Page 30 of The Hunting Moon
“A vent,” Winnie murmurs, “because it releases power.” It just sits there, right next to where the source would have rested. It’s rusted, but still sharp when Winnie plucks it out and taps it against her pointer finger.How,she wonders,do you work?
She will need to do some serious research on Dianas. Otherwise, Winnie is completely and totally clueless on how to proceed. There is no message here. No note from Dad that says,Well done, Win-Ben! Here’s why this dampener proves I was framed! LOVE YOU SO MUCH. YOU’RE MY FAVORITE DAUGHTER EVER.—DAD
There is just a cookie tin, some sodden moss, and a fishhook. Winnie even studies all the dings and dents in the tin to see ifmaybethey align into some hidden message or a new map. But it all looks random. More like the effects of a stream always burbling over two unsteady stones.
Without her thinking, Winnie’s hands reach for a sketchbook and open it to an empty page. She finds a pen from the cup beside the lamp. Like apipeline converting crude oil into gasoline or corn into moonshine, she distills the raw, useless words that float around her mind into feelings scrawled across a page.
She intends to draw the dampener and the empty circle now filled with mysteries… but instead, she draws Jay. It just happens, completely uncontrolled by her muscles. The pipeline knows what it needs to do; it transforms and adjusts and creates theactualoutcome Winnie needs right now.
Jay standing beside a stream, offering her his flannel, eyes sharp and ever so slightly hunted because the Tuesdays are near. Although, whether it’s fear that Winnie will get caught or fear over what he is about to have to relive, Winnie cannot say.
Her chest hurts staring at him. It has been so many years since she drew Jay—and it was always such a challenge because he never stood still. He was a creature of movement, a wild animal who could never be caged. No matter how many times she tried to sketch him, she could never get thelife forceof him onto the paper. He always felt flat, two dimensional, absent.
Right now, though, as she stares at the subtle shading she used for his gray, gray, forever gray eyes, she feels almost as if he is gazing right back.
And she doesn’t like it. Real Jay would never hold her eyes for this long.
Winnie closes the sketchbook and shoves it off the desk. One more illustration to add to her collection of nightmares.
It is nearing ten o’clock and Winnie is adding the final lines to her paper for Ms. Morgan when something taps at her bedroom window. Her first thought is that it must be that damnable crow that has built a nest on the roof, and she glares at the curtain hanging over the glass.
But then the tapping comes again, and Winnie realizes there is a vaguely human-shaped shadow outside her window where the roof is super slanted.
She almost falls out of her desk chair anddoesfall onto her bed after reeling across the rug. She rips back the curtain and finds Jay’s ghostly face waiting on the other side of her window. He gives a weak wave, as if it’s perfectly normal for him to be there right now.
“Oh my god,” Winnie says once she has hefted the ancient glass high.Cold, wet air sweeps in, and droplets from the latest drizzle hit Winnie’s face. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“No, I mean,here.On my roof and at my window. We have a front door.”
“Your mom’s light was off. I didn’t want to wake her.” What he doesn’t add but that Winnie intuitively understands isOr have her wonder why I’m here at this hour to talk to you.
Winnie has to admit that both of these reasons are valid, and since the Volvo is parked on the curb, he has no way of knowing Mom isn’t actually here. Which is why she informs him: “Mom isn’t actually here.”
“Oh.” He flushes bright enough for her to spot in the weak yellow of her lamp. “Should I… go to the front door?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Winnie grabs his white V-neck by the collar and hauls him forcefully into her room. Her bed bounces; the box springs groan; water drips off Jay onto her bedspread; and Winnie stoutly avoids considering the fact that she and Jay are on her bed together.
“You’re soaking wet,” she scolds, scrabbling off the bed and onto the safety of the rug as fast as she can. Unfortunately, Jay has the same idea, and by the time she is upright he is upright too.
And now dripping onto her rug.
“It’s raining,” he says by way of explanation.
To which Winnie responds, “Oh really?” And pushes past him toward her closet. Two weeks ago, Winnie thought it weird to see Jay in her family’s kitchen, the boy she used to knew transformed into a man.
Turns out having Jay in her bedroom is eighty-five thousand times weirder, not merely because his head nearly reaches her low, sloped ceiling, but because he isin her freaking bedroom.The last time he was here was over four years ago. He sat at her desk and worked on his math homework (gasp! he actually used to do assignments back then), while Winnie snuggled on her bed and read the Hunter’s Abridged Nightmare Compendium and wondered howanyonefound it useful when all the good stuff had been removed.
Now here they are again, each of them taller, while Winnie pretends she has not shifted back into overheating-furnace mode and Jay tries to make himself as small as possible and avoid more drippage onto the rug.
“Here,” Winnie says once she finds the first flannel he lent her two weeks ago, the navy tartan recently washed and smelling like dryer sheets.
“Oh.” Jay takes it. “Thanks.” He drops it onto the bed, and before Winnie can process what is happening in front of her, much less intervene, he removes his wet T-shirt.
“Oh my god.” She claps her hands over her glasses and frantically flings herself toward her bedroom door. But it’s too late. She has now seen exactly what shefelton the motorcycle ride with Jay two weeks ago, and there is no erasing it from her brain. It’s like staring into the sun: when you close your eyes, the memory of the light still sears. Replace “light” with “abs” and that is all Winnie can see right now as she digs her fingers under her lenses.
The image of Jay is permanently imprinted, with his waist (lean), shoulders (sculpted), and abs that did not used to be there.
