by Shen, L. J.
“Geez, it’s been a decade. Can’t she just, like, get over it?”
“Maybe it’s not about the mom. Have you seen the dad? Parading his young mistress…”
“She’s always been weird, the girl. Pretty, but weird.”
I wanted to bathe in my own loneliness, swim in the knowledge that my mother had looked me in the eye and decided I wasn’t enough. Drown in my sorrow. Be left alone.
As I reached to turn the radio off, Edie pouted. “But it’s my favorite song!”
Of course it was. Of course.
Slapping my window with my open palm, I let out a wrecked whimper. I shuddered violently at the unfamiliar sound of my own voice. Edie, behind the wheel, sliced her gaze to me, her mouth still curled with the faint smile that always hovered over her lips, like open arms offering a hug.
“Your dad grew up on Depeche Mode. It’s one of his favorite bands,” she explained, trying to distract me from whatever meltdown I was going through now.
I struck the passenger window harder, kicking my backpack at my feet. The song was digging into my body, slithering into my veins. I wanted out. I needed to get out of there. We rounded the corner toward our Mediterranean mansion, but it wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t unhear the song. Unsee Valenciana leaving. Unfeel that huge, hollow hole in my heart that my biological mother stretched with her fist every time her memory struck me.
Edie turned off the radio at the same time I threw the door open, stumbling out of the slowing vehicle. I skidded over a puddle, then sped toward the house.
The garage door rolled up while thunder sliced the sky, cracking it open, inviting more furious rain. I heard Edie’s cries through her open window, but they were swallowed by the rare SoCal storm. Rain soaked my socks, making my legs heavy, and my feet burned from running as I grabbed my bike from the garage, flung one leg over it, and launched toward the street. Edie parked, tripping out of the vehicle. She chased after me, calling my name.
I pedaled fast, cycling away from the cul-de-sac…zipping past the Followhill house…the Spencers’ mansion darkening my path ahead with its formidable size. The Coles’ house, my favorite, was sandwiched between my house and the Followhills’.
“Luna!” Knight Cole’s voice boomed behind my back.
I wasn’t even surprised.
Our bedroom windows faced each other, and we always kept the curtains open. When I wasn’t in my room, Knight usually looked for me. And vice versa.
It was more difficult to ignore Knight than my stepmother, and not because I didn’t love Edie. I did. I loved her with the ferocity only a non-biological child could feel—hungry, visceral love, only better, because it was dipped in gratitude and awe.
Knight wasn’t exactly like a brother, but he didn’t feel like less than family, either. He put Band-Aids on my scraped knees and shooed the bullies away when they taunted me, even if they were twice his size. He’d given me pep talks before I’d known what they were and that I needed them.
The only bad thing about Knight was it felt like he held a piece of my heart hostage. So I always wondered where he was. His wellbeing was tangled with mine. As I rolled down the hill on my bike, toward the black, wrought-iron gate enclosing our lush neighborhood, I wondered if he felt that invisible thread attaching us, too, if he chased me because I tugged at it. Because it hurt when one of us got too far away.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Knight screamed behind my back.
Edie had caught up with him. It sounded like they were arguing.
“I’ll calm her down.”
“But Knight…”
“I know what she needs.”
“You don’t, honey. You’re just a kid.”
“You’re just an adult. Now go!”
Knight wasn’t afraid to get confrontational with adults. Me, I followed rules. As long as I wasn’t expected to utter actual words, I did everything by the book—from being a straight-A student to helping strangers. I picked up trash on the street, even when it wasn’t mine, and donated a selection of my gifts every Christmas to those who really needed them.
But my motives weren’t pure. I always felt less-than, so I tried to be more. Daria Followhill, another neighbor my age, called me Saint Luna.
She wasn’t wrong. I played the role of a saint, because Val had made me feel like a sinner.
I pedaled faster. The rain slushed in sheets, turning to hail, pelting my skin with its icy fury. I squinted, passing through the gates of the neighborhood.
Everything happened fast: Yellow lights flashing in my face. Hot metal grazing my leg as the vehicle tried to swerve in the other direction. A deafening honk.
