“Sure,” I heard myself saying. My brain had not made that decision—the words bubbled up involuntarily. But if I thought too hard about it, like I usually did about everything, then I knew I would say no and probably regret it. I was kind of tired of being so responsible. “Meet me at the back door.”
The house was dark and seemed abnormally silent. I held my breath as I tiptoed past Mom’s room, convinced she would hear me breathing.
Luke stood underneath the floodlight on the deck. His hands were in his pockets, and he was scowling at the ground. Maybe he was having second thoughts, too. It was bad enough, sneaking into my house in the middle of the night. The fact that I was seeing his brother only complicated matters. And intensified my guilt.
But the grin he gave me when I opened the door didn’t have a trace of remorse in it. It was arrogant and sexy, and even a little sad, but not in the least repentant. It was also infectious—I had to smile back.
I leaned out the door. “If you wake my mother up, I’m telling her you broke in.”
He followed me up to my room. My heart slammed against my chest. Taking him into my room felt like handing him the keys to my diary. It felt like standing naked in a room full of beautiful people. It felt deliciously real.
I shut the door behind us, staying as far away from the bed as possible. I’d just crawled out, and the sheets were suggestively rumpled.
I felt trapped under a microscope as Luke examined my room, looking at the pictures tacked to the bulletin board and taped to the mirror. When he leaned in to get a closer look at my cross-country ribbons, I pulled the comforter over the tangled sheets. I didn’t want him getting any ideas. I kicked a bra under the bed seconds before he turned around.
“I normally don’t let people in here,” I said, “so be gentle.”
His grin was wicked. “I’m always gentle the first time.”
I glared at him, and he walked over to my record player. “This is awesome,” he said.
“My grandma gave it to me when I was eleven.” It had been sitting in her shop for a couple of years, and she said she got tired of dusting it. I think she just got tired of me playing the same two records over and over again every time I was there.
His hands fluttered over the needle, and I could tell he wanted to touch it.
“Go ahead,” I told him. “Just keep it down.”
I sat underneath the window as he flipped through my small collection of records. I’d dug them out of boxes and bins from the back of the store. Most of the old stuff in my room had been discovered back there. I liked finding things.
“What’s up with the little ones?” Luke asked, holding up a record. I couldn’t see which one it was.
“They’re forty-fives. Single songs,” I explained, my head leaned against the wall.
He placed the record on the player and turned it on.
“If you scratch it, I’ll have to kill you,” I said.
“Then I guess I’d better be careful.”
He placed the needle on the record, and familiar static filled the room. Then violins. I sat up and looked at him. He’d put on “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” My favorite song.
“I’ve never heard this song before,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” How could anyone
not
have heard this song? It was a classic, and in about a hundred movies.
He sat down beside me, his knee touching my knee, his shoulder touching my shoulder, his head leaning back next to mine. We were silent. I breathed the music, my eyes closed, my lungs emptying and filling with the swell of the melody. Somewhere in the middle of the song, Luke reached over and wrapped his finger around mine. Right then, I didn’t need anything else in the world. I forgot to be self-conscious and anxious and guilty. I forgot to be anything but next to him, our fingers twisted together, our breathing synchronized.
We didn’t move when the song ended, just sat still and listened to the scratch at the end of the record.
“Are you a vampire?” I asked after the silence demanded it be filled.
I could feel his chuckle. “Would you like me better if I were?”
I didn’t answer that. My feelings about Luke resembled a thousand-piece puzzle tossed down the stairs. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to figure out how they all fit together. “We almost always hang out at night,” I said instead. “When do you sleep?”
“I don’t know anymore. Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” I whispered. While I wasn’t certain about what I did want, I was sure about what I didn’t. And I didn’t want him to go anywhere.
Luke looked up at my ceiling, finally noticing all the words hanging over our heads. I knew it was stupid, but I used to think that sleeping underneath the words of great writers might help me become a great writer. “
Carpe diem
,” he read, picking one that spanned both sides of the vaulted ceiling. He turned his head toward me and raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
“I know,” I said, pulling at a loose thread on my shorts. “I’m a terrible cliché. My English teacher made us watch this old movie and the scene with this quote was pretty cool. ‘Seize the day’ and all that. It reminds me to be at my best every day—that way I’m always improving. Better runner, better student. Better daughter.” Although I was pretty sure that last one was a lifelong pursuit of failure.
