A fullness. The feeling of backsweeping, a tide rolling out to reveal gifts.
He knocks back the last of the beer and rises to his knees, his arm arched gracefully toward a trash barrel five feet away, and pitches it into the can. It clatters inside, a perfect basket. “Hey, two points!”
I reach for his waist and pull him down fast. His eyes widen. I cup his cheeks and he makes a small groan as I pull him in to kiss.
“Cold lips,” he murmurs, his own lips curling to the right, aiming for that dimple.
“Suddenly I’m okay with cold. You’re a really smart guy,” I add.
“You’re a really beautiful girl,” he says.
“Lowercase letters.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“The blood in your cheeks makes you look so, I don’t know. So alive,” he says.
“Staying alive is kind of my thing.” I rise on my knees and he rises too, and we kiss again, and instead of thinking about Liv or Shane or Apple Face, I taste the hops on his tongue, and think how I hate beer but I like this, and how good it is to taste again.
I weave my arm through his and fall against his shoulder. He strokes my hair lightly with the end of his fingertips, surreptitiously, like he thinks I don’t notice.
Not only am I okay with the cold, I’ve become downright warm.
He sighs into my hair, and it’s a vulnerable noise, and it sets me on fire. “Can I ask you one question that’s been bothering me?”
I kiss him again, because none of this is real, it will shred and dissipate as soon as the black thing comes back, as soon as the memories return and the questions start.
“Just one question,” I murmur.
“Who’s Alice?”
SEVEN
359 Days After the Woods
Deborah’s eyes flash as I stop the door with my boot.
“I need to talk with Liv. It’s really important. Do you know where she is?”
“I do not. But if you hear from her, you can tell her that her electronics privileges are rescinded for a month. She never considers what her disappearances with that orphan delinquent do to me. I’ve been distracted for the last hour and gotten nothing done.” Deborah charges back into the kitchen, shoulders scissoring as she stabs her phone, dialing. In seconds she’s spelling “O-L-I-V-I-A” for some beleaguered church secretary type. As I turn to leave, she pokes her head back into the hall.
“Don’t you go anywhere! I want to ask you some questions about that dope-smoking train wreck that Olivia…” she calls to me. “What?” she yells into the phone. “No, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to Julia Spunk, you know who that is, I’m sure. There isn’t a person in America who doesn’t know Julia Spunk. Oh, now you can hear me!”
“I’ll wait in Liv’s room,” I say, slipping through the door, past the round entrance table, and mincing up the stairs. The dimpled glass knob on Liv’s door squeals, announcing me as I step inside the airless bedroom. Filthy hoodies and yoga pants lie in heaps. The only movement is swirling dust motes in sunbeams filtering through the quarter-moon window. I look for a spot on the bed to sit, but the sheets are yanked clear back and sitting feels like a violation, so I stand. The closet door swings wide. Maybe I know where Liv is after all.
I stick my head in among the clothes. “Liv? It’s Julia,” I whisper so harshly it burns my throat. “Are you in there?”
I tug the beaded lightbulb chain. Wool coats brush my cheeks as I feel for the panel to the secret eaves. I hold my breath and press, in and to the right. The panel slides open to darkness. I drop to my knees and crawl in, which feels safer. My fingers graze the metal Coleman camping lamp. I grope for the switch, hoping the lamp’s batteries haven’t leaked and corroded. The halogen tubes buzz and glow.
The eaves have always been the only place where we could go to escape Deborah’s spying and listening. We’d crank the TV and slip into our soundproof hideaway, a deceptively large space inside the roof’s overhang. Some days it was spy headquarters. One whole winter was spent playing squirrels. As the years passed, the eaves were where we snuck sips from a dusty bottle of Kahlua, practiced kissing the backs of our hands, and almost suffocated smoking our first butt. We’d drag in piles of Deborah’s Cosmopolitans and read aloud “How to Please Your Man” and sketch tattoos we’d get when we were eighteen. Absorbed by the antique Victorian, and with enough coats blocking our portal, we were invisible. Now a rough Mexican blanket and a pillow take the place of the glossy magazines. A laptop sits in the middle. The Coleman lamp, warmed now, purrs, and soft light reflects off fiberglass insulation padding the slanted walls, making the room warm and pink.