Page 274 of Burn Bright

My lips twitch upward as I watch him. The world is a better place with Ben Cobalt in it, and I have hope that one day he’ll believe it too.

Once I send off the form to his family’s med team, we unpack my things together. I hang up my clothes in the closet, and Ben digs through a cardboard box of my knickknacks while sitting on my unmade bed.

“Kid photos?” Ben flashes a stack of four-by-six pictures I never framed. His smile widens. “You haven’t shown me these.”

“I forgot I had them.”

He flips through the pics, laughing. “Your pigtails.”

“Hey, don’t knock the hairstyle. It was the one thing Ibeggedmy mom to do and she listened. I rocked them all the way until the second grade.”

“You were a cute kid.” He flips the photo, then his smile slowly fades. He checks the back…I can’t figure out what has him looking like he saw a ghost.

“You spot Casper lurking behind seven-year-old me?” I joke, abandoning my sweaters to go plop down beside him. My shoulder presses up against his body, but he hardly budges.

“When did you go to Disneyland?” he asks.

The photo between his fingers—it’s me at Disney. The teacups ride is blurry in the background. I have on classic black and red Minnie ears and my dad has his hands perched on his waist, a little fed up with me. I think Disney wasn’t his thing, or so my mom said. The trip had been a boiling point in theirmarriage, which was likely why it was the only family vacay we ever took.

“Uh, I think I was four here.” I squint at the photo. “Yeah, four.”

“What month?”

I’m confused. “Why…does that matter?”

“Was it July?”

“I think so.” I nod. “That sounds right. It was definitely the summer.” I peek at the back of the photo. No date written. “You okay, Ben?”

He blows backward in a daze, leaning against the wall my bed is pushed against. I scoot back to be beside him. He stares off as his thoughts whirl. “I was there.”

“You were at Disneyland?”

“In July. We were there at the same time.”

“Okay, but like different days.”

Ben gazes at the photo with a faraway expression. “I remember this little girl with pigtails. Light brown hair.” My natural hair color. “Her knees were scraped.”

I peer closer at the pic. My knees are visibly reddened like I’d fallen.

“I remember her dad being so mean to her, and it hurt to see. I remember crying over it…over…” He glances down at me.

My pulse skips. “It might not have been me. What are the odds, Ben? You were…how old?”

“Five.”

“How good is a five-year-old’s memory, really?” I pat my hip for my phone, about to search the internet for the answer, but I left my cell by the printer.

“I don’t remember a lot from that trip,” he says. “But I do remember that. It was burned in my head because it upset me. I wanted to go to that girl, but I couldn’t stay. I was being tugged in another direction.” He sweeps my features.

I cling harder to his, scouring his face as if my own memories from that long-ago summer will surface. Maybe I’ll see him in my mind. “I thought you don’t believe in fate.”

“I didn’t think I did,” he whispers in the gentle silence. “What about you? What do you believe?”

“Well…Aunt Helena would tell me it’s all real. She’d want to call her psychic friend Angelica for a reading, which she’s already promised us.”

Ben met my aunt on video chat the other day. She said she sensed “goodness” in him and thought our fire and air signs would spark explosive sex—which I didnotwant to talk about with her and him together. Ben controlled his laughter well.