thirty-four.
“I know he’s just a fish, but I think he’s lonely,” Marsden said as she peered through the glass. The beta’s blue-and-black fins flashed in the water, iridescent and hypnotic, a bruise come to life.
Jude tapped gently on the outside of the bowl. “Nah, Peeve’s a fighting fish. It’s safer for him to be alone.”
“Poor guy. Unless a Mrs. Peeve comes along?”
“No can do. He’s just going to have to be satisfied with seeing my pretty face from now on instead of Rig’s. I was always the better-looking brother anyway.”
The fish had been Rigby’s, and now he was Jude’s. Marsden leaned down and looked at Jude through the fish bowl. His dark waves became a blur, his features smears of burnished amber, someone familiar and yet not.
“So you know what you’re doing as a responsible new pet owner, right?” She sat up again. In the background, his stereo played a Shindiggs song. They’d gone to Rigby’s room and found his Burn Out tape.
“Being a pet owner, I think I’m good with—it’s the responsible part I’m still working on.” Jude slid the fish bowl farther along his desk, away from the edge. “I keep thinking I’ve forgotten to feed him, so I’ll rush in here, sure he’ll be belly-up, too late to save. If you dream more than once about a fear, does that make it a full-fledged phobia?”
“Technically?”
“Sure.”
“No clue. But I don’t think it really matters.”
He looked at her. “Because the dream’s still there.”
She nodded.
Too many times she’d dreamed her fears, in all their different forms. The dead suddenly not so dead as they caught her skimming, as they buried her beneath heart-shaped leaves. Her father, stumbling from the river, soft and gray and still hating her. A teenage Wynn in Shine’s clothes and makeup, telling Marsden she could leave Glory, there was no point in staying behind for her any longer.
A new restlessness filled her, as strong as a tide, and she walked away from Jude’s desk, scanning his room to take it all in. She didn’t even care if her curiosity bordered on nosiness, or that he would notice. She wanted him to notice, wanted him to be aware of exactly how much she longed to see, examine, not miss a single detail about him. That she could be selfish enough to no longer care what it might mean for him, being with her.
Want.
Was that what it was, then? To get close enough to someone that it would be hard to breathe, even as it also, somehow, got easier?
His desk at one side of the room, with Peeve in his bowl and papers and pens and one of his friendship bracelets on top of it. The bracelet courtesy of Abbot, Marsden still assumed, with her pixie hair and loud laugh and blazingly protective eyes.
A chest of drawers next to his closet, with textbooks from just that past school year piled on top—Jude had forgotten to return every single one before school let out for the summer.
A single framed photo sitting next to that pile of textbooks. In it, Isabel Ambrose, her eyes huge and luminous and not entirely happy, her brown skin shades richer and darker than her son’s. Marsden thought it was Glory she could see in her gaze, doing its best to crowd out what she’d left behind, maybe making her feel as out of place in the town as Marsden still often did.
At her side was Rigby, a much smaller version of the teenage boy Marsden had seen that day in the library. Her being a witness suddenly felt fated, her memory of those moments what convinced her to let Jude into the covert, with the hopes of then hearing Rigby, to then hear her father. How else to explain where she was now, standing in Jude’s room and looking at a photo of him as a baby sleeping in his mother’s arms, and feeling not in the way at all?
“Wait, sorry.” He grimaced, started scrambling to pick up dirty socks, an open bag of Pirate cookies, a damp towel from the floor. “This place is kind of a landmine, lately.” He grabbed a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on it, then a jug of Tang, mouthed the word sorry again, and piled everything into one corner of the room.
She laughed. “It’s fine. I’m no inspector.”
“If you were an inspector, I’d be lighting up quality control with hits.” He shoved his hands into his shorts pockets and watched her watching him.
He looked, Marsden decided, like someone thoroughly cornered, dissecting the best way to turn.
Guilt nibbled at her. She’d given him no warning about showing up, was clearly being nosy. “I’m so rude, I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry, and how are you rude?”
“For intruding. I’m actually kind of wondering if I should leave.”
