Lydia Powell sighed with relief and pocketed her remaining pebbles. ‘I’m so glad you’re home. I’m almost out of ammo.’
‘And you almost broke the window.’
On the other side of the fence that separated Bell House from the street, I saw Jackson leaning against a No Parking sign, as though he had absolutely nothing to do with his sister’s shenanigans.
‘We are here to deliver a very formal invitation to hang out with us,’ Lydia said brightly as if climbing a tree to hurl pebbles at a window was the most normal thing in the world. ‘It’s hot as balls out here, we have no money and no plan, but you should definitely leave your beautiful air-conditioned house to walk around town with us.’
‘As tempting as that sounds,’ I replied, pressing my hand to my forehead to check for a fever, ‘I haven’t been feeling so good.’ My voice was still raspy from choking and it hurt to talk.
‘That’s because you need to acclimatize,’ she insisted. ‘Get out here, girl, you’ll feel better, I promise.’
Unless I started foaming at the mouth, bit the both of them and we all died of rabies.
‘At least come and save me from my sister,’ Jackson called. ‘I promise I’ll catch you if you start to swoon.’
He didn’t realize how much that promise meant.
‘Why didn’t you come to the front door?’ I asked as Lydia began her descent.
‘Because I’m scared of your aunt.’
I looked over at the chair wedged underneath my door handle. She wasn’t the only one.
‘I’ll be down in two minutes,’ I said as she climbed down the tree, taking several huge flowers with her. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’
‘No phone and no internet,’ Lydia uttered as we strolled down Abercorn Street. ‘It would be like losing a limb.’
‘I do have a laptop but the battery is flat,’ I told her, wrangling my hair into a topknot to get it off the back of my neck. Every single strand that touched my skin felt like too much; the humidity was even more oppressive than before. ‘It’s from the UK so the charger doesn’t work with the outlets here.’
‘If I took Lydia’s phone away, she would cease to exist.’ Jackson held up his empty hand in front of his face and posed like he was taking a selfie. ‘The bones in her wrist are deformed from holding it all the time.’
‘Evolved,’ his sister corrected. ‘I post, therefore I am. And don’t act like you don’t spend half your life on TikTok. I see you, big brother, I see you.’
‘Big brother by twelve blissful minutes,’ he explained when he saw the look on my face. ‘After nine months with no escape, it was the least I deserved. She hasn’t left me alone that long ever since.’
‘He loves me really,’ Lydia said, bounding off to the end of the block to grab hold of a lamp post and twirling around it, her pink belt bag spinning around her body like she had her own moon. She was a blur, always in motion. Jackson was much more calm and considered but they both moved through the city with total confidence. It was so obvious that they belonged here and I wondered if I would ever feel that way.
‘What kind of laptop do you have? We have a bunch of chargers and cables lying around. Lydia breaks everything.’Jackson hit me with the full force of his big brown eyes and even in the unbearable heat, my body found a way to make me blush.
‘It – it’s a MacBook, not sure what kind but I can check,’ I stammered, caught off guard by his undeniable good looks. That kind of charm really was dangerous. ‘It was my dad’s computer. All his research is on there and I’d hate to think his work had disappeared forever.’
He shrugged like it was no big deal and I looked down at the ground, waiting for my face to return to its normal colour. Any and all interactions I’d had with guys my own age were extremely limited but I couldn’t say any of them had gone well. Even if we spoke the same language, and that was rare since we moved to a different country every couple of years, just holding a perfectly normal conversation felt like an impossible task to me. I couldn’t get out of my own head, too obsessed with what they were thinking, trying to guess what they might say back before they’d said it and so busy working out what I was supposed to say after that, I hardly ever got past the first ‘Hello’. Wyn was the first guy I’d ever met who didn’t make me feel like our conversations were a game of chess no one could win.
‘How are you liking your new home?’ Jackson asked as we walked on, the fierce afternoon sun boiling me alive in my jeans. ‘Gotten up to anything fun?’
‘I don’t know about fun,’ I replied, mentally going over the events of the last few days. ‘But I am getting used to the place.’
‘There’s nowhere like Savannah.’ He smiled at the city and it truly felt as though the city smiled back, his adoration reciprocated. ‘Since we never really got through proper introductions, what else do we need to know about you, Emily James Bell?’
‘Emily James Bell,’ I repeated. ‘That’s going to take some getting used to.’
He shot another irresistible grin my way but this time I was too preoccupied with the addition to my name to react. It was so strange to hear out loud but it also felt unbelievably good to be openly claimed as part of the family.
‘You already know way more about me than I know about you,’ I pointed out. ‘There isn’t much else.’
‘Sure there is,’ he insisted. ‘Do you have any hobbies, what are you into? What do you love?’
‘Books,’ I replied readily, remembering the similar conversation I’d shared with Wyn. ‘I love books. Wherever you are in the world, a book can take you back to your favourite place.’
