Natalie looked around for Mik, but he wasn’t shadowing Jaycee for once. “So what happened with Mik in the hospital? You guys looked like you might’ve been kissing.”
Jaycee’s face fell. “Nothing. Happened.”
Natalie cocked her head. “Is that what you meant by ‘Like I’d know how to do that’? Are you…scared to kiss Mik?”
“Hey.”
“Intimidated?” Natalie asked. Jaycee climbed up on the edge instead of answering. Natalie took it as a confirmation. “Get down. The concrete is crumbling.”
Jaycee turned and jumped inside the chute. “Ow, my knees…”
“Serves you right.” Natalie sighed. “Now how are you going to get out of there?”
“I’ll find my way.”
“Are you always going to take off when we’re in the middle of a serious conversation?”
“Yes.” Jaycee started to walk down the chute. Natalie walked the path above, tagging along in Jaycee’s adventures just like when she was a kid. It had been her first bold mission to keep Jaycee Strangelove from succumbing to bad planning, but one that had always felt important. And exciting. Like she’d found her life’s calling.
“Freeze!” Natalie suddenly yelled when she saw snakelike wires across a puddle, blocking the path of the chute. “There are downed wires. Look.”
Jaycee stepped close to the water. “They don’t look live.”
“Jayce…”
Jaycee sat down, pulling her knees into her chest, and sighing loud.
“I’m going to get Mik to help pull you out.”
“No, wait. Don’t.” Jaycee’s expression was desperate. “I’m not good at being around him anymore. There’s too much…stuff between us.”
“It’s called ‘chemistry.’ And you two have enough of it to start your own meth lab.”
Jaycee blushed. “There’s other stuff too. You know I can’t date him. I’d be a walking made-for-TV movie. Girl falls for boy who killed her brother. Ugh.”
“Jake killed Jake.” Natalie muttered the words, but that wasn’t enough. “Jake killed Jake!” she yelled.
“Yeah, but—”
“Listen. I’ve been in therapy for five years because of the day your brother flipped off that swing set. Did I know that he was drinking? Yes. Should I have said something sooner? Of course. Did I have any idea that he was about to kill himself? No!” Natalie leaned over the edge, feeling fired up and more sure of herself than she’d been in a long time. “In the end, he climbed up there. He jumped.”
“I guess.”
“No, really. Jake was a suicide bomber, Jaycee. We are all his collateral damage.”
Jaycee stood up, and for a minute, Natalie thought the girl might start screaming or scurry up the side of the chute to wrestle her to the ground. Instead, Jaycee’s scowl melted a little. It twisted and turned into a rough, heavy smile. “Jake killed Jake?”
“Yes. And that, my friend, is the butt end of it.” Natalie had so much trouble not grinning back at Jaycee. “Wow, I feel better. Now I’m going to get Mik, and he’s had a head injury, so be nice.” Natalie turned to leave, but Jaycee called out.
“Just so you know, I think you did figure out how to disapparate. After the railing fell, I couldn’t move. And then suddenly we were downstairs, saving him. You magicked us there. That’s why you’re Harry.”
Natalie sighed. “You forget that Hermione can do magic too.”
“Yeah, but Harry saves the day. You saved us all this morning.”
Natalie found herself blushing. “This time, maybe, but I was still terrified. And last time—”
“Nat, everyone’s afraid. Everyone’s afraid all the time.”
“You’re not.”
“Are you kidding me? I’m actually thinking about turning my back on Mik because the idea of kissing him petrifies me. What if I suck at it?” Jaycee’s mouth stayed open, but her voice seemed to zoom off without her. “That, ugh, sounds really bad when I say it aloud.”
Natalie nodded solemnly. “They tell me confession is good for the soul. What if I tell you the things I can’t tell myself and vice versa?”
Jaycee smiled impishly. “That might work.”
Natalie was about to leave, but then she leaned over the edge. “No tongue.”
“Huh?”
“Too much tongue is the fastest way to make a kiss feel sloppy. Work up to the tongue slowly.”
Jaycee put her hands over her face and yelled, but Natalie could tell that she was also laughing in there somewhere. She left with such a sense of pride in her chest that she wanted a goddamn picture of it.
Mik wasn’t really that far. He was never far when it came to Jaycee. Natalie pointed him in the direction of Jaycee’s most recent danger, but this time, she didn’t go along to chaperone.
Instead Natalie stood by the oval brick of what was once a fountain. If she closed her eyes, she felt as stripped as Geauga Lake. She could take down all the buildings and rides—all her beautiful plans—and still be right here, foundations intact.
She thought about her three matching suitcases full of Jaycee-styled clothes and shuddered. She had some shopping to do over the next eleven days. No grunge clothes this time. No uptight clothes. Maybe she could mix and match. What would a cardigan look like with holey jeans? Could she pull off a pixie haircut? She’d wanted one for years, and her mom had expertly talked her out of it each time. Now she had to do it.
But first? She had to go break up with Zach.
Natalie looked toward the top of the front entrance where Bishop and Zach’s silhouettes stood out against the setting sun. Bishop was spray painting. Zach was sitting beside him, swinging his legs. The words came to her sort of magically as she felt the sun’s rays light up her cheeks.
