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There was the creak of an old sash window being thrust open, and Jared’s head and shoulders appeared at the window. “Hark,” he said, his tone very dry. “What stone through yonder window breaks?”
Kami yelled up at him, “It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!”
Jared abandoned Shakespeare and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Throwing a pebble,” said Kami defensively. “Uh … and I’ll pay for the window.”
Jared vanished and Kami was ready to start shouting again, when he reemerged with the pebble clenched in his fist. “This isn’t a pebble! This is a rock.”
“It’s possible that your behavior has inspired some negative feelings that caused me to pick a slightly overlarge pebble,” Kami admitted.
Jared’s gaze softened slightly. His voice did not. “I saved your life, and you broke my window!”
“You had me turned away from your door like someone selling insurance,” Kami said. “And I won’t have it. Come down here. We need to talk.”
Jared glared at her again, then glared at the ground under his window instead. “Okay,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come down.” He glanced at her once more and amusement touched his face, but not quite a smile. “Don’t break anything else until I get to you,” he said, and something about his tone was more like the voice inside her head.
Kami thought for a moment that everything might be all right. But as soon as Jared came through the back door, she knew everything was still wrong. He stood in front of her, fists clenched by his sides. He was really tall, too tall, and his shoulders were much too wide. It made her feel on
edge just to look at him. She found all her muscles locked in sheer physical discomfort. Here he was, her oldest and closest friend, and she couldn’t help wishing him out of existence.
“See?” Jared said quietly. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“That’s not true,” said Kami. Their eyes met and they both flinched. Kami stared over Jared’s shoulder and swallowed a lump in her throat. “It’s just weird,” she whispered, her voice thin.
Jared laughed bitterly. “No. Really?”
“What I mean is it’s strange for now. All we have to do is get used to it,” Kami said, gathering conviction. She knew from years of listening to him that this was the kind of situation where Jared got too tangled up in his feelings to act. It meant that she had to control her own feelings and make a plan to get them through this. “We need to take this in stages,” she announced, spinning away from him. She went to stand on one side of the half-fallen wall.
“Kami?” Jared asked, sounding taken aback.
“Go stand on the other side of the wall,” she said, and peered through a chink in the wall until she could see the flash of faded blue cotton that was Jared’s T-shirt. “And now stoop, you ridiculously tall person.”
She saw him move, the glint of his hair as he sat down in the grass. She sat down too, feeling him reach out tentatively in her mind. She reached back.
His voice in her head was familiar and soothing. You’re just tiny. It’s probably why you’re so bossy.
“You know, Napoleon complexes are entirely misnamed,” Kami said. “Napoleon was actually average height. He just had tall bodyguards who stood behind him all the time. Also, we should probably talk out loud as part of the first stage of my plan.” She wasn’t happy about having to say that to him, not when he had talked to her in her head for the first time since the well. Kami laid her cheek against the crumbling, sun-warmed stone of the wall.
“So, what’s going on with you, Kami?” asked Jared, with an effort she could feel. It was a subtle difference, but his voice sounded rusty now, instead of rough, as if he wasn’t used to speaking this way out loud.
Kami’s mouth curved against the stone. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
“Yeah,” said Jared. “I don’t—I hate—” He stopped.
“Talking like this is very classical of us,” Kami suggested. “Think of Pyramus and Thisbe.”
Jared spoke again, sounding helpless, but less like he wanted to hit something. “I might, if I knew who they were.”
Kami hesitated. “You do read, don’t you?”
“I haven’t lied to you,” Jared said, and his voice was angry again. “I read. I just haven’t read that.”
“They are characters in a Roman myth who had to talk through a wall. Then there was a misunderstanding about one of them being eaten by a lion.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Jared said. “Also, considering the way things have been going, I am thankful there are no lions in England.”
There was a wall between them, but the wall of silence in Jared’s head wasn’t there anymore. Kami still did not quite dare to come to the place where their minds met, for fear of being shut out again. She skirted the edge of what he was feeling, and stretched out her hand so he could see it on his side of the stone wall.
