I follow him up a flight of stairs to a kitchen. He helps himself to the pantry, grabbing canned soups and beans, boxes of cereal, and bags of chips. He tosses ramen noodles and packs of instant oatmeal on the counter. Then he reaches under the sink for a garbage bag and shoves the food in. When he’s done, he takes the roll of paper towels beside the sink and tosses that in, too.
He avoids the fridge. The surface is covered in magnets and photos. I stand in front of it, struggling to make out the faces in the pale dawn light filtering through the window over the sink.
“This is you.” I pluck a photo out from under a magnet. Julio’s bronze and shirtless in a pair of turquoise board shorts, his arms wrapped around a group of surfers, all of them squinting against the sun. Their boards are scattered around them in the sand, the bathhouse we just set on fire forming the backdrop behind them. I don’t know why the photoshocks me. Maybe because I can’t picture us having any life other than the one we’ve been stuck in. Can’t picture us making connections or having relationships in any permanent, meaningful way. I’m surprised by the pang of jealousy I feel. “Are these your friends?”
“I guess,” he says with a dismissive shrug. “I met them a few summers ago. We surf together. I party with them sometimes.” He disappears down the hall, into one of the bedrooms. Drawers open and close. A closet door slides open, hangers screeching as he pulls clothes from the racks with an efficiency that suggests he’s been through them before.
I find Julio in another photo, cheek to cheek with a dark-haired girl who looks a few years younger than we are. She’s in almost every picture. Posing in bathing suits with her friends. Holding a soccer ball and a pair of cleats, flanked by her proud parents. Wearing Christmas sweaters, making goofy faces with a boy who looks so much like her, he could only be an older brother—one of Julio’s surfer friends from the other photo. If I didn’t know better, I might assume they were all family... Julio’s family.
“Here, these’ll probably fit you.” Julio hands me a stack of the girl’s clothing, his expression pained as he digs mechanically under the cabinet for another bag.
“Are they...?” I don’t know how to ask without prying too deeply. And yet, I don’t know how I couldn’t have asked before. “Do you want to stay? Here, I mean. With them?”
Julio stops, the bag half open. He looks down at the clothes. At the food. At this place.
“Stay where? With who? These people who hardly know me?And do what?” There’s a quiver of emotion in his voice I’ve never heard before, a frustration that suggests this isn’t the first time he’s asked himself this. “Watch them all get older? Wait for them to wonder why I don’t? Wait for them to get sick of all the lies and disappearing acts, while I just move on to a new family in a new town every time the one I’m with starts looking at me funny? Or do I just come out and tell them the truth? That the guy who crashed in their basement last summer—the one who partied with their son and taught their daughter to surf—died thirty-seven years ago trying to save the girl heaccidentallykilled with his board? While I’m at it, why don’t I tell them I stalk and murder my best friend every spring? Or that I just executed some guy in a parking lot at the end of their street?” He shoves the last of the clothes into the bag. Reaches into another cabinet and grabs a set of hidden car keys. “This family’s no different from the other ones. They’re all better off without me.” He takes the food under his arm and tosses the bag of clothes to me. “Let’s go.”
I follow him back downstairs, mouth parted with a million unasked questions about everything he just shared with me. Julio never talked much about his life before he was turned, never bragged about the circumstances surrounding his first death, like some Seasons tend to do. Up until tonight, Julio was so indomitably confident in my mind, so slick and secure, it seemed like nothing could touch him. And now I wish I had paid more attention to the things he never spoke about—to the wounds under the shiny armor he wore to protect the fragile parts of himself.
He opens a side door to the garage and climbs into the driver’s seat of a sleek black Ford Expedition with a roof rack and tinted windows. Iscramble into the passenger side as he starts the car. He sets the thermostats to high, cupping his hands in front of the vents for a moment as he lets the engine warm.
His eyes close, leather creaking as he leans back in his seat.
“It was an accident,” I murmur. “That’s all. It wasn’t your fault. None of it.” Not the girl he hit with his board. Not Marie’s jump from the bridge. Not my slip below the red line. Not Hunter. Not any of it. “You’re a good person, Julio. You don’t have to prove it.”
