you kidding me?”
“What?” He lifts a shoulder. “Just trying to go at your pace, since you took all the time in the world at the bakery.”
“Yeah, but I was only doing that to annoy you.”
The ghost of a smile threatens at the corners of his mouth. I nearly stomp my foot.
“It’s only all right when I do that!” I cry. “Come on, just tell me.”
Alex refuses. He maintains gloating silence while I wander around aimlessly, foraging for ideas. He probably doesn’t even know the answer to number three. I tell him so.
He shrugs again.
“Fine, I’ll carry this scavenger hunt on my back,” I snap. “Sounds great. How lovely that I got stuck with you as my partner.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Shut up. Tell me the answer.”
“How can I tell you the answer if I’m supposed to be shutting up?”
“Tell me the answer, then shut up.”
He pretends to consider it, taking a good long while. His pace has slowed to a crawl. One of his defining traits used to be his speed: jogging instead of walking, constantly moving, fidgeting. When we were teenagers, all it took was one whiff of my perfume floating into the room to get him going, and he was notorious for not being able to resist touching me. My dad teased him about it all the time, because you’d never see him without his arm around me or seated right next to me on the couch like we were attached at the hip. During dinner he’d rest a hand on my knee or try to hold my hand under the table, which could make eating tricky. He’d bounce a leg with perpetual nervous energy, glancing sidelong at me with liquid stars in his eyes.
Smitten, my dad had said. And now the smitten boy stands before me starless, wholly unaffected. “No, I think I’ll watch your brain run in circles for a while longer. How was your pineapple-cherry dump cake? I hope it was worth it.”
My hands ball into fists.
He lets me lead the way down a narrow alley, pushing aside tree branches so that I don’t get scratched, letting them whip back right into him. A stray cat follows us, darting across the tips of a yellow picket fence. “You know what,” I tell him suddenly, turning around and pointing directly at his stony, cynical face. A mild breeze swirls around us, stirring the hem of his shirt. “I know the answer to number four, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. How do you like that?” Number four on the scavenger hunt is Bring a flower of the gods to the ghost of Downigan.
He scoffs, one hand on the back of his hat, the other on the bill. Kicks a foot behind him, taking a couple backward steps before circling around to stand closer to me than before. Gravel crunches beneath his shoes, shrubbery rubbing itself across his arms as he moves, tufting his arm hair with fine yellow pollen. “You do not.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I think you’re lying.”
“Prove it.”
(We are the height of maturity.)
“Want my proof? Right here.” He bends his knees, nose to my nose. “I can see all your dirty secrets right here in your—” He pauses. Draws back as he studies me. Dons a smile so naughty, it’s almost profane, which instantly has me on the defensive. “Ah, what’s this?”
“What’s what?” I touch my face, as if I might have scrawled messages across my own forehead without knowing it.
That self-righteous expression is shot through with curiosity now, and something else I can’t identify. “Your pupils are dilated to fifty-cent pieces.”
Adrenaline floods. “It’s dim here, there are lots of trees blocking the light. Pupils get bigger when it’s dim.”
“Does your neck get red when it’s dim, too?”
I clutch my neck, growing faint enough that he splits into twins. “It’s too dim to tell if it’s red.”
“I should observe your vitals, to make sure you’re all right.” He clasps my wrist between his thumb and forefinger. I gawk at him, attention falling hard onto his mouth as he silently counts the beats. “Mm, just as I thought. Your pulse is fast, too. Why is your pulse fast?”
I yank my arm back. “It’s always fast. I’m a medical anomaly.”
He taps my nose. “You forget I went to medical school for a hot minute, honey. Your lies are futile.”
My eyes narrow. “Your pupils are dilated, too. Explain that.”
He pulls me after him, moving us along in the direction of nowhere. “It’s dim out here.”
Thought so.
Being stuck with him is the last thing I want, but while I’ve got him handy, I might as well satisfy a few of my questions. I could have googled them, but I’ve been firm on my no-cyberstalking rule. My fragile psyche has needed to believe he’s been living as a monk all this time, dreaming about me every night and regretting leaving Moonville. In my mind, he’s implemented the same rule about me, and that’s why he hasn’t reached out.
As we walk, I say, “Why’d you drop out of med school?”
“Because it sucked.”
“But you got your bachelor’s in biology?”
“Engineering, actually. Medical school was nothing like college. College was all right. Medical school made me want to shut my face in a car door.”
“So you did end up going to Ohio State, then?” I venture carefully. This might be a dangerous topic, considering our history. Our arms brush as we walk, a little tingle of electricity zipping along between us. No! Bad electricity! I squint through the canopies, suspecting errant thunderclouds might be the cause. When in doubt, blame the weather.
“Yeah.”
Unfortunately, we kept tabs on each other for months after our breakup. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have seen what he saw and I wouldn’t have seen what I saw, and what a load of ugliness that was. I have to flip the page to a different topic before I make myself mad all over again.
“Good. I’m glad you went.”
This was probably the wrong thing to say. He grunts, the space between us pumped full of fresh tension.
“I did end up going to Hocking,” I inform him. “For early childhood education.”
“Good,” he replies quietly. “I’m glad to hear it. They had the campus housing, right?”
“Yep.” Which was rare for a two-year college, and extra appealing to me since I so desperately wanted to get out of the house. “I only ended up living on-campus for one semester, though.” He laughs, which I expected. I plow on: “I moved into the carriage house behind the shop instead—paying close to three thousand dollars a semester to stay in a tiny dorm didn’t make sense when my grandmother gave me free board twenty minutes away.”
