“Drugs!” Ben laughed hysterically. “My parents, of all people, want to put me on drugs?”
“Lots of people get anxious or depressed when someone they loved dies. It’s not cowardly to admit that you need help,” his mom said.
“So you want me like Mrs. Villela at Connie’s funeral? Whacked-out and spacey, so I don’t have to feel anything?” Ben said, tears streaming down his face. “So I can forget what I know?”
His mom wrapped her arms around Ben in an awkward tent-hug. “No one is asking you to forget Mira Cillo.”
Ben broke away and charged to the corner of his room. “You’re asking me to abandon her.”
“You’re not abandoning her by trying to get back on track and live your life,” his dad said.
If that was what she wanted, she wouldn’t have given me the notes, Ben wanted to say. He caught his parents locking eyes. A familiar sense came over him. He’d been here before, come up against their tag-team interrogation. The logic and strategy that kept him off balance, that seven years before had got him to say what they’d never wanted to hear.
A sullen resolve rose in Ben. He took a deep breath and looked each of his parents in the eye. This time he’d give them the answer they wanted.
He dropped his hands at his sides. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” he said.
His mom descended upon Ben, drawing him from the corner to the middle of the room, where his dad joined them, fluffing his hair like a dog. Ben allowed his mom to squeeze him while he stared over her head, out into the night at Francesca and Mira’s bedroom window. Their reflection bounced back, a fractured slurry of streetlight and aluminum siding and something shadowy inside that Ben could not see.
*
Ben had to wait until their bedroom murmurs subsided and they were both asleep for a full three hours before slipping from his room and tiptoeing down the stairs and out the slider, through the backyard and into the shed.
The smells of WD-40, loam, and musty metal were unchanged. The streetlights seeped into the long cracks where the walls met, same as the night Mira and Ben had met alone. Ben scanned the shelves and saw hammers hanging upside down from hooks. Rakes and hoes leaned in corners. Tackle boxes full of things that stuck. No note.
It had been around the same time as now: past two in the morning. They’d agreed at school to sneak out when Ben ran a flashlight beam over Mira’s window. It was early November, so not only could they not go far, they ran the risk of freezing to death. Mira with a chilly red nose, parka zipped beneath her chin and over her pajamas, doing a hopping dance, stripes of bright hair blown across her face. He’d pulled her by the wrist, both of them laughing too loud, into the shed, their breaths blooming between them. Ben had lifted his father’s heavy plaid work shirt from its nail and slipped it over her arms for another layer. Ben’s goal that night was to kiss Mira: he couldn’t wait any longer, and was convinced she’d been disappointed that he hadn’t tried in Falso’s bedroom. When Mira finally stopped laughing, he tipped her chin and leaned in to kiss her, lightly, and lips-only. Her mouth was hot when everything else was cold, and Ben wanted to get farther inside and probe where the heat was coming from. More and more, he found himself thinking about the insides of Mira, healthy, pink organs and long, smooth muscle wall. The parts of Mira no one saw, whose actions were involuntary and unguarded. He imagined glistening blood cells, villi waving like sea anemone, velvety mucosa. Turn Mira inside out, smear his hands inside.
Lust and urgency made him bold. He nuzzled Mira’s ear, the only part he could get inside.
“Don’t you want to kiss me?” he murmured.
Mira’s eyes widened in her solemn face. “You can’t imagine the things I want to do.”
Ben read that as he wanted. The shed was too cramped for the real deal, but there was plenty they could manage. He needed to convince Mira that it was okay, to make his case. He reached for Mira’s mittened hand and tugged it bare, then thrust it inside his jacket, through the gaps in his shirt against his thudding heart.
“Feel it,” Ben said, remembering Mira’s words. “Don’t you know what’s in my soul yet?”
“It’s not what’s in your soul. It’s what’s in mine.” Mira pulled him down to the dirt floor, heart racing, and they kissed in every way. He, baby kisses across the whole of her mouth. She, tugging his upper lip with her teeth. He, tracing her lips with his fingertips. She, grabbing the back of his head hard with her hand and pulling him in, then planting a kiss that left him breathless. He, kissing her fast then pulling away, in a game of keep-away.
The last one was too much for both of them. Mira rose up and wrapped her legs around Ben’s waist. She leaned in close to his ear. Ben groaned: this was it.
“I have to get back before Francesca sees I’m gone,” she rasped.
And with that she left, sawdust rising where she had kneeled. The shed door swung shut. Ben stayed unmoving for fear of shattering the memory, or for shock. At some point, his eyes fell shut, and when he awoke in the frigid morning light, an ache hung in his chest, worse than his frozen feet. His father’s shirt was tented over him.
Ben felt for his father’s shirt now and shrugged it on. The stiff flannel lined with down smelled of gasoline and mothballs. Ben tucked his fingers in the chest pocket. The hard edge of Mira’s note met his fingertips.
He opened it under a crack of light along the wall.
Francesca’s lips are so dry. Daddy says he will force
her to eat and drink from a tube in her stomach if she
doesn’t stop her protest.