“Let me feel it,” Mira had whispered, insistent.
Ben’s febrile brain had flashed on the guys’ catcalls, had they heard. But that wasn’t what was going on. This wasn’t some backseat, copping-a-feel scenario. It happened on an Indian summer day the October before, tearing out shingles and shooting in nails. Eighty degrees in Powder Neck, but closer to a hundred on the roof that Villela and Son had been working on that week, twelve of them up there. By one p.m., Ben couldn’t say his own name. Mr. Villela was worried enough that he took Ben home early himself, to sit in his cool linoleum kitchen with a jelly glass of Eddie’s mom’s lemonade. When Ben excused himself to use the toilet, it wasn’t because he needed to pee, but because he thought he might puke, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of his friend’s father. He’d heard the music of the girls’ voices in the living room as soon as he left the kitchen: Connie’s hyena laugh, Francesca’s pious insistence of something. Mira quizzical, excited. Ben slipped in the bathroom, pale and miserable, and stood over the sink for a time. When he came out, Mira was there, standing under the spoon rack. She pushed him against the wall and dragged up his sweaty shirt.
“Mira!” Ben gasped.
Mira pressed her finger to his lip. Then she pressed her ear over his heart. Hard.
Ben forgot to breathe. When he remembered, he choked.
“Shh!” Mira whispered. He gazed down into coarse, dark gold waves of hair, at the pink shell of her hand resting against the inside of his shoulder. The press of the fine bones of her ear into his bare chest was delicious and disturbing, and he needed to move, but moving might have ended it, so he stood, tense, immobile, arms by his sides. He emptied his brain, should his thoughts distract her.
It was the first time Ben felt his own blazing fear that Mira would leave him.
“Mira,” he started.
“Francesca has the gift of reading hearts.” She pressed her ear against him harder, hot and sharp. “She says it won’t work for me. But I still want to try.”
“I can tell you how I feel about you right now,” he gasped.
He felt her cheek rise against his chest in a smile. “Shh.” Her breath blew against his skin. “Not from your mouth. I want to hear it from your soul.”
For a moment, she stayed against him. Ben was so turned on he thought he might die. He shut his eyes and pressed the back of his head against rows of dusty trinket spoons. When she finally drew away, the space between her eyes crinkled in a deep frown. Ben’s soul had answered her with silence. Her chest heaved and her eyes grew wide; she looked close to crying. Her vulnerability made her even more beautiful. Ben reached down with a tinkle of the spoons and cupped her breast. It was ballsy of him, but she looked so good in that tank top, and for Christ’s sake, she’d had her whole head up his shirt. He didn’t care. He wanted her. And now that he knew, clear and hot, the terror of her leaving, he wasn’t wasting any more time.
Mira moved closer. Ben bent his neck to kiss her as the call came.
“Mira!”
It wasn’t Eddie’s dad, but Francesca calling her back to the living room. Mira’s eyes bored into his: she didn’t want to leave. Ben had pushed her away gently; in an instant, he regretted it. Mira looked at him ruefully and started for the living room.
He had called to her back, “You know, Mira Cillo!”
She stopped without turning. Ben’s heart skipped. She had looked back at him then, over her shoulder with a half smile that told Ben she knew, and that she was not done with him yet.
Ben pursed his lips and blew hard. He opened the note. Her handwriting was precise and tense.
I see bones through Francesca’s chest. She’s stopped eating.
Of course. Francesca.
The grass swayed in a sudden, hot wind.
One more year and he’d have had his full license, and there would have been no stopping them. They’d start over, in New York, he figured, where she wasn’t the sheltered daughter of an overprotective father and he wasn’t the son of the man the jerk hated. Where he wasn’t known as a boy who’d been touched. Why couldn’t Mira have waited? What could have been so bad that she had to leave this earth before they had a chance to leave together?
Ben mashed the note with his hand and crumpled it into a tiny ball.
“Ready for a ride home?” Mr. Falso called over the wheeze of the screen door. A foam egg bounced off the front step and into a bush. Ben jammed the note in his pocket and rose, walked over to the bush and snatched up the egg, setting it down on the front step. Mr. Falso kept walking to his car, talking as if Ben followed close behind.
“What’ve you got, a few more months before you’re behind the wheel? That’ll open up a whole new world for you, Ben. You wait and see!”
“I’m already six … Never mind,” Ben muttered, rising slowly under the weight of the realization that he and Mr. Falso would be spending a lot of time together. Because the next place he’d touched Mira was in Mr. Falso’s bedroom.
JANUARY 2016
Francesca adjusted her shirt for the third time waiting for Mr. Falso to come downstairs. He’d been on his cell phone, and raised his hand when he saw her at his door. He ushered her in soundlessly, and she was careful not to speak, lest the person on the other line hear her. As he wandered to another part of the house, she decided to sit on the chair she knew was his, in his living room. It was a bold move: for months now, during their wound checks, they’d sat in the same kitchen chairs as the first time she had revealed her true, changed self to him. He had snapped pictures and taken notes on a legal pad, and then they talked of lighter things, him always trying to steer the conversation to this boy or that crush, as if reminding them both that she was still a teenage girl. At the end, he cupped her hands gently from underneath and they closed their eyes and prayed for this inconceivable, unknowable miracle to explain itself to them. The week before, she’d forced his promise not to tell Father Anthony or Father Ernesto, or anyone else. She wasn’t ready, she said. She would tell him when she was.