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  “Well, hey there, you,” Elliot said softly, sitting beside me on the “couch.” “Together at last.”

  And then—to my surprise—Silas came and sat down, awkward as all get-out, between me and Elliot. “That okay?” he asked Elliot, in a voice that obviously didn’t care about the answer. Then—I could not believe this boy—put an arm around me and one around Elliot.

  “Uh,” grunted Elliot, shifting to the left to accommodate Silas, “I’d kind of like to sit by my girlfriend.”

  “Oh, right,” said Silas. “Silly me.” Then he picked me up and set me down between them, first dragging me slowly over his lap.

  “Why are you doing this?” I hissed at Silas.

  “Doing what?” he whispered back. “Just switching seats with you.” It was so nearly identical to what he’d said during our first detailing that for a second I felt angry at him. But no—this was Silas, my friend, and we were going to be good to each other this summer.

  Elliot picked up my hand and began kneading it out of habit. “Where you guys from again?” he asked Silas, trying hard to be peaceable.

  Silas was looking at Elliot’s hand massaging mine and didn’t answer.

  I answered for him. “They moved from Alaska,” I said, then—trying to find some common ground—added, “Silas is a runner.” Elliot was a record holder in our school for football and track. “The Filipino Palomino” is what the Green Lake Times called him.

  “Yeah, what’s your mile?” he asked Silas.

  For the first time since I’d met him, Silas looked a little shy. “Oh, I do distance . . .”

  But I knew and shared his average, and Elliot raised his eyebrows, impressed—but a second later, he frowned. “You play ball at all?”

  “Not really,” said Silas. “I mostly just run.”

  “Shoot,” said Elliot apologetically, his Minnesota o’s stretching a mile long, “people here care more about football. Oh well.”

  “Shoot,” repeated Silas.

  “Behave,” I growled under my breath, not sure which boy it was directed to.

  The movie lineup was a couple of years old. To my left, Elliot held my hand; he was finally relaxed and enjoying the movie. To my right was another story.

  Silas leaned back into the van seat, long legs stretched before him, rocking his head on his neck to loosen his muscles. He leaned forward, eyes wide, and I could almost hear his mind humming.

  Things always seem more important in the dark, more significant, more profound: he pushed his knee next to mine, and when I moved it away, Silas cracked his back, twisting a little in his seat, ending up half an inch nearer to me, and pressed his knee to mine again.

  Was this all just to piss off Elliot? Why?

  In any case, it wasn’t working, because Elliot didn’t even notice how close Silas was sitting to me, our bodies touching at the foot, knee, hip, and shoulder. Silas proffered the tiniest lift of the side of his lips, this sweet little grin of victory without turning his head at all.

  What in the world?

  Elliot held my hand, thoughtlessly making circles with his thumb. Marcy’s eye wandered from the screen to Elliot every ten minutes while Bridget twirled her fingers in her long red hair, making tiny tendrils without noticing. Beside Laurel, Whit was leaning over to whisper something that made her laugh as he nodded toward the movie.

  Then Whit left his seat, momentarily disappearing into the side door of the minivan, and reemerged with a bottle that he passed around the group, the smell of black licorice preceding it. I took a healthy gulp, and it burned on its way down like swallowing cough syrup.

  What would Dad say if he knew? I asked myself. But Dad doesn’t know—and he won’t. There’s church in the morning. He won’t even ask about tonight.

  When I passed the bottle to Silas, he waved it off, and my thoughts changed direction. Forget what Dad would think—what does Silas think?

  And why did I care so much?

  I couldn’t even tell you what movies were playing. Something with weapons. Then something with kissing. My head was a mess, what with Elliot holding my hand on one side and Silas pressing into me on the other. I felt exhausted and—almost literally—pulled in two directions.

  Which was ridiculous.

  You are here with Elliot, I reminded myself. Your boyfriend.

  It was already one in the morning when the final movie started. On the screen, a young farmhand visited a country carnival and boarded a rickety old roller coaster. Ominous music swelled in the background, so it wasn’t a surprise when the coaster flew off the tracks . . . but right before it crashed, the boy woke up, no longer a farmhand but a famous actor, living in Hollywood.

  “Shit,” muttered Silas and glanced at his sister. I did too.

  She stared hard at the screen, eyes wide, and seemed okay enough—except I knew her brain was working overtime with what ifs.

  “What should we do?” I whispered to Silas.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s wrong?” Elliot asked on my other side.

  “Nothing,” both Silas and I lied.

  The boy in the movie was learning the ropes of life on the set of his daytime drama from his pretty costar. The two of them went to kiss and then he woke up again, this time as the oldest of seven children in an abusive home.

  Laurel’s face didn’t betray her thoughts, but I imagined they were manic. I was worried—for her and for myself—that she might have a reaction—or worse, a breakdown, in front of my friends and in this crowd. She’d been triggered by far less before.

  On the screen, the raging, drunken father hit the boy, who woke once again. Another new reality.

  “Laurel,” Silas said softly. She looked over at him. “Let’s go.” She nodded and got to her feet so readily I knew I’d been right about what was going on behind her calm exterior.

