“Ivy?”
I turned. The Paxtons’ house was belted in the shadows of its long country-style porch. Inside them floated the orange cherry of Billy’s cigarette, fading and brightening like a signal at sea. “Did something happen?” he called.
“I think there’s someone inside my house.”
“Seriously?” He dropped his cigarette and jogged down the drive. “Are you okay? Did you call the police?”
Even by streetlight he was sunny, charged up like a solar battery. I could see every freckle on his skin. My cheeks heated remembering the sketch I’d found, in which my younger self drew those freckles as stars. “I didn’t.”
“Oh.” He looked mistrustfully at my house. “Should I?”
“Not yet. Can you just … sit with me a sec?”
He dropped obediently to the concrete. “Yeah. Of course. So—what happened?”
I didn’t know what I looked like. Like I’d just stepped away from an explosion, probably, my eyes all wide with revelation. I couldn’t bear to start blathering about cookies. “Nothing. Nothing actually happened, I just … I’m home alone. I thought someone was in the backyard. Then I went back inside and I thought maybe they were in the house.”
“Holy shit. Were they?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. Maybe I’d bitten the cookies myself. Had I? Hadn’t I? I could still taste chocolate on my tongue. When I tried to picture an intruder, all I could see was my mother moving through the house in horror-film jump cuts. I shuddered. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
He pressed his toes into a strip of soft tar. “But you don’t want to call the cops.”
“No.”
I thought he’d push me on that, but he only nodded. It was oddly intense sitting so close to him. Billy Paxton, with that lanky body in jeans stained with paint and oil and pizza sauce, because he had three part-time jobs. I only knew that because I’d seen him in his blue jumpsuit at the Jiffy Lube, and rolling down the drive with a Pepino’s delivery light on his hood, and climbing in and out of his dad’s truck, its bed laden with primer cans. I had the strangest urge to tell him the whole and actual truth. I didn’t, of course. I told him one sliced-down, shined-up piece of it.
“The weirdest things have been happening,” I said. “And it’s all—it’s all making me think I don’t really know my mother.”
For the briefest moment, he seemed to stiffen. But right away he relaxed, and spoke in such an even tone I figured I’d imagined it. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” My fear was abating now. In its place came a kind of recklessness. For years I’d avoided looking at this boy, but out here, in the late and the quiet, I finally could. Tea-colored eyes, dark brows that made him look kinda wicked. His bottom teeth were crooked. I got a flash of him as a kid, lisping around a retainer, and blinked.
“I see you sometimes on your porch,” I said. “When I’m awake too late and I look out the window. Even in winter I see you there.”
“Spying on me?”
“I’m just wondering when you sleep.”
“Who needs sleep?” Billy said lightly, then sighed. “Nightmares, you know? Not often, but sometimes.”
I didn’t know, but I nodded. “That sucks. I can never remember my dreams.”
Now I knew I wasn’t imagining the odd expression that skidded over his face, like a hard wind across water. He looked down, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, smacked them against the heel of his hand. Then he shook his head. “Look, would you throw these away for me? I quit.”
“In the last five minutes, you quit?”
“Yeah. I was out here having my last one.”
“So just … for your health?”
He mopped a hand over his hair. There was a dent in his curls where a hat had been. “No, for Amy. She vowed not to speak to me till I quit, and she actually did it. It’s been two weeks of total silence.”
Amy was his little sister. She had to be about twelve. “Really? That’s awesome. She must really love you.”
“I mean, probably. But no, she’s just pissed I left a pack out and Gremlin ate it. Don’t worry, he’s completely fine.”
Gremlin was their pit mix, infamous in the neighborhood for all the things he’d eaten and somehow survived: channel changers, a bag of sugar, part of a laptop. “That’s good. Poor Gremlin.”