“There you have it, then.” His words are heavy. “Everything worked out.”
It’s my turn to grunt.
Grandma and I did have a ball together—I didn’t fully appreciate how stressful the last few years of my parents’ deteriorating marriage made life for everyone in our household until I removed myself from it and awoke one day in an environment where my fight or flight instinct wasn’t triggered by the sound of a door slamming.
I was breathing easier, surviving, but I wouldn’t have called it living. Mornings were a fog, nights hell, a continual cycle of re-remembering that my strongest support was gone, off living his own uncomplicated-by-Romina dreams.
“Where are we going?” he asks, pausing for a moment.
“Bowerbird’s Nest.”
He turns his head toward me quickly. His mouth wants to grin, I can tell.
“What?” I prop my hands on my hips. “Gilda will know the answer. If there’s someone in this town who built a house and decorated it for somebody else, she’s gonna know about it.”
His almost-grin breaks into a great big smile that looks achingly lovely on him, and very handsome. Infuriating, too. He laughs and laughs at me.
“What!” I sputter again. “It’s a good idea!”
It is.
Boisterous busybody Gilda Halifax knows everything. She and Grandma were dear frenemies, each of them psychic, each calling the other one a fraud. Gilda passed out business cards at Grandma’s Celebration of Life, and half the eulogy was an incredibly ballsy ode to her costume shop, Bowerbird’s Nest, advertising discounts on palm-reading services when you sign up for her e-blast. She wears a locket that she swears Grandma’s ghost is sometimes curled up inside of. Now and then, I see her talking to it.
And it turns out that I was right. When we push open the door to Bowerbird’s Nest, Gilda scurries toward us with a loud “Well, it’s about time!” squashing each of us against her in a hug. It’s Gilda’s signature. Whether you haven’t seen Gilda in one day or in ten years, when she sees you, she’s going to hug you, and your eyes will water from all the hairspray holding her stiff red barrel curls together. A white woman in her seventies, Gilda reminds me a lot of Dottie. Not just because of the psychic thing, or because Gilda wears the same blue eyeliner Dottie did, but because Gilda is so woven into memories of my grandmother. Lots of bickering, but I think each always secretly considered the other to be her best friend.
“I was starting to worry you two didn’t know your Moonville history,” Gilda exclaims.
Alex laughs at my confusion. Over the next minute, I discover that apparently male bowerbirds build nests for their potential mates during their bird courtship, and decorate those nests with brightly colored things. He claims to have known this already, but I don’t see how. That is simply not a common piece of trivia. The man is a liar with an ego and a half.
“All right, I’ll stop torturing you,” Alex hums to himself after Gilda checks off Team Yellow on a clipboard and we go on our merry way. “I know the answer to number four.”
“Yeah, so do I.”
He continues as though I hadn’t spoken. “Bring a flower of the gods to the ghost of Downigan. Obviously, the ghost of Downigan is referring to Downigan Cemetery, and that one lady from back in the day.”
“Lovisa Coe, who haunts the town.”
“She doesn’t, because there’s no such thing as ghosts, but anyway, that’s the spot. The first half of the clue was easy to figure out. Just popped it into Google, which says that flower of the gods is the symbolism for dianthus flowers.”
I laugh. “You are so off track.”
He determinedly heads to Budding Romance, anyway. In his mind, there is no way he could be wrong. This is going to be delightful.
“Dianthus, please!” he booms as soon as we get inside the flower shop. I poke him.
“Calm down.”
“Calm down? Did you hear Gilda? It’s about time. We’re going to lose, Tempest!”
“We’re going to lose because you’re wrong. You won’t even consider the possibility that you’re wrong.”
“It’s statistically unlikely that I would be wrong.”
My eyes roll for eternity.
He gets his dianthus, and we amble on our way to the cemetery. We’ve been dawdling so long that the sun’s run all the way across the sky, and it strikes me that we probably could have won this if he’d been more forthcoming about clue number three, and if I’d been more forthcoming about clue number four, but there you have it. Neither of us can pass up the opportunity to make the other one flail.
Gilda’s daughter, Millicent, is dressed in an old white Victorian gown, waiting for us next to Lovisa Coe’s weathered tombstone. I don’t care what Alex says; that woman (Lovisa, not Millicent) has been banging cupboards and opening locked doors all around town since 1885.
Alex proudly presents his dianthus to Millicent, who shakes her head.
“This is for the scavenger hunt,” Alex tells her, as if she might be here for some other reason. Which, honestly, she might. We get a lot of cosplaying ghost hunters in these parts.
“Thaaaat’s not the ooone,” she responds in a ghostly wail. “Tryyyy agaaaiiin.”
Everything that Alex thinks he knows explodes. His brain shorts. He stares at me, takes in my smile, and my pupils that are hopefully not doing anything untoward. Sighs.
“All right. Just tell me.”
I tip up my chin, skipping around him. “No, I think I’ll let you run in circles for a while.”
“Oh, come on.”
“But you were so sure you were right,” I sing. “How can I, a mere squirrel, know the answer when you, All-Knowing Wizard, do not? How can this be?”
He crosses his arms, mouth flat. When I still do not give in, he starts walking again (in the wrong direction, I might add) and motions for me to hurry up. “Fine. You can lord your secrets over me while we get something to eat.”