I sat on the edge of the bed and thought some as I heard the shower running. I thought how my sister was gone, and wouldn’t be back for hours. I thought how, ever since Jonah had come up to talk to us on the widow’s walk, he hadn’t crossed the barrier. I thought how all the other guys had left. How Owen and I were alone, practically.
I thought about how he wasn’t worth liking. No. How he wasn’t for me—I knew it as well as if he had those three words Not for You eye-penciled across his chest in Ruby’s distinctive handwriting. Ruby said no, and I always did what Ruby said.
But Ruby had never asked me what boys she could be with. Ruby took for herself the things she wanted, and she didn’t wait for anyone’s permission. This summer was proof of that.
Then I heard my name. Owen was calling my name from the shower.
The door was cracked when I approached, steam pooling out. It was a hot day for such a hot shower, but I was glad for the steam—it made it next to impossible to see inside. “Yeah?” I said into the white. “Did you call me?”
“There’s no soap,” he said.
“There is, it’s up on the shelf.”
Through the fog I saw his hand reaching out from the shower curtain, a blind hand with fingers splayed, totally off-target. I took hold of it, my fingers guiding his fingers, leading them up for the shelf, to the bar of soap. When his hand found it, I let go. He pulled the soap into the shower, but not before I saw inside. Saw a glimpse of him in there, saw him seeing me.
I retreated back to my room, my skin slick with sweat, my lungs brimming with hot steam, forced to catch my breath on the end of my bed.
I was still there, breathing, when he came in. He’d dried off and put his clothes back on, but his chest was still damp—his T-shirt stuck to it—and his hair dripped darkening spots onto his shoulders.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem.” The voice that came out of me wasn’t one Ruby would use in front of a boy. Ruby wouldn’t offer him her one clean towel and let him use her bar of eucalyptus soap, the same one she’d used on herself that morning. Ruby wouldn’t sit on the bed staring at her hands. Ruby wouldn’t be turning pink, right there with him watching—to her, that would be like racing him up a mountain and trying with all my might until the very last second, when I slowed to let him win.
I was giving myself away. Boys should be left guessing, Ruby always told me. Boys should never know how their night will turn out, because you—here, she’d tap me in the chest, dead center—you hold the power. It’s your night, not his.
But, with Owen, I’d lost control as soon as I let him step over the gate.
His hair hung in his face, mostly brown today. He didn’t know how long I’d liked him. Since before he had the mohawk, since before he grew it out into the fauxhawk, before that one time he shaved his head. I liked him when his hair was all brown, plain as could be, and maybe he didn’t remember how far back that was, but I did. I liked him when his hair was green. When it was red, then when it faded out to pink. Now the tips of it were blue again, the palest blue, like it had been dyed a long, long time ago but had mostly washed out. Like in the two years since I’d been gone he’d dyed it blue and didn’t bother to redye it—like all the time I’d been gone was written right there in his hair.
“Should I call my ride?” he asked. “Or . . .”
I shook my head, meaning he could stay.
“Should I . . . close the door?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t lock, but, yeah.”
Soon he was wedging the door into the frame to keep it closed, looking back at me to be sure it was okay. Then he ruined it by sitting beside me on the bed and pulling out a bowl, packed full of weed and ready to light. For a moment, I saw him for who he was—this big nothing, thinking he was something—and then I blinked and saw what the younger me had seen, this beautiful, careless boy who acted like he needed no one and how I’d always been drawn to that for some reason, wondering what could have been.