Sign Here(65)

“So, tell me, how long have you liked Josh?”

Mickey held still, her eyes closed. Ruth’s fingers were cold, answered prayers against her sun-and-thrill-burned scalp.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know. Kind of forever.”

“Aww!” Ruth cooed. “The boy next door!”

“Shut up.”

“No, really. That’s so cute. And he was totally checking you out.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Mickey said. “They were both just looking at you.”

“That’s because I have confidence,” Ruth said, taking Mickey’s chin in her palm and holding her head straight.

“You have good reason. I don’t.”

“No,” Ruth explained, snapping an elastic from her wrist onto Mickey’s braid. “It’s not real confidence. I fake it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just pretend it’s like a movie, and you’re the star. What would a totally ballsy chick do right now? And then you do it.”

“No way,” Mickey said, grateful when she felt Ruth’s fingers loosen the braid she had just created, and start over. “I’m a terrible actress.”

“Get up.” Ruth said, her hands under Mickey’s arms. Mickey stood up and faced the mirror. She hadn’t spent much of her life thinking about how she looked. Not yet. But she knew then that she would never go back. Her nose and forehead were burned and shiny from the heat of it, as if her freckles had been laminated. Her hair was half braided, half not, and entirely ratty. The straps of her bra under her tank top seemed the very definition of faking it. Ruth took her place on the bed, her skin the opposite of Mickey’s: if Ruth was sun-kissed, Mickey was sun-slapped.

“Give me the best you’ve got.”

“What?” Mickey asked.

“Come on, seduce me.”

Mickey’s jaw dropped, and she hit Ruth on her perfectly tanned knee.

“Screw you!”

“I’m serious! Pretend I’m Josh. What are you going to do to prove you’re not just Sean’s little sister anymore?”

Mickey pressed her open palms to her face.

“I mean, if you’re going to be a prude about it—” Ruth said, sighing. “But this is what best friends are for. To help each other.”

Mickey looked through her fingers. “I don’t know how.”

Ruth grinned.

“Here,” she said, pushing Mickey gently back down to the bed. “I’ll show you.”

When Ruth stood and turned around again, she held her face in a way Mickey had recently become familiar with, but hadn’t tired of. Ruth’s was a face of many parts. One part asked, another told, and a third, which pulled the whole thing together, challenged. How far will you let me take this?

“Hey, Josh.”

“Ruth, come on.”

“You’ve certainly grown up.”

Her voice matched her speed as she stepped closer, lazy but with a destination.

“Have you been working out?”

“As if I’m going to ask him that.”

Ruth stopped inches from Mickey’s hard-pressed knees.

“Remember when we used to play hide-and-seek?”

She reached out and touched the top hem of Mickey’s shirt, her fingertips light like insect wings.

“We played tag,” Mickey said.

Ruth laughed as if Mickey hadn’t spoken. “Well, I have a confession to make.”

“What?”

“I always wanted you to be the one to find me.”

Ruth’s fingers went from Mickey’s collarbone up her jaw to her lips, and then she leaned in until talking was nearly the same as kissing.

“Want to play again?”

Mickey had never been in love before. Not with anyone besides Robin Hood—Disney’s fox version. All of that was still ahead of her. But she thought at this moment that maybe she was falling in love for the first time. Not in the way some girls fall in love with other girls; she didn’t want to make Ruth her girlfriend. She wanted to be inside her, but not like that. She wanted to occupy her, to live in her skin. To live in a body that knew what it was doing. A body that could move without burning from the inside, as if someone were narrating her every move over a loudspeaker.

So when she answered yes, she meant it.





LILY





OUT ON THE LAWN, Lily saw cans lined up along the wooden ledge, nails still holding strong. He had planned ahead. To her surprise, it made her happy. Giddy, almost. She always loved the way Silas knew exactly what he was doing. It felt like discovering inconsistencies in her favorite television series, finding evidence of his effort under all that cool. It’s what made her fall in love with him in the first place. The cool, sure; but, even more so, the glimpses of the work that built it.

“Want to make this interesting?” she asked as she took the gun from Silas. She hadn’t forgotten the flower on the table, the threat of it. But she was well versed in living between the forgotten and the feared.

“Thompson!” Silas whooped, followed by a slow clap. “You haven’t been a gambler in ages.”

“Well, it’s vacation, isn’t it?”

She pulled her hair into one fist and cinched it into an elastic. She could feel Silas’s eyes on her shoulders, her neck. And for the first time in a long time, she found that she liked it. They weren’t talking about the kids or the house, the minute details of the present, or the looming obstacles of the future. They were talking the way they used to talk, before all that.