When they were little, they had sometimes slept out here, side by side in sleeping bags, surrounded by empty packages of chips and cookies. One time, she had woken up and found a raccoon sitting on her chest. Bishop had yelled to startle it away—but not before getting a picture. It was one of her favorite memories from childhood.
She could still remember what it felt like to wake up next to him, with dew covering their sleeping bags and soaking the canvas, their breath steaming in the air—they were so warm next to each other. Like they were in the only safe, good place in the world.
Now she unconsciously moved her head onto the hollow space between his chest and shoulder, and he wrapped one arm around her. His fingers grazed her bare arms, and her body felt suddenly fizzy and warm. She wondered how they must look from above: like two pieces of a puzzle, fitted neatly together.
“Are you going to miss me?” Bishop asked suddenly.
Heather’s heart gave a huge, awful thump, like it wanted to leap out of her throat.
She’d been trying all summer to ignore the fact that Bishop was going away to college. Now they had less than a month left. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, nudging him.
“I’m serious.” He shifted, withdrawing his arm from under her head, rolling over onto one elbow to face her. Casually, he slung his other arm over her waist. Her shirt was riding up and his hand was on her stomach—his tan skin against her pale, freckled belly—and her lungs were having trouble working properly.
It’s Bishop, she reminded herself. It’s just Bishop.
“I’m gonna miss you so bad, Heather,” he said. They were so close, she could see a bit of fuzz clinging to one of his eyelashes; she could see individual spirals of color in his eyes. And his lips. Soft-looking. The perfect imperfectness of his teeth.
“What about Avery?” Heather blurted. She didn’t know where the words came from. “Are you going to miss her, too?”
He drew back an inch, frowning. Then he sighed and shoved a hand through his hair. As soon as he wasn’t touching Heather anymore, she would have given anything to have his touch back. “I’m not with Avery anymore,” he said carefully. “We broke up.”
Heather stared. “Since when?”
“Does it matter?” Bishop looked annoyed. “Look, it was never a real thing, okay?”
“You just liked hooking up with her,” Heather said. She suddenly felt angry, and cold, and exposed. She sat up, tugging down her shirt. Bishop was leaving her behind. He would find new girls—pretty, tiny girls like Avery—and he would forget all about her. It happened all the time.
“Hey.” Bishop sat up too. Heather wouldn’t look at him, so he reached out and forced her chin in his direction. “I’m trying to talk to you, okay? I . . . I had to break up with Avery. I like . . . someone else. There’s someone else. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. But it’s complicated.…”
He was staring at her so intensely; Heather could feel the warmth between them.
She didn’t think. She just leaned in and closed her eyes and kissed him.
It was like taking a bite of ice cream that’s been sitting out just long enough: sweet, easy, perfect. She wasn’t worried about whether she was doing it right, as she had been all those years ago in the movie theater, when she could only think of the popcorn in her teeth. She was simply there, inhaling the smell of him, of his lips, while the music thudded softly in the background and the cicadas swelled an accompaniment. Heather felt little bursts of happiness in her chest, as though someone had set off sparklers there.
Then, abruptly, he pulled away. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”
And instantly, the sparklers in her chest were extinguished, leaving only a smoking black place. Just that one word, and she knew: she’d made a mistake.
“I can’t . . .” Suddenly he looked different—older, full of regret, like someone she barely knew. “I don’t want to lie to you, Heather.”
She felt like she’d swallowed something spoiled: there was a bad taste in her mouth, and her stomach was lashing. She felt her face begin to burn. It wasn’t her. He was in love with someone else. And she’d just shoved her tongue down his throat like a lunatic.
She had to crab-walk backward, away from him, to the edge of the trampoline. “Stupid,” she said. “It was stupid. Just forget it, okay? I don’t know what I was thinking.”
For a second, he looked hurt. But she was too embarrassed to care. And then he frowned, and he just looked tired and a little irritated, like she was an unruly child and he was a patient father. She realized suddenly that that was how Bishop saw her: like a kid. A kid sister.
“Will you just sit down?” he said in his tired-dad voice. His hair was sticking straight up—the hair equivalent of a scream.
“It’s getting late,” Heather said, which it wasn’t. “I have to take Lily home. Mom will get worried.” Lie on top of lie. She didn’t know why she said it. Maybe because in that moment she really wished for it—wished that she was heading back to a real home with a normal mom who cared, instead of back to the car and the parking spot on Meth Row. Wished that she was small and delicate, like a special Christmas ornament that needed to be handled correctly. Wished that she was someone else.
“Heather, please,” he said.
The world was breaking up, shattering into colors—and she knew if she didn’t get out of there, she would start to cry. “Forget about it,” she said. “Seriously. Would you? Just forget it ever happened.”
She only made it a few steps away before the tears started. She swiped them away quickly with the heel of a hand; she had to pass through a dozen old classmates to get to the house, including Matt’s best friend, and she would rather die than be the girl crying at her best friend’s birthday party. Everyone would probably think she was wasted. Funny how people could be around you for so many years, and be so off the mark.
She went in through the back door, taking a second inside to stand, inhaling, trying to get control of herself. Weirdly, although Bishop’s whole property was a junkyard, the house was clean, sparsely furnished, and always smelled like carpet cleaner. Heather knew that Mr. Marks’s longtime girlfriend, Carol, considered the yard a lost cause. But the home was her place, and she was always scrubbing and straightening and yelling at Bishop to take his dirty feet off the coffee table, for God’s sake. Even though the house hadn’t been remodeled since the seventies, and still sported shag carpet and weird orange-and-white-checkered linoleum in the kitchen, it looked spotless.
Heather’s throat tightened again. Everything was so familiar here: the Formica dining room table; the crack running along the kitchen countertop; the curled photographs stuck to the fridge with magnets advertising dentists’ offices and hardware stores. They were as familiar to her as any she had ever called her own.
They were hers, and Bishop had been hers, once.
But no more.
She could hear running water, and muffled TV sounds from the den, where Lily was watching. She stepped into the darkened hall and noticed the bathroom door was partly open. A wedge of light lay thickly on the carpet. Now she could hear crying, over the sound of the water. She saw a curtain of dark hair appear and disappear quickly.
“Nat?” Heather swung the door open carefully.
Water gushed from the faucet, and steam was drumming up from the porcelain bowl. The water must have been scalding, but Nat was still scrubbing her hands, and sniffling. Her skin was raw and red and shiny, like it had been burned.
“Hey.” Heather forgot, for the moment, about her own problems. She took a step into the bathroom. Instinctively, she reached out and shut off the faucet. Even the taps were hot. “Hey. Are you okay?”
It was a stupid thing to say. Nat was obviously not okay.