looped around me and his long body pushed up against mine. I loved to dance, but I’d always been aware that I was dancing, aware of what my body was doing. Now, with the music thumping and Cole dancing with me, everything became invisible but the music. I was invisible. My hips were the booming bass. My hands on Cole were the wails of the synthesizer. My body was nothing but the hard, pulsing beat of the track.
My thoughts were flashes in between the downbeats.
beat:
my hand pressed on Cole’s stomach
beat:
our hips crushed together
beat:
Cole’s laugh
beat:
we were one person
Even knowing that Cole was good at this because it was what he did didn’t make it any less of an amazing thing. Plus, he wasn’t trying to be amazing without me — every move of his body was to make us move together. There was no ego, just the music and our bodies.
When the track ended, Cole stepped back, out of breath, half a smile on his face. I couldn’t see how he could stop. I wanted to dance until I couldn’t stand up. I wanted to crush our bodies against each other until there was no pulling them apart.
“You’re an addiction,” I told him.
“You should know.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
• SAM •
Because Grace was feeling more solidly herself, we spent the day out. She ducked down inside the car as I ran into the Dollar Parade to buy her some socks and T-shirts and ventured into the grocery store to buy the things on a list she’d written for me. There was pleasure in the mundane, in the pretense of routine. It was only marred by the knowledge that Grace was trapped in that car, officially missing, and I was tied to Boundary Wood, tangled in the pack still, and we were both prisoners in Beck’s house, waiting for our sentences to be commuted.
We took the groceries home and I folded Grace’s list into a paper crane and tied it to my bedroom ceiling with the others. It strained toward the window in the current from the air vent, but when I bumped it with my shoulder, its string was only long enough to tangle it with the crane next to it.
“I want to go see Rachel,” Grace said.
“Okay,” I replied. I already had my keys in my hand.
We got to Grace’s old high school well before school let out, so we sat together in silence and waited until the bell rang. As soon as it did, Grace ducked into the backseat, out of sight.
There was something odd and terrible about sitting outside her old school, watching the seniors begin to trickle out in groups, waiting for the buses. They moved in knots of twos and threes. Everything was bright colors: Day-Glo messenger bags hanging on shoulders, brilliant shirts with team mottos, fresh green tree leaves by the parking lot. Their conversations were silent with my windows rolled up, and without the benefit of sound, I thought that they could communicate entirely with their body language. There were so many hands punched in the air, shoulders bumping, heads thrown back in laughter. They didn’t need the words, if they were willing to be silent long enough to learn to speak without them.
I looked at the clock on the car. We’d only been here a few minutes, but it seemed longer. It was a beautiful day, closer to summer than spring, one of those days where the cloudless blue sky seemed high and far out of reach. The high schoolers kept coming out of the school, none of them familiar yet. It was ages ago that I’d waited for Grace to come out of class, back when I’d had to hide from the weather.
I felt so much older than all of them. They were seniors, so some of them might have been my age, which seemed unfathomable. I couldn’t imagine walking among them, backpack slung over my shoulder, waiting for a bus or walking to my car. I felt like I’d never been that young. Was there an alternate universe where a Sam Roth had never met the wolves, never lost his parents, never left Duluth? What would that Sam look like, going to school, waking up on Christmas, kissing his mother’s cheek on graduation day? Would that Sam without scars have a guitar, a girlfriend, a good life?
I felt like a voyeur. I wanted to go.
But there she was. Dressed in a straight brown dress with striped purple stockings underneath it, Rachel was walking alone