Dark and Deepest Red(13)

“Wise choice,” said a girl’s voice, one he placed just as he turned toward it.

“When Sylvie and Aubrey get into it about skirt length, I stay half a mile away,” Rosella said.

With rising dread, Emil realized his friends had quieted.

They were all staring at her.

“Sorry,” Rosella said. “Am I taking him away from whatever great scientific breakthrough you all are working toward?”

They all shook their heads slightly, snapping back to the moment. It was so similar that despite the far range in their coloring and build, it made them look like brothers.

“Not at all,” Eddie said.

“Get out of here, Woodlock,” Luke said.

“Yeah, we don’t need you,” Aidan said.

Emil tried not to cringe, at least not visibly enough that Rosella would see it. His friends may have meant well, shoving him in the direction of a girl they knew he’d liked for years. But if lack of subtlety was a recognized art, they’d all have museum exhibits in their honor.

“Sorry if I scared you earlier,” Rosella said, walking a few steps from the fallen tree his friends had spread the blueprint over.

He went with her. “You didn’t.”

Rosella tripped over a rock or a root.

Emil caught her forearm. “You okay?”

Her hand stayed on him.

The back of his neck went hot. She seemed nervous now, when she hadn’t earlier. Instead of making him less nervous, that somehow made it worse, like how jumpy he felt was rubbing off.

A few trees away, two silhouettes leapt from the dark.

Rosella’s hand drew back from Emil and flew to her sweater.

Emil couldn’t quite place the laughter, but the sound of it was familiar, boys he’d heard laughing behind him in class, boys who considered scaring girls the best way to impress them.

Piper Tamsin and Graham Davies pitched themselves into the dark, sending up twin choruses of, “Chris, you ass! Get back here!”

The boys fled, their laughter ringing through the night.

“Yeah, you better run,” Piper yelled after them, and the sound echoed off the clouds.

Emil watched them. “My money’s on Piper and Graham.”

“It should be,” Rosella said. “Don’t be fooled by the manicures.”

She buttoned the last buttons on her coat and studied the glimmer reflected in the water. It looked silver and shiny as mercury or antimony.

“Why did we stop swimming out here?” she asked.

“You mean other than our fathers’ identical safety lectures?” He put on his best Julien Woodlock voice. “‘Do you know how cold the water gets down there?’” he quoted.

“‘Worse for every foot you go down,’” Rosella jumped in with her closest mimic to her own father.

Emil laughed.

“Seriously, did they rehearse those?” Rosella asked. “It was like they were reading off a script.”

Emil and Rosella had stopped going to the reservoir years ago, and it was hard to know if that was part of what had led to them not being friends anymore, or if it was something lost to the fact that they weren’t friends anymore. They had never stopped greeting each other in the halls, or inserting dragon and unicorn stuffed animals among the nativity display at church (they had yet to be caught). But the relentless teasing of classmates who singsonged that they were boyfriend and girlfriend had worn them down a little more each year. And realizing how much he liked her—liked her, in that way his classmates taunted them both about—had made him less inclined to hold on to her, not more. It was half not wanting them to be right, and half not wanting to find out if it was one-sided.

This whole time, Emil had thought he’d need some kind of nerve, flinty and unhesitating, to talk to Rosella for more than a few sentences. But now it seemed like all it took was falling back into the memory of being nine or ten together, knifing their bodies into the freezing reservoir.

Rosella stopped at a high point on the rocks. Far voices rose off the scattered knots of people they knew, mixing with the smell of cheap beer and cigarettes and the sugary mint gum meant to cover both.

She stared at the ribbon of light above the reservoir. It wavered and flickered, like stars reflected in a still pond. Both the clouds above and the water below mirrored it.

“I never really thought of you as someone who came out for this,” she said.

He shrugged, looking where she looked. “I’m not.”

He felt the slow turn of her face toward his, like the clouds unveiling the moon.

“Emil?” she said.

“Yeah?” he said, wondering what question she was holding in her mouth.

Being this close to her brought him back to the chill of the water on their skin years ago, the light cutting down through the depth, how it felt like the darkness underneath them was infinite. And how that was both terrifying and thrilling.

The way she stared at him now made him wonder if she was there with him, in the reservoir in July, the thick blanket of dark water letting them pretend that any way they touched was accidental.

The air felt sharp enough to grow frost flowers. And something about the glimmer above them turned his overthinking brain off just enough.

Emil slid his hand onto the back of her neck, a gesture small enough that it could have been the start of anything. He would wait, stay still, until she told him what.