my hand to wave as the compartment door starts to slide shut.
“You,” he says, before the door closes all the way. “I often dream of you.”
8
Desire
It’s a good photograph. Beautiful. The sunlight falls perfectly against his face, reflecting sharp and clear off its angles. Brown eyes squint at the light. And that smile, so sweet, sincere, spontaneous, a happy moment captured on film.
Yes, it’s a splendid piece of work, but it doesn’t change that awful question. Can I love the boy smiling at me from this photograph?
No, not at me. Smiling at her.
“Oh.”
I spin around at the unexpected voice. Sean is standing behind me, staring at the picture I’ve been examining. I want to hide the photograph from him, but I can’t move my hands. I’ve never seen a deer caught in headlights, but I’ve heard it’s like the poor thing’s been frozen, pinned in place, and I feel a little like that now.
“So this is him?”
“Yes.”
“Bit pasty, isn’t he, for an Indian kid?”
“He’s not pasty.”
“He’s fairer skinned than you. But you don’t get much of a tan, seeing as you spend your life in this marvelous climate. What’s his excuse?”
“He’s half French.”
“How unfortunate for him. Is he called Pierre?”
“No, as a matter of fact, he isn’t called bloody Pierre. His name’s Ray. I think his mother’s French.”
“I’m sure you’ll make a lovely pair.”
“He and I are never going to make a lovely anything,” I snap, “because I’m never going to meet him. Odds are Amarra will outlive their sweet little love story. And me.”
“Stop saying things like that. She won’t outlive you.”
“Then you don’t say rude things because you don’t like him.”
“Don’t like him? I don’t even know him. But you”—he grimaces at me—“you’re defending him already. I suppose you’re well on your way to falling in love, then, like you’re meant to.”
I spring out of the chair and stomp away.
We’ve never acted so angry with each other before. It’s been months, a whole autumn and winter and spring, since the night I snuck out to his house and that moment as the train doors closed. In all that time we’ve never got to arguing like this. I thought we would. We jumped like scalded cats every time we accidentally touched, we avoided each other’s eye if the room was full—it was weeks after that evening before we went back to talking and acting like we used to. I had expected something to snap in that time. But it never did.
Yet now—
I storm out the back and throw myself into the swing. The sky is gray, overcast, and grim. Soon it’ll start to rain (what a surprise, rain in England!) and I’ll have to go back indoors.
The photograph has turned everything topsy-turvy. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. It startled us all.
The first time I saw the face of the boy in the picture, it was the night before my birthday. At the end of April.
After I slipped away to see Sean, Mina Ma went angry lioness in the extreme and scarcely let me out of the house for months. She still doesn’t trust me not to do something reckless again. I can’t blame her. I haven’t exactly given her reason to think of me as a steady, cautious type. So I spent most of my time at the cottage, as snow came and went over the lakes and I got a lopsided haircut for the New Year because Amarra, for reasons unbeknownst to me, let her best friend, Sonya, go at her hair with a pair of blunt scissors.
Really. I’d expected more sense from her.
And on the night before my sixteenth birthday, I dreamed about a boy with black hair and dark, flashing eyes. He looked familiar. Maybe I had dreamed about him before, but I have no memory of it. My chest tightened. I felt like I knew him, which was strange, and the way I felt looking at him was even stranger, until I woke up and realized that it must have been some snapshot of Amarra’s life. Someone she knew from school or a friend of the family’s.
Those feelings, the feelings I shared with her in the dream, should have tipped me off, but I didn’t pay attention.
I woke up and I was sixteen.
The rest of my birthday went so normally, so perfectly, there was no reason to stop or to ask questions. Sean and Erik and Ophelia came, with presents, and Mina Ma made me a cake in the shape of