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It wasn’t Ulla who visited Linnea at Dairy Queen that evening. Had they ever gone this long without talking? Her time spent in foster care didn’t count.

Everett leaned his elbows on the counter. He appeared almost coy. His eyes were doe-like and begging. As if he were looking for a fix. “Can you come over tonight?” he whispered. “I miss you already.”

Those words pressed the gas pedal of her senses: the ache to be wanted. By a boy, by Everett. It raced through every vein. She nodded.

When he picked her up from work, after they downed a Dairy Queen hot dog and fries, she was underneath him again. Less than twenty-four hours later. It only took Everett a few moaning thrusts. He gripped her head to brace himself, and his face twisted in ecstasy. An ecstasy Linnea found herself to be no part of. Instead, she was drifting further off track, away from the reach of the one person who actually knew her. Who helped her find herself.

Chapter Fifty

Linnea

Linnea caught Ulla at her house early that next morning. Ronja was scrambling eggs. She looked over at Linnea with a brief flicker of surprise and said, “Hi Lin, Ulla’s still sleeping,” instead of what Linnea sensed Ronja had wanted to say. Did something happen between you two?

Linnea went to Ulla’s bedroom. It felt more like their bedroom. Ulla was not, in fact, sleeping, but pretending to. If Ulla were sleeping, her limbs and wild hair would be splayed over the mattress. But she was hugging her knees. Linnea climbed next to her and lay on her back, linked her fingers over her stomach, and waited.

Finally, Ulla said, “So what was it like?”

Did Linnea smell like sex? When a guy entered inside, did it release some sort of imperceptible aroma that only those who knew you most intimately could detect?

“It—” her voice cracked.

Ulla rolled toward her and propped on an elbow to cradle her head. Her eyes looked beaten as if she hadn’t slept at all. Ulla always awoke in the mornings with hooded, soft eyes.

Linnea spoke to the ceiling. “It’s nothing.”

“Do you want it to be something?”

Linnea shook her head.

“You’ve been with him every night.”

“It didn’t mean anything to me.”

“Do you want it to?”

“No,” she insisted.

Ulla rolled onto her back, reflecting Linnea’s posture, but her eyes were a dark, wet, storm. Neither spoke. Linnea couldn’t understand how two people of the opposite sex could cause her stomach to tumble like this. She didn’t want to choose between either, and anyway—did she have to? Was she cheating on Ulla? Tell me to end it, she pleaded silently. Everett was a riptide, and Linnea felt only Ulla could rescue her. “I don’t want anything to change between us.”

Ulla sighed as if she didn’t believe her, but that didn’t prevent them from reaching for one another.

Everett showed up at Linnea’s house on the first day of school. But Linnea wasn’t going to further fray the precarious rope that knotted her to Ulla. “No thanks,” she’d said. “Ulla and I always go together.”

Everett gave her a slow once-over. It had never occurred to her that he’d take that as a challenge.

The minute she stepped through the doors of the school, she noticed the change in the air. Eyes trained on her. Seeing her. As if for the first time. No longer dopetard Linnea.

Student after student asked Linnea if she and Everett were going steady. “No,” she said emphatically, each time suppressing a grin. As the morning wore on, the attention grew into a potent, novel addiction. She’d do anything to keep this drug pumping.

At lunch, Everett tugged Linnea to sit with him amongst the growing horde of lemmings. And just like that, overnight, she’d rocketed into the popularity stratosphere. Everett had been mildly popular in junior high. But he was even more so now. God-like. He graced Mora with his New York sophistication and acid-washed jeans. As if his coolness were transmissible by association, if he acknowledged your name. He was enticing, flirtatious, charismatic, mysterious. He could tell anyone anything. Really. How could they disprove him? Is it true you got mugged? How big is Central Park? Did you really get to see a taping of Letterman? One would’ve thought Rob Lowe had joined their class.

Everett called out to Ulla as she walked from the lunch line in search of Linnea. “Hey, Oo-La! You can sit here, too.” He said this as if granting her charity. Those who didn’t know Ulla the way Linnea did would’ve missed her moment of frozen uncertainty, the tight knuckles on her lunch tray, the flash in her eyes. But it passed quickly when she shrugged in that bored way of hers. As if it didn’t matter where she sat. She squeezed next to Wiley, shoving him playfully.

Linnea caught Ulla’s eyes. A glint of something sharp and unmistakable: Is this really what you want?

Chapter Fifty-One

September 1986