Chapter 2
Fireworks rattle the old window, casting red and blue light across James’s typewriter.
In the square below, Lincoln’s measly population is gathered like the townspeople at the end of a Christmas film with an unrealistically positive ending.
The villain has a change of heart. Love never dies.
Every cat gets adopted into a happy home.
The people down there, aunts and cousins and past teachers and peers, gape open mouthed at the rainbow sparkles above the downtown gazebo like children mesmerized by a shiny necklace.
If they’re the townspeople, James thinks, that makes me the grumpy hermit.
Glued to his work, cooped up in his mountaintop lair.
James tries to concentrate by pretending the crackling fireworks are jazz instrumentals.
Nothing but background noise, like the hum of his teal Smith Corona typewriter.
Like his parents and his sister, Midi, talking over steak and broccoli during Sunday dinner.
Like everything he once loved seems to have become.
Background noise. Even writing.
His fingers poise over the keys, unsure how to continue. He promised his boss, Nancy, that he would have his assignment, about the new crosswalk beside the high school, finished for the paper’s next issue, but the deadline is in two days, and so far he has written only three thin paragraphs.
Nancy doesn’t love when he asks repeatedly for extensions, and she hates that he only submits finished articles on typewritten pages.
She called him a “pretentious ass” once under her breath, but she desperately needed help at the underfunded Lincoln Gazette, and James needed a summer job.
Thus began his dreary articles about painted stripes on asphalt.
Instead of sunbathing on a beach somewhere, he devotes hours every day to a cramped newspaper office built in 1864.
He doesn’t hate the work—words are his passion, in any form or fashion—but he prefers to craft prose about dragons and murders and love affairs, not crosswalks.
James rolls the half-finished page out of the typewriter and stares at the shitty writing as if he can magically will it to improve.
After a moment of consideration, he balls it in a fist and tosses it in a metal bin.
Fireworks reflect against the window, crackling like gunfire.
He replaces his fingers on the keys as his half-empty coffee mug goes lukewarm.
Downstairs, the front door of his parents’ house creaks open, breaking his weak concentration again. Even his mom’s mouselike steps make the century-old floorboards groan.
Her voice cuts through the bones of the house. “James!”
Sighing, he descends from his lair into the hallway that stretches from one end of the house to the other.
“Yeah?” He dreads his mom’s worried tone when she asks why he isn’t out with everyone.
She pokes her head in from the kitchen, her brown hair threaded with silver. “Uncle Benji’s fireworks probably have about ten minutes left, then your dad goes on.”
As much as James wants to say, Sorry, Mom, I’m not coming out tonight, he can’t force it out.
It’s important to her that he stand beside his dad and sister, completing the ideal family portrait for the town to see, bathed in colors like they are caught in the cross fire of strobe lights.
Is it important to him? No, but many things are that he would never expect his mother to understand.
So he bends to her will, as he so often does, even when it breaks him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m coming.”
“Good. Help me carry some stuff out.”
James schleps a red cooler across the manicured lawn and down the street to Lincoln’s square.
He drops it beside a gingham-covered picnic table laden with burgers and hot dogs.
Firework smoke swirls with grill char, reeking of summer in the South.
His dad flips burgers over flaming charcoal, a grease-stained apron tied around his waist. As the mayor of Lincoln, Peter Finch travels a lot, his arms tan now from a recent work trip to Savannah.
His face is movie-star quality, his biceps push the constraints of his shirtsleeves, and he has an off-white, dimpled smile that puts people at ease.
All genetic traits that somehow surpassed his only son, who hides his thin arms inside baggy blue sweatshirt sleeves, whose resting bitch face, hard brows, and sharp cheekbones tend to make people feel unsettled.
The First Lady of Lincoln, Teresa Finch, slinks an arm around her husband’s waist and holds her light beer by its sweaty neck.
She laughs at something pole-thin Aunt Patricia says.
Children slither snakelike past the picnic table, shrieking laughter as they snag hot dogs and cups of homemade ice cream.
Despite his Grinchly attitude, James enjoys a burger and ice cream.
He doesn’t hate the fireworks. The kids pretending their sparklers are magic wands remind him of those golden years when he possessed the ability to cast spells and brew potions.
