by Jessi Kirby
“The girl in the drawing,” I stammer. “Did you know her?”
“I did.” He says it in a way that makes it clear he isn’t going to elaborate. And then he glances at the sketch, just barely, before going back to making my drink, and I see it. A flicker of something. “Such a tiny thing, a glance,” Julianna wrote. And his glance says something.
Before I can form a response, the door opens, letting in a whoosh of cool air, and Trevor Collins steps in, shaking the rain from his hair. A smile breaks across his face when he sees me. “Hey, Frost. I thought that was your car outside.”
“Hi,” I manage. My mind is spinning a million miles a second with what I think I just saw. With what really has been right here in front of me this whole time. I’m so close to something, I know it. The last thing I need is to complicate it with Trevor Collins, cute as he looks with his hair all damp, and his eyes a vibrant blue against the gray outside. What I need is to keep talking to Josh. Ask him some more questions to be sure.
Trevor looks around at the empty café. “You alone? Where’s your partner in crime?”
“I don’t know,” I say curtly. “Either sick or ditching. She wasn’t at school today.” I turn my back to him and dig out a few dollars to pay, hoping he’s not planning on staying.
“Oh,” he says from behind me. “I was gonna head up to the mountain for a few runs, but it’s all gonna be slush now.” There’s a pause. “You want some company?”
The question zings straight to my stomach, makes my cheeks flame up. There’s no joking or pretense to it. I can hear the smile in his voice when he asks, picture it without turning around, and any other day—well, lately at least, I might’ve actually said okay. But it feels like I’m right on the edge of discovering something that would change everything, and I need to get back there.
I turn around. “Not today.” His smile takes a tumble, and the zing I felt turns into a stab of regret. I soften my tone a little. “I’m sorry—I just have a lot of work to do—my speech. Maybe another time?”
“Here you go,” Josh says before Trevor can answer.
I turn back to the counter and hand him my three dollars, trying to figure out how I can pick our sort-of conversation back up after Trevor leaves. But when Josh reaches out to take my money, all the thoughts in my head grind to a screeching halt. I only catch a glimpse of it when I put the money in his palm, but it’s enough to recognize it. On his forearm, buried in a maze of other tattoos, is a tiny triple spiral.
I gasp. Audibly.
“You okay?” he asks. Josh, Orion, I don’t know what to call him right now.
I nod wordlessly and he slides my cup across the counter to me. When I grab it and turn around, I almost run into Trevor. “Some other time then,” he mumbles. He looks through me, at Josh. “I’ll take a hot chocolate. To go.”
I wish I could explain that I’m not blowing him off, because I can see on his face that’s what he thinks is going on, and I feel awful about it, especially since this time he seemed sincere. Sincerely interested, even. But at the moment, the only thing my brain can do is try to reconcile the fact that Josh is Orion. Or Orion is Josh.
“See you tomorrow?” I ask, a cheery octave higher than normal.
“Sure,” Trevor says, measurably aloof now. I don’t blame him, but I don’t try to stop him either. He turns without saying anything else, and I do too, and we go our separate ways. With my hands shaking I head to the table in the far corner, where I can pretend to bury myself in work while sorting out the fact that the Orion Julianna wrote about is standing right here in this café, with a different name, and seems to be a whole different person than when she knew him.
I open up her journal to where I left off and get a pen out of my purse like I’m going to write something down. Trevor pays for his hot chocolate and glances over at me one more time just before he pushes out the door. I smile briefly and drop my eyes to the page in front of me, but I don’t read the words. I hardly even breathe. Trevor walks out the door and Josh busies himself with unloading the box of coffee bags, and I take a good long look at him from the safety of my corner.
For a second I think I can see him there. Orion. Not as he is now—barely thirty but already weighed down with life. But as he was with her. I can see him standing on the balcony under the stars, diving into the freezing lake, falling in love with a girl he could never have. I wonder what happened after. Who she chose before—
“Hey, I gotta go finish up in the back,” he says, breaking down the empty box in his hands. “Just yell if you need a refill.”
“Thanks,” I answer. And I leave it at that for now. Before I can ask him anything else, I have to know how it ended. The pages of the journal are a little damp from the rain, but the ink hasn’t smeared or bled. I take a deep breath, a sip of the too-hot chai, and brace myself for what comes next. For where the story ends.
15.
“I have been one acquainted with the night.”
—“ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT,” 1928
June 8
I woke up afraid today. Afraid of what I’ve done, of what it means, of what I feel, and of what I could lose because of it all. Shane has been my constant every day for the past four years of my life, and until now I thought he was my future, too. And it was safe, that thought, and known, and seemed like how it should be. I don’t want to lose the comfort of his hand sliding into mine or the smile on his face when he talks about what that future together will look like. The thing I can’t stand more than the thought of losing him is the thought of hurting him. I don’t want to know what his face will look like if I tell him what I’ve done. What I chose. I don’t think I could look him in the eye. But I don’t know if I have a choice in that anymore. I think I have to tell him that I stepped off the edge I’ve been balancing on since the night I met Orion. Because I don’t think there’s any coming back from that.