I felt something hurling me back by the collar of my tweed jacket with a force that almost choked me, and before I knew what was going on, I’d collapsed into a puddle on the side of the road.
Just then, the sound of my bike exploding rang in my ears. The assaulting car shattered it to pieces. The seat flew inches from my head, and the frame glided in the other direction. My face hit the concrete. Dust, wet dirt, and blood coated my mouth. I coughed, rolling around and fighting what felt like the weight of the entire world to find Knight straddling my waist with his legs. The car careened to the end of the road, taking a sharp U-turn and zinging back past the gates of the neighborhood. The hail was so bad I couldn’t even see the shape of the vehicle, let alone its license plate.
“Butthole!” Knight screamed at the car with ferocity that made my lungs burn on his behalf. “Rot in hell!”
I blinked, trying to decipher Knight’s expression. I’d never seen him like this before—a storm within a storm. Although Knight was a year younger, he looked older. Especially now. His forehead was wrinkled, his pink, pillowy lips parted, and his soot-black lashes were clustered like a heavy curtain, damp from the rain. A drop ran its way down his lower lip, disappearing inside the dimple in his chin, and that simple image sent fire tearing through my heart.
It was the first time I’d realized my best friend was…well, beautiful.
Stupid, I knew, especially considering the circumstances. He’d saved me from certain death, pounced on top of me so I wouldn’t get hit by a speeding car, and all I could think of was not Val, or Edie, or Depeche Mode, or how fragile life was, but the fact that the boy I’d grown up with was about to burst and bloom into a teenager. A handsome teenager. A handsome teenager who would have better things to do with his time than saving his awkward childhood friend or teaching her how to say douchebag in sign language.
I’d thought the memories of Valenciana nicked my heart, but that was nothing compared to the violent rip of it when I looked at Knight, realizing for the first time that he was going to break that piece of my heart he held hostage. Not maliciously, no, and definitely not intentionally. But it didn’t matter. Hit-and-run or struck by lightning—a death was a death.
A heartbreak was a heartbreak.
Pain was pain.
“What the fudge?” he screamed in my face.
He was so close I could smell his breath. Sugar and cocoa and boy. Boy. I still had a few years before it all started. Transfixed, I couldn’t even bring myself to wince at his anger. How had I never noticed the graceful angles of his nose? The color of his eyes—so vividly green with flecks of dark blue, a shade of viridian I’d never seen before? The regal slopes of his cheekbones, so sharp as they outlined his mischievous face like pop art inside a thousand-dollar gold frame?
“Answer me, goddammit.” He punched the concrete near my face.
His knuckles were as swollen as golf balls by now. He’d recently started cursing for real. Not a lot, just enough to make me cringe. I stared at him, steadfast, knowing he’d never hurt me. He wrapped a hand around his injured fist and let out a frustrated howl, then dropped his forehead to mine, panting hard. We were both out of breath, our chests rising and falling in the same rhythm.
“Why?” His voice was a soft growl now. He knew he wasn’t going to get an answer. Our hair matted together, his penny brown
mane mixing with my dark curls. “Why’d you do this?”
I tried to wiggle my arms from out of the confines of his thighs so I could answer in sign language, but he pressed his legs against my body, locking me in place.
“No,” he growled, his voice thick with threat. “Use your words. You can. I know you can. Mom and Dad told me. Tell me why you did this.”
I opened my mouth, wanting so badly to answer his question. He was right, of course. I could speak. Physically, anyway. I knew because sometimes in the shower, or when otherwise completely alone, I would repeat words I loved, as practice. Just to prove I could, that I was capable of uttering them aloud, that I chose not to talk. I repeated the words, the sound of my voice sending small shudders of pleasure down my back.
Old books.
Fresh air (especially after the rain).
Watching the moon watching me back.
Seahorses.
Dad.
Edie.
Racer.
Knight.
Now, for the first time, Knight was demanding my words. I wanted to say them. More than that—I knew he deserved to hear them. But nothing came out. My mouth hung open, and the only thing flashing through my mind was, You don’t just seem to be stupid, you look it, too.
