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“Grab my hand again,” he said, but this time Meg shook her head mutely and clung on.
“I think you should come down,” she called as a fly buzzed Silas’s nose. He shook his head at it, blond hair flying about wildly, not daring to loosen his grip to swat at it.
“It’s too high,” Meg insisted.
“Too” anything was the wrong thing to say to Silas. Didn’t Meg know that by now?
He climbed a few more feet, one outstretched arm almost, but not quite, reaching the base of the train track over their heads. “Just a sec. I just want to try to—”
He made a second lurch for it, lost his footing, and spun there, above Meg’s head, for what felt like a very long count of ten, with one hand holding on to the pillar. He could feel his grip loosening, and loosening, until finally gravity prevailed, and he fell like a rock to the ground.
“Silas!”
Shock came first, as all the air was knocked from his lungs. Then pain, radiating outward from his ankle.
“Are you okay?” She hadn’t witnessed the landing, her face pressed against the trestle post as she clung for dear life, but at least her death grip prevented him from taking her down with him. “I’m coming!”
And surprisingly, her limbs seemed capable of movement again, propelling her back down the trestle to the ground. “Go slow,” he gasped, on a cough. Then, when she landed far more lightly than he had into the blanket of pine needles at the base, “Wow, good job.”
“Guess I just needed proper motivation,” she said sarcastically.
“Guess so.” The thought took some of the sting out of Silas’s fall.
“You okay?” she asked again, her shadow falling over his face as she bent in close. The sun cast a halo behind her auburn hair, and he was about to make a joke about an angel coming to his rescue, but then Danny’s face was floating over him, too. And for some reason, it no longer seemed like a good idea.
“What happened?” Danny sounded breathless, and the bottoms of his pants looked wet. “I heard you guys shouting but couldn’t get here in time.”
Silas forced himself to his feet. “Wind just got knocked out of me. That’s all.” He looked at Danny, who, now that Silas took him in completely, had definitely splashed his way upriver to get here. “Sorry, man.”
But his ankle still smarted, and he’d scraped his knee and ripped his pant leg, and Meg insisted they end their day at the river early.
“Why’d you have to push your luck?” Danny complained on the ride back into town. “It’s like you have to prove yourself all the time.”
Aunt’s Mary’s words reverberated. Uncle Les’s, too, his reprimand landing lightly, but spanning all the way back to that very first time Silas had pulled Danny into his orbit of trouble, out on Marble Lake, alone and adrift.
“I was just having some fun,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry I ruined yours, though.” And he was. Truly. Especially since the sight of Megbending over him, making sure he was okay, still lingered in his mind’s eye, making him feel a bit uncomfortably warm inside.
As penance, he finally committed to a double date to the homecoming dance, asking Jessica with what Meg told him was unacceptably late notice. “It’s a miracle she was still free,” she told him, to which Danny had retorted, “I’m pretty sure she turned down at least two offers holding out for you, man.” The look on his face told Silas he didn’t find this entirely cool, either.
Silas didn’t disagree, and he really couldn’t say why he’d put off asking her. Beneath the bubbly all-American cheerleader persona, Jessica ticked all his boxes. But somehow, instead of her interests and achievements making her stand out, they blended her into a vanilla sort of popular that left him a bit ... uninspired. What had Meg called her? A cliché. Which was harsh, though Silas kind of got why. But it wasn’t Jessica’s fault that she faded into the background. No more than it was Meg’s fault that she sort of glowed with an aura only Silas seemed to see. He told himself he just needed to apply himself, as Danny liked to say. To focus on the things that made Jessica glow.
At the dance, she did kind of sparkle under the disco lights and streamers hung by the dance committee—headed by Jessica herself—her sequined dress sending prisms of color across the lacquered gym floor as she twirled. The gym still smelled like sweat and popcorn, kind of killing the vibe, but Silas pulled her close anyway, earning him an equally dazzling smile.
As they shuffled their way toward the three-point line, Meg and Danny brushed past them, Danny giving Silas a playful punch on the shoulder. As they spun away again, Silas heard Danny tell Meg, “You look beautiful.”
She did. Silas knew he wasn’t supposed to notice, but he had eyes, didn’t he? She wore a dress that hugged the curves of her hips and theback of her neck, where the thin halter straps tied in a knot, and while Silas actually preferred her in jeans and a T-shirt, hiking boots at the ready, when Danny ran his hand down the bare skin along the curve of her spine, it took effort for Silas to look away, back at Jessica’s open, pretty, made-up face.
Shit. He swallowed hard, and spun Jessica around playfully. Gave her his full attention.
“Having fun?”
In answer, she executed another graceful pirouette, her hair flashing bronze and then gold in the pulsing light, like tinsel on a Christmas tree.
Silas laughed, which drew Meg’s eye. He had trouble reading her expression in the dark, but something flashed there—disapproval? Annoyance?—before Danny spun her away from him again and the next song drowned everything else out.
When midnight rolled around, the chaperones began to usher students out the doors, hovering in the lobby as parents were called and rides procured. Silas had planned to crash at Danny’s—his dad was on his southwestern route through Reno, gone until Monday—but Meg might hang there, too, and for the first time, it felt like three might be a crowd.
When Jessica suggested late-night snacks at the only diner in town, he agreed readily, leaning into the Formica table across from her until two in the morning, sharing greasy tots and trading stories of Feather River and the wider world beyond. He learned that Jessica loved owls and classic movies in addition to Linkin Park, and that unlike Silas and Danny, she’d devouredSense and Sensibilityin English 12, and had secretly borrowedPride and Prejudicefrom the library right after. When he kissed her for the first time under the neon sign of the diner, she’d tasted like salt, her lips cold from the ice in her Coke. He’d told her he hoped they could hang out again, and he’d been pleasantly surprised to realize he meant it.
