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“Don’t tell her that. She’ll take you up on the offer sometime.”
“I always wanted a sibling.” I let my eyes close heavily. “I think you were the closest thing I had to that.”
“Just what I wanted to hear.”
I’m not sure why he sounds so bitter about it. Like, am I really that bad? “Well, until Corrine. Then I kind of realized that she and I are like siblings. You and I weren’t, after all.”
“Yeah?” he asks in a quiet, hopeful voice.
“I wish there was a way to have you both,” I mumble, an inch from sleep.
If he says something else, I don’t hear it. I hover somewhere in that in-between stage of awake and asleep where I could tip either way until, over a short bit of time, I feel like I’m literally tipping one way. I jerk awake and hit my head on the window.
“What the hell,” Holden says to himself. He slows the car, pulling it to the side of the road, but since there’s no real shoulder, we’re still halfway on it. “Are you okay?”
“Just moderately concussed, don’t worry about me.” I glance out the back window, making sure there aren’t any cars coming. There’s no one around, the area barely illuminated by overworked streetlights emitting an orange glow.
“I think I blew a tire.” He turns his hazard lights on and unbuckles his seat belt.
“We should get out of the car.” The words claw their way up my throat, raw and painful, thinking about how bad things happen when I’m in Holden’s car and someone could come speeding around the corner without enough time to stop before ramming into us. “I want out of the car.”
I slip out of the passenger door and stumble to the closest bit of grass I can find, because grass means no cars. The cool air feels perfect on my hot, buzzing skin for maybe two minutes, and then the adrenaline ebbs away slowly, leaving me freezing and realizing that my jacket is back at the party. Holden finishes inspecting the van—pathetically flat tire on the front passenger side—and calls his mom.
“What if I mess it up and it falls off while we’re driving?”he asks quietly into the phone, waving on the lone car we see post-accident. He pops the trunk and unearths the spare tire. “No, you don’t need to come.” He examines this dark, lonely street. “We’re fine. I’ll call you if I need help.”
He hangs up and crouches in front of me. “You’re shaking.”
“In trembling anticipation of how hot you’ll look trying to change this tire.”
He laughs, but it doesn’t last long. He meets my eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just cold.” And the panic at a potential car accident has my body shutting down. One minute everything can be fine and the next, you could be dead. Why do I ever get in any car? Why do I ever leave my house or take a chance on new foods? Or any foods? I could choke.
I’m losing my grip.
Instead of telling me to get back in the car where it’s warm, he shrugs out of his black jacket and throws it over my shoulders. I slip my arms in and wrap it around me, pleased that it stretches a little as opposed to being too tight like Corrine’s and Elijah’s clothes. It’s perfect, warm, and it smells like him. Not like his body wash or deodorant, but like him. A little sweet, a little spicy. Warm, if warm could be a smell.
“Thank you.”
“Perfect fit.” He grins. “Unlike that time you stole my shoes, bywearingthem, and face-planted down the stairs.”
“I didn’t realize how hard it would be to run in clown shoes.”
“They weren’t clown shoes, and I grew into them.”
My eyes fall on his worn sneakers—not the same shoes thatI tried to steal. “What, the shoes?”
“No, my feet.” He considers this. “Well, and the shoes.”
“You know what they say about people with big feet....”
His cheeks turn from a weather-bitten pink color to splotchy red, like an apple. “What do they say?”
I lean in to his ear and whisper, “They wear clown shoes.”
He pulls away, just a little, enough to see me, and laughs. “Okay, I don’t think that’s the saying—”
He’s still so close, so warm, so fucking cheerful and sweet, like, he went to help his little sister with a romantic disaster at the drop of a hat, and I think I’m, I don’t know, attracted to him? Is this the alcohol talking? But Corrine was sober before, and it almost felt like she was encouraging it. What am I—
