Page 44 of Nowhere to Hide
“I’d rather not,” I say. “And… uh… I never did finish the chapter. You’re too distracting to study with.”
“You’re not so easy yourself, all that staring and all that arranging,” she says, using her free hand to nudge my pen a few degrees out of square, then watching my fingers twitch toward it before I catch myself. “You do that with everything, don’t you? You see something crooked and put it right.”
“Reflex,” I say.
“I know.” The tease goes out of her face, and her thumb moves once, slow, across the back of my hand. “Can I ask you something, and if you don’t want to answer, that’s okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, without hesitation.
She’s quiet for a moment, like she’s deciding whether to say it. Then she does. “Why do you carry so much for everyone?”
The answer is ready before she finishes.Somebody has to. That’s just how I’m built. I don’t mind.
But she deserves more than that.
“I guess I just always have,” I say, taking a breath and looking at our hands on the table. “The first time I remember doing it, I was fourteen. Ivy was twelve — braces, the works — and she got caught stealing a lipstick from the CVS on Boston Post Road during a field trip.”
“Oh no.”
“She didn’t even want it. She just wanted attention.” My thumb moves along the side of Sloane’s hand. “But when the school called my dad, his assistant said he was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed, so they called me. I had the flu, fever was a hundred and two.”
Her fingers tighten on mine. “But you fixed it anyway?”
“I had to.” I shrug. “Dad was busy, and Mom was upstairs with one of her headaches.” I hear the word come out, pausing to make sure she’s alright with it before I go on. “That’s the family term for it.”
She doesn’t push. She waits.
“So I forged a note, biked to the school, and then threw up in the parking lot before I went in.” I laugh. “Then I walked into the vice principal’s office and told him my parents couldn’t make it, and he bought it, because I had my shit together.”
The reading room is so quiet that I can hear the clock above the reference desk.
“I got Ivy on my bike. She was crying. I was riding with one hand on my handlebars and one steadying her.” My voice is doing the level thing it always does. “When we got home, Mom looked at both of us and said, ‘Oh good. You sorted it,’ and then went back to bed.”
I stop and look away. Outside the window, the wind has picked up, and fallen leaves scatter sideways through the lamplight. I keep the lid on it, barely, and realize again why nobody else on campus has ever heard that story.
But Sloane is still holding my hand, and her thumb traces a line across my knuckles, slow. “Are you lonely?” she asks.
I laugh, surprised. “I’ve got so many people in my life I can barely keep them straight some weeks. Ivy, the guys, Coach?—”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” she says, gently.
My thumb stops on her hand. “Yeah,” I say after a while. “I am.”
It sits between us.
“Me too,” she says, but she doesn’t pull her hand away. “Rowan, I?—”
She catches herself.
“You don’t need to tell me, Sloane,” is all I say, giving her an off-ramp.
“I want to tell you the rest.” Her voice catches, and she laughs at herself, frustrated, wiping under one eye with the heel of her hand. “Out there on the wall, I gave you the start of it and then I lost my nerve. This next part I’ve only ever said to family, so?—”
“Take your time.”
She takes a breath, letting it go too fast.
I make myself hold still, my jaw already tight.
