“Hey…” That was a girl’s voice, young like me.
In the seconds that followed, my dad arrived, yanking me into his arms and fussing at me before noticing my tears. The boy must have fetched my glasses, because Daddy slid them on my face. I blinked and realized we were standing on a pool deck. Then I turned to look over my shoulder, and I saw them.
A tall boy with messy brown hair and sun-kissed skin, and a smaller girl beside him. She had jet black hair that sat above her shoulders in firm ringlets. Both of them had big, olive eyes. Their mouths were different, I noticed. Hers was frowny. His was soft and kind, one corner tugged up in a kind of pre-smile.
His gaze was holding mine, unblinking, as if his eyes could talk and he wanted to tell me something important. “My name is Dash,” he said.
The girl stepped closer to Daddy and me, tossing her hair back and jutting one shoulder out as she smiled and stuck out her arm, waving her tiny hand like a pageant princess. “I’m Alexia.”
Daddy patted my wet head. “These are your new neighbors.”
Two
Amelia
August 2010
It’s after midnight, and I’m lying on the door side of Alexia’s bed in Cowboy Bebop pajamas I ordered from Japan, my red hair fanned around my made-up face, staring at a ceiling I can’t see because I set my glasses on the bed side table. All the better for feigning sleep.
We were going to stay up all night, Alexia and I, so we’d be up to send Dash off at 4:30 in the morning. So we’d be up at 3:34 when the International Space Station glides over Georgia, glowing like the brightest star, a pod of humans with real hopes and hearts right over us, hundreds of miles away in space.
Dash had mentioned wanting to see it, and this summer, climbing out onto the roof was sort of our thing. Alexia and me, up late watching movies in the Frasiers’ home theater. Dash stumbling in from a night of parties. He would pass the spiral staircase outside his and Alexia’s bedroom doors and hear us, climb upstairs to the third floor and tease us. Lex the Biddie and Ammy Dove, he’d call us.
He’d come in and sit with us, his big feet propped up on the seat in front of him, munching popcorn, half-drunk, critiquing our chick flicks. The more nights I spent here, the more solid this routine became. Then one night we went to sleep before Dash got home, and sometime after midnight, we awoke to a knock on Alexia’s window.
Going out onto the roof became our ritual. Almost always, it was all three of us, but on the couple nights Lex didn’t want to, Dash would say, “C’mon, Dove, don’t leave me out here by myself”—as if he was forced to stay out on the shingles—so I eased onto the slanted rooftop with just him.
We talked about everything: the moral implications of killing flies and house spiders (there were probably some, we agreed); whether it’s better to send a bunch of troops to another country to try to help people like the Iraqis and risk messing things up more, or just to stay “home” and let the situation play out (neither of us knew); the likelihood of past lives (likely enough to be good conversation fodder); whether dogs can really save their owners in a house fire (Dash thought so, and planned to get a dog in college); and whether dead people like my mom could look down on us (I thought so, but wasn’t sure if I was only being hopeful; Dash told me he thought so too).
A few weeks ago, I came over in the afternoon like Lexie asked me to, and she wasn’t here—but Dash was. I found him in the home theater watching an animated show about futuristic space criminals, a funky Japanese show, set to jazz music: Cowboy Bebop. It’s anime, like the Miyazaki films he likes so much, the ones Alexia and I watch with him even though Lexie says they’re weird. I sat down beside him, and we watched Cowboy Bebop until my stepmom Manda came looking for me close to nine.
That night, I ordered these pajamas online. I read some of the myths relating to the constellations, hoping to impress Dash the next time we went out on the roof. But in the last week, he hasn’t been around much. When he has, he’s seemed distracted. Distant.
Tonight’s my last chance to spend time with him before he leaves for college.
I don’t hear him tromping down the hall. I hear his knock on the window, as if he walked straight from his truck onto the roof. Then I hear the window open.
“Pssst!”
I try to wake Lex, but she moans. “No…”
“Are you sure? It’s his last night, Lexie.”
“Shut up.”
I feel a pinch of worry: Lexie got into her parents’ wine cellar earlier. She does it to be funny, but she usually ends up getting sick and crying. Honestly, I think it’s kind of weird. It makes me worried.
“Anybody in there?” Dash calls, leaning into the window.
“Lex, come on.”
“I’m tired!”
With one last look at Lexie’s curvy form under the blankets, I crawl outside. Dash’s hand comes down on my shoulder, steadying me while I push my hair out of my face. The night is breezy. Strands rise up around us. Dash’s hands smooth them down.
I giggle. “Thank you.”
“Can’t have you taking flight on me, big D.”
Big D is one of Dash’s nicknames, but sometimes he turns it back around on me—I guess as an abbreviation of Dove. It’s something he called me the first day we met, but I think it stuck because my friends picked up on it. I’m the peacemaker in our clique, and doves are supposed to be peaceful birds.
Dash glances behind me, and when Lexie doesn’t leave the bed, he crouches down beside me.
“Hey…” He tugs on my pants-leg. “What’s this now? Is this what it looks like?” I can see him grinning. My heart pit-patters.
“Of course.” I feign smugness.
“Where’d you get them?” he asks, still rubbing the fabric of my pants.
“Online.”
“Sweet.”
“I know,” I say, crouching beside him on the slanted roof. In the dark, I grin. “I’m pretty much the coolest person you know.”
I run my eyes along his crouching form, startled as I always am by his nearness, by the width of his shoulders and the beauty of his face. His hazel eyes seem tired, and his luscious mouth looks relaxed tonight, like maybe Lexie’s not the only one who’s been drinking.
He looks once more at the window and then bumps my arm with his. “Just you and me, Dove.”
He stretches out on his back, his long legs bent at the knee, his arms behind his head. I shift onto my butt beside him.
For a few electric moments, everything is quiet except the crickets’ song, the gentle rumbling of thunder in the distance.
Then he softly says, “I’m gonna miss this place.”
“Georgia?”
He shakes his head. “The roof.”
I smile. “Just the roof.”
“Not just the roof. But there’s a lot of shit I won’t miss, too.”
“Like what?”
I see him arch one thick, dark eyebrow. “Homeroom at seven-thirty every morning.”