“He’ll still follow me home. Corner me at my door. Make me take him back. I’m sorry, I know this sounds crazy—”
“It doesn’t sound crazy. I actually kind of hate that word.” He looked down, playing with a patchwork quilt at the end of his bed. “It sounds like you’ve been scared for a really long time. Trust me, I know the feeling.”
Ruby’s breath faltered. She thought of that day, in the junior hallway, when they’d danced, and Shane’s mask had fallen away. The sadness in his eyes had mirrored her own. Now he wouldn’t meet her gaze, and he wouldn’t stop playing with his blanket. The quilt was made up of multicolored squares, and Ruby caught a glimpse of words woven into the corner.
For Shane, with love.
“Your mother?” she asked, and maybe she was prying a little. Maybe she’d heard rumors at school about Shane’s mother disappearing in the night. One minute corporeal, and then vapor.
And then wind.
“She made one for each of us,” he said, folding the corner of the blanket over, so Ruby couldn’t see his name woven into it. She realized she was sitting on one of the patches, and she lifted it out from under her, out of respect.
“Is she . . .” Ruby trailed off, unsure of how to finish the question.
“She left.”
“Oh.” A beat. “My father’s gone too.”
“Oh yeah?” Shane ran a hand through his hair. “I was, um. I was being euphemistic.”
Ruby’s heart tripped over itself. Paused, then quickened to make up for the lapse. For a second, she thought she could tell him everything. The dark, dirty truth about the night her father disappeared. But Ruby had already made herself out to be the victim in the Parker scenario, and even if she was, she hated talking about herself like that. Like boys could wrap her up in their sticky little webs and make her do whatever they wanted. Suffocate her. Siphon her blood, bit by bit. She’d broken free of her father’s web, and she’d break free of Parker’s, too, with or without Shane’s help.
Right now, she wanted to help him. “You should tell me about your mother,” she said.
“I should?” Shane cocked his eyebrow. “And why is that?”
“Because you don’t want this weight on your chest.” Ruby squeezed his hands. “Trust me, I’ve been walking around for months, feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest. And all this time, I’ve been blaming it on Parker being a stalker—”
“He is a stalker.”
Ruby nodded, but the gesture was jerky, more a puppet’s movement than a person’s. “Parker being Parker, well. That’s on him. But I’ve been keeping it a secret. I’ve been keeping it a secret for him, and I didn’t even realize that until I let it out.” She looked up, meeting Shane’s gaze. “So tell me about your mom.”
He laughed, but it faded quickly. “She loved taking us to the circus,” he began. “She used to make up stories about the animals, and when Bri worried about the tightrope walkers falling, she told us they had invisible wings.” He swallowed, toying with the fraying edge of his T-shirt. It was black, like his hair, and Ruby wanted to peel it off him and wear it to bed. Instead she sat very still, listening quietly as he spoke. “Then we got older, and she started to read about how badly the animals were treated. She said she could see holes in the tightrope walkers’ wings. One year, when I was eight, I went to her room, all ready to go, and she was lying in bed, still wearing her nightgown.”
“Was she . . .”
“What, depressed?” Shane huffed bitterly. “My mother was the happiest person I’ve ever known. She was always telling us stories or singing us songs. But sometimes she’d lie down in bed, and it was like nothing could get her out. Like the entire big-top tent came falling down around her, and she couldn’t find the exit.” He glanced at Ruby. “Like an elephant was sitting on her chest.”
Ruby smiled, a soft, feathery thing that fluttered away in an instant. She could almost envision Shane’s mother, dark-haired and bright-eyed, trying to explain to her children how depression felt. It was sweet, and it was heartbreaking, and Ruby wanted to slip into the memory and cradle Shane when his mother couldn’t.