I’m Natalie, she’d say to the people she met in New York. And it’s been a rough few years.
Chapter 55
Jaycee
Before today, the universe had killed Jake.
It was my parents’ leniency or whoever bought him the beer. Or it was Natalie’s fault for not telling someone that he was drinking. Maybe it was God’s fault or whoever endowed him with that revving, broken-braked personality. Or maybe all of that was crap, and Mik was to blame because he had been the one to dare him.
I buried my head in the fold of my arms.
No.
Natalie was right; Jake killed Jake, and now I had to live with that crystal clarity. That’s what Natalie brought to my madness: method. After all, I might have been the one who came up with the idea to make a video of us discovering King Tut’s tomb, and I was definitely the one who spent all my money on a camera, but Natalie did the research. She painted all the vases and turned a cardboard boot box into the most elaborate, bejeweled sarcophagus imaginable.
And she was the one who watched the YouTube video over and over so that she could teach me how to get out of my straitjacket.
I moved the toe of my Chucks toward the puddle. Then I hunkered and stared at the water. Reaching one finger then two, I was about to touch the surface but pulled back. I didn’t actually want to die. I never did. I just didn’t want to feel so separated from my brother. So left behind. “Sorry, Jake,” I muttered at the dark water. “Guess you’re on your own.”
Mik jumped into the chute, exploding the narrow space with the sound of his boots.
I held up my hands in surrender. “I’m not going to touch the puddle. Promise.”
He didn’t say anything. Looking up from where I was crouched, he seemed even more like the boy I used to know. The boy who came to our house dressed as the headless horseman one Halloween, wearing an actual hollowed-out pumpkin on his head and his father’s long, black trench coat. I might have told him that I loved his costume, and he might have worn that trench coat ever since.
I stood up, and he moved closer.
My whole body leaned in, and I knew I couldn’t trust myself around him. Was that a good thing? A bad thing? “Mik…” I paused. “Ryan?”
“Better,” he said quietly. “Are you going to let me explain about that day?”
“Natalie already told me. Jake was being a jerk to you.” I turned and started walking down the chute, but his voice stopped me.
“Melanie Howard.”
“What?” I snapped, swinging around, and then, “Who?”
“When I started high school, Jake wanted to hang out again like we’d never stopped. Only he wanted me to fit in with his new friends. Drink with them. Date the same girls. Go on the urbex weekends. You’ve met Tyler, so you can imagine how appealing that idea was. Jake was always pissed at me, and that day, graduation day, he kept shoving beers in my hand and sending Melanie Howard over to talk to me. I tried to tell Jake to leave me alone, but he just kept pushing. I didn’t know how much he’d had to drink. And I said that dare to get him off my back for five minutes. He’d done that flip a hundred times before. We both had.”
Mik took a jagged breath, and emotion ripped through his voice. “It was his fault.”
“I know.” I leaned against the chute and put my hands over my eyes. “But that doesn’t make me feel better.” Would anything ever make me feel better? I felt Mik’s hands on my arms, and my sneakers slipped on the curved bottom of the chute as I looked at him closely, newly. “You should have told me a long time ago.”
“Couldn’t,” he said. “I…my feelings made it impossible to…say anything.”
“I still don’t know much about you, Mi—Ryan.”
“So ask me. Ask me anything.”
I dug into my mountain of questions. “Start with where you live. Where do you go when you’re not with us?”
“Home. I live with my parents in the summer. During the school year, I live near here. I go to Kent. I’m premed, starting my junior year. I talk much more when I’m up here. It’s easier when people don’t assume that I won’t. What else?” he asked.
I liked his voice. A lot. I liked the way he looked while leaning in. I liked him.
“I’m turning twenty-one in three weeks,” he added.
“Why are you studying medicine? You want to be a doctor?”
“Something like that,” he said, blushing. “I like the healing process. It’s fascinating.”
“But you don’t like talking to people.”
“Strangers I don’t mind. The more I care about someone, the harder it is to…” His voice disappeared, and he kissed me. And I didn’t do a thing. Mik’s lips met the wall of mine, and I froze. He stopped short. “You know, Jayce, when I imagined this, you kissed me back.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Mik stepped back. His boot hit the water, and he yelled and stamped. “Those wires are definitely live.” He deadlifted my hips toward the top of the chute. I grabbed the wall and climbed over the top.
On the other side, I scrambled away while Mik used his height and reach to get himself out. I half expected Natalie to appear and tell me that she’d seen everything, and that I’d both completely botched my first kiss and was swiftly ruining everything with Mik.
My heart hammered painfully as I watched him trip on his trench coat, only to rip it free and leave it as a black puddle by the edge of the chute. He started to walk away, and then he turned back around, his face unlit. We were standing in the long twilight shadow of the fake, old west building.
“You’re giving me mixed messages. Last night in the hotel, you were the one who started touching me and—”
“That was a game. A series of dares,” I said in a rush, attempting to joke.
“A game.” His tone was either furious or wounded. Maybe both.
