Because You Love to Hate Me(29)

“Yours are cold. Have you considered gloves?”

No laugh. He was too wrapped up in his thoughts that night.

To cover the embarrassment charging up my cheeks, I mimicked his pose and lay back. Then I hugged my arms to my chest and fixed my eyes on the sky.

The heat fled my face as fast as it had come, and in an instant I understood why Jim had put this space between us.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth. It must be what’s real, and I needed that gap between us to feel it.

I’m sorry, Jean. I know this all sounds so completely unlike me. But that’s why I have to tell you—don’t you see? I’d never felt anything like it. Not then and not now. No drug has come close to it. No adventure. No dreamscape.

Air beneath my feet.

Darkness to hug me tight.

All with the universe spread above me, speckled and humming and so damned alive that there could only be one outcome from it all: a death foretold and my intestines on the dusty earth below.





Jim’s phone buzzed at nine thirty. I jolted. Lost. Almost asleep.

He eased it from his pocket. “An alarm,” he explained lazily. “It goes off every night, so I don’t miss curfew-call at ten.”

I swallowed—my mouth was dry; would he notice?—and eased up onto my elbows. “You come here every night, then?”

A grunt of acknowledgment as he pushed to his feet, dusted off his hands, and then helped me to rise.

“Your fingers are still cold,” I said with a smile.

“And yours are still warm,” he murmured back, offering a grin of his own. But it wasn’t a real one. It wasn’t the one I wanted.

As before, he guided me across the roof. Transitioning from the thwack and creak of ancient wood to the muffled glitter of asphalt, and finally back to my window.

Our room was dark, Jean. You were still away, and although I could have asked Jim to join me inside—the formal wouldn’t end until eleven—I knew he would refuse.

Or maybe . . . maybe I simply knew he wouldn’t fit inside my cage. He was too big for those walls.

Instead, we sat on the windowsill. He faced outward, feet resting on the roof. I faced in, feet atop my desk. Atop my calc homework.

Music thumped through the windowsill. A beat that suggested “YMCA” was playing in the gym, accompanied by that torturous dance I know you think is fun.

Neither Jim nor I spoke. But unlike the silence before, where the entire universe had cradled me and called me friend, this silence was strained. I could feel the tick of Jim’s internal clock, and there was no denying that the bomb attached was about to go off.

The breeze kicked at his hair while he picked his thumbnail. A halfhearted movement I didn’t have the guts to interrupt. I just watched. I just waited.

At last, he shifted toward me, and in that instance, the scrape of his jeans was too loud. Too real. Too inescapable, and made all the more so by his eyes, rooting on my face. Dark behind his glasses.

My heart picked up speed. Not because I thought he might kiss me—though god knows I wanted him to—but because there was something wrong. Something off.

“What, James?” I said, harsher than I’d intended. Breaking the spell that had fallen over us.

His forehead tightened. That stare was killing me. That pause was killing me. Until finally: “I saw you got into Harvard, Holmes.”

Nothing could have surprised me more, Jean. I hadn’t told anyone about my acceptance e-mail. Not you, not my parents. “How do you know?”

“I was poking through the school’s server.” He said it so nonchalantly—as if it were perfectly normal. As if I shouldn’t care.

But I did. “Why were you on the school server? And why were you looking at my e-mails?”

His hands lifted defensively. “It wasn’t on purpose, Holmes. I told you, I came here to find something.”

“A key,” I said, my tone mocking and harsh. “So you can walk through walls and whatever other nonsense it is you like to do.”

That hurt him. I saw it in the way his face fell. “Someone has to step outside the rules,” he said eventually. “How else can I help the people enslaved by them?”

“And why do you have to help them at all? Hacking into the school’s system will get you expelled.”

“So? So what if that happens? Why do you care?”

“Because . . .” I stopped. I had to swallow. Had to gather my thoughts and tamp down this heat that strained against my stomach.

“Because what?”

“Nothing.” I looked down at my shadowed calculus homework. A slow rhythm was thumping through the walls now, completely at odds with the frustration building in my lungs. It was the same fury I’d felt when Jim had grilled me on becoming a lawyer.

Irrational. Childish. And bubbling over too fast. I mean, why should I be the one to confess how I felt? Wasn’t it obvious?

Jim didn’t push me, though. Not yet. Instead, he asked, “Will you go? To Harvard, I mean.”

“Of course.”

“Then why haven’t you told anyone about the acceptance? It came in two weeks ago, Shirley. What are you waiting for?”

My breath caught. He had said my name. For the first time ever, Jim had said my name, and it was all too much.