Twenty-seven
It was simple enough.
We stopped meeting at the shed. We didn’t spend any time together that wasn’t accounted for by school.
I rarely saw Cedric and turned sharply on my heels every time I did, but he haunted every second I spent at home nonetheless; I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had eyes and ears in the walls.
And I was spending more time at home than I ever had since my Trade.
Constantly anxious of surveillance, I guarded my phone, never letting it out of sight. I only texted Mason in the privacy of my bedroom and told him to stop sending voice messages. I’d never been so on edge for so long.
Mason stole the seat across from me in art class, and I crossed our ankles under the table.
We spoke in hushed tones any moment we could get away with it.
It felt shitty, throwing ourselves in Cella’s face, but everything felt shitty.
Leaving class to “use the bathroom” turned into showing up ten minutes late, taking up every last second of the school policy wiggle room.
Within the first ten minutes, we would be marked tardy but not absent.
We went to empty classrooms, janitor’s closets, the equipment room.
Snow fell twice in January, one icy evening flurry that melted by morning and a fluffier fall that left two inches on the ground by midnight, just enough for me and Casper to make snow angels.
Mason cooed over the size difference between the angels in the picture I sent him.
He responded with a photo of the sheep dusted in snow like powdered doughnut holes.
Our poppies thrived in the weather. By mid-February, they looked close to budding.
It was simple enough. It was also, emphatically, the worst.
I was starting to associate our relationship with the cool falseness of air-conditioned air and the smells of paint, bleach, and sweat.
We could only be marked late a handful of times before the school would call home, and we used ours up too quickly.
Our forty-five-minute lunch break became the only time we were alone together.
It was such a clear step backward, I wanted to punch a hole in the equipment room wall.
Mason had stayed unexpectedly positive about the whole thing, all smiles.
I tried to follow his lead. It would be a waste of the time we did have to spend it pissed off and whining about how badly everything sucked.
But it did suck. And I was pissed.
Feeling so tense all the time was creating knots in my back. Mason took it upon himself to rub them away. His lifetime working with animals showed in his thorough hands: he knew how to touch gently but deeply.
He unwound me.
Sitting on an upside-down bucket in the janitor’s closet, Mason worked his hands over my shoulders.
I was on the floor between his legs, absentmindedly massaging his right calf through his jeans where he’d told me he was sore lately.
It was a rainy day, so we had taken lunch inside.
We spent most of our lunch breaks kissing or talking, feverishly making up for lost time, but today had been quiet. Mason had been quiet.
The first bell rang for fifth period. I had five minutes to get to economics.
Behind me, Mason slumped forward, draping his arms over my shoulders and burying his face in my hair. He clutched the front of my shirt as he breathed in my scent.
I mumbled a curse. If he started to crack, we would crumble.
“Okay?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. Several seconds went by before he continued. “I didn’t expect it to be so hard. People date thousands of miles apart. I don’t know why I’m being such a loser about this.”
“You’re probably horny.”
Mason chuckled, pinching my chest in retaliation. “That, sure.” I still couldn’t get behind hooking up at school, and we were both suffering for it. “And then some.”
“Yeah. And then some.” I turned around, rising on my knees to nose along his neck. The smell of his blood was a comfort, now. I let him hold himself up against me. “I know. Me too.”
***
On a Friday evening in mid-February, I was driving toward Carrington, edging around post-rain puddles, when I flew past a familiar figure on the sidewalk. I stopped the car, reversed, and rolled down my window.
“You are one hundred percent going to get soaked by some jerk in a Mustang,” I said. Annalisa took that for the invitation it was and scurried into my passenger seat, hiking up her long dark skirt to keep it dry. “Date night?”
Since Annalisa couldn’t exactly be picked up for dates in our driveway, she always waited for Lara outside of a house that was decidedly Not Ours, two neighborhoods down (the closer neighborhood was Cella’s, and Annalisa didn’t want to encourage any unprompted daytime visits).
I pulled up to the curb in front of an olive-green ranch-style house, wondering if any of the inhabitants had ever noticed Wednesday Addams waiting in front of the oak tree at the edge of their lawn.
Annalisa turned on the light and opened the visor mirror. “Well, now I’m early,” she said.
“I’ll wait with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m not leaving you alone at night.”
