“Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. But I feel better. She has called me by my mother’s name, so I know she understands. “A cautionary tale, maybe.”
“I’m serious.” She brushes her hair out of her face, staring at me intently. “I was wrong, you know. Remember what I said at the beginning of the summer? I thought you were afraid. I thought you were too scared to take any chances.” The sad smile tugs at her lips again. “Turns out you’re braver than I am.”
“Hana—”
“That’s okay.” She waves a hand, cutting me off. “You deserve it. You deserve more.”
I don’t really know what to say to that. I want to hug her, but instead I wrap my arms around my waist, squeezing. The wind coming off the water is biting.
“I’ll miss you, Hana,” I say after a minute.
She walks a couple of steps toward the water, kicks sand in an arc with the toe of her shoe. It seems to hang in the air for a fraction of a second before scattering. “Well, you know where I’ll be.”
We stand there for a while, listening to the tide sucking on the shore, the water heaving and tumbling with bits of rock: stone whittled to sand over thousands and thousands of years. Someday maybe this will all be water. Someday maybe it will all get sucked into dust.
Then Hana spins around and says, “Come on. Race you back to the track,” and takes off, running, before I can say, Okay.
“No fair!” I call after her. But I don’t try very hard to catch up. I let her stay a few feet ahead of me and try to memorize her exactly as she is: running, laughing, tan and happy and beautiful and mine; blond hair flashing in the last rays of sun like a torch, like a beacon of good things to come, and better days ahead for us both.
Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.
But that isn’t it, exactly.
The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you, God.
Love: It will kill you and save you, both.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
—From the cautionary tale Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare, reprinted in 100 Quotes to
Know for the Boards, by The Princeton Review
It’s cold when I make my way toward 37 Brooks sometime after midnight, and I have to zip my nylon windbreaker up all the way to my chin. The streets are as dark and still as I’ve ever seen them. There isn’t a whisper of movement anywhere, no curtains twitching in windows, no shadows skating across walls and making me jump, no glittering alley cat eyes or scrabbling rats’ feet or the distant drumbeat of footsteps on the pavement, as the regulators make their rounds. It’s as though everyone is already braced for winter—as though the whole city is in the middle of a deep freeze. It’s a little freaky, actually. I think again of the house that somehow survived the blitz and now stands out there in the Wilds, perfectly preserved but totally uninhabited, with wildflowers growing through all its rooms.
I’m relieved when I turn the corner and see the rusty iron fence that marks 37 Brooks’s periphery, feel a tremendous rush of happiness when I think of Alex squatting in one of the dark rooms, solemnly packing a backpack with blankets and canned food. I haven’t realized until now that at some point over the summer I began to think of 37 Brooks as home. I hitch my own backpack a little higher on my shoulder and jog to the gate.
But something’s wrong with it: I rattle it a few times but it doesn’t open. At first I think it’s stuck. Then I notice that someone has looped a padlock through the gate. It looks new, too. It glitters sharply in the moonlight when I tug it.
37 Brooks is locked.
I’m so surprised, I can’t even be frightened or suspicious. My only thought is of Alex, and where he is, and whether he’s responsible for the lock. Maybe, I think, he locked the property to protect our stuff. Or maybe I’m early, or maybe I’m late. I’m just about to try to swing myself over the fence when Alex materializes from the darkness to my right, stepping silently out of the shadows.
“Alex!” Though we’ve only been apart for a few hours, I’m so happy to see him—soon he’ll be mine, openly and totally—I forget to keep my voice down as I run to him.
“Shhh.” He wraps his arms around me as I practically leap on top of him, and staggers backward a little. But when I tilt my head up to look at him, he’s smiling, and I can tell he’s just as happy as I am. He kisses the tip of my nose. “We’re not safe yet.”
“Yeah, but soon.” I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him softly. As always, the pressure of his lips on mine seems to blot out everything bad in the world. I have to wrench myself away from him, slapping his arm playfully as I do. “Thanks for giving me a key, by the way.”