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So completely clueless.
Lulu, a four-year-old mutt, is happy to see me when I unlock the door and bathes my hands with her tongue. I give her some love, then lead her to the backyard to take care of business. Knowing she likes to sniff every spot at least six times before choosing which to bless with her pee, I plop onto a padded chaise and lean back. The morning’s chill lingers, but sunlight tingles warmly against my face.
That summer day the Adlers moved in next door is etched in vivid detail in my mind. The cloudy condensation of my breath on the window. The height of excitement and the crushing depth of disappointment.
I didn’t go with my parents that evening to bring the customary welcome-to-the-neighborhood bottle of wine. In fact, in the following weeks before school started, I closeted myself in my bedroom with my easel and the two new canvases I got for my birthday, translating my feelings into paintings.
Years later, I read somewhere that art was a two-sided blade. As we cut space in the world for art, the art cut us back. And that’s when I understood, finally, that from the moment I first saw him, Lucas Adler was like art. Cutting through the world. Through me.
“Peapod.”
I yelp and jerk upright, my gaze swinging to a particular section of the fence, knowing who will be standing there before I see him. Only one person has ever called me that, and he used to live next door.
For a few, breathless moments, I stare at the man whose arms are braced on the divide. Memory creates double vision—skinny arms in the same position, a shock of golden hair above pale blue eyes, a wicked grin aimed at me—superimposing the boy I knew atop the stranger before me.
This man barely resembles his younger self. For one, his arms now are easily three times the size of mine. He’s always been tall, but now he’s reached the promise in his broad shoulders, which stretch the fabric of his black T-shirt.
I wait for him to dissolve, to go back to that rusty old box in my mind. He doesn’t. Nor does he smile.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, and my voice, unlike his, is angry. I’m rattled. I can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but from his clenched jaw, I surmise they’ve turned frosty.
“I’m not allowed to visit my mom?”
I feel exposed, suddenly, even fully clothed, with dirty Converse on my feet and my hair in a messy bun. I’m exactly the same. He is not.
I look away, silent. My tongue is sandpaper.
The fence groans—the sound itself a Pandora’s box of memory—as Lucas swings himself up and over. From the corner of my eye, I watch him pick his way through the plant-and-flower circus that is my parents’ backyard. Only when his shadow falls over my legs do I lift my gaze. My heart flutters like a trapped bird.
“Are we going to hate each other forever?” he asks softly.
My voice finally comes, hoarse and low, from an aching place inside me. “I don’t hate you, Lucas. I’ve never hated you.”
He pulls off his sunglasses. I play with a small hole in the thigh of my jeans, avoiding his eyes.
At length, he says, “Sorry I startled you. I know you hate surprises.”
I mutter, “Only when you orchestrate them.”
He laughs—not the unrestricted, joyous sound I remember, but dark and ironic. “Remember the first day of freshman year?”
I groan. “How could I forget the first of so many traumatic locker incidents? You guys were such assholes.”
He chuckles with real humor. I want to smile but don’t. Or can’t. The air between us feels thick and warped. I wonder if he feels it, too—the way the breeze seems to bend around us, leaving us still and hot.
“So classic.” He pauses. “I still think we should have done water balloons instead of balloon animals. We were up half the night making those damn giraffes and bunnies.”
My lips curve a little to one side. It’s all I can manage past my madly thumping heart and tight lungs. The moment itself—of opening my locker for the first time on my first day of high school—roars forward and flattens me.
I was so nervous and had barely slept the night before. All I’d wanted in the world was to pass through the ocean of high school without making waves. I’d spent middle school feeling like a pariah. Having skipped third grade, I was a full year younger than everyone else and there’d been no shortage of mockery.
But Jeremy and Lucas hadn’t cared that I was younger, that I didn’t act or dress like other girls in our class. They’d never cared about what anyone else thought. And they’d loved torturing me almost as much as I’d loved being tortured by them.
The memory chips further at my composure. Jeremy apologizing over and over for the balloons. Lucas merely rolling his eyes at my outrage. The contrast of the two of them. Dark and light—devil and angel.
Only the angel had turned out to be the devilish one.
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