The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(11)

A week later I ran into him at a bookstore on Fifty-Seventh Street. It was like something out of a bad movie: I’d tugged a fat, tattered copy of Yeats down from a shelf, and there he was, a book-sized slice of him in the space it left behind. He was chewing his thumbnail, reading Patti Smith.

The third time I saw him he was under an awning at a restaurant a block from Harold’s, its long windows open to let summer in and a spill of rich people at tiny, marble-topped tables out. He was sitting with a man I recognized from the internet as his father and a gaunt woman with a sharp blonde bob, trailing a steak knife through crème br?lée. He caught me looking before I could turn away, and stood up like he was on strings. In three bounds he was away from the restaurant and walking beside me.

“You saved me,” he said. “I was starting to levitate back there. I was starting to think, What if my entire life has been watching my stepmom take fourteen minutes to eat one bite of dessert, and all my memories of the world before that were just implanted by the Matrix? Hi, Alice.”

“Hi,” I said, flustered. I was on my way home from work. My shirt was covered in scone crumbs and my hair was spiked with sweat.

“You smell like a coffee bean,” he said when we reached the corner. “It’s awesome.” He glanced back at the restaurant, his face so full of regret I almost laughed. “Okay, I better get back.”

“Back to stabbing your dessert.”

His smile reached his eyes then, just for a moment. A flicker of light on dark water. Then he swung around and walked back up the sidewalk.

After that he’d started waiting at my locker some mornings, leaning against it with one foot up like something out of an eighties movie.

“Crewe,” he’d say, nodding, then he’d stand there while I juggled my books. When I was done he’d pull a book off the top of my stack, walk me to class, and hand it back when we got there, like an inside joke he had with himself. Finch’s approval was armor. I wasn’t just Audrey’s weird stepsister, I was Finch’s … something. Charity case?

Friend?

It wouldn’t be a first, exactly, but close enough. I didn’t talk much to anyone. It wasn’t that people didn’t try—there’s always somebody who wants to adopt the new girl. I’m small, with blonde hair and dark eyes that look soft and surprised until I get angry.

“Aren’t you a pretty little house cat,” a teacher said to me once, in a low voice nobody else could hear. It was my first week as a freshman in Nashville. His words and the way he’d looked when he said them shivered under my skin and stayed there like poison. The only way to purge it was to pour a thermos of hot coffee into the keyboard of his laptop. I never got caught, and I never stopped hating the disconnect between what I saw in the mirror and how I felt.

But it was different with Ellery Finch. I’d grown up too steeped in fairy tales and shit luck that kicked in like clockwork to believe much in coincidence. I had … something with Finch. I’d never quite decided what that might be, but there was this skin of meaning that had attached itself to him. Maybe it was the Althea connection, or the way our paths kept crossing like we were skaters spinning in a figure eight. Or maybe it was wanting to see that light in his eyes again, a possibility that made my skin flutter with heat rash.

It was weird that Audrey’s seat was empty—she never ditched Drama—but I took it as the gift from the universe that it was. She had a way of identifying weak spots and sticking her fingers in them. She liked to watch me and Finch like she was watching TV.

And my premonition was right: Toby paired us up, dropping a quick wink that filled me with a hot-lava embarrassment—for myself, but also for him. Teachers who clocked their students’ alliances, then tried to play matchmaker, were almost as sad as teachers who let themselves get bullied by teenage girls in Nars lip gloss.

I pretended to look for something in my bag while my face cooled, then drifted over to where Finch sat, watching me come and bending back the cover of The Glass Menagerie.

“Hey, Crewe.”

“Finch,” I replied.

“You want to read Laura, or should I?”

I hated Tennessee Williams’s Laura. She reminded me too much of a fairy-tale character. Not the ones my grandmother wrote, allegedly—those women drew blood. No, she was the worst type of Grimm Brothers beauty: isolated, soft-spoken, waiting for a man to save her. She probably looked like me.

“You take Laura,” I said quickly.

For the next fifteen minutes we ran lines together. He was weirdly good. Most of us didn’t try, and the ones who did tried way too hard, speaking in plummy stage tones that had everything to do with the school myth that Toby was a talent scout in disguise. You should’ve seen Audrey chewing over Maggie the Cat.

When the bell rang, Finch put his hand out affectedly, like he was laughing at himself for doing it. That was his thing, I’d noticed: doing everything with an ironic twist. Like he was going to laugh at himself before anyone else could. Being a perpetual new kid made you an anthropologist of the American Teen, and I’d seen his type before. I’d seen every type before.

I hesitated, then shook it.

“We should meet up on purpose sometime,” he said, holding on for an extra beat. “Like, outside of school. Don’t you think?”

I pulled away, my mind filling like a fishbowl with reasons to say no. Ella needed me. We’d be leaving town soon anyway. The bad luck. Maybe Ella thought it was sleeping, but after last night I didn’t buy it.