I looked down, feeling a burn across my cheeks. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Ryan. I’ve never done anything with anyone. Never been on a date. You’ve probably had sex.”
I couldn’t look at him. Sometimes I felt like a girl with a silly crush around him…but not always. No. Sometimes, when I got too close, I wanted to take him down and claim him like a flag.
He sighed. “Well, this is going to be awkward, but I did say you could ask me anything. Yes, I’ve had sex. My ex-girlfriend’s name is Sam. We met at school and dated for a year.”
Dammit. She even had a cool name. I broke my hair free from its ponytail. A year? I might as well jump back in the chute. “So why aren’t you still together?”
“Because last June, I spent the whole night walking around with a girl who proved that my feelings for Sam were nothing.”
I glanced at him. “That night meant something to you?”
“Meant something? I had a crush on you when we were kids, Jaycee. It’s not a crush anymore.”
The words looked like they hurt him, and I reached out. My fingers wrapped around his wrist, touching the burn scar that ran up the inside of his right forearm.
“The bottle rocket,” he said as if to explain.
“I remember.”
Jake and Mik were setting off fireworks in the backyard, and one didn’t pop. It skipped into the grass. Jake went to pick it up, but then Mik—or he was Ryan then—slapped it out of Jake’s hand, and it went off, setting his sleeve on fire. I had held his arm under the kitchen faucet while Jake went to get Dad so that we could take Ryan to the hospital. He was shaking so hard, and I told him to just cry already, because in trying not to, he’d bitten his lip bloody.
A flood of knowing Mik came with the memory, and not just knowing him as a kid but the person he was now. He was still the boy who’d rather bite himself than reveal too much.
“I wasn’t trying to give you mixed messages.” My fingers went to his stomach, to the edge of his shirt, daring him like I had on the hotel room floor. A game, I thought. Was that the answer to beating my fear? Natalie would kill me if she knew I was boosting my courage this way. But whatever, because Mik caught on. He reached for my stomach, touching me in a way that was stolen from the previous night.
I slipped my hands around his back, and he did the same. We were chest to chest, and I kissed his neck, damp with sweat. He kissed my neck in return, and my heart blazed as I reached for something more than a dare. A truth. Maybe Natalie would be proud.
“When you put your hands in my hair,” I whispered, “I feel like I’m falling open.”
He made a deep sound in his throat, and his fingers slid up to the back of my head. I wondered if that was his next move, but it wasn’t. He had a truth for me.
“Stop hurting yourself. It’s killing me.”
I leaned away so that I could see his face, planning on telling him what I told Natalie, my dad, myself: that I was never actually trying to hurt myself. But that’s not what came out.
“I was trying to feel closer to him.” The tears appeared, the silent ones that never asked permission, and I realized for the first time that they had nothing to do with Jake. They were my tears. For me, about me. They sprung from all my swallowed-back and buried feelings. Tears for everything I pushed aside so that I could spend every waking hour chasing a ghost.
I kissed Mik, and the suddenness of wanting his lips made me smile and then laugh. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll get better at this, I swear.”
And then I did.
I kissed him hard and with everything that ached. I wound my fists into the front of his shirt and pressed him back and pulled him into me, and I was aware of his hands through my hair and our bodies getting hotter, and then his back slammed into something because I’d pushed him all the way against the porch brace of the old west house.
It creaked. Moaned. And I ripped the neck of Mik’s shirt as I hauled us away from the collapsing porch.
We stared, still wound up.
“Was that more like you imagined?” I asked.
“Yeah.
” His voice cracked.
Chapter 56
Zach
Zach and Bishop watched the old west collapse. They had climbed the redbrick towers at the entrance and were standing on the roof. It was soggy in spots but otherwise surprisingly sound.
Bishop had been busy painting over a nasty bit of graffiti on the teal dome top of one of the side buildings when they heard the breaking wood of the old west’s porch snapping off. A few moments later, the rest of the building went down with a few cracks and snarls and a huge exhausting puff of dust. The gnarliest part was that Mik and Jaycee barely stopped kissing long enough to get out of the way.
Natalie rushed over. “What was that crashing?” she called up.
Zach pointed toward the spot where the old west had been. “It’s just Mik and Jaycee’s love taking down the world.”
“What’s happening?” she yelled. “I can’t see anything from down here. Are they okay?”
“Oh yeah,” Bishop said, squinting. “They’re kissing again.”
Natalie cheered, dancing in a circle and waving her hands in the air.
“Do you ever feel like whatever’s happening between them is way bigger than the rest of us?” Zach asked.
“Yes,” Bishop and Natalie said together like they were both surprised Zach had noticed.
“Do they remind you of Marrakesh?” Zach asked.
Bishop stopped spray painting one of the stencils. He glanced at Zach from the side.
“Stupid question. Everything makes you think about Marrakesh,” Zach answered for him.
“Mostly not in a good way,” Bishop said. “It was always intense between us. Everything dire. I never just went to visit her and gave her a hug and watched a movie. I’d always find her singing at the top of her lungs or cutting herself.” He started painting again but kept talking. “One time, I grabbed the knife and started cutting my arm and said that I wouldn’t stop until she promised me she’d never cut herself again.”
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