“Say it.” Knight shook my shoulders.
The hail faded into light rain, and my visibility cleared. His eyes were red-rimmed and tired. So tired. Tired because of me. Because I always got into stupid trouble he had to pull me out of.
He thought I’d tried to hurt myself. I hadn’t. I kept opening and closing my mouth like a fish, but the words wouldn’t come out. I tried to rip them from my mouth, my heart escalating, beating everywhere behind my ribs.
“Ahh…I….hmm…”
He stood up, pacing back and forth, threading his fingers in his thick, wet hair and tugging it in frustration.
“You’re so…” He shook his head, letting the drops fly everywhere. “So…”
I got up and ran toward him. I didn’t want to hear the rest of his sentence. I wasn’t keen on finding out what he thought of me. Because if he believed I’d driven straight into the car, hoping for a collision, he clearly thought I was way more screwed up than I was.
I grabbed his shoulder and twisted him around. He scowled.
I shook my head, frantic. “I didn’t see the car. I swear,” I signed.
“You could have died,” he screamed in my face, pounding his scarred knuckles over his heart. “You could have left me.”
“But I didn’t.” I used my hands, arms, fingers to reassure him.
My lips trembled. This was about so much more than us. This was about Rosie, his mother, too. Knight didn’t like people disappearing. Not even for a few days, to get better in the hospital.
“Thanks to you,” I signed. “You saved me.”
“Remember always, whenever, forever? What happened to that bullshit? Where’s your side of the bargain?”
He repeated my promise to him all those years ago, his voice dripping disdain. I opened my arms for a hug, and he stepped into it, melting into my body. We molded, like two distinct colors mixed together into something unique and true—a shade only we could paint with.
Knight buried his face in my hair, and I squeezed my eyes shut, imagining him doing it with someone else. Despite the chill, my blood ran hotter.
Mine.
I wasn’t only thinking it. My lips moved, shaping the word. I could almost hear the word. I tightened my hold on him.
“Ride or die,” he whispered into the shell of my ear.
I knew he meant his promise.
I also knew how unfair it was, because I didn’t know if I could save him if I had to.
If someone like Knight would ever need saving. Knight was a normal kid. He talked. He was athletic, outgoing, and oozed confidence. Edie had said he was so handsome, modeling scouts stopped Rosie at the mall and thrust their business cards in her hands, begging her to let them represent him. He was funny, charming, well-heeled, and rich beyond his wildest dreams. The world was his for the taking, and I knew one day he would.
I started crying in his arms. I wasn’t a crier. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d wept since Val left. But I couldn’t stop myself. I knew, then, that ours would not be a happily ever after.
He deserved more than a girl who couldn’t tell him how she felt.
He was perfect, and I was flawed.
“Promise me.” His lips touched my temple, his warm breath sending shivers down my body.
Shivers that felt different—like they filled my lower belly with lava. Promise him what? I wondered. I nodded yes anyway, eager to please him, though he hadn’t completed his sentence. My lips moved.
“I promise. I promise. I promise.”
Maybe that’s why he didn’t trust me.
Why he’d sneak into my bedroom that night—and every night, for the next six years—and wrap his arms around me, making sure I was really okay.
Sometimes he smelled of alcohol.
Sometimes of another girl. Fruity and sweet and different.
Oftentimes, he smelled of my heartbreak.
But he was always making sure I was safe.
And he always left before my dad knocked on my door to wake me up.
For the next six years, before jumping through my window, Knight would drop a kiss on my forehead in the exact same spot where shortly thereafter Dad would kiss me good morning, the heat of Knight’s lips still on my skin, making my face radiate.
I’d see him in school, his cocky swagger and whiplash-witty comebacks making girls drop their guard and panties. Tossing his shiny, thick mane as he showed off his pearly whites and endless dimples.
There were two Knight Coles.
One was mine.
The other everyone else’s.
