Pixie giggles. “Gawd, girl. You have so much to learn.”
I see him before he sees me. Light brown hair, fine like my own, but his is slightly wavy. Eyes that light up an open face, with a smile that tunnels under my skin as if I’ve bitten off a piece of the sun and the warmth now lives inside me.
I reckon I sound like a goober, but there aren’t enough words to describe the pull. It’s like Nessa’s magnets. Indigenous. I think of the men in the woods. But somehow, Ryan stays Ryan. I remember what Delaney said in the kitchen, before things got so emotional.
“Girls like you have to be careful, you know“
I rinse Jenessa’s plate, licked clean by Shorty when Melissa wasn’t paying attention.
“Girls like me?”
Does she mean the woods?
“You know you’re gorgeous. There’ll be lots of guys liking you for how you look.”
My face heats up, thinking of guys liking me at all.
“Believe me. Been there, done that. Don’t let it go to your head. High school boys are all about one thing: getting into your pants. You’ll see.”
I stare at her, horrified. The men in the woods were bad enough. Not boys, too.
Not Ryan.
I smile as he catches sight of me.
Why does he like me? Because it’s obvious he likes me. Is it because I’m new? Is it the violin? Could it be like Delaney said?
All of a sudden, I’m unsure. What am I doing? I think of Delaney and Mama’s note. I think of the circles burned into my shoulder and the white-star night, which makes my stomach jump. It’s strange how those times feel realer than here, no matter how many days lengthen the distance between then and now.
I keep my eyes on Ryan’s, touching my violin case reflexively. I see relief flood his face, as if he wasn’t sure I’d show. He meanders in my direction while smiling hello at students along the way. I slide down into the study carrel. What am I doing?
I know nothing about boys and whether they like me, let alone how to handle girls like Delaney, especially if she tells people about the woods. I’m playing with fire, and I know what happens when people play with fire. I mean, I wouldn’t even know what study carrels were if the sign—NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED IN THE STUDY CARRELS—wasn’t posted on the wall above me.
“Hey. Pixie told me to meet you here. Why all the cloak-and-dagger?”
I don’t know what he means, but I get the gist.
“It’s a long story,” I say, stalling as I search the library for Delaney and her court—namely, Ashley, Lauren, Kara, and Marie, but, just as I suspected, the library isn’t their hangout of choice.
“Let’s get out of here, CC. It’s lunchtime, after all.”
I smile when I hear his stomach grumble and mine answer in kind.
Ryan slings my knapsack over his shoulder. I grab my violin case, still not sure why I constantly drag it around. I don’t want to be “Fiddle Girl,” as Delaney called me, either at school or at home. I don’t want anyone to make me play . . . to make me remember Mama, or being in the woods.
The best place for the instrument would be to shoved at the back of the closet shelf. But each morning, I can’t bear to leave the thing behind. I think of Ness’s old blankie, a “security blanket,” Mama called it, worn to a rag. I just wish my version wasn’t so clumsy to carry around.
“I know where we can go,” Ryan says, leading me through the library and its maze of books and out the back door, through a grotto of trees. We cross a sizable snow-encrusted field, the kind people chase balls around, and before I can react, he takes my free hand and leads me into the woods.
The trees grow thick, like in the Hundred Acre Wood, and I smell the familiar old twang of earth and shade. Ryan doesn’t know it, but I’m more Carey among the trees than anywhere else. I breathe in the musky aroma of old leaves and freeze-dried earth. We find a large flat rock.
“You have a strap on your violin case. Like a guitar case.”
“Yeah. Mama—my mother—glued it on. So she could carry it over her shoulder.”
“Just stand there for a second, okay? Don’t move.”
I freeze while he pulls out a camera from his pocket. The click is loud in the stillness.
“Done. Come sit.”
I do.
“May I?” he asks, and I nod. I watch him open my knapsack and pull out a crumpled brown paper bag, which he sets in the space between us. “I brought a bag lunch, too.”
With a flourish, he pulls a banana from a side pocket, a foil-wrapped sandwich from another, and a Baggie of black disks with white between them from a zipped compartment inside his coat.
“Do you like Oreos?”
I nod, acting like I know what he’s talking about.
I empty my sandwich, a green apple, a Baggie of Pringles, and two small containers of apple juice onto the rock. Ryan grins. With a flourish, he pulls a dented package of something named Twinkies from the depths of the same pocket that housed the banana.
We survey the spread before us.