Heroes Are My Weakness(35)

She moved on. The icy crust cracked beneath her feet as she reached the Harp House beach. She hadn’t been here since the day she’d almost died.

The memory she’d tried so hard to suppress came flooding back.

She and Regan had found the litter of pups a few weeks before the end of the summer. Annie was still miserable from Theo’s hostile withdrawal, and she’d been staying away from him as much as she could. On that particular morning while he was out surfing, she, Regan, and Jaycie were in the stable with the new pups. The pregnant mongrel who hung around the yard had delivered them during the night.

The pups, cuddled against their mother, were only a few hours old, six squirmy masses of black and white fur with their eyes still closed and their soft pink tummies rising and falling with each new breath. Their mother, a short-haired mix of so many breeds it was impossible to guess her pedigree, had shown up at the beginning of the summer. Theo had initially claimed her as his own, then lost interest after the dog had hurt its foot.

The three girls had sat cross-legged in the straw, their soft chatter drifting back and forth as they examined each tiny pup. “That one is the cutest,” Jaycie declared.

“I wish we could take them with us when we leave.”

“I want to name them.”

Eventually, Regan had fallen silent. When Annie asked if something was wrong, Regan twisted a strand of her shiny dark hair around her finger and poked at the floor with a piece of straw. “Let’s not tell Theo about them.”

Annie didn’t intend to tell Theo anything, but she still wanted to know what Regan meant. “Why not?”

Regan pulled the lock across her cheek. “Sometimes he—”

Jaycie jumped in. “He’s a boy. Boys are rougher than girls.”

Annie thought of Regan’s oboe and the purple notebook full of her poetry. She thought of herself—locked in the dumbwaiter, attacked by the gulls, pushed into the marsh. Regan jumped to her feet as if she wanted to change the subject. “Come on. Let’s go.”

The three of them had left the stable, but later that afternoon, when she and Regan had returned to check on the pups, Theo was already there.

Annie hung back while Regan went to his side. He was crouched in the straw stroking one of the small, wriggling bodies. Regan settled next to him. “They’re cute, aren’t they?” She framed it as a question, as if she needed him to validate her opinions.

“They’re mutts,” he said. “Nothing special. I don’t like dogs.” He rose from the straw and stalked out of the stable, not even glancing at Annie.

The next day Annie found him in the stable again. It was raining outside, the smell of fall already in the air. Regan was off packing the last of her things for the next day’s trip home, and Theo had one of the pups in his hands. Regan’s words came rushing back, and Annie leaped forward. “Put it down!” she’d exclaimed.

He didn’t argue with her, just set the pup back with the rest. As he looked at her, his normal sulky expression disappeared, and in her imaginative eyes, he seemed more tragic than sullen. The romantic bookworm inside her forgot about his cruelty and thought only of her beloved misunderstood heroes with their dark secrets, hidden nobility, and prodigious passions. “What’s wrong?”

He shrugged. “The summer’s over. Sucks that it’s raining on our last day.”

Annie liked the rain. It gave her a good excuse to curl up and read. And she was glad to leave. The past few months had been too hard.

All three of them would be going back to their old schools. Theo and Regan to fancy boarding schools in Connecticut, and Annie to her junior year at LaGuardia High, the Fame school.

He dug his fists into the pockets of his shorts. “Things aren’t going too great with your mom and my dad.”

She’d heard the quarrels, too. The quirkiness Elliott had originally found so charming in Mariah had gotten under his skin, and she’d overheard her mother accuse Elliott of being stuffy, which he was, but his stability was what Mariah had wanted, even more than his money. Now Mariah was saying she and Annie were going back to their old apartment when they returned to the city. Just to pack things up, she’d said, but Annie didn’t believe her.

Rain clicked against the dusty stable windows. Theo nudged the toe of his sneaker into the straw. “I’m . . . sorry things got weird with us this summer.”

Things hadn’t gotten weird. He’d gotten weird. But she wasn’t big on confrontation, and she’d merely muttered, “It’s okay.”

“I—I liked talking to you.”

She’d liked talking to him, too, and she’d liked their make-out sessions even more. “Me, too.”

She didn’t know exactly how it happened, but they ended up sitting on one of the wood benches, their backs against the stable wall, talking about school, about their parents, about the books they had to read next year. It was exactly as it used to be, and she could have talked to him for hours, but Jaycie and Regan appeared. Theo jumped up from the bench, spat in the straw, and jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s go into town,” he told them. “I want some fried clams.”

He didn’t invite Annie to come along.

She felt ugly and stupid for talking to him again. But that night, right after she’d finished packing the last of her things, she found a note from him slipped under her bedroom door.