Shade

by Jeri Smith-Ready

“Last night. Why?”

  “I figured I should tell you first—his headstone is almost ready. My mom said she was going to call your aunt so we could all go out together next week to see it.”

  My fingers turned cold at the thought, as if they were already caressing the hard granite proof of his death. “I don’t want to see it,” I said flatly.

  “Me neither.” There was a brushing noise, like he was shifting the phone to his other ear. “So when he comes over, what do you guys do? I mean, do you, you know …”

  His implication made my face flush. “No. Mostly we just talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. Old times, I guess.”

  “Hey, you remember when we all went camping in Harpers Ferry, and my dad told ghost stories?”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, I think I was what, seven? And you were six.”

  “I guess.” His voice faded for a second, then brightened. “Anyway, then remember me and you pretended there were real ghosts at the campsite and freaked everyone out?”

  “And they made us pack up all the tents and go to a motel? That was awesome. Except that there were actual ghosts in the motel.”

  “It was worth it, though, to see everyone get scared. I hated all the bugs outside, anyway.”

  A few silent moments passed. “Well, thanks for calling,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you at the cemetery.”

  Dylan paused, and I checked the phone to see if it had cut off. Finally he said, “I’m in the bathroom.”

  I scrunched up my face. “I didn’t need to know that.”

  “I mean, I’m in the bathroom because I don’t want Logan to hear.”

  The BlackBox, of course. “Wait, is it … that bathroom? In the upstairs hallway?”

  “Yeah. Kinda funny, huh? A ghost who can’t haunt the place he died? Everyone else is too creeped out to use it. Siobhan and Mickey started showering in Mom and Dad’s bathroom. So it’s pretty much all mine now. Which is cool. But I had to use the old land phone with the long cord to call you.”

  “What don’t you want Logan to hear?”

  “Oh.” He continued in a near whisper, “Do you ever wish he would leave?”

  A shiver ran up the arm that was holding the phone, as if his words carried an electrical shock. “You mean for good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Swear?”

  “Why, Dylan? Do you wish he would leave?”

  “I don’t know.” He paused. “Sometimes. Maybe not for good, though. It’s weird, seeing him like that. All purple and shit.”

  “I’ve gotten used to it.”

  “Me too. That’s what scares me.” He let out a hard breath. “What if he stays a really long time? He died when he was seventeen, right? What if one day seventeen years from now, he’s still around? Then he would’ve been a ghost longer than he’d been a person.”

  “He’s still a person.”

  “But did you ever think about that? What if one day we get married? I don’t mean me and you,” he rushed to add. “When we get married to other people, will Logan be at the wedding? Will he visit our kids? Will he sit in his old room every night, staring at that fucking guitar?”

  A lump filled my throat at the image. “If your family wins the lawsuit in January, he’ll pass on. That’s a long time before either of us has kids.” I twisted my tone. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling us.”

  “We might not win,” said Dylan, ignoring my lame attempt at humor. “Dad says there’s a fifty-fifty chance. Which means there’s really a thirty-seventy chance. And then what if Logan—”

  I waited a moment for him to finish his sentence, dreading its end. “What if Logan what?”

  Dylan’s voice dropped to the faintest whisper. “He could go shade.”

  “No!” I glanced at the older couple at the next table, who were giving me the evil eye for yelling, or maybe for existing. “Dylan, he would never.”

  He snorted. “Maybe Logan’s all happy when he’s with you, but I see him the way he really is. He’s pissed as hell—about dying, about this stupid court case, about everything he can’t do.” The phone shifted again. “Sometimes he makes me so dizzy I think I’m gonna hurl.”

  My pulse surged, and I fought to keep my breath steady. “That never happens when he’s with me.”

  “Well, that’s just great. For you.” Dylan’s voice cracked. “Next thing we know, those Obsidian Corps people could be after him. They could lock him up forever.”