“I was wondering how I could convince you to stay.”
Her chest went achy with knots, and fire painted itself along her cheeks. “That was pretty smooth.”
“Trying.”
Marsden walked over to his bookshelf, trying to act casual. “You have a lot of books.”
“Most of them are Rig’s.” He came over to stand next to her. “He usually gave them to me once he was done reading.”
She ran her fingers down the spines, wishing she could have asked Rigby about his books. Why he’d chosen to read one over the other, why he kept the ones he did, how he decided which ones were then good enough for his brother. Horror, lots of sci-fi. “King, Adams, Butler—have you read any of them?”
“Most. Some of them—like those Gibson ones on the side—I got from one end to the other all right, but that’s about all.”
She pictured Jude lying on a couch with a book, his expression completely lost and close to furious, and laughed. “They’re your books as much as they were Rigby’s, you know. Not just because he gave them to you, either.”
“What do you mean?”
You said are Rigby’s books, not were. When are you going to start feeling okay saying were? “They’re just . . . more Eddie Murphy movies that you guys saw together.”
Jude’s grin held a trace of sadness. “I like that. I bet Rig would have liked it, too.”
Marsden moved along the shelf, saw piles of old Archie and Richie Rich comics nestled alongside the books. Bundles of hockey cards, a bright blue yo-yo.
“You’ve got as many toys on this bookshelf as you do books,” she said.
“Hey, comics are books.”
Then her eye caught on something that made her smile.
She wrestled out the Magic 8 Ball. The black sphere was covered with scratches and scrapes and dust, a hand-size planet with a liquid core. “For example.”
“Wow. I’m ten years old, seeing that again.”
“Now you can give Theola a run for her money.” Marsden sat down on his bed, already flipping the toy.
“That was my plan all along.” Jude sat down beside her, rumpling the already rumpled sheets, and she tried not to think about that fact and where they were and that they were alone in the house.
“I used to have one of these,” she said, “but one day the die just stopped showing.” The sloshing sound was deeply familiar as she tilted it, as was watching faces of the small die appear through the viewer window, the tiny blue bubbles that accompanied it like froth from a surf. Star had given it to her, too amused with such a thing to not bring it home from the store, she’d told her. Shine had given the Magic 8 Ball a look of disgruntlement but had otherwise left Marsden alone, refusing to say a single word.
Jude reached over and wiped off the dust from the small viewer window with a swipe of his thumb. She passed it to him, and he tilted it. The die inside slowly floated up through blue liquid. IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.
“What was your question?” she asked, realizing she wasn’t even joking.
He flushed all the way to his hairline. “Uh, something about dinner.”
She laughed, was aware all over again of that word want, how it’d infiltrated her brain, her blood, made her reckless. “You’re an incredibly bad liar.”
“I know.” His gaze turned hot. She felt it on her skin.
Acting on absolutely nothing but instinct, Marsden moved to lie down on the bed. She turned on her side, inhaled his scent from his pillow, and tried not to think. “Come here.” She touched the bedspread next to her.
He opened his mouth to say something but abruptly stopped. He shut his mouth again, then simply peered down at her on his bed.
Her pulse was a jackhammer, and she felt the first stirrings of a terrible and long-lived embarrassment.
“I asked if you being here was a good idea,” Jude said quietly.
IT IS DECIDEDLY SO.
Marsden took the toy from his hand and placed it on the bed in front of her. “So come here. Magic 8 Ball orders.”
“I can’t.” His voice was low, rough as fresh timber.
“Why not?”
“Because. I might never get up again.”
She felt her own skin flush all the way from her toes to the top of her head. “There’s something to be said about you going all out with the honesty thing.”
Jude twisted over until he was lying down facing her, his face only inches away from hers on the pillow. Marsden knew, then, what it was like to have self-control slowly and definitively become untethered.
From the stereo, the Shindiggs song that had been playing suddenly surged into full chorus—She likes the city but hates the maaaaan—shattering the odd, delicious tension of the moment, and they both began laughing, hard.
