“Tell me again how he kissed you,” I say. “You must have left out some detail.”
She giggles and chucks one of the throw pillows at me. “Shut up.”
I catch the pillow and hug it to my chest, reveling in the warmth there. I’ve seen Rowan almost every day since Mom died, but it’s like her death created an invisible wall between my best friend and me. We’ve been struggling to find a way to break through it. Last night didn’t tear down the wall—but it knocked a few bricks loose.
I wish I could figure out how to tear it down the rest of the way. This small crack is barely wide enough to join hands through, but maybe that’s enough.
Out of the blue, I say, “I need to tell you something.”
My voice must sound more serious than I intended. She sits up straight on her swing. “Tell me.”
I turn my head and look at her. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Yes. It is a big deal. I knew there was something. Spill.”
I frown. “You knew there was something? What something?”
“Jules! Oh my god! Just tell me!”
Now I’m self-conscious. Any confidence vanishes. “It’s silly. It’s stupid.”
“Is it something about Brandon?”
I laugh. “You are obsessed.” I pause. “No. It’s nothing about Brandon. It’s about another boy.”
“I’m listening.”
I pull my phone out of my pocket. “I don’t know his name. We’ve been emailing.” I should have planned this better. “This is going to sound ridiculous.”
A frown line appears between her eyebrows. “You met him online?”
“No. Not really.” I hesitate. “I met him in the cemetery. Sort of. He wrote back to one of my letters.”
The frown line deepens. “Your letters?”
My cheeks feel hot, and I look away. “I was writing letters to Mom. He wrote back to one of them. At first it pissed me off, so I wrote back to him. But then . . . something happened.” I shrug a little. “He’s lost someone, too. I think . . . I think we understand each other. A little. Last night, when I was stuck on the side of the road, he offered to help, but someone else got there first.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.” I click through my app until I find the latest email, where he’s apologizing for taking too long to help me. “In his email address, he calls himself The Dark. So that’s how I think of him.”
She scans the email quickly. “I can’t decide if this is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or if this is creepy as hell.”
I grab my phone back from her. “This is not creepy!”
She gives me a look. “Are you disappointed or relieved that he didn’t show up last night?”
Well, that’s a direct question. “Both. I think.” I pause, considering. “But I’m more relieved because knowing who he is would ruin some of the . . . openness.” I fiddle with the phone, rubbing at the edges. “I’ve told him a lot about Mom. He’s told me a lot about his family. His sister died a few years ago. Something to do with his dad . . . I don’t know all the details yet.”
Rowan gives me a leveled look. “When you do meet this guy, make sure it’s in a public place, okay?”
“I’m not stupid, Ro.”
“You asked a complete stranger to help you when you were broken down on the side of the road, Jules.”
Right. I did do that.
I make a face. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Who did help you? You never said.”
I wonder if my answer is going to be better or worse than the fact that I asked a complete stranger to help me on a dark, deserted road in the middle of the night. “Declan Murphy.”
“No, seriously.”
“I am being serious.”
She throws herself back into the swing, making it rock violently. “I am never leaving you alone again.”
I think of Declan, how he seemed almost affronted that I was afraid of him. Heat returns to my cheeks. “He was . . . okay.”
“I’m glad you’re here to talk about it instead of lying in a ditch on the side of the road.” She turns toward the street and makes a face. “Look. There’s his weird friend.”
I follow her gaze, and there’s Rev Fletcher, pushing a pink-and-white baby stroller down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He’s back in a hoodie, leaving his face in shadow, but out in the sunlight, there’s no disguising his height or the breadth of his shoulders. It’s a shame he spends so much time hiding, because he’s built like a quarterback, and when you actually get a look at his face, he’s not too hard on the eyes.
I remember what Declan said about the photograph. “He’s not weird,” I say under my breath.
“What?” says Rowan.
“I said, he’s not weird. He’s actually a pretty nice guy.” While Rowan starts scraping her jaw off the floor, I raise my hand and call out to him. “Hi, Rev!”
He looks up in surprise and almost seems to shrink into himself until he locates me waving at him. His whole frame relaxes, and he changes course to push the stroller across the street and up Rowan’s driveway.
“Hey,” he says.
The baby in the stroller squeals and swings her legs. She’s got a cookie in one hand, but she’s gummed it to where bits of shortbread cling to her chubby fingers.
“Are you babysitting?” I ask him. It’s somehow both unexpected yet unsurprising.
“Sort of. Mom had a client call and Babydoll wouldn’t nap, so I figured I could get her out of the house for a half hour.”
“Her name is . . . Babydoll?” says Rowan.
“Yeah,” he says, like it’s nothing.
Her eyebrows go up, but she doesn’t say anything further. My eyes flick between Rev and the dark-skinned baby. “This is your . . . sister?”
He smiles. “Not exactly. She’s a foster kid.”
“And your mom had a client?” Rowan says. Her tone makes it sound like his mother is doing something unsavory, and I think of what Declan said about how some people seem to be fair game for hostility.
