I wasn’t ready for that. Those stolen moments with him in the library had become precious to me. I’m sorry, Jean, and so ashamed to admit it. But it’s true. We had built an entire world trapped in time, perfect in all its layers. In its dust motes and sunshine. In its broken carburetor to rattle above the sparrows’ cries. In the stink of bio-lab hand sanitizer to burn over the must of old French pages.
I knew our glass walls wouldn’t last, and that had left my humor foul. “What else do you have for me, Professor? Maybe something with a happy ending this time? Is that too much to ask?”
His eyes squinted. Thoughtful and perhaps a bit pleased. “So no winter formal for you tonight, then?”
“Oh,” I said with a flippant shrug. “Is that tonight?” Obviously, I knew when it was. But no one had invited me, and I knew for a fact that no one had invited him, either.
I won’t lie: I was afraid he might ask you to the dance, Jean. Ever since he’d plied me with those questions about the Watson family, I thought maybe he was into you.
But now I see the truth.
And I also see what an idiot I was.
“I’m not going,” I added, just in case Jim wasn’t aware of my solo status.
“All right, then, Holmes.” He nodded slowly. “I have a book in mind for you. Where’s your dorm? I’ll bring it.”
“Boys aren’t allowed in the girls’ wing.”
“Come, now.” A smug bounce of those eyebrows. “As much as I love when you talk rules and regulations, I’m interested to see a different side of you.” He eased his queen to D7, dragging his thumb across the top. A caress I couldn’t tear my eyes from.
The movement set off the roller coaster inside me. My throat closed up. My stomach ached with need, loop after loop. And it wasn’t Jim’s words, as flirty as they’d been, that did it. It was the movement—the offer implied in his fingers against the queen: Why be what you’re expected to be? You could be like me, Shirley Holmes, if you just tried.
The thing was, as much as I wanted it and as much as I hungered for Rebellion with a capital R, I wasn’t ready to be a ghost. Not yet.
But I also wasn’t ready to lose my world trapped between. So I smiled, cheeks on fire. “Room fifty-four, James. On the corner. But wait until after the winter formal starts, okay?”
“Your wish is my command, Holmes.”
If only that had been true, Jean. If only that had been true.
He came to the window. Not to the door, as I had anticipated. You were (of course) at the winter formal with Marty, and I was sitting at my desk, pretending to do calculus homework. But I’d been staring at the same problem for an hour without getting anything solved.
I put on makeup with you—do you remember that? While you were getting gussied up for the dance, I made you show me how to create the illusion of cheekbones. Contouring, you called it. But as soon as you left, I wiped it all off. I was afraid Jim would notice and then make some comment on the “myths of beauty.”
A tap at the window sent me jumping from my chair. The window was right above my desk, but I had the blinds down. I hadn’t seen him approach over the sliver of roof right outside.
I lifted the blinds, his face coalescing in the darkness. Hazy and terrifying through the glass. I turned off the light before finagling open the window, and then he said only one thing: “Join me.”
I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t think about the rules or the sharp angle of the roof or the forty-foot drop beyond. I didn’t even think about how awkward I looked, clambering onto my desk and squeezing through the window.
But here’s the thing I see now: we all want that vampire from the CW so badly that sometimes we forget sunlight kills.
The roof is beautiful at night. The asphalt shingles glitter more than you’d expect. A fairy path that Jim followed while I followed Jim. First we crossed the newer roof above the dormitories until that gave way to the moss-covered, wood shingles of the original school.
Jim was so comfortable and easy in his angled lope across the roof. Meanwhile, I moved as best I could, out of my element but wishing this height, these shadows, and this magical guide could be mine.
When at last Jim came to a stop, I recognized from the nest in the gutter and the dark shape of the hedges below that we were directly above our library nook.
Jim turned to me, glowing in the starlight. “Let’s sit on the edge.” A command in his tone, yet a question in the way he extended his hand—one I answered by giving him my own hand. His fingers were frozen to ice, but strong all the same.
Jim crouched at the roof’s lip. He helped me sit so my feet dangled over the hedges. Our hedges, always growing despite the landscapers’ best attempts to stop them.
In hindsight, it was crazy foolish of us to be up there. I mean, a drop that could break my bones plus a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters were booming through my blood. My brain. My heart.
It was exactly the sort of thing I never did, yet all thought and reason and basic Darwinian good sense had shut down in favor of an electric light show in my chest.
I thought . . . I hoped Jim would ease down beside me. Close. Touching.
He didn’t. A chasm of two feet spanned between us.
Clasping his arms to his chest, he lay back. Legs swinging. Shingles creaking. The wind swept over us, damp with the closest thing to seasons we ever get here. Fragrant with earth and yesterday’s rain. With leaves decomposing under the live oaks.
No winter here. Just one life giving way to another.
“Your hands are warm, Holmes,” Jim said eventually, and I realized he had curled his own fingers into fists. Holding in my heat, I wanted to believe.
“Yours are cold. Have you considered gloves?”
No laugh. He was too wrapped up in his thoughts that night.
To cover the embarrassment charging up my cheeks, I mimicked his pose and lay back. Then I hugged my arms to my chest and fixed my eyes on the sky.
The heat fled my face as fast as it had come, and in an instant I understood why Jim had put this space between us.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth. It must be what’s real, and I needed that gap between us to feel it.
I’m sorry, Jean. I know this all sounds so completely unlike me. But that’s why I have to tell you—don’t you see? I’d never felt anything like it. Not then and not now. No drug has come close to it. No adventure. No dreamscape.
Air beneath my feet.
Darkness to hug me tight.
All with the universe spread above me, speckled and humming and so damned alive that there could only be one outcome from it all: a death foretold and my intestines on the dusty earth below.
Jim’s phone buzzed at nine thirty. I jolted. Lost. Almost asleep.
He eased it from his pocket. “An alarm,” he explained lazily. “It goes off every night, so I don’t miss curfew-call at ten.”
I swallowed—my mouth was dry; would he notice?—and eased up onto my elbows. “You come here every night, then?”
A grunt of acknowledgment as he pushed to his feet, dusted off his hands, and then helped me to rise.
“Your fingers are still cold,” I said with a smile.