  “You’re leaving now?” Whit asked. “In the middle of the movie? You should stay.” He tugged at Laurel’s hand, and for a second, she appeared to doubt her decision.

  “It’s late,” Silas said with authority. “Coming, West?”

  I hesitated.

  “We need a navigator,” Silas said.

  Elliot threw an arm around my shoulder. “Dude, use your phone.”

  “No reception,” Silas said, holding up his phone as evidence.

  I looked at Laurel. She had that same wild, lost look in her eyes that I’d seen before on her worst days.

  I looked at Silas. “Please,” he said softly.

  I stood to my feet.

  “What the hell? West? Draw them a fucking map.” I hated the tone of Elliot’s voice—jealous, possessive, incensed.

  Elliot and Silas both stared at me.

  “Shut the hell up,” someone growled from another nearby group. “We’re trying to watch the movie!”

  I bent toward Elliot, kissed him hard on the lips, then apologized quickly, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll call you.” He stared after me as I climbed, along with the Harts, into Papa Arty’s pickup: Silas in the driver’s seat, me beside him, and Laurel by the window. Elliot blinked when Silas turned the pickup’s lights on.

  We drove the dirt path through the movie area and onto a back road between two fields where the corn stalks were climbing out of the earth. We were a few miles outside Enger Mills, and the night felt thick and black.

  “Elliot’s going to be so pissed at me,” I muttered.

  “Sorry,” Silas mumbled back.

  I didn’t say anything to him, just leaned over Laurel and rolled the window down to let the night air work like a salve. “Laurel, you okay?”

  “No.” Her voice was small, even in the tiny space of the cab. It slipped out the window and was left behind in the road.

  “It’s just a movie,” I said to her. “Just a stupid movie.”

  She laid her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes.

  “Laur, don’t let this get to you,” Silas said, staring straight ahead, hands tight on the ste
ering wheel. “It’s just science-fiction shit.”

  But she was shaking.

  “Do you have something you can take to calm you down?” I asked.

  “My beta blocker’s at home,” she said.

  “Perfect,” quipped Silas under his breath.

  “Shhh, okay. That’s okay,” I said, and took her hand. She squeezed it hard, and I let her. The three of us drove in silence, and after a while, Laurel stopped shaking and her grip relaxed. Her head felt heavy on my shoulder. “She’s asleep,” I whispered to Silas.

  He let out a giant breath.

  “I was surprised when you spoke up tonight,” I confided. “I thought maybe you’d just tell her you were leaving through some twin power.”

  Silas snorted. “That’s ridiculous,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “What?!” I said, trying hard not to wake Laurel. “You hear stories like that all the time. Once on August Arms, there was a story about twin girls—one was kidnapped and left to freeze to death in a cabin on a mountain, but the other twin knew just where to lead the authorities to find her sister, even though she had never been on the mountain and had never seen the cabin before. They climbed into the detective’s car together and she would—calm as anything—say ‘left’ or ‘right’ until they found her sister.”

  “That’s just creepy,” he said. At this early hour of the morning, the road belonged to us alone. The moon was big and yellow and very low; up ahead of us, it seemed to be biting into the horizon, perhaps peeking into the windows of the Harts’ sunroom in Heaton Ridge. I located Saturn on my own.

  “The same night,” I continued, “they told a story about these fraternal twins—the boy was playing baseball in the yard with some friends, and the girl was inside the house. The boy got hit in the face by a line drive but somehow wasn’t hurt, but the girl ran out into the yard, blood dripping from her nose. You’ve never had anything like that?”

  “Coincidence,” Silas said. “The closest thing we ever had to that was . . . well, okay. So, we grew up in Cape Canaveral, and we played pickup ball with other kids from our neighborhood, and Laurel and I always knew where the other one was on the court.”

  I smiled. “I always forget you grew up in Florida.”

  “Yeah, my parents were NASA hotshots. That’s where they met—they both had internships at Kennedy Space Center.”

  “So badass!”

  “Yeah,” Silas admitted. “When we played basketball, we would do this dumb thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  He laughed a little, and Elliot and the movie started to feel far away.

  “We’d put a two over our hearts.” He demonstrated, holding out two fingers and placing them on his chest. “It started because of our basketball team name: Hart2Hart. Laurel picked it.” He grinned without taking his eyes off the road. “I don’t know. It was like a little secret code for a million things. I love you. You’re my twin. I’ve got your back. It’s sissy, right?”

  “No,” I said. “I think it’s sweet.”

  “We still do it.”

  “I know.” Silas glanced at me, and I smiled. “What was it like growing up with Laurel?”

  “It was fine.”

  “The human thesaurus just described something as ‘fine’?”

  “It was curious,” he amended. “Our childhood was buried in books. Mom and Dad let us stay up as late as we wanted so long as we were reading. In elementary school, we read our Shel Silverstein books so much that we could recite every poem. We both liked the same stuff—books with magic and disguises and kid geniuses and idiot parents. Then the gulf started to widen in fifth, maybe sixth, grade. By junior high, I was reading the classics and mountains of whichever poets my favorite teacher put in my hands, but Laurel started reading sci-fi.”

