“Said she met you in New York this summer,” Frankie kept going. “But weren’t you in LA?”
“The whole time.” That’s what I’d told my hallmates, to distance myself from the missing Jessica Anderson.
“Like I said, super weird.” Frankie gave me a big smile. “Maybe you’ve got a doppelgänger!”
She put the hairbrush back into her hutch, and padded out of the bathroom.
I took a long drink from the water bottle. I wasn’t running—not yet.
My family had nothing to do with leaving the crow skull on my door, because they’d never had it. At some point I’d left the skull in Hiromi’s apartment, or in her studio.
Crystal had her own set of keys.
58
I lost at poker that night.
The cards in my hands were meaningless, the math of them jumbled. The other girls kept talking about our mysterious visitor, and wondering who Jessica Anderson could be. Nura and Frankie insisted that I looked nothing like the picture Crystal had shown them; Aaliyah was noncommittal.
I should have changed the subject, told them to forget Crystal. But I couldn’t stop listening to their theories about another version of me.
Those other Jessicas in the little graveyard had been my first friends.
I itched to tell Sebastian about the skull, but he was still away on his mysterious off-campus business, not answering my texts. So I waited, losing crooked stacks of quarters, until it was time to meet Sebastian.
He arrivedat the Physics Lounge twenty minutes late and wearing a dazzling smile—until he saw the crow skull on the coffee table, pale in the darkness.
“Not my best gift,” he said.
“I loved it.” Hiromi had loved it.
“Didn’t Garrett burn your stuff?”
“Come here.”
Sebastian sank onto the musty couch, kissing the scars on my nose. I peeled off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt. Ran my fingers down hisflank, over the faded burn marks, gifts from his father that were still pink when he joined our family.
Hiromi had been undiscovered territory; Sebastian’s body was as familiar as my own. I knew every freckle, every scar, the extra cartilage in the concha of his right ear. We’d fought, wrestled, raced each other; danced, climbed, and endured together. I knew the different scents of his sweat, from heat, exertion, or fever.
I licked his lower lip, tasting the clean salt of his haste to get to me, then lightly bit. His hands slid down my body, my nerve endings humming. I opened my mouth to his, tasting caraway, sugar.
Beatrice’s cookies. He’d gone home today?
I pushed away the question, kissing him deeper, his hand between my legs, sliding into wetness, until all I could feel was my heartbeat there, my shallow breaths. Waves building, nerves blazing.
The sensation grew too big, too intense, too quickly. My lips moved against his. My thighs clenched hard, squeezing his fingers as the climax spilled over me.
I pushed his hand away, then settled against him.
“Are you back?” he asked, stroking my cropped hair. “You went away for a second.”
“Yes,” I said. Like drifting from shore.
The moon rosebefore we spoke again, its light trickling through the smoke. Sebastian lay in my arms, in beautiful disarray.
I bent to kiss the scar under his bottom lip. “What was that smile when you got here? Because you went home for cookies?”
“For this.” He reached for his jacket and pulled something from the pocket: an antique American flag pin, the blues and whites faded to bare metal, the red stripes somehow still pristine.
