Page 3 of Our Crooked Hearts
Nate jumped, eyes going wide. I think he expected to see my mother out there. But it was my neighbor, Billy Paxton.
I peered up at him. Billy lived across the street from me, but we’d never really talked. Especially following a painful incident back in junior high, memories of which still had the power to make me stop what I was doing and wince. He’d been at the party Nate and I came from, and I’d pretended not to see him.
Nate rolled the window down, touching behind his ear to make sure he hadn’t dropped his cigarette. “What do you want, man?”
Billy ignored him. “Ivy, you okay?”
I leaned around Nate to see him better. “Uh, yeah? I’m fine.”
He put a hand to his mouth. There was a stripe of white paint over his forearm. “Did he do that to you?”
“Are you for real?” Nate squawked.
I felt, suddenly, like I might cry. It was the pain, I told myself. The adrenaline, fizzing away. “No, no. It was a… car thing. I’m good.”
Billy watched me a little longer. He was too tall for it, bent practically in half to see into the car. “Okay. I’ll be right there.” He pointed at his porch. “Just so you know.”
“Thank you for your service,” Nate said sarcastically, but not until Billy was up the drive.
I wrenched the door open, slammed it behind me, and turned. “We’re broken up.”
“No shit,” Nate said, and gunned it down the street.
I lingered on the curb. My lip was throbbing, my body pounding with exhaustion, but it was laced with the feather-light euphoria of beingfree.
Billy cleared his throat. He was perched tensely on his porch, still watching me. Embarrassed, I lifted a hand.
“Sorry about that,” I told him.
“Sorry for what?”
He said it quietly enough that I wasn’t sure I was meant to hear. I almost let it pass. Maybe it was the pain in my mouth—needling, insistent—that made me turn.
“I’m sorry you thought you had to step in,” I said, more sharply than I intended.
Billy stared at me. Then he stood, shaking his head. “Won’t happen again,” he said, and disappeared into his house.
My eye went to the darkened second-story windows. One ofthem lit up a minute later and I looked away, regret and bottom-shelf vodka muddling queasily in my stomach. Time to get in bed, I figured. Before my night found one more way to go to shit.
Slow and steady I unlocked the front door, holding my breath as I opened it just wide enough to slide through. Then I let it all go in a strangled yelp, because my mom was sitting on the stairs waiting for me.
“Mom!” I dipped my head, bringing a hand to my lip. “Why are you awake?”
She leaned into the patch of moonlight falling through the window over the door. Her bright hair was tied up, her eyes safety-pin sharp. “Bad dream.” Then she snapped to her feet, because she’d seen my mouth.
“What happened? Were you in an accident?”
My lip beat like a second heart. “No! I’m fine. I mean—it wasn’t really anaccident…”
The beam of her focus felt physical. “Tell me. Tell meexactly.”
“Nate—swerved,” I said. “His car went off the road.”
“Then what?”
I thought of the stranger in the woods, slapping at her chalk-colored skin. “Then nothing. Then we drove home.”
“That’s it? That’s all that happened?”