  I loved the way he talked about books—I could tell that, just like Gordon, Silas found them “good company.”

  “Laurel read this philosophy book in eighth grade—somewhere around there—and afterward, she looked at me in that creepy way of hers and asked, ‘What if there is no God?’”

  The brakes of the old pickup made obscene grinding noises at an intersection, and we both grimaced a little and glanced at Laurel, but she didn’t wake up.

  “And then sophomore year,” he continued, “she started to cry a lot. I mean, all the time. I didn’t know what to do or how to help her. Then, the next year, she quit eating. I mean, she’d eat when Mom and Dad forced her. It wasn’t really anorexia—like with a lot of dancers—it was more like just losing interest in food. So her stomach got really messed up—all the anxiety and her weird eating habits—so she missed a lot of school and did the rest of junior year, at home, online.”

  We were entering Green Lake city limits now, driving in from the south. Silas slowed down as we drove through town, which was as quiet and still as a ghost town, the only din of noise and energy coming from the Mean Green Pub.

  He drove past my house and toward his own. “You missed my street.”

  “I want to drop Laurel off first.”

  When we got to Heaton Ridge, it took a bit of rousing to wake Laurel, and she looked really confused when we did, but Silas convinced her to go inside and head straight to bed. “Got it?” he asked. “No Googling the movie.”

  She used the garage code and went indoors, then Silas backed out of his driveway to take me home. “She’ll be okay, right?” I asked.

  “I hope so, West. She’s on meds, and she has a new therapist here, but nothing seems to help. You can’t reason with her; solipsism always wins. She just thinks you’re an illusion, a projection of her own mind. So the good days I swallow like grace on a spoon.”

  It was a lovely image. I wanted so much to say something useful.

  Instead I said: “I’m staying with my cousins in the Cities this week.”

  “That’s right; I think you mentioned that. Monty and Mae?” He turned down Cedar, and in the distance, Whit’s and Marcy’s cars still sat in the church lot. I wondered what they thought of Silas and Laurel and of my sudden exit with them.

  “Yup. I’ll be back for the Fourth. Trudy will be here, remember? I’ll introduce you!”

  He smiled. “Deal.”

  We pulled into my driveway. My parents had left the porch light on for me, and it glowed like a halo just above the front steps. It was nearly two a.m., nothing awake on Cedar Street but the cicadas.

  “So, Elliot doesn’t like me,” Silas said, suddenly changing topics as I unbuckled my seat belt, realizing for the first time that I had stayed in the middle seat, right beside Silas. His familiar sandalwood smell—peppery and musky like scented lumber—mixed with the scent of freshly mown grass coming in through the open window. I thought of his knee pressing into mine tonight.

  “Well, durr,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You acted like a crazy person tonight—were you trying to rile him up? Why get him pissed off over nothing?”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I repeated emphatically. “I am dating Elliot”—I pointed to myself—“and you”—I poked his chest—“are dating Beth. Remember, your gorgeous little girlfriend in the short skirts?”

  He looked thoughtfully at the spot where I had poked him. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I said with incredulity. “You drive me crazy sometimes, you know that?”

  “You know you’re beautiful, don’t you, West?”

  It almost knocked the wind out of me. “Me?”

  “Durr,” he said awkwardly to his steering wheel.

  I grinned at his uncustomary discomfort. I went to open the passenger door but paused and turned back to him. “You drive me crazy.”

  “You said that already.” He was grinning like a total goon. “Hey!” he said as if just remembering something. He reached beneath his seat and pulled out a small container. “Here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cookies. Oatmeal chocolate chip. Maybe now you can
find it in your heart to forgive me for crashing your date.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depends on how good they are.”

  “Oh, they’re good.”

  We looked at each other then while the pickup engine purred. “You drive me crazy,” I said again, quieter this time.

  “You might have mentioned that before,” he said softly.

  After a long pause, I said, “I have to go.” I opened the door and stepped out of the pickup. “Good night, Silas,” I said, closing the door behind me.

  But through the open window he called after me, “‘Just fine’ isn’t how you should be kissed, West.” His smile had returned full force.

  “Good night,” I said again, without turning around.

  I didn’t want him to see that my face matched his.

  fourteen

  The nine a.m. church service came much too early the morning after the drive-in. I had missed a couple of late-night calls from Elliot, but I knew he’d be sleeping now.

  In the front row, I sat between my siblings, mouthing the words to “Amazing Grace.” The Hart family was conspicuously absent from the row behind us, setting off an alarm in my stomach. Even the Mayhews were gone.

  Dad’s message was about God’s faithfulness, but I couldn’t help calling it into question as my mind focused on what must be happening at the old Griggs house that morning. I slipped away after the service and called Silas as I walked across the parking lot toward our house.

  “Hey, where were you this morning?” I asked.

  “Laurel’s freaking out.”

  “Great,” I said dryly.

  “She was asleep when I got home, but when I woke up this morning, I found her in the den on her laptop. She’d been on the computer for four straight hours, looking up hypnotism and prayer healers and studying forums that discussed the movie. And searching on eBay for that doll with the red dress too. She looked like a total zombie.”