“Kids are shits,” Riley said when she told him about stealing Deanna’s birthday money. “You can’t beat yourself up for that stuff.” They were lying face-to-face on his family’s trampoline, deep in the backyard under the shade trees, where it was cooler. Still, their hair stuck to their damp foreheads and they wiped trails of sweat from around each other’s nostrils.
Grace cried. Stealing Deanna’s hundred-dollar bill was the worst thing she’d ever done, and the worst thing she’d ever do, ever. Whenever she saw Amber at school, even now, two years later, she felt horrible all over again. Grace didn’t even know the girl who’d stolen that money. She couldn’t even fathom her.
“I killed a finch with a slingshot once,” Riley said. “Me and Alls shot the nest out of a tree because we wanted to see the eggs, and then we shot the bird.”
“The mother bird?” Grace gasped.
He winced. “We were just kids.”
Riley made it easy for Grace to be good. Her mother didn’t seem to like him much, but Grace suspected that had more to do with Grace than with Riley. But if everyone liked the Grahams, and the Grahams liked Grace, then maybe Grace’s mother had been wrong about her.
The Grahams had given her a chance, and she was eager to show them that she could be worthy of their love. They treated Grace as if she belonged to them, and so did Riley, and she devoted herself to earning her keep. She left her frantic, lonely childhood behind to become the Grahams’ daughter and Riley’s dream girl, silky haired and shyly smiling. She knew to go wherever she was wanted.
One afternoon the summer after Grace’s sixth-grade year, she wandered outside when Riley was playing video games and Mrs. Graham had gone out. Dr. Graham was repairing the lawn mower in the driveway, and he was startled at her appearance. “I never hear you coming, sweetie,” he said. “I’m used to thundering boy hooves.” Then she was handing him tools as he described them—“the long thingie with the spinny thingie,” he said—and listening as he explained how the motor worked. When he finished, he ruffled her dark hair and said, “Thanks, daylily!”
“You’re so welcome!” She beamed at him, ecstatic over her first nickname.
“My parents love you,” Riley said when she told him. “My mom really wanted to have another baby after me. She always wanted a girl, but my dad said five kids was too many kids.”
A few weeks later, Grace was curled up on the couch in the den with Mrs. Graham watching To Catch a Thief, one of Mrs. Graham’s “glamour films,” when Dr. Graham came in late from work and poked his head around the corner.
“I see you got your girl,” he said, and Grace, as shy as she was eager, sneaked a look at Mrs. Graham, who was nodding to her husband as she reached to smooth the blanket over Grace’s knees.
? ? ?
Grace couldn’t see then what Riley saw in her, but he was like sunlight, shining easy faith on her and eliminating the shadows. His town, from the crossing guard to the college girls scooping ice cream behind the counter at Ginny’s to the principals of their schools, adored him. He was the youngest of the four Graham boys, spirited and handsome, a prankster who liked to tell stories about the times he’d been caught and the times he should have been. He had wild red hair and uneven dimples—a face for boyish mischief—and freckles everywhere: a spray across his face, a blanket over his shoulders and down his arms. To Grace he looked vibrant, brighter than everyone else, as though sparks burst through those freckles and that hair. His manners could be almost comically courtly: He blessed strangers when they sneezed, and tipped the brim of his ball cap and said “take care” after the Ginny’s Ice Cream girls handed him his change.
Dr. Graham was the physician for the college basketball team, a humble hero, and Mrs. Graham worked in the student counseling clinic. There was more money from the family lumber company started by Riley’s great-grandfather. But it was never about money, Grace consoled herself in later years—except by then, she understood how desperation of any kind could turn you meager, mean. The Grahams were not meager in anything. In their stacks of books and rows of inherited photo albums, their jars of mysterious condiments and overfull crisper drawers, their inside jokes and bottomless well of traditions, their boxes full of extra coats and gloves and cleats and Boogie Boards, the Grahams had only abundance.
When she surveyed her pimply classmates—the girls who’d quickly shut her out, the boys who vacillated between buffoonery and cruelty—she felt a surge of pride, even victory, that she had Riley. Would she have wanted Greg, the overgrown baby whose father had promised him a Land Rover for his fifteenth birthday if he kept up honor roll? Would she have wanted Alls, who never went home of his own volition? No, of course not. She couldn’t believe her luck that Riley wanted her, but she was grateful, and she loved him for it.
The June that Grace turned thirteen, she and Riley lost their virginity in an abandoned house at the edge of his neighborhood. They had been climbing through the windows of the house for months to poke around and write their initials in the dust, and they had begun to think of it as their house. They did it on the carpeted floor of one of the bedrooms—their bedroom. Neither of them was prepared for how much it would hurt Grace, and Riley kissed her all over her forehead afterward. Neither of them was prepared for the blood either, and Grace thought sex had brought her period, as if her body had rushed to catch up with her. When she got her real first period a few months later, the blood seemed both more disgusting and less substantial. It was only once Grace got older, when she was sixteen and found herself lying to a nurse about when, exactly, she had become active, that she realized she had been too young. If she and Riley hadn’t stayed together it might have become a source of shame. Instead, every secret they shared was a double knot that bound them tighter.
Mrs. Graham clutched at Grace like a long-awaited gift. She bought Grace dresses, sweaters, books (none of her sons really liked to read, not the way she did, not the way Grace did). When Mrs. Graham laughed, she tilted her face up and her mouth opened in surprise, almost as if she were in pain. When she really laughed, at her husband or at her boys, she bit her lips together, laughing through her nose. Once, Grace, using the master bathroom, had tried on her lipstick, a shimmery plum called Crushed Rose that came in a gold tube, and tried her Mrs. Graham laugh silently in the mirror.
Mrs. Graham even took Grace to purchase her first bra. Grace had twice started to ask her own mother, but stopped—Aiden was screaming, then her father came in—and Mrs. Graham had not needed to be asked. She took Grace aside and said, quickly and softly, smelling like grapefruit, that she needed to exchange a jacket at the mall and Grace should “come with” to “pick up a few bras.” She didn’t even make Grace answer; they just went. Later, curled up in Riley’s bed, Grace would sometimes notice one of those bras strewn on his floor amid the homework and sweaty socks, and she would feel overwhelmed with love for the Grahams, her real family. She sometimes fantasized a whole childhood as one of them—Grace Graham, the daughter Mrs. Graham had wanted—though she couldn’t tell Riley this without making it sound as though she wished she were his sister.
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