Which meant I only had one question to ask: “Are you sure?”
Grace nodded.
And just like that, everything changed.
I tugged the backpack strap gently and sighed. “Oh, Grace.”
“Are you mad?”
I took her hands and rocked them back and forth, dancing without lifting a foot. My head was a jumble of Rilke—“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start”—her father’s voice—I’m trying really hard to not say something I’ll regret later—and longing personified, a physical being here, finally, in my wanting hands.
“I’m scared,” I said.
But I felt a smile on my face. And when she saw my smile, an anxious cloud that I hadn’t even noticed on her face sailed away, leaving only clear skies and finally, the sun.
“Hi,” I said, and I hugged her. I missed her more now that I actually had her in my arms than when I hadn’t.
• GRACE •
I felt hazy and slow, moving in a dream.
This was someone else’s life, where the girl ran away to her boyfriend’s house. This wasn’t reliable Grace, who never turned in homework late or stayed out partying or colored outside the lines. And yet, here I was, in this rebellious girl’s body, carefully laying my toothbrush beside Sam’s brand-new red one like I belonged here. Like I was going to be here a while. My eyes ached from fatigue, but my brain kept whirring, wide awake.
The pain was quieter now, calmed. I knew it was just hiding, pushed away by the knowledge that Sam was near, but I was glad of the respite.
On the bathroom floor, I saw a little half-moon of a toenail lying on the tile next to the base of the toilet. Its utter normalcy sort of drove home, with utter finality, that I was standing in Sam’s bathroom in Sam’s house and I was planning on spending the night in Sam’s bedroom with Sam.
My parents would kill me. What would they do first, in the morning? Call my cell phone? Hear it ringing wherever they’d hidden it? They could call the police, if they wanted to. Like my dad said, I was still under eighteen. I closed my eyes, imagining Officer Koenig knocking on the door, my parents standing behind him, waiting to drag me back home. My stomach turned over.
Sam softly knocked on the open bathroom door. “You okay?”
I opened my eyes and looked at him standing in the doorway. He had changed into some sweats, and a T-shirt with an octopus printed on it. Maybe this was a good idea after all.
“I’m okay.”
“You look cute in your pajamas,” he told me, his voice hesitant as if he were admitting something he hadn’t meant to.
I reached out and put a hand on his chest, feeling the rise and fall through the thin fabric. “You do, too.”
Sam made a little rueful shape with his mouth and then peeled my hand from his chest. Using it to steer me, he switched off the bathroom light and led me down the hall, his bare feet padding on the floorboards.
His bedroom was illuminated only by the hall light and the ambient glow from the porch light through the window; I could just barely see the white shape of the blanket tidily turned down on the bed. Releasing my hand, Sam said, “I’ll turn off the hall light once you’re in, so you don’t smack into anything.”
He ducked his face away from me then, looking shy, and I sort of knew how he felt. It was like we were just meeting each other again for the first time, like we’d never kissed or spent the night together. Everything felt brand-new and shiny and terrifying.
I crept into the bed, the sheets cool under my hands as I edged toward the side of the mattress that met the wall. The hall went dark and I heard Sam sigh—a weighty, shaky sigh—before I heard the floorboards creak with his steps. The room was just light enough for me to see the edge of his shoulders as he climbed into the bed with me.
For a moment, we lay there, not touching, two strangers, and then Sam rolled toward me so that his head was on the same pillow as mine.
When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was all the thrill of our first kiss and all the practiced familiarity of the accumulated memory of all our kisses. I could feel the beat of his heart through his T-shirt, a rapid thud that sped even more when I twined our legs together.
“I don’t know what will happen,” he said softly. His face was right next to my neck, his words spoken right into my skin.
“I don’t, either,” I said. Nerves and the thing inside me twisted my stomach.
Outside, the wolves still intermittently sang, their cries rising and falling, hard to hear now. Sam, beside me, was very still. “Do you miss it?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, so fast that I couldn’t believe he’d actually considered my question. After a moment, he gave me the rest of his answer, stumbling and hesitant. “This is what I want. I want to be me. I want to know what I’m doing. I want to remember. I want to matter.”
He was wrong, though. He had always mattered, even when he was a wolf in the woods behind my house.
I turned my face quickly, to wipe my nose on a tissue I’d brought with me from the bathroom. I didn’t have to look at it to know that it would be dotted with red.
Sam took a deep breath and wrapped his arms around me. He buried his head in my shoulder, and I felt him take handfuls of my pajama top in his fists as he breathed in my scent. “Stay with me, Grace,” he whispered, and I balled my shaking fists up against his chest. “Please stay with me.”
I could smell my own skin, the sick-sweet almond smell of me, and I knew he wasn’t talking about just tonight.