  “That won’t happen.” I clutched the phone, sweaty now against my cheek. “What do you want me to do, Dylan? Convince him to move on?”

  “He’ll listen to you.”

  “Not about this.”

  “Aura, just try, okay?” He let out a long, hissing sigh, like it was coming through his nose. “It was fun at first, having Logan back, me and him hanging out. It was like when we were kids and people used to call us ‘the other twins,’ before he got into music with Mickey and Siobhan. Now I just want to stay in the bathroom all the time.”

  I pictured Dylan huddled on top of the toilet seat, waiting for his brother to get bored and go away. I wondered what it would take to put me in that desperate, sick-of-Logan state.

  It wasn’t that Logan had never pissed me off. I’d suffered through his loudest prima donna fits, his heaviest drinking binges, his craziest thrill-seeking stunts.

  But sitting in that café, surrounded by ordinary ghosts, I had a feeling that the world wasn’t done with Logan.

  And neither was I.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A new sky greeted Zachary and me the next time we went to Farmer Frank’s field.

  “I knew in my head that things would change.” I craned my neck as Zachary laid the blanket down. “But somehow I’m still surprised.” I gestured to Cygnus, the Swan, a large, pointy constellation that was diving headfirst beneath the western horizon. “A month ago, that would’ve just been starting to set.”

  “Eowyn would say, ‘I told you so,’ but I won’t.” Zachary smoothed out the blanket’s corners. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

  I let my shoulders relax a notch. I’d been waiting for him to ask me why I’d lied about my knowledge of Newgrange. But if we were small-talking about holidays, maybe he really was letting the subject go.

  “It was busy.” I settled on the blanket next to him. “We went to my grandmom’s like always, in Philly. I have a million cousins up there that I only see a couple times a year. They hang out together all the time, so I feel kinda odd when I’m with them. I don’t get their inside jokes, and they always—” I caught myself, remembering I was talking to a guy. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  I studied my fingernails, where I’d picked off half of the black nail polish. “They look so perfect. Their hair is all sleek and shiny and cut in new styles, while mine is terminally frizzy. My cousin Gabi? She’s twelve, and her makeup looks better than mine.” I glanced over at him. “See, I told you it was stupid.”

  “I guess I’m the stupid one, since you don’t seem to value my opinion.”

  “Opinion about what?”

  He unzipped our packet of pencils. “Remember what I told you that first day we went to see Eowyn? What I said in the parking lot?”

  My cheeks warmed along my hairline at the memory of his bonnier-than-ever declaration. “I thought you were trying to make me feel better.”

  “I was.” Zachary focused on the drawing tools he was arranging between us. “Doesn’t mean it’s no’ true.”

  I let the silence weigh heavy for a few moments, wondering how to respond. If we started flirting, it could be a long, unproductive evening. Not to mention frustrating, since I couldn’t hook up with Zachary without contracting a major case of guilt. Logan and I were together, even though we couldn’t be together.

  “Most of your family lives in the same city?�
�� Zachary asked.

  I nodded, relieved to change the subject. “The same neighborhood, even. All but me and my aunt. Who wants to meet you, by the way. She’s kind of overprotective.”

  “All right.” He opened our constellation book and switched on the red-painted flashlight. “You never mention your parents.”

  “My mom died just after I turned three. Cancer. I don’t know my dad.” I kept my voice casual as I unfolded the portfolio. “I don’t even know who he was. Or is, if he’s still alive.”

  “No clue at all, then?”

  “Just that he has brown eyes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have brown eyes and my mom had blue. Brown’s dominant genetically, so if I have them, it means my father did. Does. Whatever.” I replaced the top sheet in the portfolio—last month’s star map—with a blank one. “Oh, and he might be Irish.”

  “Really?” Zachary said with a note of curiosity—or maybe disbelief.

  “I think my mom was in Ireland when I was conceived.” I gestured to my face. “I know, I don’t look it, right? My grandmom always jokes that I look more Italian than the rest of my family put together. Her parents came from Tuscany, which is in northern Italy.” I took a breath to pause the babble. “Which I’m sure you, uh, already know, being from Europe.”