What I’m most afraid of, though, is that I don’t know if I want to come back from it. I’m afraid of wanting to sink deeper into it. Shane is all of the things I thought I wanted. Orion is freedom and possibility, and so many other things that feel like what I need. When I close my eyes I can still feel the warmth of his mouth on mine, and the heat of the water, and the cold of the night, all wrapped around us like we belonged to it, and I don’t want to let that go because it was the most intense thing I’ve ever felt.
But I couldn’t look at him right now either, because that night when he brought me home, I lied. I told him it was a mistake, that it never should have happened, and that I didn’t want to see him again.
“That’s what you really want?” he asked. Hurt washed over his face, pooled in his eyes, and I knew he didn’t believe me.
I closed mine a second so he wouldn’t see me waver. When I opened them again, I looked at him in the dark, and I said, “That’s what I need. I need to not see you again.” It was the last thing I said to him. And then I went into my house and I cried, because of the look on his face and the awful taste of my own words. It wasn’t what I wanted or needed.
I tried to fix it today. I called his house, but it just rang and rang until finally his uncle picked up. He said Orion had packed his bags first thing in the morning, told him he was going home, and that he wasn’t coming back. Maybe I should be relieved, but I only feel empty now.
Tomorrow I’ll seal this journal up and turn it in to Mr. Kinney to pack away for ten years. The day after, I’ll put on my graduation gown, walk down the aisle, and get my diploma. After that it’s blank, like the rest of the pages in this book. Empty. I was supposed to answer the question about what it is I plan to do with my life, and it was supposed to be something beautiful and filled with hope. Something I could look back on ten years from now to be reminded not to give up on the things I want most in life. What I’m afraid of now is that I’ll look back, and I’ll see that’s exactly what I’ve just done.
I sit there stunned. Angry, almost. That is what she did. She let the wrong one go. She lied t
o him and to herself about how she felt, and he left before she had a chance to tell him any different. He left, and she died, and that really was the last thing she said to him. I wonder what the last thing she said to Shane was. For all I know they died in the middle of a fight.
I hate it. This can’t be how it ends. When I took Julianna’s journal, I thought it was going to be the real words of a girl who was more like a myth in my mind. And it has been. But I also thought it would be the perfect love story of the perfect couple that disappeared together, which, as far as endings go, is tragic. But there was even something romantic about that too—them perishing together, like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde. I sometimes used to imagine that none of those couples really died, because they were together. That somehow, leaving the world with one’s true love allowed them a different kind of ending, where they lived on together in their own paradise, far from the real world that ended in tragedy. It was my way of making a happy ending, I guess. But there isn’t one here. The story I’ve always known was based on a different perception altogether. One that never accounted for Orion.
He comes out from the back just then, and I watch him from behind the journal. There are so many things I want to say. To ask. Why he didn’t fight for her. Didn’t even argue when she told him to leave. Wouldn’t he have? If he felt like she did? When did he come back to town, and why did he stay, even after she was gone?
Josh/Orion glances my way and I drop my eyes back to the journal. I’m scared to look at him because of what I know. I feel guilty for it. It’s one thing to know the secrets of someone you’ll never look in the eye. But it’s an entirely different thing to know things about the person standing in front of you. Painful things, that he’s probably tried to bury deep in work and art. Maybe that explains why he is the way he is—kind of distant, always with a hint of sadness to him, always alone. He’s one of those people who seem only halfway there, always listening to some low, wistful song in the background of his mind.
Behind the counter Josh grabs a big round mug, pours tea and then milk in, and takes it over to the steamer. He does it automatically, like he’s not thinking about it, so much as just going through the motions. I stop my deep character analysis when he turns with the mug on a saucer and heads my way. I pretend to be looking at a picture to my right. It’s part of the patchwork of art covering the walls. The still lifes and abstracts, paintings and sketches, all form the constantly evolving backdrop in the café. I’ve watched so many of my favorites move around on the walls to make places for new art, which is what I think this one that I’m looking at is. I’ve never noticed it before.
Clink. Josh sets the chai on the table and I look up into warm brown eyes. “Thought that one might be cold by now.” He nods at my full cup, and then his eyes flick to the journal, which is sitting facedown on the table. “Must be some absorbing work there.”
“Thanks,” I say, and look back at the painting because if I don’t focus on something besides him, I won’t be able to keep all of my questions to myself. And I need to think about all this before I say anything. If I say anything.
“That one’s something, isn’t it?” He’s looking at the painting too.
I nod. Where so many sunset paintings look peaceful and calm, melancholy is woven into every brushstroke of this one. It’s a twilight image of the familiar dark razor peak silhouettes of the Minarets, looking icy and stoic. The only warmth in the painting comes from a barely visible sliver of golden light behind the mountains. The last of the sun. Above that the sky pales, then deepens to violet, faintly lit by a delicate wash of stars and the tiny sliver of moon. It’s a skyline I’ve fallen asleep looking at most nights of my life, but the feeling in it is so lonely and sad it’s hard to believe it’s the same one.