“God, this song is awful,” Jude finally choked out when he could speak again. “I don’t know how Rig did it for all that time.”
She wiped an eye. “Didn’t you end up having to listen to them, too?”
“You’re right, let me fix that. I don’t know how I did it.”
“Hey, they were big for a reason, you know.”
“Well, it wasn’t taste.”
She grinned. “I like them. Don’t make me challenge you.”
He picked up the Magic 8 Ball. “Do the Shindiggs suck?” He flipped it. “MY REPLY IS NO.”
It took them longer to calm down this time, to just let the music play without breaking out into fresh laughter. Marsden knew it had nothing to do with the Shindiggs and everything to do with the strain of the last few days, the covert having slid into their hearts like an uneven beat, into their minds like a nightmare for the day, the pain-pleasure question mark of whatever she and Jude were becoming. That moment of loosening their grip, just a bit—it was like coming up for air before the final plunge.
She cleared her throat and gestured to the Magic 8 Ball. “I have a real question for this thing now.”
“Sure. Go.”
“Ask how many days until we find your brother’s time capsule.”
Jude smiled, uncertain. “What?”
“I’m serious.” And despite still being half-breathless from laughing, from lying so close to Jude she could feel his body heat, she now also felt a strange chill along her skin, the dance of skeletal fingers straight out of a graveyard. “Because even though it’s just a toy, we’re also in Glory. And Glory has its own rules.”
He nodded, though his eyes remained hesitant. “Only yes or no questions, remember?”
“Oh, right. Okay, so ask if we’ll find it.”
“Will we find Rig’s time capsule?” He flipped the Magic 8 Ball with one hand. “ASK AGAIN LATER.”
Marsden frowned. “Ask again.”
“I think later means later later.”
“Humor me.”
“Will we find Rig’s time capsule?” Two flips. “CANNOT PREDICT NOW. See?”
“Stupid toy.”
Jude snorted.
She shut her eyes. Her brain was on overdrive, fueled by the oddity of lying on his bed and needing to find some kind of truth from a toy. She saw the covert, the river, her father, each image seared into the back of her eyelids.
“Can you please ask if I’m ever going to hear the dead, so I can know for sure why my father left that day?” she whispered.
“It’s a toy, Marsden.” His voice was soft, infinitely understanding.
“I know,” she said, still whispering, staying in the dark. In her head, she was running, hands out, soil flying beneath her shoes, ginger as thick as mist in the air. Her lungs hurt with exertion, her heart burst with her wishes—I’m listening, I’ve always been listening!
She heard him ask and then read out the answer. “REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.”
“Am I meant to hear the dead?”
“BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW.”
“Now I know what really happened to my Magic 8 Ball,” she muttered. “It didn’t stop working—I just threw it away because the thing refused to give me the right answers.”
“At least you weren’t a demanding kid?”
Marsden opened her eyes. She was staring at Jude’s mouth, hovering so close to hers, and decided she wanted, more than anything else at that moment, to taste it. Him. Them, together.
She laid a hand on the side of his neck, let her fingers slide up and around to touch the back of his head, and stopped when she touched a curve of scar tissue.
“Stitches—the doctor never questioned Rig’s story about my falling off my bike.” His gaze was clear and unflinching. “My father never has bad aim.”
She saw in her mind’s eye the crescent of a dent in the kitchen wall, smashed in by a flying beer bottle, and knew she could hate Leo Ambrose forever. “Anyone ever tell you the scar’s in the shape of a horseshoe? Which means it’s a sign of luck.”
Jude smiled. “I knew the shape, just never thought of it as a good-luck thing.”
“Saving it. For one day.”
“Today.”
Marsden moved her hand to push his black hair out of his eyes, all thick waves between her fingers. “Ask if we’re ever going to kiss.”
The Magic 8 Ball slipped from his grip. It careened off the bed and smashed onto the floor behind him with a distinct crack.
He swore, loudly and without restraint.
She felt herself melt, felt her heart ache. “Well, now we’ll never know.”
Jude leaned up onto his elbow, wound one hand into her long, dark hair, and found her mouth.