  “What was your mum doing in Ireland?”

  I’d said too much already. “Just travel. So what about you? I know you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but did you do anything fun on your days off ?”

  Ugh. I sounded like the people at Gina’s office, who would ask each other how their weekends were, without sounding like they cared about the answers. But I felt a great need for a subject change.

  “My dad cooked a turkey. When in Rome, he says. It was bloody awful. I did like the pumpkin pie, though.”

  “That reminds me.” I dug into my book bag and pulled out a white cardboard box tied with a string. “I brought these back for you.”

  He looked at the box, then at me, before slowly reaching out. “What are they?”

  “Poisonous snakes. Open it.”

  Zachary untied the string. “They seem like very quiet snakes.”

  “They’re stealthy. Or maybe dead.”

  He opened the box, and his face melted into a smile. “You brought me biscuits?”

  “Italian cookies. My grandmom has a bakery that’s kinda famous—in Philadelphia, at least.”

  He picked out a crescent-shaped cookie and bit into the end. Powdered sugar made a small blizzard on the front of his brown sweater. I had a sudden impulse to dust it off.

  “Mm, almond,” he said. “And—is it rum?”

  “Yep, but don’t worry. The alcohol bakes off. And besides, I’m your designated driver tonight.”

  “It’s pure braw. Delicious, I mean.” He set the box between us. “Thanks very much.” His voice was muted and a little strained. He stared into the distant woods as he munched the other half of the cookie.

  I wondered if I’d made some huge cross-cultural faux pas. “Are you okay?”

  “Hmm? Yeah.” Zachary rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together, as if to make the powdered sugar part of his skin. “My mum used to bake a lot.”

  Ah. I fidgeted with my pencil, deciding whether to leave the touchy subject alone or push forward. Either way, things would be tense.

  I chose talking-tense instead of silent-tense. “You don’t have any idea where she went?”

  “All I know is that she left on purpose. My dad’s job is—I can’t tell you what it is exactly, and I sort of lied when I said he was a political science professor.” Zachary looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. A lot of people around here have classified jobs.”

  “Anyway, it’s the kind of career that takes over your life. Mum got tired of placing second to his work. She hated moving around all the time, and when Dad got assigned here in the States, I guess that was the last straw. She left.”

  “Why didn’t she take you with her?” I winced as soon as the question left my mouth.

  “I didn’t want to go.” Zachary creased the corner of the bakery box lid. “I thought if I went with her, she would never come back to him. So I said I wanted to stay with Dad.”

  “Was that true?”

  “Not really. He’s not bad or anything, just obsessed with his job. And they’re still married, so maybe one day …” He folded his lips in, as if afraid to voice the hope.

  “What happened when you told her you wanted to stay?”

  Zachary didn’t speak for several seconds. “She cried.”

  I had the worst desire to hug him. Even though I sometimes wondered if my father had left because of something I did, I knew it was crazy, since I hadn’t been born at the time. But Zachary had to live with the fact that he’d made his mother leave him.

  “You haven’t talked to her since?”

  “No’ exactly.” He scratched his ear. “I get e-mails sometimes, but they could be coming from anywhere.”

  “Why doesn’t she want to be found?”

  He leaned back on his hands and scanned the sky. “Bollocks. There’s clouds moving in.”

  I looked to the east, where a single thin, stringy cirrus cloud stretched over Orion’s Belt. That was all. It was Zachary’s turn to change the subject.

  Maybe his secrecy had to do with his dad’s classified dealings. It seemed like half the people I knew had parents who worked at NSA or DMP or some other semicovert agency. Maybe Zachary’s mom—whether she was an agent herself or not—would be in danger if anyone, even her son, knew where she was.

  “We can work around the cloud,” I told him. “Let’s start before it gets worse.”

