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  Breath held, Edy eased inside. On turning to close the door behind her, she jumped at the figure on the couch.

  Hassan pressed a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said.

  Even though he had a key to the place, it seemed wrong for him to lurk in the shadows, unannounced. Still, Edy’s attention turned; keen to hear whatever required her silence.

  “There’s confusion about what did and didn’t happen,” her mother said from an adjacent room. “No more than that at this point.”

  “There’s more than confusion, Rebecca. There are outright accusations,” came a second voice. Edy recognized it as Kyle Lawson’s dad, Cam, a long time friend of her mother’s. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Cam, please. How do you find the energy to worry so? I don’t give rumors much thought,” Edy’s mother said.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Do you?” her mother said.

  Cam hesitated. “Maybe.”

  Edy and Hassan exchanged a frown.

  “You always did confuse wishful thinking with reality,” her mother said.

  “Rebecca. We have to know. Our best currency is knowing,” said Cam.

  “So get the police report and be done with it. Speculation is garbage, as is worry,” her mother said.

  “Let me do this my way,” Cam said. “Let me deal with him.”

  “Oh be quiet,” she snapped. “Witch hunts are so passé. And where’s that keen ear of yours? We haven’t been alone in this house for at least ten minutes.”

  Edy and Hassan flung into action, tearing open her backpack and spilling the contents on the couch. Both snatched for a random book and notebook, before spreading out papers on the cushion between them. Edy’s mother and Cam stepped into the hallway; just as Edy realized her Latin book sat upside down in Hassan’s hand. She snatched it from him, heaved the history book she held at him, and squinted in what she hoped looked like a mimicry of real, serious scholarship.

  Out the corner of Edy’s eye, she watched her mother’s beige heels as they strode down the hall and out the door, never pausing to acknowledge them. Cam did the same.

  “What was that about?” Edy said the second they were gone.

  “Politics, what else? They’re going to burn some sucker alive.” Hassan tossed aside his book.

  He gave her a once over, gaze snagging for a second as he did.

  “What?” Edy looked down at herself. She blushed, before remembering the way he’d rushed to Sandra Jacob said. Heat drained from her face.

  “You’re late,” Hassan said. “Mom cooked your favorite, butter chicken. It’s probably cold by now.”