“I decided not to go that year,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “I told my dad I was staying home, but I didn’t tell my mom. I wanted to bring the circus to her. So I gathered up all my stuffed tigers and elephants, and I even put on a top hat, like I was the ringleader.” He paused, grinning. But his hands trembled as he said, “While I was setting up, she went to take a bath. Sometimes, on the darkest of days, it helped, you know? To light a dozen candles and surround herself in warmth. But it was weird, because the faucet was on for so long, I thought, it must be cold by now. She must be freezing to death.”
Another pause.
“She didn’t answer when I knocked. But the lock on the door is fussy, and if you push hard enough, you can kind of, um . . . override it. I pushed, and the door came open, and the entire bath was pink. I told myself that she’d put food coloring in there. She did that when we were kids and Bri would have a fit about taking a bath. Mom would pretend it was the ocean and stain the water blue. Get plastic sharks and dolphins and make them dive into the air. By the end of it, Bri would be laughing and splashing and neither one of us would want to get out.”
“It wasn’t food coloring,” Ruby said. “Was it?”
Shane shook his head. “I probably knew it, deep down. But it’s so funny, the tricks your mind plays on you in those moments.”
Ruby bit her lip. She knew a thing or two about going into shock. The mind wandered, taking you into curious places, some of them very dark, and some of them weirdly light. “What did you do?” she asked after a minute, sliding her thumb over Shane’s finger.
He jerked away, startled. “I called the police and I got all the water out of the tub. I couldn’t find any bandages, but she was wearing this long lace dress, and I tore off the bottom of it, to bind her wrists. I kept thinking, ‘She’s going to be mad at me for ruining her dress,’ but by the time the ambulance arrived, I realized I was hoping she’d be mad at me, because if she wasn’t . . .”
“That must’ve been terrifying.”
“It was . . . an impossibility come to life,” he said. “But so much realer than anything else.”
“Brighter, and more vivid.”
“Yes.” He looked up, into her eyes. “How did you know that?”
Ruby shrugged, suddenly coy. “Same way I knew to wear strawberries the first day we met. The universe told me.”
He smiled, looking down at his quilt. In one of the patches, two dark-haired babies held hands, one dressed in white, one dressed in black. “The thing about fear is, it doesn’t go away once the most terrible thing has happened. It compounds, so you expect more terrible things to happen. You wait for them.”
“Brianna,” Ruby whispered, and she wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. Brianna wasn’t standing on the other side of the window. She wasn’t knocking on the door. Still, from the moment Shane had mentioned his mother lying in the bathtub, Ruby had envisioned Brianna floating there. Wearing a long lace dress. Mimicking Mrs. Ferrick the way another girl might dress up in her mother’s wedding dress. Pull on a string of pearls. Dance around in too-big shoes.
“Bri’s a lot like our mother,” Shane said. “Too much like her, if you want the truth. They both shake hands with tree branches, and they both dance at midnight in the garden. They did,” he corrected, as if remembering his mother had slipped into another plane of existence and wasn’t waiting for him in the next room.
Ruby related to this. After her father’s disappearance, she’d woken up morning after morning, forgetting he was gone. It happened for days, then weeks, then months.
Eventually, the truth sank in.
“I know that Bri isn’t my mother, and she’s never once spoken about leaving, but still, I worry about it.” He lowered his head. “Every time I hear the bathtub running, I sit perfectly still, listening. I can see her in there, lying in the wa
ter, and I . . .”
Ruby took hold of his hands. Just like that, her fingers were gliding up his arms, into his hair. She lowered her forehead to his. “We won’t let anything happen to her, okay? I promise.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” Shane’s hands were warm as they slid over hers. “We’re going to stop being scared. Together.”
“And then?” Ruby asked, breathless. “After we’ve stopped being scared?”
Shane grinned. It was a Cheshire cat smile, a crescent moon curving across his face. It was mischief and magic combined. “Then we’ll just be together.”
She inhaled, fingers curling into his hair. She wanted to protect him. From sadness. From pain. From the absolute horror of knowing that a loved one was never coming back, except in nightmares. “What about Parker?”