“I think you missed the whole point,” he told me.
“I’m sorry?” I didn’t exactly enjoy being told I was wrong, but definitely not when I knew I wasn’t.
“My Latin teacher,” he began, but stopped when I gave him a strange look. “I went to school. I took Latin. It’s not like I was always a juvenile delinquent.”
When I looked doubtful, he grinned. “Okay,” he admitted, “I was usually doing something I wasn’t supposed to, but I rarely got caught.” There was an edge to his voice.
“My dad made us take Latin,” Luke said. “Anyway, my Latin teacher said it’s more accurately translated ‘enjoy today.’ I like that one better. ‘Seize the day’ puts too much responsibility on a person. Grab the day. Do great things. Change the world. I don’t need that kind of pressure. Now, ‘enjoy the day’?” He raised his eyebrow. “That I can do.” He nudged my shoulder. “You should try it sometime.”
“I’m enjoying myself right now,” I said.
The smile he gave me was like watching the sun creep out and spill light over the mountains. It chased away most of the shadows that had been clouding his face.
“And what are you going to do once you’re
better
?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t going to toss out the truth so carelessly. The truth was something I couldn’t get back. The uncertainty of whether or not I could actually do all that I dreamed left me feeling like I was being tossed around an angry ocean with nothing but a pair of Floaties.
Luke saw right through me. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I know.” I gave him a partial truth. “But this one life isn’t going to be enough. There’s so much I want to do, and I know I won’t be able to do it all. I want to live in a big city and write a novel. I want to own a horse ranch in Wyoming. I want to work at a museum and a magazine and a surf shop. There isn’t time for me to be all the different people I want to be.”
“That’s why you have to start early,” Luke said.
“All of my different versions live other places,” I told him. “All of my planning and all of my
better
are because all I really want is to get out of here.”
“Trust me, it doesn’t matter where you go,” he said. “You’ll still be you. You can’t escape yourself.”
Now he was missing the entire point. I wanted to escape Solitude and my family’s dysfunction. I wanted to find myself. “Who said I wanted to?”
“You do,” he assured me. “We all do, on some level.”
I wondered which part of himself he was trying to escape, but I didn’t ask. He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “When I was little, I used to believe that if you wanted something bad enough, you could will it to happen. If you focused on it and wanted it enough, it would come true.”
“And you don’t believe that now.” It wasn’t a question.
Luke shook his head. “No. Well, at least not for me. For you, yes. You are so amazing—the world would be crazy if it didn’t do everything it could to make you happy. You deserve it.”
“And you don’t? You’re—”
He put a finger to my lips, stopping my words. His eyes were so sad that my heart ached. “No,” he whispered, his voice hard and edged with wire, “I deserve many things, but happiness isn’t one of them.”
I wanted to weave happiness together and wrap him in it like a blanket. I wanted to pluck it like a fruit and feed it to him. But I couldn’t. I kissed him instead, and the world shifted just a little.
Jenna was so quietly hopeful that it hurt. I found myself hoping a little when I was with her, which was dangerous, because having hope only hurt in the long run when things fell apart. And they would. They always did.
But then she kissed me. Me. Luke. Without any provocation on my part. Her skin was earthy and absolutely amazing. Did she kiss Ian like that? I tried not to think about it.
Her cheeks were flushed when she pulled away, her eyes bright. Damn it.
“Why did you come over here tonight?” she asked. “Really?”
I grinned. “Wanting to see you isn’t enough?”
Jenna’s hazel eyes searched my face. Her intensity unnerved me. I was fascinated by the fact that she was willing to look past the Luke I normally threw at everybody. Jenna saw everything, and that scared me.
I sighed. “My dad called this morning. He talked to my mom for a little while, then Ian. Not me. He didn’t want to talk to me.” I didn’t want to care. I wanted to hate the bastard, but I couldn’t.