  Surprisingly, it wasn’t as cold that night as it had been on our first sky-mapping trip in October. But it was just as hard not to shiver every time Zachary leaned in close to add another star. I tried not to notice the way his dark lashes flickered as his eyes searched the page, or the way he bit his lip as he figured out the perfect placement. I tried not to stare at the curve of his neck as he craned it to gaze at the sky, and wonder what it would feel like to kiss it, right at the hollow of his throat.

  I failed.

  Maybe it was the sugar rush of eating all those cookies, but my hands were trembling so hard I had to draw super slowly to keep the lines straight. It was taking forever to finish this stupid map.

  “Wait a minute.” I flipped the sheet to look at last month’s chart of the southeastern sky. “That bright yellow one wasn’t there before. Maybe it was too hazy that night?”

  “Maybe. Let me see the other page.”

  I moved the flashlight closer and bent low over the chart. “It should have been here, in Taurus.”

  “Let me see.”

  “What star would be that bright? How could we have missed it last month?”

  “Aura.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zachary’s hand near my face. Slowly he brushed back my hair, sliding it behind my shoulder. His fingertip grazed my bare neck right under my ear.

  My entire body tensed. I held my breath to keep from gasping.

  “Sorry.” He quickly tucked the ends of my hair inside my hood. “It was in the way. I couldn’t see.”

  I stared at the page in front of me. If I turned to look at him, it would be all over. I’d ask him to do it again. This time, put all ten fingers in my hair and on my neck and my shoulders and—

  This was definitely not the sugar talking.

  “What do you think it is?” I heard the huskiness of my voice.

  “I know what it is,” Zachary said softly. “But I think you should figure it out yourself.”

  I tried to force my mind back to the project instead of counting how many weeks it had been since anyone had touched me—really touched me, the way I wanted Zach to. I mean, the way I wanted Logan to.

  Breathe. Blink. Focus.

  Okay. A star where there hadn’t
been one before. A supernova? A comet?

  I smacked my forehead. “Duh.” I checked the steady yellow-white glow in the sky. “It’s Jupiter.”

  “Is that your final answer?”

  I finally dared to look at him. “It’s my final answer.”

  In the faint red flashlight glow, his green eyes had turned almost black. “I think you’re right.”

  “Good.” I laughed a little, to relieve the tension.

  “Yeah. Good.” Zachary shifted, pulling one knee up and resting his elbow on it. I wondered if he knew this was one of his hottest poses.

  “Your turn to draw.” I tossed the pencil at his chest.

  “At least my hair won’t block your view.”

  “No, but your big head might.” I crawled behind him so he could take my place in front of the chart.

  “I’ll have you know, my head is a perfectly average size.” He spread his fingers. “My hands, though, are enormous, and you know what they say—”

  “Shut up and draw, lad,” I said in my best attempt at a Scottish accent.

  “Ouch.” Zachary covered his ears. “Don’t try this at home, children.”

  “I thought it sounded good.”

  “In your head, maybe.” He put down the pencil. “A few pointers on talking like a Scotsman. First, you don’t trill your r’s, you gently roll them. Try it. Say ‘no trill, just roll.’”

  “No trill, just roll.” I bit my lip. I had trilled. Possibly even spit on him.

  “No, no, it’s not Italian or Spanish. Don’t bludgeon that poor r with your tongue.”

  “I can’t help it.” Must change topic from what tongues should do. “I took Spanish. And my family’s Italian.”

  “They tell you to relax your mouth and let it go, right?” When I nodded, he replied, “That’s the thing, then. Keep in mind, my people are extremely uptight. So to talk like a Scotsman, you’ve got to keep that mouth under control.”

  “That’s no fun.”

  Zachary closed his lips. He blinked and looked to the right, then blinked again and looked back at me, as if preparing to share a secret. His voice came low and growly. “You’d be surprised how much fun it can be.”

  My heart slammed in my chest so hard, I thought it would pop open my ribs. “Surprise me.”