He ran over to help.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe that happened. Ricky’s been bugging me to take him to the midnight gala for weeks, even though he knows it starts way past his bedtime. So I bet him that if I could dunk, he’d have to stop pestering me about the party, and—”
Cassidy suddenly stopped talking and dropped the basketball hoop back on the grass. Her mom had emerged from the house and made her way to the broken fence.
“And you decided to destroy our neighbor’s property?” Mrs. Rivera finished for her, arms crossed.
“Coach! I mean, Mom. I can explain.…”
“I think this shattered fence and our basketball hoop—which, last I checked, was inourbackyard—gives me all the explanation I need.”
“No, Mom, it was awesome,” little Jordan said as he ran over, too pumped up to catch on to the fact that he should not, in fact, be elaborating. “We turned the backboard sideways so Cassidy could get a better angle, and then she took a running jump off the trampoline and hooked onto the hoop, and then—”
Mrs. Rivera arched a brow at him, which was evidently a scary enough hint for Jordan to shut up.
Ricky came over and grabbed his brother’s arm. “We should probably go inside for a while.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Mrs. Rivera said.
The boys were gone in an instant.
She turned to Ash. “I apologize for my children. It’s Ash, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he managed to whisper. “AshLee. I mean, Ash-space-Lee. Not Ashley.”
Cassidy gave him a funny look.
He felt his skin go pale, and his voice escaped him again. But those were seemingly the only parts of him that were capable of ghostliness.
“Are your parents home, Ash?” Mrs. Rivera asked.
He shook his head. His mom was at work at the library, where they were doing their annual Gentleman and Lady of Moon Ridge history weekend, and Ash’s stepdad was at a furniture woodworking class over at Blush Apple Orchards.
“All right, this is what we’re going to do,” Mrs. Rivera said.“I’m going to take the boys over to Home Depot to get some replacement boards for the fence, and we’ll pick up some nails, too. Cassidy will stay behind and clean up this mess. And then when I get back, she’s going to start rebuilding the fence for you.”
“I don’t know how—” Cassidy began to say.
“You break it, missy, you fix it,” Mrs. Rivera said. “It might take you all weekend, but youwillput the fence back up.”
You don’t have to do that,Ash wanted to tell her. Honestly, he and his stepdad could easily patch up the fence. But his ghost voice still had a hold on his larynx, so he said nothing.
Mrs. Rivera pulled her car keys out of her pocket. “Ash, sweetheart, I’m sure you’re busy”—she looked at his apron (oh god, he was still wearing his studio apron)—“so please don’t let this interrupt whatever you were doing. Again, I apologize profusely for my kids’ recklessness, but don’t worry, they will make this right.”
Without waiting for Ash’s reply—or maybe because she’d figured out he was incapable of intelligent response and she was giving him the gift of a gracious exit from the conversation—Mrs. Rivera turned and shouted for Ricky and Jordan to get in the truck. There wasn’t any room in her tone for negotiation.
Suddenly, it was just Ash and Cassidy, alone in his yard.
If only girls were more like paintings, then Ash would stand a chance. He knew how to look at art, how to talk about art, how to melt into art and let it consume you. But Cassidy wasn’t apainting; he couldn’t just sit at her feet with a sketch pad and stare at her for hours upon hours.
He thought about her for hours every day, though, ever since her family’s U-Haul pulled in next door, in the summer before freshman year. Ash had been getting the mail when Cassidy and her brothers clambered out of the truck. His eyes met hers, and his heart palpitated, because Ash was fourteen and terrible with girls, and because she smiled like sunbeams opening up the sky. She waved and said hello, and heat rushed through his cheeks, and he couldn’t make a damn noise out of his throat.
So instead of attempting to say hello back, Ash ran into his house, clutching the mail in his hands.
Later that week, his mom came home with a copy of the free local paper. (TheMoon Ridge Gazettewas half news and half gossip, and everyone read it, because what else are you going to do in a small town?) “Looks like we’ve got a pretty extraordinary new neighbor,” she said, setting the newspaper onto the kitchen table in front of Ash. “And she’s your age. Maybe you two can be friends.”
Ash groaned. Leave it to parents to assume that just because you’re in the same grade, you’re automatically going to be BFFs.
But Ash still snatched up theMoon Ridge Gazetteand buried himself upstairs in his bedroom to read it, because he did actually want to know everything about the girl next door.