Shane leaned in. Lips close to hers, he said, “Parker Addison is a grain of sand in a land of pyramids and gods. All you have to do is wait for the wind, and he’ll blow away.”
“I’ve been waiting for the wind for so long. Couldn’t we just . . .” She lowered her lips to his neck, and when she exhaled, she knew he could feel it.
“Ruby—”
“Is that my name?”
“Strawberry,” he drawled, low and sultry, and Ruby’s body flushed with heat. She felt like a moon goddess in a land of pyramids and sand, overflowing with light, swelling with longing.
Then Shane trailed his lips along her jawline, whispering, “Tell me what you want,” and her entire body froze. Her heart felt heavy under the weight of desire. Of danger.
She said, “I don’t know.”
“That’s all right.” He pulled back, lifting her chin with his fingers. “You don’t have to know.”
“I don’t?” No one, in the history of Ruby’s existence, had told her that it was okay to be unsure. To not know what she wanted. To give herself space to find out. “Are you mad?”
“Are you kidding?” He laughed. “Ever since I met you, I’ve been telling myself this story about you showing up at my window. I knew it was a fantasy. I knew this impossibly beautiful, impossibly powerful girl wasn’t going to climb into my bedroom, just because I willed it so.”
“And yet . . .”
“You came.” He kissed her nose. “You appeared, and it was so much better than anything my memory could conjure. So much better than anything my imagination could create. You were the opposite of all my nightmares, the antidote to all my fears.”
Ruby knew it, in that moment. He was the great love of her life. She could see their future splayed out before them: a grand departure from the city, a list of off-the-wall jobs they’d acquire from town to town. Always discovering new places, eating new kinds of food. Feeding it to each other with their hands. Kids, maybe, way down the line. Ruby wasn’t sure yet. But she was sure of him, in a way that she probably shouldn’t have been.
They’d only just met.
Still, she knew in her gut they were meant for each other, like she knew Parker would hurt her if he ever found out about them. That was the tricky part. How were they going to get her away from him?
And so, that night, after they’d crawled under Shane’s covers, they whispered of liberation. They fell asleep as the sun started to rise. For the first time since her father disappeared, Ruby slept without nightmares, and without waking up terrified. And when she did wake, once, at the sound of a dog barking outside, Shane just followed her body, curving into her. She could feel that he wanted her. As he pressed against her back, his blood shifted. But he didn’t try to take. No fingers slipped into the opening of her shirt. No lips moaned, “Please?” He even scooted away a little, to keep her from feeling uncomfortable. But Ruby pulled him back, drawing his hand up to her heart, reveling in the feeling of being safe and wanted at the same time. And she realized that she would do anything to get away from Parker and keep stealing these moments with the love of her life.
Anything.
18.
STORM CHASER
Juniper felt seasick. Her vision blurred, her stomach churning. Of all the secrets Ruby had kept from her, this was the worst. “You were in love with him. You knew Shane Ferrick for all of two seconds, and you fell for him, just like you did with Parker.”
“Shane wasn’t anything like Parker,” Ruby snapped, her voice defensive. “He was my greatest protector, the antidote to all my fears.”
“And how did that work out for you? Did he make that video to protect you? Did he show it to the entire school because—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then tell me, Ruby! Tell me something. Because all this time, I’ve been thinking of you as the victim. As the girl who got swept up in a hurricane, until your body was twisted and your clothing was torn and you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face. But now . . .”
“Say it,” Ruby taunted, stepping closer. “Tell me I deserve what people do to me. Tell me it’s my fault.”
“I’m not saying that! But my God, there are people who board up their windows when they hear a storm is coming, and there are people who race out the front door.”
“And me?”
“You climb to the roof with a pitchfork in your hands. You summon the lightning. You chase the storm.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong, Juniper. I don’t chase the storm. I am the storm. I am a goddess in a land of pyramids and sand, and if I want, I can make all this blow away with the wind.”
Juniper swallowed, staggering backwards. “He’s still in your head,” she said bitterly. “You’ve made him into a hero, like you did with Parker. Like you did with your dad.”