Rev blinks at her. “Yeah. My mom’s an accountant.”
“Oh.” Rowan seems thrown by that.
I want to elbow her to stop being so rude. Is this how I came across a week ago?
“Can I hold her?” I say to Rev.
“Of course.” His movements are quick and efficient, and he hoists the baby from the stroller in a practiced motion. She’s wriggly at first, but my shirt collar seems to fascinate her. She rolls the fabric between the fingers of her free hand, mouthing the cookie in the other. Her eyes are large and dark and guileless.
“She’s so cute,” I say.
“She likes you,” he says.
“She doesn’t know me.”
“She’s a good judge of character.” Rev pauses, then says, “How’s your car?”
Declan must have told him. “It’s okay. My dad let me trade yard work for new tires and a battery.”
His eyebrows go up. “Your dad sounds like a nice guy.”
He is, I realize. Maybe it’s been buried for a few months, but at his core, Dad is thoughtful. Compassionate. Somehow I’d forgotten.
“I’m glad I saw you,” I say. Beside me, Rowan is silent but fidgety.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I wanted to tell you . . .” I hesitate, but Rev is patient. There’s nothing hurried about his expression. I shrug a little. “I’ll delete that picture on Monday. The one I took at the Fall Festival.”
His expression takes on a sudden stillness, which I only partially understand. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable. “Could you tell Declan?” I say quickly. “I know it was important to him.”
He nods—but then he hesitates. “I don’t think he really cares that much. You don’t have to delete it.”
“I don’t?”
“No. It’s . . . okay.”
The baby must feel the tension in the air, because she begins to fuss. I bounce her
a little and she settles. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” He reaches out to take Babydoll from me. “I should probably keep her walking. I don’t want her to lose it.”
I watch him buckle her back into the stroller. She doesn’t protest one bit. In fact, I think he must be making faces at her, because she giggles a little.
“You’re really good with babies,” I say.
Rev smiles, but his expression is a little hollow, like he’s still trapped in our exchange from thirty seconds ago. “I get a lot of practice.”
“Seriously,” says Rowan. “What’s with you and the hoodies?”
He straightens. “What?”
“Are you trying to make a statement?”
I can’t figure out her tone. It’s not bitchy—she sounds genuinely curious. I am, too, really.
“Yeah. A statement that it’s cold.” Rev starts pushing the stroller down the walkway. After a moment, he looks back. “I’m glad you got your car taken care of. Dec said it was in pretty bad shape.”
“It was.” I hesitate. “Tell him thanks. If you see him. You know. No one else stopped.”
Some of the tension leaks out of his expression. He nods once. “I will.”
Then he doesn’t say anything else—and I’m not sure what to say, either. We both have a secret tragedy in our pasts, and not for the first time, The Dark and Rev occupy the same space in my thoughts.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” I say.
“You didn’t.” But he hesitates, like he wants to say more.
“Come on, Jules,” says Rowan. “We need to go inside for dinner.”
“One sec,” I say.
But when I look back, Rev is on the sidewalk, moving away, heading toward home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
From: Cemetery Girl
To: The Dark
Date: Sunday, October 6 11:22:03 AM
Subject: The guy who stopped
So . . . remember how I told you about the guy who gave me a hard time at the dance? The one who was such a jerk that I left?
He’s the one who helped me with my car. That’s who you saw.
His name is Declan Murphy. Do you know him? Don’t answer that. Maybe that’s too close to us figuring out each other. But even if you don’t know him, I’m sure you know of him.
He’s kind of notorious.
When he knocked on my window in the pouring rain, I was terrified. I thought he was going to steal my car or murder me or use me to smuggle drugs or something I don’t even want to imagine.
Okay, I almost went back and deleted that last sentence because I feel so terribly guilty about thinking those things. Now, in retrospect, those assumptions feel ridiculous. You want to know what kind of egregious crime he committed after knocking on my window? He let me sit in his car and warm up while he got down on the ground in the rain and fixed my car. Then he followed me home to make sure I got there safely.
Mom used to tell me how her goal with photography was to tell a whole story in one picture. I’m not sure if Mom ever felt she accomplished that. She came close—I know she felt pride about much of her work, and in many of her pictures, you really can see several different layers of what’s going on. It’s all in the details, like with her Syria photo. The joy in the children, the fear in the men. The sweat and the blood, the motion of the swings. Something terrible has happened, but the children can still find joy. But is that the whole story? Of course not.
The more I think about it, I wonder if that was a crazy goal altogether. Can a picture ever tell the whole story?
When I was sitting with Declan, he said something that I’ve been thinking about all weekend. He made a comment about how vulnerable people are protected by rules and guidelines, but people like him can be attacked without question, because people assume he deserves it.
Do you think there’s any truth to that? If a rich kid taunts a poor kid for wearing old hand-me-downs, that’s obviously cruel. If a poor kid mocks a rich kid for failing a test, is it a lesser cruelty because of their stations in life? Is everyone a one-dimensional target in some way?