And although he always spent recess with me, continuously protected me, forever treated me like a queen, I knew he was everyone’s king, and I only reigned in a small part of his life.
One night, when the moon was full and peering in at us through my window, my Knight kissed the sensitive skin beneath my ear.
“Moonshine,” he whispered. “You fill up the empty, dark space—like the moon owns the sky. It is quiet. It is bright. It doesn’t need to be a ball of flame to be noticed. It simply exists. It forever glows.”
He’d called me Moonshine every single day since.
I called him nothing, because I didn’t speak.
Maybe that’s how he knew, all those years later, that I’d lied—by omission. He wasn’t nothing. He was my everything.
Knight, 18; Luna, 19
“She’s not here. You can tuck your vagina back in, Cole.” Hunter Fitzpatrick yawned, flicking a red Solo cup against some tool’s head.
Said douchebag turned around from his conversation with a sophomore cheerleader, ready to talk smack. As soon as he saw that it was Hunter, he bit the inside of his cheek, glowering.
“Ew. Why so constipated?” Hunter growled in the Joker’s why-so-serious voice.
Downing the last of my fifth beer of the night, I pulled my gaze from the front door, tucking the empty bottle into the back pocket of some girl’s jeans. She turned around and laughed when she saw it was me.
I cupped and lit my joint, sucking on it as I watched the amber flickering under my nose. I passed the joint to Vaughn, releasing a plume of smoke and sinking back into the plush couch until it swallowed most of my upper body.
“Suck a dick,” I told Hunter, my voice hoarse from the smoke.
“Any tips from a pro?” he teased, mumbling “Sláinte” and knocking back a shot of something electric blue.
“Let me call your mom and ask,” I quipped.
“Friday is a busy night for her; better call Hunter’s sister.” Vaughn, who somehow still held the title of my best friend, had a profile like an eagle and a voice so low it felt like black smoke seeping into your ears. “Side note: Knight wasn’t looking at the door.”
I had been. But I was also high and drunk, and a little off guard. Nothing a few harmless flirts couldn’t fix.
“Sure, sure,” Hunter said in his Boston accent.
I pulled him into a headlock, messing his perfectly moussed, wheat blond hair.
There was just one crack in my unshakable, good-natured, billion-dollar smile, and hot-motherfucker-jock stereotype persona. A barely noticeable chip. You could see it from one angle. Only the one. And only when Luna Rexroth entered the room and our eyes met—for exactly the first half-second, before I rearranged my features back into my usual smug grin.
Other than that—as far as anyone else knew, at least—you couldn’t rattle me if you tried. And, seeing as I was an untouchable legend among the mortals inside the walls of All Saints High, many people did. Often.
Why I thought she’d be here was beyond my basic-ass logic. The shit I was smoking was obviously more powerful than a nice tall cocktail of bleach and antiperspirants. Moonshine didn’t frequent parties. She had no friends other than Vaughn and me, and she only hung out with us when we were riding solo, sans our harem of fangirls and shit-for-brains entourage.
Maybe I thought she’d come because summer break was crawling to its inevitable end. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone, and Luna was still dragging her feet about college.
Her dad told my dad he was trying to convince her to go to Boon College in North Carolina. It was highly populated with gifted students who had mild disabilities. She fit the profile perfectly. But she’d been accepted to Columbia, Berkeley, and UCLA as well. Personally, I found it damn near offensive she’d think about moving out of Todos Santos at all. There were a few academic establishments in San Diego, a stone’s throw away from us, that should do her just fine. Luckily, I knew Moonshine, and she’d never leave home, so it didn’t really matter.
“I’m in the mood for some ass.” Hunter slapped my thigh, probably sensing I was spending too much time in my head. He leaned toward the coffee table to grab his beer, elbowing Vaughn in the process. “You in?”
Vaughn stared at him blankly, as if the answer were obvious. With his icy, pale eyes and raven black hair, he looked like a dropout from a Twilight movie—a vibe a surprising amount of girls dug. More than anything, Vaughn had perfected the art of making you feel like a dumbass for asking him a simple question, the way he’d done to Hunter right now.