Josh tilts his head one way and then the other, looking at it from slightly different angles. “It’s called Acquainted with the Night.”
“Like the Robert Frost poem,” I say, still looking at the painting. At the stars. “That fits.”
And it does. I can’t take my eyes off it. Not only does it capture the feel of the poem perfectly, but it seems to embody Frost’s whole view of nature, with its austere but beautiful indifference to us and our comparably tiny lives. The little control we actually have over them. “It’s a sad poem,” I say, glancing at Josh.
“Yeah? I don’t know it. But it feels like that, doesn’t it? Sad.”
His question hangs in the air above us a moment, and I’m not sure what to say. I want to ask him who the artist is. My eyes search the canvas for the answer, but there’s no signature that I can see. There is, however, something else. Something that takes my breath a second time, because I’ve already seen and recognized it once today. It’s tiny—barely discernable if you didn’t already know what it was: a set of three swirling spirals brushed into the dark silhouette of a mountain. It matches the one sketched on the pages of Julianna’s journal—like a signature, almost, beginning with the day she wrote about seeing it on Orion’s arm. The day that she said she knew something had changed in her.
“Did you paint it?” I ask him. It’s an innocent enough question, but I watch closely for his reaction, because I think he’s going to say no. Because I think I know who did.
“No,” he says evenly. “My uncle brought it back for me from his last vacation.”
He hasn’t given me any reason to doubt his honesty. He told me the truth when I asked him about the sketch, but I don’t believe him about this. That spiral in the corner has to be Julianna’s. I search my memory for any mention she may have made of doing a painting for Orion. I don’t recall anything, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t. Maybe that was what she meant when she said she tried to fix it. Maybe she went home and painted this, and wanted to give it to him. To see him again. Maybe she did, and that last entry wasn’t the end of the story. And he’s kept it all these years—his secret and hers.
“It’s funny. I’ve never noticed it before,” I say. “Is it new? Did he just give it to you?” Somewhere inside my head I realize I sound more like I’m interrogating than making polite conversation, but the questions come out before I can stop them.
“It’s new to the wall,” he says. “I just put it up a few days ago. But he brought it back from a trip last summer.”
Now it feels like he’s covering. “Trip to where?” I ask. “Where did he get it?”
He looks at me, mildly surprised, or maybe annoyed by my sudden interest. “Some little hippie town on the coast near Hearst Castle. I don’t remember what it’s called. He goes every year.”
It’s quiet as we both look at the painting again. And that’s when I notice something else about it that cannot possibly be a coincidence. Or an accident.
“Anyway,” he says, filling the silence, “I’ve got a lot to do before I close tonight.”
He turns to go, and I know I should just leave it at that. Figure out exactly what I think is going on before I go any further or ask any more questions, but I can’t stop myself. “Hey, Josh?” I say, though now it sounds wrong to me.
He pauses. Looks over his shoulder at me. “Yeah?”
“Did you ever notice the constellation in that painting?”
He glances at it, then back to me. Shakes his head. “No. You see one in it?”
I nod, making sure I look right at him. “I do. I see Orion.”
16.
“A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed.”
—“Etherealizing,” 1947
By the time I burst through the double doors at school, sleep-deprived and wired on too much coffee, I’ve convinced myself that I’m either crazy or a genius because of where the words “what if” led me after I left Kismet yesterday. When I pointed out the constellation in the painting to Orion, he said nothing. He just dropped his eyes and ducked into the back room. I stayed then, leaving my chai untouched, listening to the rain pour down outside, and looking into the painting. The pa
inting that had to have been done by her. All the while wondering—what if?
What if he wasn’t hiding anything? What if he wasn’t lying about the painting? If his uncle really did bring it back from vacation? What would that mean?
And then—
What if there is more to the story? More than what I know, or what she wrote down. More—that happened after. What if I was the one who ended up with all the pieces to figure it out? Who was given the chance to see how they fit together? What if, after all these years, I found her journal for a reason. I know it’s impossible to change the past, but what if I could uncover a version that’s been hidden all this time. One that leads me to the most important question of all:
What if Julianna Farnetti is still alive?
I know it sounds insane. I’m still not sure how I’ll be able to say this out loud, even to Kat. In the empty hallway, under the bad fluorescent lights, the question seems even more ludicrous in my mind. But then it doesn’t. That “what if” kept me up all night, sent me to my computer to dredge up every article I could find on Shane and Julianna’s wreck: the location of the Jeep in the icy river, the likelihood they’d been swept down it into the lake, where it was near impossible they’d ever be found. And then, the inarguable fact that they never were. That they disappeared into the swirling spring night, just like that. Case closed.
Or maybe not. Each time I tried to tell myself it wasn’t possible, my mind went back to the painting hanging on the wall at Kismet. The palpable sadness in it, Orion visible in the sky, but mostly, the title. Frost’s title. I’d remembered it being a sad poem, but when I got home, the first thing I did was open up my anthology to “Acquainted with the Night,” and when I sat down to read his words, it was with a different set of eyes. As crazy as it sounds, I swear I could hear her voice in them.