No One Knows Us Here(35)

When it was over, we lay panting on my faux-fur rug in the middle of my bedroom floor. That was where we had ended up on our way to the bed. His head was buried in the crook of my shoulder. His breath warmed my neck. My fingers traveled lazily through his hair, slightly damp with sweat.

Gently, I rolled him off me and tried to sit back up, tugging at my dress. My eyes scanned the room in search of my underwear before I remembered casting it aside in the entryway.

“You’d better go now.” I smoothed my hair with my hands and sat up straighter.

He was still buttoning up his jeans. He froze, trying to make sense of the words that had just left my mouth.

He reached out to touch me, but I scooted back to the edge of the rug. I was crouching down, ready to bolt out of there if I had to.

“Rosemary—” His voice sounded tired. Defeated. I could tell he was trying to formulate a response and coming up with nothing.

“I can’t be with you,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.”

Sam’s eyes blinked once. Twice. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I have a boyfriend.”

His eyes opened wide for a moment, then went back to normal. “Since when?”

“Sam—”

“Who is he?” Then, a second later: “Break up with him.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t? Or you won’t?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re telling me that whatever you have with him is better than this?” He gestured to me and back to him. Cue a flashback of our whole romance, starting with meeting on the stairs and ending a few moments ago when we were rolling around on this faux-fur rug and he was murmuring my name into my ear and I was digging my fingernails into his back. “You’re in love with him?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What about the zombie apocalypse? All that stuff about our souls.” His expression was mutating before my eyes, getting chillier by the second. Good. That was how it needed to be. He could hate me if it made things easier.

“I didn’t mean any of it,” I said. “Everything I said last night was just”—my hand fluttered through the air—“pillow talk.”





CHAPTER 13


I’d expected my sister to look different when I met her at the airport. She’d be thinner, paler. No spark left in her eyes. Something like that.

If anything, Wendy looked healthier than ever, an all-American teenage girl in tight jeans and an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt that revealed a lacy black bra strap. She squealed through my tour around the apartment. Here’s where we’ll have parties, and here’s where we’ll sit down for breakfast, and here’s where we’ll eat Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll have to invite everyone, she said, and I laughed and said, Who’s everyone? and she laughed, too. In her mind, we already had dozens of mutual friends, people who would attend our parties, sit around our table for Thanksgiving, bring us presents to display under a ten-foot Christmas tree.

I sat on her bed and watched her unpack. She didn’t have much. An oversize suitcase that must have been her grandmother’s, a big duffel bag, and a rolling carry-on. She pulled her clothes from her suitcase and stuffed them into the built-in dresser drawers.

“Remember this?” She tossed a framed photograph in my direction. It landed faceup on her bed.

It was one of those old-timey sepia photographs, of me and Wendy. I was a teenager, a senior in high school, Wendy a little girl about nine or ten. We both wore lacy high-collared shirts and long, dark, heavy skirts that swept the floor. I sat ramrod straight on a high-backed cane chair, and Wendy stood behind me, a hand on my shoulder. We wore hard, unsmiling expressions, our chins tilted up. We weren’t orphans then, but the picture made it look like we saw it coming, our grim future. “Of course I remember.”

“Remember how I stayed home sick?”

“Mom had a class.”

“Dad was away, on a business trip or something. You said you’d stay home with me.”

“But you weren’t sick.” We smiled at each other. My mom didn’t want to let me miss school to take care of my little sister. Usually she’d stay home herself, but she was taking classes until late in the evening, trying to get her bachelor’s degree. She had a test that day, something she couldn’t miss. I said I didn’t mind missing school. I didn’t. As soon as our mother’s car pulled out of the driveway, Wendy perked up. She brushed her hair and styled it in two tight braids. I fake-scolded her, and she told me she needed a “mental health day.” Ha! She’d been a funny little kid.

We went out to breakfast at Denny’s and then drove up to Virginia City, a tiny little mining town way up in the foothills of the Sierras, the kind of town you’d visit on school field trips to learn about the old Wild West. It had wooden sidewalks, jangly old-time casinos called things like Bucket of Blood and the Mark Twain Saloon, and tourist attractions—fudge shops, ice cream parlors, old-fashioned photo studios.

We walked up and down the sidewalks, wandering into shops and dinky museums. I stuck a few quarters in a slot machine and won fifteen dollars. Quarters jangled into the metal trough, and we gathered them up with our hands, looking around, afraid we’d get caught. We ran out whooping with laughter and used the winnings to pay for the old-timey photo.