“Okay,” he said at last, voice dropping, eyes falling to his blood-dirty shoes. “Tell me what you know about killing demons.”
13
E
Early summer heat pressed heavy in Evie’s attic room. The smell of dry wood pricked her lungs like a sauna. It was way too hot to study. At least, that was her excuse. Exams were just days away, but she pushed her books across the desk and leaned back in her chair, sweat sticking the whole room to her skin.
She stared at her phone. It hadn’t buzzed in days.
She hadn’t seen anyone at school. Well, she’d seen them, of course, but they had seemed somehow to dot a faraway horizon, disappearing as soon as she approached. Their absence stuck in her mind like grit in a shoe, small but impossible to ignore.
She picked up the phone and clicked open her contact list. Ré’s number, of course, was at the top. Dufresne. She stared at it miserably. If she called him now, would he even answer? They hadn’t spoken since she’d yelled at him in her living room, days ago. He’d made himself just as invisible as the rest.
And that was what she’d asked him for, wasn’t it?
She scrolled through the numbers, Henry-Deacon, Janes and finally Seong. She hit Call. Sunny answered on the second ring.
“Whoa,” she said. “Actual phone call. Must be serious.”
Evie laughed. “No, not serious. Just bored. What are you doing tonight?”
“I have a thing until eight,” Sunny said, sounding disinterested. Evie pictured her examining her perfectly painted-black fingernails as she spoke. “But I could come get you after, if you want.”
Evie glanced at the clock beside the bed. That still gave her two hours to kill, but it was better than cooking in the attic all night with nothing but homework to do. “Perfect,” she said. “See you then.”
Evie hung up, but she kept staring at the phone. Her heart turned slowly, a dark feeling seeping out around the edges. She thumbed through the numbers again, back up to the top. She swallowed at the lump in her throat, then dialed.
This time there was no ring at all, just a voice. Rough and sweet and familiar. Her heart skipped at the sound.
“Hey, you’ve reached Shaun. Leave a message.”
Her breath caught. It hadn’t occurred to her before that the number would still work. That it might trap his voice like a bug in a bell jar. No one used phones anymore—at least, not as phones. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually called him, even when he was alive. Phone calls, like Sunny had said, were only for serious things.
She’d forgotten the sound of his voice, the way he drawled a bit, stretching hey and Shaun out from the back of his mouth, giving the words a lazy, friendly tone. It was mostly affectation. None of the others spoke the way he did, the way she imagined surfers talked in California, mixed with a little backwoods Brad Pitt. But no one questioned it either. It was just Shaun. Just the way he was.
The voice mail beeped in her ear, snapping her back to the attic. She pressed End and dropped the phone to her lap. Nothing left of him is real, she thought. Just pictures on Facebook and voice mail that no one will ever check again.
She pushed her chair back and went to the window, pulling the curtain aside. If she leaned her cheek to the frame, she could just see the patch of uncleared land at the edge of the yellow field. Nan’s place was beyond it, hidden from view at the far end of the road. Was his phone still there? Did Nan even know how to use a cell phone? The idea made Evie strangely sad.
A picture of his room, the disaster of it. Pale-beige water stain blooming across a corner of the ceiling, clothes on the floor, peeling posters, broken skateboard decks. And at its center, Shaun turning to grin at her, embarrassed, pulling his earlobe, his other thumb hooked to his jeans. His toast-and-honey drawl: “It’s kind of a mess.”
He’d once told his story about Nan walking in on him in bed with a girl. It had sounded so implausible, just an excuse to talk about sex. But after she’d seen his room, she wasn’t surprised that Nan hadn’t noticed the girl in the ruins. The place was like the crater of a blitz bomb. Evie’s own little attic might have been small and cold all winter, and too hot come spring, but it was sure better than Shaun’s room.
But still, some of the best nights of her life had been at Nan’s. In the front room, all of them together. Sunny lounging her long bones in Alex’s lap, swinging her hair and laughing her bright, pointy laugh. Ré as slouched as the faded chair he sat in, looking dark and moody as always. And King Shaun, of course, holding court.
To think of Nan’s place now, empty and still, was just too painful. Like swallowing something jagged that scratched all the way down.
Three hours later Sunny pulled up to the house. She leaned on the horn for an obnoxiously long time, forcing Evie to leap down her front stairs so the neighbors didn’t shout out their windows.
She threw herself into the car, breathless. “God, I didn’t think you were coming!” she said. “What took you so long?”
Sunny threw the car into reverse and backed out of the drive with the same mighty confidence she’d had with Ré’s car. “I told you,” she said. “I had a thing.”
“You always have a thing,” Evie said, clinging to the passenger door and her irritation.
Sunny shrugged. “I’m a busy person. Besides, what else were you doing
