“I’m not taking your bet,littlebrother. Because I’m leaving… just not yet.”
“Doubt it!” he calls.
“Watch me!” I move down the driveway, but I hear him laugh, and then the thump of the front door as he retreats back inside. These are the moments Iwillmiss. The back-and-forth with my brother, my twin. When I’m gone, there will be a silence where he used to be.
The light drains from the sky, crickets sing from the tall grass along the back porch, and I stand in the shadow of a crooked birch tree beside the mailbox, waiting.
I don’t want Oak walking up to the house like he did last night. I don’t want to risk Archer seeing him, asking questions, making things unnecessarily awkward. So I wait.
There are no headlights on the road, and as the minutes pass, I begin to wonder if Oak will even show up.
Maybe he changed his mind.He’d be smart if he did, if he stayed away.
I tilt my eyes to the star-studded sky, breathing in the warm night air. Maybe I am stupid for staying in town, for delaying my escape. All for a boy who I’ll never see again after tomorrow. Why am I wasting my time? Why am I standing out here in the dark?
I close my eyes, feeling foolish, thinking I should head back up to the house, when I hear the crunch of gravel underfoot.
Squinting through the dark, I see him. Oak is walking up Swamp Wells Road, hands in his pockets, wearing a gray T-shirt and looking like he was swept in on a summer breeze.
He came after all, like he promised.
“Hey,” he says, casual and airy and full of secrets. And all my resolve to walk back to the house, to forget about Oak, melts away. Just like that.
“Sorry,” he adds. “Were you waiting long?”
I shake my head, my thoughts tangled up. I’m not used to this: Meeting a boy after dark. Being this close to someone, getting to feel like an ordinary girl.
“Are you okay to walk a little farther?” I ask, not knowing exactly how far he’s just traveled to get here.
“Sure.”
He doesn’t ask where I’m taking him, doesn’t question whether he should be this close to a Goode, but follows me around the side of the house, past the newly fenced garden, to the dirt path through the woods. The path leads us alongside Rabbit Cross River, where the water is cold and full and rushing, and the night air is like a warm breath against my throat. We haven’t walked far when the path veers deeper into the trees, and we reach the train tracks that run east–west through Cutwater.
“We’re almost there,” I say, and he nods, seeming content just to walk. Unaffected by the scent of tulips always on my skin.
We make our way silently up the tracks, an owl hooting from somewhere in the trees to our left, until at last we reach the abandoned train car—left on an unused section of track. Rusted in place, a relic forgotten.
But not by everyone.
The door into the train car is slid wide open, the dark interior filled with empty beer cans, half-smoked cigarettes, and names painted on the walls. Kids from Cutwater have been coming here for years to mark their place in the world, to declare that they were here in this shitty, middle-of-nowhere town.
But I don’t move toward the door; I walk to the metal ladder on the outer wall and hoist myself up to the first rung, then climb up to the flat roof of the train car. When I glance back down, Oak has already swung himself up the ladder without much effort and reaches the top quickly.
“You come here a lot?” he asks, turning in a circle to gaze out at the forest pressing in around us.
“Sometimes. In the summer.”
I lower myself to the roof, stretching out onto my back—my heart a riotous thump in my chest—and Oak does the same. The metal roof is warm beneath us, heated by the sun during the day, but above us the stars feel close, drawn down by the spiky treetops. It always feels darker out here, swallowed up by the night.
I press my palms against the roof and close my eyes. “Sometimes I swear I can feel the train moving,” I say.Sometimes I swear I can feel it inching down the tracks, gaining momentum, a ghost train come to life.
Oak presses his hands to the metal, his fingers only a millimeter from mine—the width of a snowflake, a tear, a strand of hair. “You want out of here that bad?” he asks, turning his head, his eyes almost black in the darkness. But his mouth is a calm, comforting line: a dangerous mouth, one that is far too close.
I breathe and pull my eyes away. Heshouldfeel drawn to me, but instead it’s me who can’t control my own thoughts—an unmistakable, fathomless feeling, like falling into an unknown darkness. And I keep waiting to snap awake, for the sensation to pull me back to the waking world. But it doesn’t.
Through my lashes, I peer up at the starlight, counting the seconds and imagining the trees whipping by as the train carries us both far away from here. I don’t know why I don’t tell him the truth: That I was supposed to be on a real train this morning, leaving this place behind. That he is the reason I stayed.
“Don’t you want to leave?” I ask instead.