“Why?”
No. I wasn’t going to tell her yet. Someday maybe, but not yet. “I just can’t quite be the Luke he expects me to be.”
“He probably just has a hard time telling you how he feels.”
I tried to keep my voice down; I didn’t want to wake her mother. “He doesn’t have a hard time telling me ‘You’re such a screwup,’ or ‘You’ll never amount to anything until you learn a little responsibility.’” I was disgusted at myself for telling her these things. “And then Ian came home yelling, and I needed out.”
“Sorry, that was my fault,” she said. She was wrong about that. “I asked him about you. It’s just weird that he wouldn’t tell me he has a brother.”
“Nothing about our argument was your fault,” I told her.
She didn’t believe me, and I didn’t want to get into the catalyst of our family fights. “Here,” I said, pulling a pebble out of my pocket. “I’ve got a trick.”
“I’m sure you have more than one,” she said.
I had to laugh. I showed her the pebble, then made it disappear. She waited patiently until I pulled it from behind her ear.
She grinned and clapped. “Dazzling trick.”
“I’m very good with my hands,” I said, reaching out to rub her arm. “And at making things disappear.”
She slapped my hand away. “I’ll take your word for it.” She took the pebble from me. “Do you always carry rocks in your pockets?”
I decided to let that one go. “I found it in the yard. I thought it was interesting.” It was a bad habit I’d had since I was a kid. I stuck all sorts of things in my pockets—bits of glass, marbles, sometimes even frogs and lizards. Mom nearly had a heart attack once when she was doing the laundry and a grass snake crawled out of my jacket.
“Stay right there,” Jenna said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I promised.
She disappeared behind a heavy rug that obviously served as her closet door. She banged around in there for a minute, then came out carrying a beat-up shoebox.
“You’re not going to make me play dress-up again, are you?” I teased.
She folded down next to me, cradling the box like it was the most important thing in the world. She set it down between us and removed the lid.
There was a speckled bird’s egg with a tiny hole in the top, half a wooden bird, some old keys, a single chopstick. An old pipe—that had to have been her grandfather’s. There were several rocks.
“I’m a magpie,” she said.
“Or a serial killer,” I amended.
She ignored me. “I pick up most of this stuff on my runs.”
I couldn’t categorize her. In the shop, I had a place for tools and one for nails, a place for scrap wood and useable wood. Everything was organized according to function. But I had no idea where Jenna belonged. Just when I thought I had everything tidied into a pile, she scattered my conjectures. She wasn’t any one thing; she was all good things put together, and put together in a way that was only
her
. Everything I built had the same basic components-wood, nails, screws, wood glue. But there were a million and one possibilities as to what it would be when I was finished. I could take those things and make a bookshelf or a drawer to hold my socks. And while I couldn’t entirely identify all the pieces that went into forming Jenna, I liked who she was when they were all cobbled together.
“I told Ian I’d stay away from you,” I admitted. Jenna seemed to make the truth appear. It wasn’t going to be pretty when all of it did.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
“No. And I don’t like being told what to do.”
Her gaze made me feel like I was standing in the sun. “So you’re only here because you’re not supposed to be?” she asked.
I couldn’t tell her why I was really there. “Aren’t you?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore.”
I cupped her face in my hand, her skin warm and alive in a way that caused my fingers to tingle. She parted her lips, and as I leaned in to kiss her, I half-expected her to swirl away in a cool breeze. But she didn’t, and my head was full of nothing but her as her lips formed around mine. She stole my breath, and when I pulled away, I expected to see my heart beating frantically in the box next to the other things she’d claimed her own. It felt as if the answer to all of life’s questions was cupped in my palm. I knew it couldn’t last much longer. I was going to screw it up. I always did.
Luke wasn’t there when I woke up the next morning. I was curled into a tiny ball underneath the window, and someone—Luke—had covered me with a blanket. There wasn’t a note. He’d slipped away like a ghost, leaving me to wonder if he’d really been there at all. Maybe it had only been a delicious dream.