I knew it was coming. I just didn’t know it would feel like this.
Since then, there were two places I wanted to be: with Lena, or alone, so I could try to hammer it all out in my mind. I didn’t have the words for what we were. She wasn’t my girlfriend; we weren’t even dating. Up until last week, she wouldn’t even admit we were friends. I had no idea how she felt about me, and it wasn’t like I could send Savannah over to find out. I didn’t want to risk whatever we had, whatever it was. So why did I think about her every second? Why was I so much happier the minute I saw her? I felt like maybe I knew the answer, but how could I be sure? I didn’t know, and I didn’t have any way to find out.
Guys don’t talk about stuff like that. We just lie under the pile of bricks.
“So what are you writing?”
She closed the spiral notebook she seemed to carry around everywhere. The basketball team had no practice on Wednesdays, so Lena and I were sitting in the garden at Greenbrier, which I’d sort of come to think of as our special place, though that’s not something I would ever admit, not even to her. It was where we found the locket. It was a place we could hang out without everyone staring and whispering.
We were supposed to be studying, but Lena was writing in her notebook, and I’d read the same paragraph about the internal structure of atoms nine times now. Our shoulders were touching, but we were facing different directions. I was sprawled in the fading sun; she sat under the growing shadow of a moss-covered oak. “Nothing special. I’m just writing.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.” I tried not to sound disappointed.
“It’s just… it’s stupid.”
“So tell me anyway.”
For a minute she didn’t say anything, scribbling on the rubber rim of her shoe with her black pen. “I just write poems sometimes. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I know it’s weird.”
“I don’t think it’s weird. My mom was a writer. My dad’s a writer.” I could feel her smiling, even though I wasn’t looking at her. “Okay, that’s a bad example, because my dad is really weird, but you can’t blame that on the writing.”
I waited to see if she was going to just hand me the notebook and ask me to read one. No such luck.
“Maybe I can read one sometime.”
“Doubtful.” I heard the notebook open again and her pen moving across the page. I stared at my chemistry book, rehearsing the phrase I’d gone over a hundred times in my head. We were alone. The sun was slipping away; she was writing poetry. If I was going to do it, now was the time.
“So, do you want to, you know, hang out?” I tried to sound casual.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
I chewed on the end of an old plastic spoon I had found in my backpack, probably from a pudding cup.
“Yeah. No. I mean, do you want to, I don’t know, go somewhere?”
“Now?” She took a bite out of an open granola bar, and swung her legs around so she was next to me, holding it out toward me. I shook my head.
“Not now. Friday, or something. We could see a movie.” I stuck the spoon in my chemistry book, closing it.
“That’s gross.” She made a face, and turned the page.
“What do you mean?” I could feel my face turning red.
I was only talking about a movie.
You idiot.
She pointed at my dirty spoon bookmark. “I meant that.”
I smiled, relieved. “Yeah. Bad habit I picked up from my mom.”
“She had a thing for cutlery?”
“No, books. She would have maybe twenty going at a time, lying all over our house—on the kitchen table, by her bed, the bathroom, our car, her bags, a little stack at the edge of each stair. And she’d use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork.”
“A dirty old spoon?”
“Exactly.”
“Bet that drove Amma crazy.”
“It drove her nuts. No, wait for it—she was—” I dug deep. “P. E. R. T. U. R. B. E. D.”
“Nine down?” She laughed.
“Probably.”
“This was my mom’s.” She held out one of the charms suspended from the long silver chain she never seemed to take off. It was a tiny gold bird. “It’s a raven.”
“For Ravenwood?”
“No. Ravens are the most powerful birds in the Caster world. Legend has it that they can draw energy into themselves and release it in other forms. Sometimes they’re even feared because of their power.” I watched as she let go of the raven and it fell back into place between a disc with strange writing etched into it and a black glass bead.
“You’ve got a lot of charms.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked down at the necklace. “They aren’t really charms, just things that mean something to me.” She held out the tab of the soda can. “This is from the first can of orange soda I ever drank, sitting on the porch of our house in Savannah. My gramma bought it for me when I came home from school crying because no one put anything in my valentine shoebox at school.”
“That’s cute.”
“If by cute you mean tragic.”
“I mean, that you kept it.”