Page 499 of Flirting with Darkness

“Yes, I’m inviting you in. Probably shouldn’t, though,” I said, then stuck my tongue out at him, and got up and raced toward the house.

When I looked back over my shoulder, he wasn’t there. I turned and he was already standing on my back porch.

“We have to be really quiet,” I told him, my voice dropping to a whisper. I didn’t know why I wanted him to see my room and maybe even my parents, why I wanted him to see what my life was like. But I did. I wanted him to see the secrets I kept so desperately form the other kids in my school, who I knew would scent my vulnerability and my differences.

He nodded without asking any questions. He felt like a solid presence at my back as we moved through the mud room into the hallway, then up the flight of the stairs. Something felt different being in my house with him there. I could feel my mother’s presence in the living room as much as hear the faint sound of magazine pages turning and a glass being set down again on the coffee table. I crept quietly up the stairs, and he moved ever so silently behind me.

I pushed open the door and led him into my room. It was a big room with dusty-rose painted walls and a long bench seat under the arched window; white tulle curtains hung from the canopy. Roses dotted the comforter, and the sheets were edged with embroidery. It was a pretty little girl’s room for an ugly little brat.

He moved quietly around the room, opening drawers to look at my neat rows of socks and the paintings and paints stored in the drawers of my desk. He knelt to look at the covers of my books.

“You can borrow one if you want.”

He shook his head. “I can’t read.”

He said it without any discomfort or embarrassment. I would’ve laughed uncomfortably if he’d said it any other way, but with him, I just nodded.

“Some kids have those little…” He shaped his hands in the air. “Animals.”

“Stuffed animals? I don’t have any.”

“Why?”

I’d watched my mother cut the head off one with vicious, triumphant strokes of her scissors, and I’d been sure she’d cut off my head next. I’d love my stuffed animals one day, and the next I’d convinced myself they were nothing. I’d dumped them into the garbage bin, on top of my favorite stuffed cat with its stuffing pooling out his neck and its button eyes staring at me forlornly.

“I don’t like them,” I said.

“But you like to read.”

I nodded.

“You should teach me.”

“The books would get wet.” I tilted my head to one side, imitating him. “Why do you only come when it’s raining?”

It had taken me a while to notice the pattern, but now I was sure of it.

“I’ll tell you when you teach me.”

“Do you even really care about reading?”

He gave me one of those flashes of a smile that he always did when he wasn’t going to answer a question.

“Bethany!” My mother called up the stairs. There was that faint quiver of anger in the way she called my name, something tremulous and weak and terrifying all at once. “You left muddy footprints!”

I ran to the doorway. “Sorry! I’ll clean it up!”

“Get down here!”

I gave him a look, begging him to hide away.

When I came back up to my room, I looked around for him with a mixture of eagerness and shame. I wasn’t sure what I expected, besides not to be alone.

He wasn’t in my room, not even in the closet amidst the neat rows of pretty dresses on their fabric hangers.

I ran to the window, hoping for another glimpse of him. A rainbow, colorful, slender and wild, stretched across the sky, reflected in the blurry pastels of the still puddles. On another day, I would’ve felt a lilt of excitement.

But now I had a lump in my throat.

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