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“On my floor?”
He shrugs, his shoulder brushing his ear with his movements. “I need to be here next time you’re on the mountain. To keep you from falling off the cliff.”
“Won’t your mom get mad if she wakes up and you aren’t there? My parents would call the police.” It’s true. My parents are pretty lax, but they’ve always been extra cautious about my safety, like one blink and I’ll disappear.
“I’ll just go back into my room before she wakes up. She stayed up late waiting for my dad to call.”
“Where’s your dad? At my old house, my friend’s dad was in the army. Is that where your dad is? Is he in the army?” Her mom was always waiting for his phone call, and I always saw her meet the postman at her mailbox so she could see right away if she got a letter from him. Sometimes he didn’t send letters when he said he would. That always made her sad, but my friend told me it’s because people in the war are busy all the time.
He shakes his head, his hair noisy as it brushes against the pillow. “No. My dad’s a rock star.” He puffs up his chest at this. “I’m going to be a rock star someday. My dad teaches me how to play the guitar when he’s home from tour. He says I’ll play better than him when I grow up.”
I tilt my head toward the ceiling, imagining Roman with an oversized guitar underneath his arm, propped on his thighs as he learns the different tunes.
“I’m going to be a ballerina. I want to dance in front of thousands of people and have everyone come watch me.”
Roman doesn’t say anything for many moments, and I wonder if he’s gone to sleep when he says, “You’ll be a ballerina, and I’ll be a rock star. And someday, we can go to where your dream was.”
I imagine twirling in my ballet slippers on the cliff of the mountain, overlooking the angry waves as they crash against the cliff. Roman can play a soft acoustic tune on his guitar while I dance on the rocky, jagged ground. The sand won’t slap at my skin angrily as I dance. The sun will shine, and the waters will be calm, and the world will settle as we dance and play my nightmares away. “Where the mountains meet the sea.” I murmur.
“What?” he asks, his voice growing raspy of tiredness.
“Where the mountains meet the sea. We’ll go to where the mountains meet the sea.”
“Where the mountains meet the sea,” he echoes. “I like that.”
I roll over and give him my back, smiling as I burrow my face into my pink pillow. I can hear rustling across the room, and I imagine him turning over and getting comfortable himself.
I forget about my nightmare and how scared I was. I forget about needing my parents tonight. I don’t need them, not when I have Roman to protect me. I hope he can protect me forever. I hope we can be best friends for the rest of our lives.
And secretly, I’m hoping that one day he’ll marry me.
CHAPTER THREE
LUNA
The sun tickles my skin, the rays embedding deep within me as I lay on the beach. I’ll burn, I know it. I’m not one to get tan. Having that golden shade that Roman seems to constantly have seems to be impossible. I go from pale, to burnt, and back to pale. My mom thinks it’s odd. She says her entire family tans well, and I’m the only one that can’t seem to catch the rays and gain some color from them.
It’s like my body rejects the sun. It’d rather me be a pale, ghostly white. I don’t know why I look the way I do, with my weird gray eyes and my pale skin. My hair couldn’t get any darker even if I dipped it into a pool of black ink.
I dig my toes into the hot sand, burrowing beneath the dry grains until my toes curl around the cold ones deep into the earth. I dig until the sand is wet, keeping my toes there, letting them cool from the hot day. My hair lays in a mess of strands around my head, probably dirty and grainy from the beach. Strands stick to my forehead, and I pick them away, only for them to stick back to my skin.
I’m alone today, and if I were to be honest, a little crabby.
I start school next week. The summer has been fun. Playing with Nora. Playing with Roman. Playing in the water and going to the park. Nights spent with Roman sneaking in my window to sleep on my floor. I’ve forgotten about school altogether until this last week when my mom told me that I’ve grown out of most of my clothes from last year and we needed to go get a few things from the store before school starts.
Then it hit me, I’m going to an entirely new school.Again.
The worst part is that Roman is a year older than me. He will be going into second grade, and I’m only going into first. At least I’ll have Nora with me. She’s become my best friend faster than any of my friends in Illinois and Kansas put together.
But there’s something about Roman. He’s more than a best friend. It’s like he’s a part of me. The lace on my ballet slipper. The chord on his guitar. A piece that’s needed to make the other whole, and that’s what Roman is for me.
I think I’m the same for him, too.
Except, now his friends are back from their summer vacations. The past month Roman has been playing with his friends more and more. He doesn’t ask if I want to play with him. I don’t know why, because I like to catch frogs and tadpoles, or do anything else that Roman likes to do. But he doesn’t want to play with me when they’re around. So, I’ve ended up spending a lot of these last few weeks with Nora. She’s excited to start school, telling me that she hopes we’re in the same class.
I brush my arms out against the sand, creating a sand angel. The grains are warm against my skin, the insides of my eyelids yellow and glowing from the bright sun above.
Roman’s mom brought him and Nora to pick up Roman’s friends. That means another day of me all alone. I might as well spend it in the sun, since my mom tells me the nice days are limited. She says the winters here will be worse than any other one we’ve ever had, being this north in the country. Roman was there when she said that, stuffing his face with a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. The chocolate was still gooey and stretched from his fingers to his lips as he mumbled, “But we can go ice skating on the lake. That’s really fun.”