“It’s seven, and the scariest thing you’ll find in this neighborhood is a poorly trained labradoodle.” She leaned close to the mirror, examining her face. “Also—and this is significant—I have superhuman strength and immortality.”
Pulling her sleeve over her thumb, she used the fabric to dab at the edges of her dark eyeliner.
“But I want to see you off on your date,” I teased.
“I’m not going,” she decided suddenly. “My hair looks like shit.”
“Your hair looks like it normally does.” Annalisa’s big eyes got bigger, black with grief. “That’s not a bad thing! How is that a bad thing?”
“You think I look like the girl from The Ring?” she wailed.
“Now who said that?” I balked. “Your girlfriend isn’t going to judge how you look.” Annalisa wrapped the seat belt around her neck. I added, “Which is great! Why are we panicking right now?”
She buried her face in her hands. “I think I’m going to tell her. Tonight.”
“You’re what?”
“She’s starting to get all weird every time I turn down another one of her date ideas or say I’m busy during the day. It was bound to happen eventually. I don’t want her to think I’m cheating. I’m sure it’s at the front of her mind after seeing her friend—uh, you know.”
“You’re worried she’ll take it badly.”
“How could I not be? I’m pulling my hair out. Which is probably why it looks like shit.”
“It doesn’t—”
“This has to come out eventually, right?” she said. “I don’t think I ever expected to make it this far, but . . . I want her to meet my parents, Kieran. That has to mean something. I’m tired of the secrets.”
After a beat, she tacked on, “Sorry.”
It had been six weeks since Mason and I had shrunk even further into hiding.
“No, I get it.”
“I trust her. No matter how she reacts, I know she won’t tell anyone. If this is the end of our relationship, I’d rather it ends because she knows than because I couldn’t tell her. I think.” She slammed the sun visor shut and looked at me beseechingly. “Can you braid my hair?”
I asked her, “One, or two?”
She really looked like Wednesday when I left her, a couple of minutes before Lara was supposed to arrive. I hadn’t told her it would be okay, bad as I wanted to. How would I know?
My uncle Dante hadn’t been thrilled to learn about Lara, and Aunt Francesca had been beside herself.
Because of the human thing, not the gay thing—they’d been great about that.
It had been tense for a few weeks, but the argument had blown over.
I was envious that her big bad secret was the kind that could blow over.
Her bad decision could be written off as teenage foolishness.
Stopping for Annalisa had interrupted my plan to get to school right when the auditorium doors opened and secure the farthest seat from the stage. I managed to snag a back corner anyway. Not the best view, but I had sharper eyes than most.
It was opening night for the school play, the high school edition of Clue: On Stage.
I flipped through the playbill until I found Marcella’s name.
It was printed beneath the role of “Miss Scarlet.” Fifteen minutes before curtain, the doors closest to me opened and I saw Annalisa again, this time holding a box of jelly beans in one hand and Lara’s hand in the other.
So this was the date. Lara held a bundle of tulips and baby’s breath.
I pulled my hood over my head so she wouldn’t see me.
Five minutes to eight, my eyes were drawn to the far doors.
Mason paused briefly at the auditorium entrance, equally surprised to see me.
I told myself to relax. I was allowed to go to a school play on a Friday night.
If my werewolf ex-boyfriend just so happened to show up, that wasn’t my fault.
With a wink, Mason turned and took a shady back-row seat like mine on the opposite side of the room.
The lights flashed, then dimmed. Miss Jenkins gave an animated opening speech, and the curtain went up.
The only times I’d ever seen Cella perform were in classroom exercises and the lies she told when Mr. Gibson stopped by her room to make sure we were still studying.
I had known she could act, in a way—she did it every day for the sake of good impressions, but she had always done that to blend in.
In Miss Scarlet’s bright red dress, she stood out like a candle flame in a dark room.
Her mannerisms took on an elegant carelessness, coy but whimsical.
She was hilariously ironic. I wasn’t sure whether she had become Miss Scarlett or she’d been holding this inside all along. Either way, she was made for this.
I didn’t move for the first several minutes of intermission, so proud I was stunned still.
“That’s a face I haven’t seen before.” Mason was crouching beside my seat at the end of the row. His hand settled over my knee. “Yeah. She’s amazing.”
“You didn’t mention you were coming,” I told him.
“Neither did you.”