An unfamiliar look sweeps across her face as she takes in my agitated, traitorous body. She makes a motion with her hand, almost as if she plans to touch me, soothe me somehow, but she freezes with a beat of hesitation. Instead, she turns to face the little window beside her bed.
“Come on.”
I follow her gaze. “What?”
“I want to show you something.”
Drawing to her knees, Stevie crawls over to the window and pulls it open. A mid-September breeze flutters inside and sweeps across my skin like the warm hug I often crave.
“I sit out here sometimes when I feel anxious or scared…sad, even.” She squeezes through the open window, beckoning me to join her.
I do.
We take our positions on the roof, the soles of my boots catching on the shingles to keep me from sliding.
“The world looks different from up here,” she tells me, her hair crisscrossing her face in chocolate stripes. She loosens the tangles, twists her thick hair into aponytail over her shoulder. “It seems…bigger, I guess. And I think that makes my problems feel a lot smaller.”
We sit together, side by side. It’s hard to imagine her having any problems. Her life is perfect. She has everything…everything I don’t.
I swallow, my jaw locked tight as I glance around at the acreage below. “Aren’t you ever worried you might fall?”
She shakes her head. “No. That’s the whole point. I don’t worry about anything when I’m up here.”
Envy digs its way through me, because I don’t know what that’s like. “I don’t have any places like this.”
“Really?” She looks at me, then returns her attention to the sky. “I usually come out here at nighttime. It’s even better with the stars.”
I imagine it: the vast expanse above us lit up with a thousand tiny lights and the cool night air wrapping around me, keeping all my fractured bits in place.
“You could join me some time…if you ever need an escape.” Her voice is a melancholy whisper. A lullaby. “Or if you can’t sleep.”
As I stare out at the treetops bleeding into the pale-blue skyline, I drink in a deep breath that fills me up. The fresh air dissolves into my bones, dousing me in a wash of real peace.
I glance over at Stevie, at her closed eyes and gentle smile, her head tipped back as sunshine paints her face in a muted glow. Our shoulders brush together, but I don’t pull away. I allow the moment to be what it is.
An escape.
A much-needed pause.
That’s when I notice my hands aren’t shaking anymore.
Chapter 8
Stevie
I hate her.
Joplin nails me with the watering hose on a Friday afternoon in late September as we tend the vegetable garden. Her cackling intensifies when she sees the look on my face—the shriek of horror, my drenched hair plastered over my eyes like a vile sea creature, and my arms flapping at my sides with outrage.
“S-sorry,” she says, feigning apology, doubled over and clutching her stomach. “I…I had to.”
“Youhadto.” I am seething.
“I did. You know I did. Call it a sisterly duty or whatever.”
This is war. I leap forward and wrench the hose from her grip, but she fights back, scrambling for leverage, and water shoots to the sky and rains down on us both like an impromptu fountain in the middle of a battlefield.
At least we’re both wet now.