And if we are, is there a way to show more of ourselves? Or are we all trapped in a single photograph that doesn’t tell the whole story?
Notorious. Her words jab at my pride and tug at my heart simultaneously.
I wish I had told her.
I’m glad I didn’t. Maybe.
This space, with one of us knowing, feels uncomfortable. I don’t like keeping a secret from her. It feels wrong, like now I’m tricking her. Before we had a level playing field. Now I don’t know what we have.
What I have.
I remember her sitting in the rain, crying behind the steering wheel of her broken-down car. At the dance, I’d seen another beautiful, spoiled girl with nothing better to do than sneer at me, the lowlife who might tarnish her shine and sparkle. In the letters, I know a girl who peeks from beneath a glitter overlay, hiding the torment. It’s hard to reconcile. It’s hard to wrap my head around it.
I know what it’s like to need to strike first. I wish I’d seen through her bravado when we were standing by the punch bowl. I wish I’d known it was just a front.
Rev has this saying that he likes, something about how a gentle tongue can break a bone. Knowing him, it’s from the Bible. This is the first time it’s ever made sense to me.
What did she say to me in the car last night? You’re pretty confrontational.
I wish I’d been more patient with Juliet. How could I have missed the turmoil that simmered just below her surface?
How could she have missed mine?
Alan is alone in the kitchen when I come downstairs around lunchtime. He’s reading something on his tablet while eating a sandwich. Sunlight pours through the window behind him, and I’d say he looked like a normal suburban dad if he were any other guy.
We both stop and look at each other. If we were wolves, there’d be raised hackles and cautious circling every time we interact, but we have to do the human thing and glare.
Alan looks away first, which is usually the case. He’s not intimidated by me, though. That would be too easy. Instead, he looks away like I’m not worth his time.
We weren’t always like this. I can’t imagine Mom marrying him if we were. He made a few attempts to play the father figure in the beginning, but we must have been operating on different frequencies because I missed the signals. More likely, I ignored them. He’d try to have man-to-man conversations about school and responsibility and—well, I really have no idea. I’d plug in my headphones and tune him out. I basically thought he was another transient boyfriend who’d be sent packing sooner or later, so why waste the time?
Now I feel like Alan skipped stepfather and went straight to warden.
Really, I can’t decide which bothers me more: that he plays the heavy or that Mom lets him.
I head for the cabinet and dig around, looking for cereal. Mom is on this new health kick, so everything is organic and full of fiber. Maybe protein. I would kill someone for Froot Loops, but instead I grab a box of strawberry Power O’s.
When I open the refrigerator for some milk, I realize Alan is still watching me.
I don’t like him watching me.
I think about Cemetery Girl’s line—Juliet’s line, I remind myself—about being trapped in a single photograph. That’s how I feel right now. Alan saw one side of me, one moment of my life, and that’s all I’m reduced to now. That’s all anyone sees. Declan Murphy, drunk driver, family ruiner. My snapshot, captured forever in time.
It’s a depressing thought, and my hackles go down. “Where’s Mom?”
“Taking a nap.”
I hesitate with the milk poised to pour. “In the middle of the day?”
“That’s when naps usually happen.” His voice is sharper than it needs to be, more acerbic.
My hackles go up again—but the image of my mother getting sick in the back
bathroom is still fresh in my mind. I wonder if he has any idea. He should have been the one taking care of her. He should be the one worrying about her now. “You don’t have to act like such a prick, Alan.”
“Watch your language.” He points a finger at me.
I slam the milk back into the refrigerator, then whirl, ready to get into it.
He’s not even looking at me. He’s looking back at his tablet.
I want to flip the table and send everything flying. I want to get in his face and scream, Look at me! Right now! Look at ME!
My cell phone vibrates against my thigh, and I jerk it out of my pocket. I press it to my ear without looking at the screen—the only person who ever calls me is Rev.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey, Murph.”
The voice is thickly accented, and it takes me a second to place it. Melonhead. I haven’t been able to break him of the nickname, but I’ve found I prefer “Murph” to the overenunciated DECK-lin that turned out to be the alternative. He’s never called me. I have a panicked moment thinking I’m supposed to be at community service right now, but then I remember it’s Sunday. My heart sputters and finds a normal rhythm.
I still have no idea why he’s calling. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you were doing anything this afternoon. I was thinking maybe I could use your help. Well, my neighbor could.”
I am so confused, and I can’t think past the work we do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “You need me to mow today or something?”
He laughs like I’ve said something truly funny. “No. My friend needs help with his car. You said you’re good with engines, right?”
I frown. “Sometimes. I mean . . . if it’s something modern, he should probably take it to the shop. Newer cars have computers—”
“It’s not new. He’s restoring it. It’s a—” He pauses and must put his hand over the phone to talk to someone else, but I hear him say, “What is this?” A dog barks in the background.
After another pause, he comes back on the line. “A 1972 Chevelle. He thinks it’s the carburetor.”
I grunt noncommittally and take a spoonful of cereal.
People always think it’s the carburetor.
“Do you know about carburetors?” Frank says.