Page 51 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The suburbs
Right now
I checked the locks on the doors again, because Sharon had told me to. But I knew it didn’t matter. The girl stalking my mother had found her way in twice; she could do it again.
I’d been awake too long. In my bed, behind a locked door, I watched the dawn sky shade from purple jelly to pre-storm green, the atmosphere fattening like a wallet with unspent rain. Then the weather broke. A pause and a sizzle, the heat giving way. I closed my eyes.
While I slept the storm flooded the fields and pulled down branches and made the creeks swell up like black eyes. Rain leaked through the window seams and humidity tangled its fingers in my hair. When I woke my brain was beautifully blank. Then it caught hold of everything I’d gone to sleep to escape.
Nausea scratched at the back of my throat. I snatched up my phone, but its screen was empty. I tossed it aside, crossed the hall, and flung open my parents’ door. I wanted so badly for her to be lying there, back safely from wherever she’d been, that fora moment I saw her shape beneath the sheets, her face against the pillow. But the illusion faded. No one was there.
It was half past three in the afternoon and it felt like the end of the world. Rain was still falling and the house was as dark as if it were underwater. I went to the kitchen and ate cereal from the box. When I drifted to the window I could see Billy out there, jogging between car and house, carrying disintegrating bags of groceries. His T-shirt was plastered to his skin, his hair water-dark and running.
I walked outside to meet him. All the storm’s electricity had played out, leaving behind a saturating, paper-soft rain. Halfway down the drive I was soaked to my skin. Billy saw me coming and I watched him consider hurrying inside. But he stopped, swung his car door shut, and waited for me. I got right up close and still I didn’t know what I was going to say. The rain hissed around us and the world was submarine green.
“Wait,” I said, when it seemed like he was about to speak. His eyes widened as I came a step closer, too close, dropping my head back to see him. I took in air like a Channel swimmer and began.
“I’ve had one conversation with you in my life. Last night. I’ve seen you around, I remember what happened in junior high. But last night, that’s the first time we really talked.”
He said nothing, just watched me.
“Except that’s not true, is it,” I said quietly. “I know that now, but I swear I didn’t know it yesterday. And the thing is, it doesn’t even feel that strange. Because all these years I’ve been ignoring the way Inoticeyou. The feeling I get when I look at you. Theway you are, the way you move through the world, it’s all so familiar to me.” I looked at him, freckles and villainous eyebrows and hair swept back in wet waves. “Iknowyou. How do I know you?”
He breathed in. Then he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me against him. My head filled with honey and I rose to my toes and we held each other inside the green rain. His head dipped low, his mouth pressed into my shoulder. I could feel the relief that ran through him in a long shudder.
He lifted his head, just a little, so his lips were at my ear.
“When I kiss you,” he whispered, “it won’t be our first kiss. I need you to know—before you can let me, I need to tell you about the first time.”
I nodded. And I listened with a hurricane heart as he spoke with total certainty of an alternate past.
“Five years ago,” he began, his voice a little shaky, “I was eleven, you were twelve. It was the summer before you started junior high, and I was so worried everything was about to change. We were always neighborhood friends, you know? Summer friends, weekend friends. And in junior high there’sdances.I figured you’d get some mall cologne boyfriend and never talk to me again.”
“I would never get a mall cologne boyfriend,” I said, then flushed, thinking of Nate. Though he was more of a discontinued French cologne boyfriend.
Billy laughed. “So what I decided was,Iwould become your boyfriend. Except I had no idea how to do it. I honest to god looked up, like,how to become someone’s boyfriendandhow to be more than friends,and I’m reading all this horrible pickupartist stuff thinking,that can’t be right,and I’m getting nowhere because I’m eleven years old and I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground—according to my dad, when I got desperate enough to talk to him about it. Never ask for love advice from John Paxton, by the way.
“It was the very end of summer and the sun was going down. We were playing by that part of the creek we called the saucer, where we found all those teeny frogspawn after the flood, remember?” His brows knit. “No, wait, you don’t.
“We had our feet in the water and the sun was almost gone and I wanted to kiss you so badly. But I knew I’d look like a turtle even trying to reach your lips. Then you slid all the way into the water, right over your head, and when you came up you pulled me in, too. Thenyoukissedme.And I was…” He moved his hand in the arc of a paper plane. “Gone.”
I could see it. Looking at him now, soaked through with rain, I could picture a younger Billy standing in the bowl of the creek, grinning at me.
“That was a Monday,” he said. “The week before school started. The next day your mom had to go to the hospital—it was her appendix, I think—and for a while you couldn’t see me. Then I started to worry you didn’twantto see me. I came over on Saturday and your mom said you couldn’t come to the door. I tried twice on Sunday. The second time…”
I leaned back to see him. His face, this close, was almost blinding. “She broke your heart.”
“She told me you’d… I can’t believe this is still so hard to say. She told me you’d outgrown me. You were my best friend since I was seven. You were my first kiss. I thought you weremy firstgirlfriend.Then it all just stopped.” He winced. “So I decided to make a grand gesture.”
“Oh, no,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth. “When you asked me to be your girlfriend… oh,no.You must’ve thought I was awful.”
He didn’t deny it. “After that I was too mad and embarrassed to talk to you. But eventually I got over it. I guess. And that was that, until last night.” Gently he moved my hand from my mouth and laced his fingers in mine, tentatively. Like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to. “You remember none of that?”
I shook my head. “I’m so sorry. My mother was lying to you, I wouldnever—all of this was her. I can’t fully explain it, I know it sounds impossible, but she did this.”
Billy blinked the rain from his lashes, his face filling with a slow-breaking light. He brought his hands up to cup my face. His skin was warmer than the air, our lips so close I could feel it when he spoke. “Oh, my god,” he breathed. “I should’ve known.”
