Page 38

FOUR

I t’s late, long after dark, and Francis and his friends are doing their best to teach Eddie the dances: the Varsity Drag, the Turkey Trot, the Peabody, even the Texas Tommy. Eddie, of course, struggles. He can barely step back and forth at a school dance, let alone shimmy like a flapper on a speakeasy dance floor. But there’s something about the music here, about the boys, about being so far away from Mesa Springs and the twenty-first century, about Francis, that seduces him to go for it anyway. Here, on this dance floor, his clumsiness is seen, mirrored, forgiven, even celebrated. It fits. He fits.

Francis trips through the dances effortlessly, without appearing to concentrate at all, switching from a two-step to a slide as easily as he crosses a street or a threshold. A new tempo, a cross-rhythm, a burst of syncopation—Francis seems to anticipate them all, never straining, always exactly on the beat. “I could do these dances in my sleep,” he says, swinging his arms to one side as a new song starts. “We’ve been doing them for five, six years now. I suppose they are a little passé. The Bright Young Things over in jolly olde England would turn up their snooty noses. But we still love them. Of course, five years isn’t a very long lifetime for a dance, if you think about it. Do you ever think about it?”

“About dancing? I’m trying to!” Eddie catches one foot on the other as he swings it backward, trying hard to follow Francis’s lead. He lands on the opposite foot, clumsily, breaking their rhythm. “Sorry!”

Francis throws an arm around Eddie’s waist and shouts over the music. “Wanna go upstairs? Get some air?”

“Yes please!” Eddie shouts back, although he has no idea what’s upstairs.

Francis leads the way. They make their way back through the front door, grabbing Eddie’s camera from Link on their way, then around to the back of the building. Francis boosts Eddie up onto the iron fire escape, then leaps, grasps the bottom step with his fingers, and, in a single gymnastic motion, swings himself up behind. Eddie marvels silently at Francis’s lean strength. He’d never be able to do that.

They climb seven flights, to the roof, where they can see the whole city. Times Square to one side, distant downtown to the other, and the Hudson River to the west. Francis walks to the edge and peers over, down to busy Eighth Avenue below.

“Yikes!” he yelps, before taking a step backward. He grabs Eddie around the waist and buries his face in Eddie’s neck. He has to bend down to do it, being a half-head taller. “Afraid of heights!”

“I remember,” Eddie says, and Francis looks up at him and smiles.

Oh, that smile. It’s nearly as magnetic as his eyes, now half-hidden behind the sharp locks that came loose on the dance floor. They hang almost to the bridge of his nose, grazing his eyelashes. Francis laughs, squeezes Eddie’s ribs, then sits on the edge of the roof, his boots dangling over the edge.

“Come sit with me,” Francis says. “I’m afraid of heights, remember?”

Eddie laughs and sits down next to Francis. They’re facing west, away from Times Square, and if you were to look at them from in front, they’d look like angels against the skyline, their shapes just shadows, surrounded by the glow of the city. Eddie grips the edge of the roof.

“You can see all the way across the Hudson from here,” Francis says. “All the way to New Jersey. On a clear day, you could probably see all the way to California, if you squint really hard. Just don’t lean too far forward.”

To see as far as California, Eddie imagines, you’d have to look straight over Colorado, straight past Mesa Springs. He wonders what Mesa Springs looks like right now, in 1930. Probably dusty and rough, if it’s even there. He feels so far away from that place. It is, at best, a distant memory from far in the future, a place he barely ever knew at all. And a time that, right now, he doesn’t miss at all. Here is where he wants to be. Here and now.

A tiny, mischievous smile curls at the corners of Francis’s lips. “I’m not actually afraid of heights, you know. I just want you to hold my hand. Will you hold my hand?”

The words move slowly through the air, surrounding Eddie, seeping like warm syrup through his ears, curling into his chest. He knows Francis is just flirting, of course. He’s surely said this to a dozen boys before, a hundred. But still, no one’s ever said anything romantic to Eddie before, and it feels so, so warm.

Why me? Eddie wants to ask. Why did you want to find me? But he doesn’t ask, because he’s afraid that Francis’s answer will pierce this beautiful balloon, revealing it to be only a fantasy, not real at all.

Besides, he can’t ask that question. Not now. Not while Francis is laying his hand over Eddie’s, threading his fingers through Eddie’s, pressing his palm against Eddie’s like it belongs there, sending waves of dopamine coursing through Eddie’s body. He shivers.

“Can I ask you something?” Francis says.

“Okay,” Eddie says.

“Who are you?”

“What do you mean? I’m Eddie.”

“No,” Francis says. He raises Eddie’s hand to press against his lips. “I mean who are —”

But before Francis can finish the question, a car on the street below, a Duesenberg perhaps, or a Chrysler or a Ford, careens around the corner and rams into a streetlight, knocking it over with a colossal crash and sending a stream of sparks high into the air. Eddie startles and jumps, nearly losing his balance on the roof edge. But Francis is there, to grab him and yank him away from the edge, to toss him, as if he were weightless, to safety. Eddie lands with a thud, and everything goes dark.