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It made her wish again that Silas would just find a girlfriend of his own already, so she’d at least have someone sane to talk to up here. But that forced her to actually picture some other girl right here, in Silas’s room, hiking the trails with them and doing lodge chores with them, and who would that girl be? Undoubtedly someone perfect and popular and pretty—and suddenly Meg couldn’t picture someone like that being here at all. Atherlodge. Receiving Aunt Mary’s hugs and eating her cranberry-oatmeal cookies. So maybe shecouldpicture it. And she didn’t like it.
“Who are you going to take to homecoming?” she asked Silas impulsively.
He glanced up from his map with a distracted frown. “I dunno. Why?”
“Because it’s, like, in just a few weeks.”
Danny looked up from the Etch A Sketch screen. “You should totally ask Jessica.”
Now Meg frowned. See? This was precisely what she’d been afraid of. She shouldn’t have brought it up. “If you want to be a total cliché,” she said before she could bite the words back.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Silas said. Danny looked like he’d like to know, too. His hands had paused on the little white knobs of the toy.
Meg stared over Silas’s shoulder at the constellation map on the wall. “I just mean ...” Shit. Whathadshe meant? “It’s just pretty predictable, right? The hot new guy dating the picture-perfect cheerleader?”
She realized her stupid slip the second it came out of her mouth and flicked her eyes instantly to Danny, who looked like he was trying to work out if he’d heard that right. Maybe he hadn’t. “Never mind,” she said, “I’m not explaining it right.”
But no way was she going to get off that easy. A ridiculously annoying smile had grown across Silas’s face. “Wait. You think I’mhot?” He nudged Danny. “You hear that, dude? I’m hot.”
“Oh, shut up,” Danny said, kind of nudging him. “You know what she meant—and itwouldbe a cliché.”
“You don’t even know her.” The chastisement was for both of them, but Silas looked resentfully at Meg while he said it. “Neither of you do, and you’ve gone to school with her for, like, forever.”
Meg felt a little lurch in her stomach, because he was right, of course, even if itwaskind of nice to hear Danny take her side for once. She sank down on the edge of the bed, feeling shitty.
“You’re right, man,” Danny conceded, and Meg continued to feel Silas’s eyes on her. Knew he was waiting for her to apologize, too. But she just kept on feeling awful. Day after day, she and Danny drove up here to live vicariously in Silas’s world. And every time, she wished she didn’t feel like a tagalong. And now maybe she wouldn’t have to be, and she’d tried to throw a wrench in it. Why? Didn’t she get tired of dividing her and Danny’s time as they constantly hung out withhisfriend?
No,she realized, the moment she’d posed the question in her mind. Shedidn’tget tired of it. She didn’t miss her empty house and her and Danny’s predictable routine. She hadn’t dragged her heels about coming up here since that very first day, and somewhere along the line she’d stopped living vicariously through Silas at Marble Lake and had laid some sort of claim of her own. A claim she didn’t want to relinquish to some mystery fourth party. They were a trio, it dawned on her with some dismay; she didn’t want it to change.
After a comment, Silas grabbed the TV remote with a sigh and started surfing, and Danny hefted himself off the bed to go scrounge up a snack in the lodge kitchen. Meg settled into his spot, eyes trained on the TV, her brain still working overtime as she propped her stocking feet up on a tattered stuffed bear Silas didn’t seem chagrined to have on display.
She and Silas hadn’t really been alone together much, just the two of them, and she wondered if he, too, felt the shift in dynamic. Maybe it was just her, because she was lying on his bed, inches from his pillow. Which felt intimate, combined with the drumming of the rain on the roof. She was hardly ever alone with Danny inhisroom. It was justbetter that way, she’d decided, until she was sure she wanted to take things to the next level. Going all the way meant commitment, Meg’s mom had told her, shuddering a little at the word, which made it all the more significant to Meg. She had a good thing with Danny. She couldn’t risk messing it up.
After a minute, Silas diverted his attention from the movie he’d settled on, reaching across Meg to palm a Nerf football sitting on the bed. She kind of startled, given where her mind had just been, but he just lay back on the bed to toss the ball high up into the air, catching it with an easy confidence on each return. Meg watched the blur of the green-and-blue-paneled ball, spinning as it traveled up and down, glad for the distraction.
Upon his next catch, Silas said, “Am I bugging you?”
Meg turned her head on the pillow and tried for a lighthearted tone. “What, right now, or overall?”
Silas didn’t answer at first. “Let’s start with overall.”
Meg studied the tiny muscles in Silas’s fingers flexing and relaxing with every catch of the ball. “No, you’re not.”
His gaze flicked over—just for an instant—which was long enough to cause him to miss the ball on its next descent. It bounced off his forehead gracelessly, and he and Meg both laughed. As far as a tension-breaker went, it would suffice.
Silas didn’t bother to retrieve the football. “So,” he said, still smiling. “Megan.”
“Meg.”
“Yeah. About that. Why don’t you like Megan?”
She frowned in thought, wanting to really answer, not just brush this off. It was a feeling she had a lot in Silas’s presence, now that she thought about it. This new need to define herself before anyone else did it for her. “I’ve just never really felt it was me.”
“Megan is too tame for you,” Silas agreed, his voice carrying a lilt of scholarly observation. “No one named Megan does anything butfade into the background.” Meg rolled her eyes, but Silas looked at her without blinking. “You don’t fade. You know that, right?”
Meg didnotknow that. And she liked hearing it, rolling it over in her mind as a possibility. Still, just like before, she found herself underplaying it. “Not while I’m only seventeen, at least, I hope,” she quipped.
Silas looked up at the poster of the constellations on the wall. “You’re kind of like Cassiopeia.” He smiled, pointing out the zigzagging path of stars in the northern plane of the chart. “Half of her stars are the most luminous in the hemisphere, but the other half aren’t even visible to the naked eye.”