He sits up with a heavy sigh and puts the SUV in gear. “Great. If I get arrested in the next thirty minutes, you can explain all that to the cops.” He eases out of the driveway. With a sharp click of a button on the visor, he shuts the garage door.
Julio turns down the next street and creeps to a stop beside the curb. He kills the headlights and checks the mirrors.
“Stay here,” he says, grabbing a screwdriver from a tool case under the front seat. He gets out, looking both ways before stripping the license plates from the SUV. Hood pulled low, he crosses the street, kneeling before a car-shaped lump under a sun-bleached tarp and swapping out the plates. The entire process takes under a minute, and he climbs back in without a word.
“What were you arrested for, breaking and entering or burglary?” I ask, remembering Amber’s warning to him just before she disappeared into the bathhouse.
His lip twitches as he pulls back his hood and maneuvers the SUV back onto the road. “Which time?”
“How many times have there been?”
The clouds part as Julio cracks a grin. “I lost count in 1995.”
I laugh, comforted by the return of the carefree Summer I know.Hungry to know more about him and wishing I’d asked more questions before. I don’t feel like a very good friend. Certainly not a best friend. “Then tell me about 1989, with Amber.”
“Should have known you were going to ask me that,” he says through a sigh. He waits, probably hoping I’ll lose interest. When I don’t, he switches on the radio. I reach over and turn it off. He squints against the hazy rising sun.
“She’s wrong about the year,” he confesses. “It was 1990, the second year she came to kill me. She’d gotten me good that first time in eighty-nine.” A nostalgic smile touches the creases around his eyes. “I saw her coming down the beach, with that fiery hair and that pout and that confident way she walks, and I don’t know... I just stood there. All I could do was stare.” He gives a slow shake of his head and sighs. “Next thing I knew, she was sticking a knife in my gut. Or in my heart. Maybe both. Hell, I don’t remember.” He gnaws at his lip. Drums the steering wheel. “I woke up in my stasis chamber three months later, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I spent the next six months planning all the ways I was going to kick her ass and reclaim my honor. Instead, when the time came, I got shit-faced drunk and arrested, and as I was lying in my cell without my transmitter, with a fever and the shakes, the one thought that bugged me the most was that I might never see her again. Later that night, Amber came for me. And like a lovestruck, inebriated idiot, I walked myself right up to the bars of my cell and asked her to kiss me.” I watch the light leave his eyes. Watch the smile on his mouth fade into a tight, thin line. “The next year, they docked our rankings and stuck us both in Reconditioning. I spent hours getting the shit knocked out of me by four of Chronos’s Guards while they pumped smoke and the smell of dead leaves into the room.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes. No. Maybe.” He frowns, his knuckles white where they grip the steering wheel. “We never kissed each other again, but I never stopped thinking about it, either.”
I lean back in the heated leather seat, the adrenaline of the morning slowly beginning to recede. It’s nice, being able to talk like this, without feeling guarded. Without a clock ticking. He’s shared more with me in the last thirty minutes than in all the years we’ve known each other.
Maybe Jack’s right and we’re not supposed to hunt each other. Maybe we’re just supposed tofindeach other. To make a space for each other and give each other room to be strong. To hold on to each other when we’re not, protect each other, and ride out the occasional storm.
Julio winds through the neighborhood, taking the long way back to South Atlantic Avenue. He navigates the streets here with an ease, making me curious about the 75 percent of his life I’ve never seen: the parties and surf competitions he mentions in passing, his relationship with Marie, his life at the Observatory... who he is the other nine months of the year. I wonder if this sudden need I feel to know him better is because we don’t have to be enemies anymore, or if I’m hoping it will erase the worst of the 25 percent we’ve been.
He parks in front of the bathhouse and leaves the engine running. Our friends look up with weary, dirt-smeared faces, their clothes still wet and stained with gore. The beach behind them is bathed in the rosy light of a blood-red sunrise, peaceful in the daylight, as if the worst should already be over.
27
