“There’s...ah...dirt.” I don’t lower my hand.
“Okay,” she whispers and it’s the closest Stella’s given me to permission to be in her space. I rub at the dirt and it easily transfers onto my fingers, but I caress her skin again because her cheek is soft. Warm. And I like the blush forming there.
Stella’s chest rises as she inhales and as she slowly releases the air, I find myself breathing out along with her. Wow. What was that?
I drop my hand and clear my throat. “Did he steal the car?”
Stella blinks several times and I decide to help her out. “You were telling me how Joss found someo v
“Oh.” Stella stabs the ground again with my mother’s garden spade. “No. She told him that the engine was going out and he decided to leave.”
I chuckle. “You make up half your stories.”
I expect her to laugh, but instead she mumbles, “I wish.”
“So is Joss your stepmom?”
“What did I tell you about personal questions?” she says.
She told me that if we hung out together, not to ask them. In exchange she said she’d forget who I was friends with. Not wanting to face my past decisions of either laughing or saying nothing when it came to Stella, I agreed. I also promised that I’d give her space at school, but as each day passes that I spend time with her outside of class, the urge to break that promise grows stronger.
“You bring up Joss a lot but you never mention your mom or dad. Is she your sister?”
Stella pauses mid-dig, my mother’s spade suddenly resembling a weapon more than a garden tool with that darkness radiating from her face. “You made a promise.”
I hold my hands out in a white-flag motion. “Consider me backed off.”
“Good,” she says. “We’ll need to pour water over these mums. There’s a spigot across the way in the other section, but we’ll have to bring a container to lug it.”
“I’ll do it.” I glance over at James Cohen’s grave. No one has visited that I know of, and it creates a hollowness inside me, a feeling that reminds me of loneliness.
The wind blows and a few orange and yellow leaves float to the ground. Stella brushes them off her newly planted masterpiece then sinks from her knees back onto her butt. “There. Now Lydia has more.”
A few strands slip from her makeshift ponytail and spill onto her face. She doesn’t move them as she focuses on her favorite grave.
“Why do you come here?” I ask.
“That sounded awfully like a personal question.”
“It wasn’t one.” It is. “It’s like discussing the weather.”
“Why do you keep visiting James Cohen?” she replies.
Answering a question with a question. Nicely played. “I asked first.”
Her lips twitch. “Well, I asked second.”
“Like you don’t know why I come here,” I answer.
She raises one eyebrow. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked.”
The meaning of her words hits me like a shockwave. “You don’t know?”
“Uh...no.”
“You don’t know who James Cohen is,” I state.
She tilts her head. “He’s a dead guy. Over there. And you’re obsessed with him.”
I’m numbed by the fact that she knows nothing and has never, until now, asked. That’s all everyone does—ask.
Everyone asks, but I can never speak. I don’t know how to explain what happened or what it was like, because the nightmare is tucked away behind a see-through wall. The memories, they torture me every second I’m awake and at night while I sleep, but the wall prevents me from connecting with it, talking about it, and I’m not sure if that’s good o {ate ar bad.
I’m unnerved when Stella inches over into the sunlight and begins her daily ritual of sunbathing. No one’s abandoned this conversation before. While I’m grateful, part of me wants to matter to her because she matters to me. “Talking with you, being with you...it’s the only time I feel normal.”
The leaves crackle as her head moves and I know Stella’s scrutinizing me, but I don’t have the guts to meet her gaze. “You feel normal hanging out with me?”
Strangely enough. “Yeah.”
“You realize most people think I’m weird and will tell me that—as often as they can.”
I inwardly flinch. She means Cooper. It’s what he mock-mumbled when she walked into American Lit today and once again, I said nothing in her defense. When she’s only experienced Cooper’s bad side and doesn’t know how he’s been a friend to me, it’s hard to make her understand. “He’s not that bad a guy.”
Stella’s off the ground, her arm barely missing hitting me in the process.
I jump up after her. “Stella!”
She doesn’t run, but she’s fast. My heart drums like it’s in the final stages of a death march. I don’t want to lose the feeling I have when I’m with her. “Stella!”
I catch up and when she doesn’t stop, I take her hand. Stella grinds to a halt and while still facing forward, she tries to yank her hand away, but I wrap my fingers around hers to keep her there. “Please don’t go.”
She whips around and I’m horrified by the wetness in her eyes. “You laughed! Year after year, you laughed!”
It’s like she jolted me with a stun gun and thousands of currents of electricity are invading my body. I cringe and her hand slides away from mine.