The Mystery of Hollow Places(29)

“When I grow up?”

“Or whatever, say you went to BU and you graduated and got a dog and now you’re thirty and fabulous. What are you doing?”

I squinted as she tugged back the hair at my temples. Normally I’d give Jessa the line I use on Mr. McCormick, and Lindy, and whoever reads our self-important college application essays: I want to write great mysteries. But that’s not really true. It’s not whodunits of my own making that I want to solve; it’s the mystery I’ve been waiting and reading and preparing all my life to unravel. Rather than spill my hopes and dreams all over Jessa, I dodged the question. “Who says I want to go to BU? It’s enormous. I still get lost at Sugarbrook High sometimes, and that’s just a big horseshoe. And I’d maybe run into Jeremy.”

“He’s not that bad,” she insisted, not for the first time.

“Okay, so where do you want to go to college?”

“I want to go to RISD. They have all these computer art programs. Like graphic design?”

That made sense. Jessa liked art class best of all, was really good at it, and any job that required competence with a keyboard, she’d kill at.

“But I’ll probably only get into, like, Quinsigamond Community College. I’m not like Chadwick.”

“So he’s smart? You’re smart, Jessa.”

“Pshh.”

“You are! You’re a better liar than me, right? So maybe you should be the writer.”

“Or I should be a powerful f*cking wizard. Voilà!”

I turned to face the mirror for Jessa’s big reveal. The hair was right—a poofed-up kind of French twist in the back, with two thick braids wrapped around the crown of my head. Jessa can do anything with hair. And with the bright pink lips and a slick of liquid eyeliner, I looked . . . not exactly like the girl in the prom photo, with her curtained silver dress and braided French twist and winged eyeliner, but not unlike her either. The awkwardness of my elbows and knees helped as I tried to figure out what to do with my body. And my face really was shaped like hers—you could see it when our hair was up like this.

Jessa popped into the mirror behind me. “Hot! Chadwick’s gonna want to rip your tights off like wrapping paper.”

“Oh, whatever,” I said, and then, “Doesn’t he have that girlfriend, anyway? I thought he was still dating that girl. The ski instructor. That he brought home for Thanksgiving?”

She shrugged mysteriously and finger-combed her own hair. “Not that I know of.”

It turns out there aren’t any college girls or ski instructors at the party, but then there aren’t usually, and calling it a party is pretty generous. What it is, is a collection of Doritos bags, KFC buckets, beer bottles, and boys. Still, I know girls who would wear uncooked sausage links to this gathering of snack foods if it meant they could come. Soccer is big at Sugarbrook, and Chad, Omar, Jeremy, and Mike led the team to States, which made them übermensches. I mean, Chad was kind of a nerd off the field—all AP classes, the hardest science and math courses Sugarbrook offered, and a member of the tech club off-season. But I once saw Jaime Rivers fish his Slurpee straw out of the cafeteria trash and carry it around in her pencil case because it’d touched his lips.

Chad levers himself up with much squeaking of vinyl and shifting of beans. Clearly he did not spend an hour and a half agonizing over his outfit; he’s wearing generic dark boy-jeans (wearing them well) and a white T-shirt with a huge blue jellyfish pumping across the front, a bowl trailing ribbons and clouds. On the back it reads Rhizostome or Die. His hair stands in damp spikes from a recent shower, paler blond under the basement fluorescents like a tangled halo.

Jeez.

He lopes over to us, then joins us by the mini fridge. On top is a small collection of liquor bottles and soda bottles, some of which he mixes into a red Solo cup while I relearn the freckles on his biceps I’ve spent summer days memorizing.

Jessa drives an elbow into my hip before heading for the Ping-Pong table.

“What are you drinking?” I ask. So clever.

“Just a Captain and Coke. Kind of heavy on the Captain.” He hands it to me to taste, and our fingers brush. “You’d like it.”

I take a long sip of it, sweet and syrupy and throat-burning.

He snatches it back. “When you’re a grown-up like me. Stick with beer and gather ye rosebuds while ye may, youth.”

“I’m not that youthful. You’re not that old.”

“You are,” he says, laughing, “one year and four months younger than me. That’s more than the lifespan of the brine shrimp. That’s, like, one brine shrimp and one dragonfly. That’s fifteen bees younger! And there’s this mayfly—”

“It lives for an hour, right? It has no mouth and no digestive system and it’s made to have sex and die.” I stifle the urge to crack my knuckles. “Just like college boys.”

The dimple in his left cheek appears. “So you watch Animal Planet. So what? Young people watch Animal Planet.”

“Not many.”

“You’re still . . . 10,958 mayflies too young for the Captain.” Then, squaring himself to me—the toes of his socks inches from my mine, his dimples at eye level, and his green eyes warming my face—he places his palm on top of my head, measuring. He lifts it and hovers it just above, so I can still feel my hair catching on his callused skin. My whole scalp tingles.