“Ainsley hates me because I won’t be one of her bitches,” Leah said. “And because I have better hair than her.” She gave her pink-streaked ponytail a twirl.
Carter laughed.
Ava missed Mercy that week. She always did, whenever he was away, but it was different now, more urgent and painful. She felt like she was trying too hard to be normal, to be chipper. It was easy with Carter and Leah, distracting. She felt almost guilty that she was enjoying being seventeen and stupid with them, but they took her mind away from Mercy’s absence.
At home, though: helping with laundry, vacuuming, dusting, getting her great-grandmother’s china out and hand-washing it so it sparkled in the cabinet. Maggie kept giving her the side-eye about that. Maggie never breathed a word, but sometimes she would respond to an over-enthusiastic question about her work at the Dartmoor main offices with a slow “sure, yeah.” Ava lay awake long into the deep of night, staring at her ceiling, a strange sense of doom creeping up the back of her neck. Her mother suspected. And Mercy was gone, and she just wanted him to kiss her on the forehead and tell her it would be okay.
She held out contacting him until the Thursday before she returned to school. At eleven-fifty-two, in the shadowed dark of her room, she rolled toward the window and cradled her phone in the covers in front of her face, bit her lip and overanalyzed her text message before she hit SEND.
Wish you could see the moon with me tonight. I go back to school tomorrow.
Afterward, her phone screen blacked over and she stared through the slatted blinds, at the almost-full moon bobbing over the hill at the top of the street.
She didn’t expect a response. She just liked the idea of putting words from her head into his hand, dreaming foolishly that it might make him smile.
Then her phone dinged.
She sucked in a breath as she opened the message.
Still can’t see this Orion you talk about. He only comes out for pretty girls. Hit lots of bitches in the face for me tomorrow.
Ava grinned until her face hurt. She envisioned him on a blanket roll under the stars, cowboy-style, his great hands folded behind his head, the murmur of RJ and Rottie’s voices in the background as they rehashed their usual Bike Part Debate.
I love you, she thought, and snuggled down into her pillows.
“You’re crazy if you think those pipes sound better,” RJ was saying over by the cooler.
“Bro, have you heardyours?” Rottie said. “Like a damnFast & FuriousHonda piece of shit…”
A lead they now knew to be false had taken them to North Carolina. Tonight, a campground cleared out for the fall served as a place to crash. Mercy had found enough wood for a fire and they’d built it in a blackened rock pit a camper had left behind. Walsh had bought a Styrofoam cooler at a gas station and stocked it with beer. Dinner had been burgers and fries. They were bedrolling it tonight, old school 70-something MC style.
Mercy had his head propped on a low fireside bench made out of a split log, the glow from his phone fading the stars above to dull pinpricks.
He waited a moment, wondering, half-expecting Ava to keep texting him. It was in her nature to talk, not because she needed him to listen, but because she was a writer, and that was how she showed love to the world: writing about it.
When the phone went blank, he stuck it in his pocket and resumed staring at the sky, not sure of his expression, hoping he didn’t look like some kind of smiling, drooling sap. He’d needed that: her two lines of type. This was a shit run that was getting them nowhere, and her voice in the dark was like a hand going down a cat’s back: soothing and stirring all at once.
Walsh, sitting up and propped against the neighboring bench, just another shadow in the night, was impossible to notice. Mercy had forgotten he was there. His voice, that low English monotone, came out of the dark, direct and sharp-edged, like a knife. Quiet enough the other two couldn’t hear. “Something’s up with you.”
Mercy glanced over without turning his head. The fire didn’t quite reach Walsh’s face, just a red flicker against his pale eyes. “I’m lying on a big-ass rock and I haven’t showered in days. Yeah. Something’s up.”
One slow shake of Walsh’s head: not buying it. “You slipped out of dinner the other night.”
“For a smoke.”
His brows went up. “You need to be very careful, brother. If you like young ones, that’s your business–”
Mercy put a bite into his voice, one Walsh would know wasn’t bullshit. “Yeah, it is.”
“ – but Ava, that’s a whole other issue.”
Mercy glared at him.
Anyone else would have caved and looked away, but not Walsh. “I’m just saying, is all. I’m the first one to notice. But I won’t be the last.”
Mercy rolled his head back, swallowed hard and searched for Ava’s Orion among the firefly specks above him.
Her first day back. The principal – Mrs. Mullins – had a windowless office crammed full of inspirational kitten posters, live ferns, and a thermostat that must have snapped off at fifty-five degrees. She was a bulky woman – not fat, just wide and solid and substantial – and Ava would have been disappointed had she been anything other, given her profession.
