Page 34 of Tracking Snow

She sweeps the ambulance bay once. She opens the book, and a light rises off her shoulder.

Small. Round. Seafoam green. It climbs to the height of a reading lamp and hangs there, and the page goes soft gold beneath it. A second one, lilac, loops the rim of her cup and settles near her collarbone. A chain glints at the hollow of her throat, a little locket lifting with each breath, flashing lilac, then green.

She reads. Her mouth curves. When she turns the page, the green one dips too close, and she nudges it off with one finger, and it bumps her knuckle and floats up to its post again.

Four full minutes. Glowing in the open air for four full minutes before metal bangs somewhere inside the bay, and both lights sink into her and are gone. She scans the sidewalk, left, then right.

She doesn't see us. The careless ones never look up at the dark windows. They only check the sidewalk.

Something twists behind our sternum, watching her.

I memorize it anyway. Wentworth and Maple, the staff door with the broken bulb, the bench at the dark end. I add it to the map I keep of places like that. Places where someone needs our help.

Mother always wanted to know about the careless ones.

She could spot them before anyone else. Years ago, outside the farmer’s market on the Common, a boy lifted a flower out of a vendor's bucket without laying a finger on it and floated it across two stalls into a girl's hand, showing off. Mother stopped walking. She took my shoulder and turned me so I was facing him, so the lesson would land.

"That," she said, "is wrong." The same voice she used for cheating on taxes. "In front of children. In the open. And everyone walks past it like it's normal."

Then she took the little notebook out of her purse and wrote down the cross streets and the time. "Somebody has to keep track," she said.

We lost her the day we fractured, but keeping her rules is what's left of being her son.

The woman outside the hospital carries a sickness out with her book and coffee every night, and one day it will be taken from her, and she'll wake up lighter.

We are past that. Six ran the numbers on us years ago, seven ways split, too far gone. But if we can't save ourselves, we can at least save the others.

We save them, I say to the rest of us, the way I say it every time.

The quiet holds.

Four knuckles, one rib, eleven blocks from her door to ours. The sky is going gray at the bottom when we cross the lawn to the carriage house.

Some nights the walk is just a walk.

Tonight it is.

Chapter 12

Pretty Sure My Crush Isn’t Homeless

SNOW

Six is gone in the morning. I fell asleep on his chest, which frankly is a crazy miracle.

We’d made out for at least an hour, but he always kept that soft, relaxed mode. Despite my wanting to push the envelope and dry hump him into oblivion, I stopped myself.

As I cram a piece of buttered toast in my mouth, maybe he’s doing the same. I wish I knew where The Seven lived, where he was, what he was doing all day long. As I watch an episode of Hex Island with Ariel, I picture him watching it too.

As I apply mascara before my shirt, my mind drifts to The Seven. Does he have a nine to five, or is he just a homeless recluse I’ve fallen head over heels for?

Whoa, girl, chill. No one is falling over anything.

Still, his hygiene suggests he’s got plenty of access to clean water, and it’s not like he’s starving and hitting me up for survival-dependent calories. Which equals him having a home, which equals a job to pay for that home.

I am incredibly proud of myself for doing the math on that.

Again, I should be a life coach to teach people my ways...