“Ah, now we’ve come to the heart of it, haven’t we? The real reason you turned in my father.”
“I was trying to protect you,” Juniper said, but her chest was flushing with heat. She had this weird, tickling feeling at the base of her neck, like Ruby knew something she should know, something she should’ve known for years. “He was hurting you.”
“Yes, but how long had he been hurting me? How long did you know it was happening and do nothing?”
“I didn’t!” Juniper insisted, and that was the truth. All she’d ever had were her suspicions. Suspicions, and that same tickling feeling at the base of her neck, telling her she should know something.
Ruby’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You waited until I was dating Parker, and then you turned my father in. Why?”
“It was a coincidence. Or . . . I don’t know, maybe I recognized something in Parker, something that reminded me of your dad. It takes a certain kind of person to toss a kid into a row of garbage cans and then pull you into his arms without batting an eye. Maybe I thought some sort of cycle was repeating.”
“Right.” Ruby huffed. “Like I’m a chapter in a psychology textbook titled ‘Daddy Issues.’ Like I’m not a person at all.”
“You’re a person.” Juniper stepped forward. She wanted to take Ruby’s hands again. Pull her close, until they were looking into each other’s eyes and seeing the truth there. Feeling it. “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known. You’re wild and wonderful and a little bit wicked, and my life has been so much better for having you in it. I would’ve spent my childhood curled up in my room, reading about adventures instead of having them. Every time you tapped on my window—”
“Oh, so it’s okay to climb through some people’s windows?”
“Of course it is. If you know them.”
“But I didn’t know you,” Ruby countered, and that was true. The first time she’d tapped on Juniper’s window, the two hadn’t even been friends. They’d been classmates. But earlier that day, when their third-grade teacher had told them they’d be making family trees for an ancestry project, Juniper had burst into tears and raced from the class. She hadn’t heard that Ruby Valentine (the person next to her, alphabetically, on the class list) had been assigned to be her partner. She’d never expected to see that pale face staring through her window, brea
th fogging up the glass. And, in typical Juniper fashion, she chose not to open the window and risk letting a stranger into her room. Instead she drew a question mark on the glass, like some kind of Batman villain, and Ruby, upon seeing it, started to laugh.
“Let me in,” she mouthed in grand, exaggerated movements. Then she tapped—tap, tap, tap—until Juniper opened the window.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “And how did you find my house?”
“I looked you up,” Ruby said, climbing onto the bed. “I needed to know why you cried. Was it the family tree project? Are you an orphan?”
“That’s rude. You can’t just ask that.”
“Why not? Orphans are badasses.” Ruby said it so casually, like swearing was a normal thing to do on a stranger’s bed in the middle of the night. Like they were twenty-five-year-olds about to light up cigarettes. “Harry was an orphan,” she added, plucking The Chamber of Secrets from Juniper’s bedside table. “Ooh, this is a good one. Hey, guess what I did?”
“What?” Juniper asked, not even trying to follow her classmate’s train of thought. Instead she watched Ruby pull a stack of photos out of her pocket. “I found these in my basement,” Ruby said. “I pretended it was a chamber of secrets and I dug through these boxes and I found these pictures of my great-grandparents in Ireland. For the project!”
Ah, so there was a logic to Ruby’s meandering thoughts. Still, Juniper didn’t feel better as understanding dawned. Tears were welling in her eyes, and to her absolute surprise, Ruby lifted a finger to her lashes, catching one before it fell.
“Make a wish.”
“What?” Juniper was so startled, she stopped feeling sad for a second. “It’s not an eyelash.”
“Tears are better! That’s why they always work in fairy tales. They’re, like, pure emotion. That’s what my mother says.” Ruby smiled, her freckled nose crinkling. “She says crying is, um, bringing your emotions into the light. You can see all your feelings glittering in a single tear, and if you wish on it, the universe will listen, because it knows you feel something honest. So . . . blow.”
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