  He went for the door without looking back. Edy followed, with the taste of his mother’s heavy handed spices already on her lips.

  ~~~

  The next day, Edy carried a brown bag lunch of leftovers into the cafeteria. On entering, she spied not just the redhead Aimee at the “it” table, but Sandra Jacobs and Eva Meadows, too. She wasn’t in the mood, she realized, and set her eyes on Wyatt Green with the thought. She passed Hassan and the Dysons, in line, and smirked at the weight of their glares. Edy sat down before the lone boy, aware that they had the attention of the room.

  Wyatt sat up straighter.

  “Remember me?” Edy said.

  “Of course,” he breathed. He ran a hand down the front of his shirt, another through his tangle of wheat-colored locks and again corrected his posture.

  Edy pulled out her lunch, peeled back the lid, and sniffed indulgently. At the sight of Wyatt watching, she extended the container to him.

  “I . . .don’t know what it is,” he said.

  “Butter chicken,” she said.

  He stared. She went on to explain how it was only the most famous Indian dish known to man and the cultural equivalent of a hamburger. “Only tastier,” she said and dug in.

  When she cautioned a glance up, it was to see Hassan’s darkened face, unwavering in his devotion to glaring at them. Good, Edy thought. Feel jaded and set aside.

  Wyatt had asked her something. Something about going to India. She told him about summering there three years in a row, figuring it would answer whatever question he’d had. As she spoke, she made a point of looking at Hassan. He’d started in on his chicken, picking absentmindedly, when the redhead leaned over and said something in his ear.

  “Edy?” Wyatt said. He’d spoken her name with the weight of expectation. She racked her memory bank for the last vestiges of conversation. “India” was all she could come up with.

  “I go there with his family,” Edy inclined her head in Hassan’s direction. “But we haven’t been in years.”

  Wyatt’s gaze skidded apprehensively to the table of jocks and then back again. The redhead said something and Hassan laughed.

  Edy made a point of looking away. “Where do you summer?” she said brightly.

  Wyatt’s cheeks flooded with color. “We went to the Jersey Shore once. For a week, not a summer.” He looked around as if desperate for assistance. “It was my first time at the beach.”

  Edy broke wide into a grin. Seconds slid home into a minute before it melted from her face.

  Stupid. Stupider than stupid.

  The image of the battered pickup truck came back to her, the clothes in the CVS bag, the tattered old backpack. He sat before her in a sickly pale polo, rinsed to a listless yellow.

  Cruel.

  “God. You must hate everyone.” Edy remembered making him out to be the hired help, a move no better than the rumors encircling his arrival—that he was scum, a squatter, a sidewalk-sleeping meth addict whose dad was wanted for a convenience store robbery in Hoboken. Okay, so maybe her assumption was a bit better, but all of it stunk of xenophobia and elitism. He was an other and a poor other at that, promised obscurity if not outright torment. No doubt, she’d pay some price just for sitting with him.

  “Chaterdee,” he said simply.

  “What?” She’d been shaken from her reverie again.

  “It’s where I’m from. You wanted to know, didn’t you? Where I came from? I’m from Chaterdee. A soot-filled town on the edge of Pawtucket, where steel mills blot out the sun.”

  He met Edy with a steady, shy smile of his own.

  “You’re different,” he said. “From the other people around here.”

  She looked up in surprise.

  “You didn’t hiss when I told you where I’m from.”

  He took a spork to his roasted chicken, tearing off a bit of flesh before popping it into his mouth.

  “I have to admit that Boston’s much nicer,” Wyatt said. “And I’m liking it more every day.” His gaze slid from her face downward, before shooting up as if caught falling asleep.

  Edy blushed and dug into her chicken. Somehow, she didn’t think he meant his new view of the sun.

  ~~~

  Wyatt walked Edy Phelps home that day. The girl with wide button eyes and the lines of a dancer, the girl so far above anyone her age that she submitted papers on political philosophy and chattered aimlessly about places he hadn’t the money to dream of. That girl had spent an hour, maybe more, on a roundabout route with Wyatt that only eventually led home. They talked of school and Chaterdee, Boston and dance, and oh, did she unravel when the talk turned to dance, companies and schools of thought, productions and most routines. He didn’t care, and he absolutely cared. He hadn’t even known that both were possible.

  Wyatt and Edy parted for the pair of homes facing each other with reluctance. During their walk, she’d gushed about ballet, as though clinging to every thought she’d ever had about every performance until the moment they’d met. Wyatt listened when he could and let his thoughts wander when they did—swept by her voice and the sudden way she touched his shoulder or his arm with a thought. At his last school, he’d been an outcast. An early and gruesome crop of acne on his face and torso made most steer clear, and those who didn’t, well, they certainly didn’t touch him. And though some of the reddening ha
d cleared, his outbreaks could still be frequent and obnoxious.

  When they reached her gate, she was on to something about football and her dad, who had pulled into the drive. Wyatt watched him, dreading the conversation’s end. Edy said her goodbye with a touch to his shoulder, promising to share lunch the next day. She then bounded off for her father’s black BMW, body light and tight with each step. With a wave of acknowledgment to her father, Wyatt headed home, his own steps bouncing with the truth—that a girl had talked to him—a pretty girl, perhaps prettier than any he’d ever known. She wanted lunch with him. She wanted to see him again.

  A song came to him, and with it, a pressing need to whistle. He couldn’t figure where it might have come from, as he rarely listened to the radio and owned no music. Still, a tune had seized him.

  Wyatt bounded up a short set of stairs and dug out the keys to his home. On opening the door, he found the hallway dark. Glass crunched under his Converses. He could hear his mother, Debbie, and his father, Roland, shrieking, same as always. No doubt she was threatening to walk, this time for more than a day or two. No doubt, dad was telling her to, that he didn’t give a dam one way or another.