Somewhere between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, he lost the superpower to make mundane things magical.
After Uncle Benji finishes off his three-hundred-dollar firework, James’s mom tells him, “Your dad’s on,” dragging him across the grassy square to a circle of lawn chairs.
Midi and her friends note his presence with judgmental glances, then all return to their phone screens in unison.
He shoots his sister a bird, wipes the burger crumbs off his lips, and lifts his gaze to the smoky stars.
Nelle holds a corn dog in one hand and wipes away a tear with the other.
As if under a mass trance, everyone watches the fireworks explode like china cups against a stone wall. Nelle swallows a bite. Sweet and heavy with grease, but dry, coating her throat.
Hours before the fireworks began, Nelle planted herself on a bench in the sun to watch people in denim shorts and sundresses unfold tables and grill food, prepping for their celebration.
They blew up red, blue, and white balloons that now bob in the breeze like heads swaying to music.
She tries to forget about the cold, prisonlike bedroom she will return to when the night ends.
For now she is free to watch the stars. To smell smoke drifting across the square, over the heads of people talking and laughing and living together.
Nelle doesn’t need to talk to anyone or swing around a sparkler to enjoy herself, but she does wonder what it would be like to have friends. To live in a community, not a pen.
She soaks it all in, this world she has been walled off from for so many years. Glimpsed only occasionally, for a few short hours at a time.
Glass bottles and red cups are passed around, laughter growing more boisterous.
A deep, twangy voice starts singing, accompanied by the strum of a guitar.
When Nelle claimed her bench earlier, she never expected the night to become such a spectacle of beauty.
Never expected to fall in love with the fireworks, with the people and food and music.
She was naturally curious about the world outside her house, but she never anticipated this twisting ache in her chest, this desire to be a part of their world.
James looks away from the fireworks and sees her.
An unfamiliar face in a town where everybody knows everybody. Watching the fireworks, her hair behind her ears, doe eyes reflecting the starburst. Her lips part. In her right hand, resting on her leg, she holds a half-eaten corn dog.
James’s palms start to sweat.
“You see that woman on the bench.” He leans toward Midi and her friends. “She’s not in high school, is she?”
Midi’s cheekbone highlighter shimmers as she squints across the crowd. “Her?” She frowns. “I’ve never seen her.”
“Maybe it’s someone’s family from out of town,” he murmurs.
“If you want to talk to her, talk to her,” says one of Midi’s friends—Mandy Tucker?
The rest of them glance up from their phones.
Before James can plot out every possible catastrophic event that might result from introducing himself, he jumps into the sea of people in the square, his stomach flipping like the kids cartwheeling across the green.
Her round eyes rise to meet his as he closes in.
“Hey.” Maybe she won’t notice him wiping his sweaty hands on his pants.
Her knees peek out from beneath the hem of an eggshell-white sundress. “Hi.”
“I, uh, I saw you sitting over here, and I just thought, well, I thought that . . .”
“That I was lonely?” Before he can respond, she adds, “I am. Lonely. Most of the time. But not right now.”
He tilts his head. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.” Her smile hits his heart like a cannonball. “And you?”
He takes her question as an invitation and eases himself onto the wooden bench.
“Also twenty-one.” James squints at the hazy sky. His dad’s finale ended before he walked over, and the last sparks are sizzling out.
“The fireworks were pretty,” she says.
“Yeah.” The part of his brain that comes up with things to say sputters out. “And loud.”
“The noise doesn’t bother me. Do you have a name?”
“James,” he says. “James Finch. What about you?”
She sticks out her hand. “I’m Nelle.”
“Are you new in town?” he asks, shaking it. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
Her smirk holds secrets. “Nope. Lived here my whole life.”
“Cool.” James pats his thighs and surveys the crowded square, cursing his inability to maintain a stable conversation. “Did you graduate with my class?”
She blinks like a cat. “Um, I think so, yeah.”
Yet he has no recollection of her, and his graduating class could have fit on one bus. “From Lincoln High?”
She purses her lips. “I was homeschooled.”
He tries to follow the path of her eyes as she angles away. “Are you looking for someone?”
Or are you trying to hint that you want me to leave? he thinks.
“No.” She swings her feet, covered by ruffled white ankle socks and brown penny loafers. “Just looking.”