• SAM •
Folded in my arms you’re a butterfly in reverse
giving up your wings inheriting my curse
you’re letting go of
me
you’re letting go
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
• SAM •
The longest day of my life began and ended with Grace closing her eyes.
The next morning I awoke with Grace not quite in my arms, but rather sprawled indelicately across me and my pillow, pinning me to the bed. Sunlight framed both of us; the rectangle square of sun from the window bordered our bodies perfectly. The day had gotten late while we slept it away. It seemed like forever since I had slept like that, dead to the world, unmindful of the sunlight. Propping myself up on one elbow, I had a weird, falling sensation, the weight of thousands of unlived days stacked upon one another as I looked down at Grace. She mumbled as she awoke. When she turned her face toward me, I saw a flash of red before she ran her arm across her face.
“Ew,” she said, opening her eyes to look at her wrist.
“Do you need a tissue?” I asked.
Grace groaned. “I’ll get it.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m already up.”
“You are not.”
“I am. See, I’m leaning on my elbow. That is one thousand times more up than you.” Normally at this point I would’ve leaned in for a kiss or to tickle her or to run my hand down her thigh or to rest my head on her stomach, but today, I was afraid of breaking her.
Grace looked at me as if the lack of contact was conspicuous. “I could just wipe my nose on your shirt.”
“Point taken!” I said, and slid out of bed to get a tissue. When I came back, her hair was mussed and hung down around her face, hiding her expression. Without comment, she wiped her arm, balling the tissue up quickly, but not quickly enough for me to miss the blood on it.
I felt wound tight.
Handing her a wad of tissues, I said, “I think we should take you to the doctor.”
“Doctors are useless,” Grace said. She dabbed at her nose, but there was nothing there anymore. She wiped off her arm instead.
“I want to go anyway,” I said. Something had to put to rest this anxiety inside my chest.
“I hate doctors.”
“I know,” I said. This was true. Grace had waxed poetic about this before; personally, I thought it had more to do with her aversion to wasting time than it did to any fear or disdain of those in the medical profession. I thought what she really had was an aversion to waiting rooms. “We’ll go to the health center. They’re fast.”
Grace made a face, then shrugged an agreement. “Okay.”
“Thank you,” I said, relieved as she thumped back down onto a pillow.
Grace closed her eyes. “I don’t think they’ll find anything.”
I thought she was probably right. But what else could I do?
• GRACE •
Part of me wanted to go to the doctor, in case they could help. But more of me was afraid to, in case they couldn’t. What option was left if this failed?
Being in the health center added to the surreal aspect of the day. I’d never been, though Sam seemed familiar enough with it. The walls were a putrid shade of sea green and the exam room had a mural featuring four misshapen killer whales frolicking in sea green waves. All the while the nurse and the doctor were questioning me, Sam kept putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out. When I shot him a look, he quit doing it for a few minutes, then started cracking his knuckles with his thumb instead.
My head was swimmy, which I told the doctor, and my nose obligingly demonstrated its bleeding for the nurse. I could only describe my stomachache, however, and both of them looked mystified when I tried to get them to smell my skin (the doctor, however, did).
Ninety-five minutes after we’d entered, I left with a prescription for a seasonal allergy medication, a recommendation to get an over-the-counter iron supplement and saline nose spray, and the memory of a lecture on teens and sleep deprivation. Oh, and Sam was sixty dollars poorer.
“Do you feel better?” I asked Sam as he opened the door to the Volkswagen for me. He was a hunched bird in this spring weather, black and stark against the gray clouds. It was impossible to tell from the occluded sky if it was the beginning of the day or the end of one.
“Yes,” he said. He was still a terrible liar.
“Good,” I said. I was still a fantastic one.
And the thing inside my muscles groaned and stretched and ached.
Sam took me for a coffee, which I did not drink, and while we sat in Kenny’s, Sam’s cell phone rang. Sam tipped the phone toward me so I could see Rachel’s number.
Leaning back, he handed me the phone. He had his arm curled around the back of my neck in a way that was very uncomfortable but very charming, so I couldn’t move. I leaned my cheek against his arm and flipped the phone open.
“Hello?”
“Grace, oh my God, are you totally crazy?”
My stomach twisted. “You must’ve talked to my parents.”
“They called my house. Probably the Tundra Queen’s as well. They wanted to know if you were with me, because apparently you did not spend last night in your bed, and you were not near your phone today, and they were growing slightly concerned, in a way that is very disturbing for Rachel to be involved in!”
I pressed my hand into my forehead and leaned my elbow on the table. Sam politely pretended not to listen, though Rachel’s voice was clearly audible. “I’m sorry, Rachel. What did you tell them?”
“You know I’m not a good liar, Grace! I couldn’t tell them you were at my house!”