  Normally, these confrontations made him want to split his face on the stair rail if not but for a moment of blissful unconsciousness. But not on that day. On that day there was a song was in his heart, a lift in his step, and a smile on his lips, placed there by a pretty petal named Edy Phelps. He would say her name twice; it sounded so nice.

  Edy Phelps. Edy Phelps.

  Wyatt whistled a loud and sassy sound, good as a New Orleans brass band come Mardi Gras. He bounded up the stairs to his bedroom. Once there, he threw back the curtains and smiled at his view of Edy’s house. It was a smile so broad and bright it might as well have been a laugh. It should have been a laugh. And then he did it. He laughed. With his mother downstairs screaming that his dad had the prick of a caterpillar, Wyatt laughed. With his father, words slurred, hollering that her horse face kept him stepping out, Wyatt laughed. And as the few possessions they owned shattered and the shouting continued, Wyatt laughed, the song in his heart drowning everything out but him.

  ~~~

  Locked away in a blinding homage to Hello Kitty, Edy pulled up to her desk to do her homework. With her window open and the curtains pulled back, she had a direct view into Hassan’s room. As children, they’d scramble over the branches that divided their rooms, slipping from one to the other, undetected. They flashed lights as a means of late night communication before either had been permitted cell phones. When they fought, they made a point of drawing the curtains, glaring through the window panes, making evil faces, or giving each other the finger.

  Edy read the assigned chapter on Paleoamericans, made a few notes, and switched over to To Kill a Mockingbird for English. Hassan’s bedroom light illuminated his room at 6:20, his usual return time from practice. He dropped a duffel bag on the floor and stretched, yanked off his shirt, and let it fall next to the bag.

  He’d feel her watching soon and look up. Life tethered them in a way that one could sense the other, know the other’s thoughts, and understand without speaking. So, she knew he was ignoring her, even before he strode over and yanked the curtains shut without so much as a nod of acknowledgment in return. Harami. Bastard.

  Edy yanked out her cell phone and texted him, thumb jamming her screen as if it were his eyes. A single word that she could only hope carried the strength of her annoyance with him.

  Really?

  She hit send and waited, gnawing at her bottom lip in the process.

  One minute. Two minute.

  Three.

  Edy shoved aside her books, jammed on a pair of Nikes and thundered downstairs. The damp autumn nightfall had her wishing she’d grabbed a jacket, at least. Never mind that, though. Fury would keep her warm.

  She used her key to get in, wiped her shoes on the mat, and tore for the stairs.

  “Edy?” Hassan’s mother called after her. “I’m glad you’re here. Come and help me—”

  Hassan’s was the first room on the left in a house that mirrored her own. Edy tried the knob, found it open, and shoved her way in. Faintly, she registered his mother’s complaints at the bottom of the stairs. She said that they were no longer children, that it was improper for Edy to be in his room, that Edy must be mindful of her behavior now that she was becoming a young woman, something else and something else. Not for the first time, his mother’s voice had morphed like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. Wah wah wah.

  Hassan stepped out the bathroom with a towel around his neck. Saturated, ink black hair clung to him, sweeping his eyes and dripping until he slapped it back. A simple gray tee lay damp, hinting at a painfully well-muscled figure. Edy knew what it took to make a body like that, had watched him transform day by day as he sought it and sculpted through sweat. She swallowed at the thought.

  “Edy, come downstairs and help me—” Rani called.

  Hassan closed the space between them, wrapped a hand on her arm, and pulled her into his room.

  “We’ll be down in a sec, mom,” he said and closed them in the room.

  “So, you’re ignoring me?” Edy demanded the second they were alone.

  Hassan tossed his towel to the floor. “Maybe, I’m following your lead.”

  There it was again. The flash of burning fury, the iced mask that had always been others and not hers.

