Our Crooked Hearts(42)
“So we’re agreed,” Marion said, bruised and beady. “We do the spell again.”
Fee wrapped her fingers in mine. She squeezed. I heard what she didn’t say. Astrid is listening. Tread carefully.
“Right,” I said, voice raspy.
Sharon rolled her neck. “Tonight? Get it over with?”
“Not the right kinda moon,” Marion said shortly. “Next Friday’s will work. Okay?”
Five days away. Five days to figure out a fix that didn’t involve trusting Marion. I held onto Fee’s hand and nodded my assent, for now.
Marion looked at the air over our heads. “Hear that?” she said. “We won’t abandon you, Astrid.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The suburbs
Right now
I checked the locks on the doors again, because Sharon had told me to. But I knew it didn’t matter. The girl stalking my mother had found her way in twice; she could do it again.
I’d been awake too long. In my bed, behind a locked door, I watched the dawn sky shade from purple jelly to pre-storm green, the atmosphere fattening like a wallet with unspent rain. Then the weather broke. A pause and a sizzle, the heat giving way. I closed my eyes.
While I slept the storm flooded the fields and pulled down branches and made the creeks swell up like black eyes. Rain leaked through the window seams and humidity tangled its fingers in my hair. When I woke my brain was beautifully blank. Then it caught hold of everything I’d gone to sleep to escape.
Nausea scratched at the back of my throat. I snatched up my phone, but its screen was empty. I tossed it aside, crossed the hall, and flung open my parents’ door. I wanted so badly for her to be lying there, back safely from wherever she’d been, that for a moment I saw her shape beneath the sheets, her face against the pillow. But the illusion faded. No one was there.
It was half past three in the afternoon and it felt like the end of the world. Rain was still falling and the house was as dark as if it were underwater. I went to the kitchen and ate cereal from the box. When I drifted to the window I could see Billy out there, jogging between car and house, carrying disintegrating bags of groceries. His T-shirt was plastered to his skin, his hair water-dark and running.
I walked outside to meet him. All the storm’s electricity had played out, leaving behind a saturating, paper-soft rain. Halfway down the drive I was soaked to my skin. Billy saw me coming and I watched him consider hurrying inside. But he stopped, swung his car door shut, and waited for me. I got right up close and still I didn’t know what I was going to say. The rain hissed around us and the world was submarine green.
“Wait,” I said, when it seemed like he was about to speak. His eyes widened as I came a step closer, too close, dropping my head back to see him. I took in air like a Channel swimmer and began.
“I’ve had one conversation with you in my life. Last night. I’ve seen you around, I remember what happened in junior high. But last night, that’s the first time we really talked.”
He said nothing, just watched me.
“Except that’s not true, is it,” I said quietly. “I know that now, but I swear I didn’t know it yesterday. And the thing is, it doesn’t even feel that strange. Because all these years I’ve been ignoring the way I notice you. The feeling I get when I look at you. The way you are, the way you move through the world, it’s all so familiar to me.” I looked at him, freckles and villainous eyebrows and hair swept back in wet waves. “I know you. How do I know you?”
He breathed in. Then he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me against him. My head filled with honey and I rose to my toes and we held each other inside the green rain. His head dipped low, his mouth pressed into my shoulder. I could feel the relief that ran through him in a long shudder.
He lifted his head, just a little, so his lips were at my ear.
“When I kiss you,” he whispered, “it won’t be our first kiss. I need you to know—before you can let me, I need to tell you about the first time.”
I nodded. And I listened with a hurricane heart as he spoke with total certainty of an alternate past.
“Five years ago,” he began, his voice a little shaky, “I was eleven, you were twelve. It was the summer before you started junior high, and I was so worried everything was about to change. We were always neighborhood friends, you know? Summer friends, weekend friends. And in junior high there’s dances. I figured you’d get some mall cologne boyfriend and never talk to me again.”
“I would never get a mall cologne boyfriend,” I said, then flushed, thinking of Nate. Though he was more of a discontinued French cologne boyfriend.
Billy laughed. “So what I decided was, I would become your boyfriend. Except I had no idea how to do it. I honest to god looked up, like, how to become someone’s boyfriend and how to be more than friends, and I’m reading all this horrible pickup artist stuff thinking, that can’t be right, and I’m getting nowhere because I’m eleven years old and I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground—according to my dad, when I got desperate enough to talk to him about it. Never ask for love advice from John Paxton, by the way.
“It was the very end of summer and the sun was going down. We were playing by that part of the creek we called the saucer, where we found all those teeny frogspawn after the flood, remember?” His brows knit. “No, wait, you don’t.