Page 33 of Fade into You

“I don’t know. It—it’s hard to explain. I guess we tend to keep secrets in my family, and also, sometimes I feel like…” There’s more to this, I think. But I don’t quite know how to put it into words. It’s a feeling I have about wanting to keep things, not even secret, that’s not the right word.

“Like what?” she asks, carefully glancing over at me as she drives, it seems, a little more cautiously.

“I don’t know. No one’s ever asked me to explain it before.”

She nods but doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. I’m sure she’s thinking I’m some kind of pathological liar now.

“Well,” she begins. “In my family, we’re big on pretending everything is shiny and sweeping things under the rug. So, I get it.”

She turns off Main onto a street I’ve never been down before. The mood changes as we get away from the busy part of town, driving through neighborhoods that have seen better days. Left, right. Right, left. Down all these side streets, rumbling overcracked pavement and pothole-pocked roads that I don’t think see much traffic anymore.

“Um, Jessa?”

“Yeah?”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“It sure ain’t the library!” She gives me a tantalizing grin and then turns up the volume, some loud band screaming out “Rebel Girl.” I turn it back down. She playfully swats my hand away and adjusts the dial to slightly less ear-bleedingly loud.

“Jessa—”

“Calm down,” she says, laughing. “I’m taking you to a very special place. It’s sort of like my home away from home.”

“Okay. I mean, as long as you’re not ambushing me into attending homecoming,” I joke.

Her head snaps toward me with a strange questioning in her eyes before she looks back to the road. “Please. Do Ilooklike I’m going to a school dance?”

Now she has me looking at her, and I have to admit how her current band tee with a horror-movie face imprinted with the band name Battle Beasts on it hugs just the right curves of her waist and tightens around her arms, which are more muscular than dainty. Strong, solid. The kind I’d like to grab onto, the kind I’d like to have hold me.Okay.I can’t keep up with my seesawing. I just miss Silas and Kat—our closeness, the comfort of them, their openness. They were soft the way Jessa is hard, they were warm where Jessa is cold. She’s really nothing like either of them, so I swallow back my thoughts.

“I wouldn’t know,” I finally answer. “Kayla and I vowed neverto go to school dances back in freshman year, but here she is, doing homecoming with Mr. Perfect.”

She glances over again, eyebrow crooked. “Mr. Perfect?”

“Well, according to Kayla, anyway.”

“Riiight,” she says, dragging the word out while she slows the car to a stop along the side of the road, in front of what looks like an old abandoned house. “Dade’s my best friend, but he’s a million miles from perfect,” she says. Then she turns the car off and starts unbuckling.

“I’m not going in there,” I announce.

She just shakes her head and laughs, opening her car door.

“I’m serious,” I yell through her still-open car window.

I watch her walk around the front of the car, tucking her keys into her side pocket along the way. At first I’m thinking she’s going to just leave me out here, but then the heel of her boot churns in the gravel as she walks to my door and stands there, looking down at me like she’s waiting for me to do something, say something. When I don’t, she hinges forward, her forearms resting on my open window as she leans in, her face so close to mine I can see her individual eyelashes, see the tiny flecks of green in her brown eyes, her mismatched dimples as she smirks at me, her hands dangling so close I feel like I should back away. Only I don’t.

“What?” I force myself to breathe.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You really need to chill out.”

“I’m not getting high with you, if that’s why you brought me here.”

She rolls her eyes and stands upright again, her hand reaching to unlock my door from the inside, then steps aside to hold it open for me. “That’s not why I brought you here.”

I unbuckle my seat belt and slide out of the car, my sandals sinking into the gravel. She closes the door behind me and doesn’t bother locking it. I follow her up the sidewalk toward this house that looks like a former crime scene. Thick black hand-painted letters spell outTOUCHSTONEacross the brick facade above the windows on the first story of the house.

“I really don’t want to go in there,” I say again, trying to catch up to her.

She turns around, hands in her front pockets, while she walks backward a few steps, watching me. “Why not?”