“It’s just, you seem, I don’t know, sort of strange.”
I nod and run a hand through my hair. I’m not wondering anything anymore. I don’t want to know what she’s thinking.
“I’m fine,” I mutter.
“So where’re you from? I don’t recognize your accent.”
My chest tightens, making it hard for me to breathe. Why, oh, why isn’t she leaving? She should, because I can be cold. I can be a lot of things. But she’s new, lonely. Maybe she thinks she’s found a kindred spirit. “Virginia,” I say finally. “But I’ve been going to school in New England since I was twelve, so my formative years have been spent here.”
Her jaw drops. “You’ve been in boarding school since you were twelve?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you miss your family?”
“No,” I say evenly. “I don’t.”
“Oh.”
I stare at her. Hard. Her own accent rings strange to my ear, but you don’t see me asking where she’s from or what her family’s like. “So why were you spying on me?”
“I wasn’t spying!”
“You weren’t?”
“No!” she says, and the red blossoming beneath her olive skin pleases me.
I did that.
But the girl keeps going. “I was—I’m supposed to be checking the snake traps and making sure there’re enough water chestnuts in the back pond for the ecology class. It’s part of my work-study hours. But it’s sort of scary out here after, you know, what happened.” She shudders. “Look, I heard a noise. It freaked me out, so I hid. Then I saw you and those guys.…”
Her head tilts back. The hazy afternoon sun slides from behind a cloud and strikes her eyes so that I can no longer look directly at her. I glance at my filthy leg instead.
“Aren’t you the guy who gets carsick?” she asks.
My shoulders twitch. “Excuse me?”
“On the bus, on the way to the Danby meet, last Wednesday. You had all sorts of patches and wristbands on. You looked like a mummy.”
“Like a mummy? Really? That’s charming. Thank you.”
More red blooms. A full bouquet. “I—I didn’t mean … well, couldn’t you just take medicine or something?”
No, I think.
“Why?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It just looked kind of ridiculous and like a lot of trouble—”
I cock an eyebrow at her. “I won, didn’t I?”
She sighs. I doubt she likes how this is going any more than I do. “Well, now you know why I was hiding in the bushes. What are you doing all the way out here?”
All the way. There’s a longing in her voice. Her brown-eyed gaze flicks across the snaking river. We’re a good mile from the covered bridge leading back to school grounds. Two miles from the row of white clapboard dorms.
She doesn’t trust me.
Good.
It’s better that way.
“I think you’ve got a handle on what I was doing,” I tell her. “Seeing as you were watching me and all.”
This helps. She puts her hands on those narrow hips, trying to look tough, and I know she’s pissed, but come on. The laws of nature don’t work like that. I’m a foot taller than her.
Among other things.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “It won’t happen again. You’re not that interesting.”
“Agreed.”
She stomps onto the trail a few yards away, small legs so close to breaking into a run. The need to flee is held captive in every muscle. But she gives me one more glance.
“Hey, Win?” she asks.
Don’t. Please don’t say my name. You have no idea who I really am.
“Yeah?”
“What’re you going to do now?”
“I was thinking about washing my leg off in the river.”
She snorts.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s like you don’t even care someone was killed out here.”
I do the shrug thing again because she’s right. It’s like I don’t care. But she’s also wrong, because I do.
chapter
two
antimatter
I don’t remember my sister’s birth, but I’ve studied the photographs long enough to know she came at midday, greeted by the winter sun streaming through the south-facing windows of my parents’ bedroom. My older brother, Keith, appeared with the sunrise, as a sliver of gray dawn began its quiet march across the vast Virginia sky. Me, on the other hand, I was born at night. Like a secret.
As the story goes, I didn’t care for Siobhan. My parents introduced me to this pink rooting thing when she was just moments old. I watched her suckle from the place I’d recently been pushed away from, saw the doting eyes of my mother, and I hated her.