  “I did not ignore you. I sat elsewhere for lunch.”

  “I don’t care where you sit,” Hassan said.

  He fell back onto his bed and stretched out, before folding his hands behind his head.

  “Really?” Edy said. “So, it’s okay if I sit with him tomorrow? And the next day?”

  He closed his eyes, mouth thinning with his thoughts. A thunderstorm raged within, a hurricane that he didn’t always control. Edy saw that struggle in the lines of his frame, in the inadvertent flex of muscle.

  “I don’t like him,” Hassan said. His eyes flew open with the acknowledgment: green glass spun to brilliance in anger. “Stay away from him because I don’t like him.”

  Edy’s mouth snapped open in rage, hung there, and then shut on its hinge.

  “Mar sāle,” she hissed in Hindi. Go to hell. “And take your entourage with you.”

  “Edy—”

  In the time it took her to get to the door, he appeared, closing it as she pulled.

  “Move.”

  “Would you at least hear me out?”

  “I’ll hear you out when you stop locking yourself up in bathrooms with bimbos.”

  He shut the door and made her face him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. And does that make your lunches with the new kid go away?”

  “What?” Edy cried. “No! Of course not.”

  “Of course not.” His echoed words hung with the weight of accusation. Mouth twisted, he glared at a point above her head. But Edy cared nothing for the anger simmering on that face, gorgeous or otherwise. She boiled with her own rage, and it threatened to overflow, as he stood there, wanting her in his world, all the while making absolutely no room.

  Or was that even it? Was it that she needed—no scorched—for a place at his side, and in his future, a place that already stood at full capacity?

  Yeah, she did.

  The bedroom door flew open with Edy’s realization, slamming into her back and launching her into Hassan’s arms.

  Rani gaped as if they’d been that way the whole time. “Telephone,” she hissed and thrust a land line to her son.

  “I’m a little busy right now,” Hassan said. “We have some things we need to get straight and—”

  Rani’s orbs doubled in size. “Out of this room,” she hissed and grabbed Edy by the forearm. “Go to your house. You’ll be taking dinner tonight on your own. I’ll bring it to you. And they’ll be no backtalk from either of you.”

  Edy twisted, but found Rani’s grip dogmatic, unrelenting. Ushered first into the hall, she made
her way downstairs and out the door. Only when the sound of the latch closed firmly behind her did Edy and truth meet.

  She’d been thrown out, thrown out of the Pradhan home for the first time in her life. And while she had a key, there seemed no point in using it. Not on that evening, at least.

  Six

  Edy stood by her locker, hair longer than ever and pulled into a wild cloud of a ponytail. She pulled an algebra text out and another of chemistry before noticing Wyatt just behind her.

  “Hey,” he breathed.

  She smiled. She always had the biggest smile for him.

  Two weeks of lunches together had earned them whispers and outright scowls from the oxen she hung out with. Well worth the price of admission, if you asked Wyatt Green.

  “Hey, twinkle nose,” Edy said. “What’s new?”

  Twinkle nose. He touched his nose, drew away, and found glitter on his fingertips.

  “Art?” she guessed and slammed the locker.

  No malice in her voice, no mockery. Was she any other girl at that school, she wouldn’t have passed on a prime chance to mock him to stand a little taller by cutting him down. No, Edy Phelps was a different. He’d spent yesterday alone reminiscing about her fingers brushing his arm. Which brought him to this next point.

  Wyatt managed a dry swallow. “After school—”

  He lost his nerve. It walked off and left him, disgusted by the audacity of the moment. He’d only just met her. He’d never known gall. Better still, how could he ever think—

  Wyatt shook his head. All morning he’d rehearsed. Just blurt it. He might have been a stranger to gall, but he was a quiet friend of humiliation. He had no reason not to welcome it now.

  “After school?” Edy prompted.

  Her hand rested on a small spiral binder atop a stack of books labeled “Homework Assignments.”

  “I heard about a place that makes great milkshakes,” he said. “I don’t know if you want to go. You probably don’t want to go. But if you do—”