Keme stared at him. You’ve heard the expression, I’m sure,if looks could kill. Well, if looks could draw and quarter and then drag behind a truck on a bad stretch of road. After a moment, Louis’s grin faltered, and he dropped his hand.
“Louis,” Bobby said, “why don’t you help me get everybody a drink?” He shot me a glance. “If that’s okay.”
“We’re fine,” I said.
Bobby didn’t look as convinced as I’d hoped, but he directed Louis into the living room—and, in the process, probably prevented a murder.
“Do you want to shower first?” I asked. “If you need some clean clothes, I can grab something from Bobby—”
Before I could finish, Millie tornadoed into the hall. Barefoot and sopping wet, Millie is five-feet flat and weighs a hundred pounds. She’s blond, she always has flyaways, and her general vibe (on a good day) is caffeinated manic kindness. Right then, though, she was like a force of nature.
“KEME!”
I swear to God: an irreplaceable Ming vase wobbled on its stand.
She charged toward him, and she must have slowed down at the last moment, otherwise it would have been like when they fire neutrinos into other neutrinos. Or into atoms. Or however they make atomic bombs explode. (It’s science—look it up on Wikipedia.) Instead of a mushroom cloud, there was just Keme’s surprised—and slightly pained—grunt, and the crack of bones and flesh colliding. Millie’s arms wrapped around him, and Keme rocked backward. It was a small miracle they somehow managed to remain on their feet.
“OH MY GOD, KEME! ARE YOU OKAY?”
The boy stood rigidly, arms at his sides. He made no effort to hug Millie back. For that matter, he made no effort to look like he was enjoying the embrace. Millie might as well have been a stranger who had grabbed him on the street, instead of—well, Millie.
“WE’VE BEEN SO WORRIED ABOUT YOU!” Millie leaned back to get a look at his face. “I’VEBEEN SO WORRIED.”
She paused, as though Keme might say something. But Keme was pulling his now-familiar trick of not looking directly at her, and if anything, he seemed even tenser.
When it became clear Keme wasn’t going to respond, Millie looked around. She seemed only to realize then that the rest of us were there, and with what must have taken an agonizing effort to lower her voice, she asked, “Can we talk? I really need to talk to you.”
Keme mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Then he wriggled out of Millie’s grasp and padded toward the stairs. Millie stared after him. Her eyes and nose were still red from her earlier crying, and now fresh tears spilled down her cheeks, but she didn’t make a sound. That, more than anything else—her silence—cut me to pieces.
Indira entered the hall as Keme took the first step up the stairs. In that instant, the mixture of happiness and relief in her face was so sharp it was painful to look at. And then she must have noticed how the energy in the room had changed, and the fact that Keme was on his way upstairs. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, and with something like shock, I realized I’d never seen Indira in the clutches of uncertainty before. When she finally spoke, her voice had an unfamiliar note somewhere between good cheer and desperation. “Dinner is almost ready.”
Keme continued up the stairs without looking back.
“I made your favorite,” Indira said. Pain gleamed in her face as her voice trailed off.
In the silence that followed, from upstairs came the sound of a door thumping shut.
Chapter 10
“But I won’t annoy him,” I said around my toothbrush. “I won’t bother him or talk to him or—or exist. I mean, I’ll just be a spectral apparition of myself. The least annoying version possible. I’ll basically be ectoplasm.”
Even through the hiss of the shower, Bobby’s “Sweetheart” sounded worn out. The shower curtain rattled back a few inches, and Bobby peered out at me. His hair was wet and flattened against his skull from the spray, and more water beaded on his nose and glittered in the faint hint of the day’s stubble. The faint scent of his oh-so-masculine soap floated out to me. “He needs some time alone.”
“Right,” I said. “I know.”
Bobby gave me a sympathetic look and pulled the curtain shut.
“But,” I said.
I couldn’t actually hear his sigh over the sound of the water, but sometimes, when you love somebody, you know.
“But,” I said again—in defiance of that unheard sigh—“on the other hand, what if he’s, you know, not okay?”
“I didn’t say he’s okay. I said he needs some time alone. He’s hurt, and he’s confused, and he needs time and space to sort that out.” The water shut off, and Bobby pushed the curtain back. He stood there in all his, um—well, glory is really the only correct word. You know that classic vee shape? Yeah, that. And I couldcounthis abs. And let me tell you, if you thought his, uh, tush looked great in a pair of jeans… Where was I? Oh, right. Bobby grabbed his towel and, as he ran it over his hair, said through thethick cotton, “He’s a private person. And an independent person. I think you, of all people, ought to understand that.”
“I do. I do understand that.” I spat in the sink to clear the last of the toothpaste from my mouth and rinsed my toothbrush. “And I love that for him. Iwanthim to have all the time and space and privacy he needs to heal.”
Bobby was moving the towel down now, and let me tell you, it was distracting.
