“Um.” The girl shifted, not quite looking at me. “I’ve got workout clothes in my bag. They’re not clean, but…”
“Thank you,” I said. “I don’t care if they’re clean.”
She passed back a wad of black activewear and I wriggled in. Just being clothed helped. Not with my modesty, which I seemed to have left in my life before the golden box, but with that skinned, raggedy feeling of muchness.
“Was that the same girl from the other night?” Nate’s voice was tight, abrupt.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was her.”
A long pause. “So she did know you.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand it,” he said quietly, to himself. Then, “Are you gonna be okay?”
He asked it in the way people do when they want you to say, Yeah, of course, so I met his eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “Yeah. Of course.”
He was driving toward my house, but I couldn’t go there. Marion would be right behind me. I didn’t want to imagine what she’d do to my dad if she had to go through him to get to me. Nowhere seemed safe enough, but I knew where I wanted to go, so I told Nate, “Drop me up there.”
He stopped beside a grassy, moon-gray hill that unrolled to meet a row of fenced backyards. “I can go another couple blocks. You don’t want me to drop you off at your house?”
I pointed at the back of Billy’s place. Big yard with a rambling vegetable plot, and a badass tree house he helped his dad build the year after they moved in. I’d spent hours in that tree house. “I’m going there.”
“Billy Paxton’s house.” He almost managed to say it neutrally.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said as I climbed out, and meant it.
“No problem. But hey, Ivy.”
I looked back at him, his solemn fringed eyes and the blood-bruise stipple over his pretty mouth.
“I won’t tell anyone about this. I promise.”
“You probably will, but that’s okay.” I smiled at the sophomore. “Thanks for the clothes. I’ll get them back to you.”
“They’re yours,” she said, in a tone that reminded me I was striped with welling scratches and rank with sweat and chlorine.
I could hear Nate’s music switch back on as I walked away. The mystery of me, all my naked panic and the slithering girl who’d followed me from the trees, was already fading from their sight. Soon I’d just be a startling shared interval in their predictable suburban night. I smiled to myself and ran toward Billy.
One of his bedroom windows overlooked the left side of the house. I searched for convenient pebbles to toss and found massive decorative boulders. Then I remembered who I was dealing with and sprinted to the front.
He was sitting on the porch with his head tilted back, white T-shirt and pajama pants and an empty matchbook in one restless hand. I could smell burnt-out matches but no cigarette. When he saw me, he moved to his feet so fast I knew he’d been waiting.
Our bodies collided at the bottom of his steps, my nose in clean cotton tinged with sulfur dioxide, his buried in my chemical hair. Our breathing rose in sync and I clung to him, pressing the golden box into his back.
“What happened?” he murmured. “Something happened.”
I rose on my toes to reach his ear.
“Can we go to the tree house?”
Billy stiffened and pulled away to look at me. “The tree house.” His eyes so wide, so full of hope, it could break your heart. “Ivy. Do you … do you…”
“I remember.”
He collapsed a little. “I thought you did. When I saw you running up the lawn. You look—you look like yourself. Not that you didn’t before, I just—”
“It’s okay. I know.”
He gathered me up, pressed his nose to my neck. “You even smell the way you used to.”
“Like what?”
His voice was muffled by my skin. “Like wild things.”
My eyes burned. His hair was so soft on my cheek.
“What made you remember?”
“Let’s talk in the tree house.”
He nodded, but he didn’t let go. “What happens if you forget again?”
“I won’t.”
“How can you know that?”
“Tree house,” I repeated.
“Okay,” he said softly, then sighed. “It’s been a long time. Let’s get something to cover the cobwebs.”
We walked into the house still half-entwined. Everywhere he touched me was electric, everywhere he didn’t was waiting to be touched. Gremlin tap-danced our way, then froze, darting a sniff at my feet before racing off into the darkened den.