“This isn’t working.” He reaches up and transfers the hat to my head, grins. “There. Much better on you.” He angles his face to kiss me. His lips slightly chapped but gentle, tender on mine. His mind full of love.
In this moment I know I’m dreaming. I know it isn’t real. Already I can feel myself waking up. I don’t want to wake up, I think. Not yet.
I open my eyes. It’s still dark, a lamp outside spilling a watery silver light through our open window, a crack of gold under the door, soft shadows cast by the furniture. I’m filled with a strange feeling, almost like déjà vu. The building is eerily quiet, so I know without looking at my clock that it must be pretty late, or early, however you want to look at it. I glance over at Wan Chen. She sighs in her sleep, turns over.
The dream is unfair, I think. Especially since I had such a good time with Christian this morning. I felt connected with him, like I was finally where I was supposed to be. I felt right.
Dumb dream. My stupid subconscious is refusing to face facts: Tucker and I are over. Done.
Dumb brain of mine. Dumb heart.
There’s a light tapping sound, so faint I think I might have imagined it. I sit up, listening. It comes again. All at once I realize that it was the knocking that woke me.
I throw on my sweatshirt and tiptoe to the door. I unlatch it and open it a crack, squint into the brightness of the hall.
My brother is standing outside my door.
“Jeffrey!” I gasp.
I probably should play it cool, but I can’t. I throw my arms around him. He stiffens in surprise, the muscles in his shoulders tense as I hang on to him, but then finally he puts his hands on my back and relaxes. It’s so good to be able to hug him, to know that he is solid and safe and unharmed, that I almost laugh.
“What are you doing here?” I ask after a minute. “How did you find me?”
“What, you think I couldn’t track you down if I wanted to?” he says. “I thought I saw you today, and I guess I missed you.”
I pull back and look at him. He seems bigger, somehow. Taller, but leaner. Older.
I grab him by the arm and haul him downstairs into the laundry room, where we can talk without waking everybody up.
“Where have you been?” I demand after the door closes behind us.
He’s been expecting this question, of course. “Around. Ow!” he says when I punch him in the shoulder. “Hey!”
“You little twerp!” I yell, punching him again, harder this time. “How could you take off like that? Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been?”
The next time I go to hit him, he catches my fist, holds me back. I’m surprised by how strong he is, how easily he stops the blow.
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asks, and when I don’t understand what he means, he clarifies: “Who was worried?”
“Me, you idiot! And Billy, and Dad—”
He shakes his head. “Dad didn’t worry about me,” he says, and in his eyes I see that angry gleam I’d almost forgotten, his fury at Dad for leaving us when we were kids. For not being there. For lying. For representing everything in his life that feels unfair.
I put my hand on his arm. His skin is cold, clammy, like he’s come from walking around outside in damp weather or flying through clouds. “Where have you been, Jeffrey?” I ask, calmly this time.
He fiddles with the buttons at the top of one of the washing machines. “I’ve been doing my own thing.”
“You could have told us where you were going. You could have called.”
“Why, so you could convince me to be a good little angel-blood? Even if I ended up getting arrested?” He turns away, his hands shoved in his pockets, and scuffs at a spot on the carpet with his shoe. “It smells good in here,” he says, which strikes me as such a ridiculous attempt to change the subject that it gets a smile out of me.
“You want to do some laundry? It’s free. Do you even know how to do laundry?”
“Yes,” he says, and I picture him at a Laundromat someplace, frowning at a washing machine as he separates whites from darks, about to do his very first load of laundry on his own. For some reason the image makes me sad.
It’s funny that all this time, all these months, I’ve wanted to talk to him so much I’ve had imaginary conversations with him, thinking about what I’d say when I saw him again. I wanted to grill him. Chastise him. Convince him to come home. Sympathize over what he’s going through. Try to get him to talk about the parts of his story that I don’t understand. I wanted to tell him that I love him. But now that he’s here, I can’t think of what to say.
“Are you going to school somewhere?” I ask.
He scoffs. “Why would I do that?”
“So you’re not planning on graduating from high school?”
His silver eyes go cold. “Why, so I can get into a fancy college like Stanford? Graduate, get a nine-to-five job, get married, buy a house, get a dog, bang out a couple of kids—what would our kids be, anyway, thirty-seven-and-a-half percent angel-blood? Think there’s a Latin term for that?—and then I’d have the Angel-American dream and live happily ever after?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t what I want,” he says. “That’s what humans do, Clara. And I’m not one.”
I struggle to keep my voice neutral. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m only a fourth human.” He looks up at me like he’s gazing into me, inspecting my humanness, too. “That’s a pretty small piece of the pie. Why should it define me?”
I cross my arms over my chest, shiver even though it’s not cold. “Jeffrey,” I say quietly. “We can’t just run away from our problems.”
He flinches, then pushes past me for the door. “It was a mistake coming here,” he mutters, and I wonder, Why did he come here? Why did he want to see me?
“Wait.” I start after him, catch his arm.
“Let go, Clara. I’m done playing games. I’m done with all of it. I’m not going to have anyone else tell me what to do, ever again. I’m going to do what I want.”
“I’m sorry!” I stop, take a breath. “I’m sorry,” I try again, more quietly. “You’re right. It’s not my place to boss you around. I’m not—”
Mom, I think, but the word doesn’t come out. I let go of his arm and take a couple steps back. “I’m sorry,” I say again.