I pressed on. "About how there are some people who can do anything?"
He spun away from me. "I was just distracting you. I didn't want you to throw up. It worked, didn't it?"
"Don't lie," I said fiercely. "You knew. I don't know how you did, but you knew. You knew I was one of those people, didn't you?"
His back still toward me, he bowed his head and held a fist to his forehead. "No. You're not. Just say you're not." The light from the candles around Mary's feet lit the side of his cheek and left the rest of his face in shadow.
"I can't say I'm not! I am. Look." I thrust the bud out toward him, cupping it in both hands. He turned, his face drawn. There was only a second's pause, and then the petals unfolded, one after another, until the bloom had grown large enough to touch each of my fingers. I stared at the velvet yellow petals cupped in my hands, and then back up at him.
Luke hugged his arms around himself. "Impressive," he said in a small voice.
I didn't understand his reaction. "But you knew I could do this, already. Why else would you have said it?"
He turned away again, shoulders hunched. "Could you give me a minute?"
I had done something wrong. I shouldn't have shown
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him. But he had known, hadn't he? What had I done? I retreated quickly down the aisle, pushing my way through the double doors into the narthex, where I swiped one of my eyes dry. For a long moment I stood in the dim room, looking blankly at the fliers for bake sales and Bible studies on the bulletin board.
Then I heard him shout, "Damn you! Why?"
I looked through the clear glass of the narthex doors to see if he spoke to some barely seen faerie.
But to my eyes, there was no one there but Luke and God.
***
We didn't talk about the rose on the drive home. For a long time, I stared out the window at the specter of the moon, hanging above the black silhouettes of the trees, while the stripes on the road whipped by me. Something about the way the moon looked, enigmatic and eternal, reminded me of how I'd felt when I made the rose blossom in my hands.
Abruptly, Luke pulled the car off onto a barely visible dirt lane by the highway. He wrenched the parking brake up and studied the glowing clock face in the dash.
"Are you angry at me?" he asked.
Surprised by the question, I looked at him. His face was green and peaked, illuminated by the lights in the dashboard, and his expression was genuinely concerned.
"Why would I be mad at you?"
"You've gone all quiet. That's the only way I could tell 92
you were mad before, so I assume I've done something to tick you off."
" You're the one who went all quiet. I thought you were mad at me for--" I stopped short. I didn't know if I was supposed to mention the church or not.
Luke sighed and made a vague gesture. "This is all just unfamiliar territory for me."
"What is?"
"You? He shrugged uncomfortably. "I don't know what to do."
"About what?" " You."
"About what happened in the ch--"
Luke interrupted hastily. "No. Just about you. You, yourself. I keep waiting for you to tell me to leave you alone. To tell me I'm creepy."
I pointed at him. "That's why I haven't told you to leave me alone."
"What--why?"
"Because you keep telling me how weird you are. Truly sketchy people don't tell you how sketchy they are."
"I also forced myself on you, in an alleyway. That's sketchy."
So that's what this was about. The kiss. It was sort of charming that he was worried about it. I laughed. "You didn't force yourself on me. And it wasn't even an alley."
"I didn't ask."
I wasn't up on the rules of dating, but I didn't think
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anyone ever asked permission to kiss a girl. Maybe in the movies. "I kissed back."
He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. "I don't want to go too far--do the wrong thing--and get myself in trouble."
Crap, that sounded familiar. "Luke, I'm not mad at you. And..." I had to look away when I said it, and I blushed, too. "You're not going to get yourself in trouble. Or--maybe I'd like the sort of trouble you'd get yourself into." Afterward, I thought maybe I shouldn't have said it. Maybe he'd think I was a slut. Maybe he would go too far. Maybe he wouldn't know what I meant. Maybe--
Luke gave me a half-way smile, somewhere short of humor, and reached across the car to brush my chin with his hand. I wanted to close my eyes and lean into his touch, to forget about everything that made me Deirdre.
"You're a baby. You don't know how much trouble I can get into."
I bristled, pulling my face away. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I didn't mean it like--aw, see, now you're pissed at me again."
I regarded him frostily. "No, really? You called me a baby."
Luke thumped back in his seat, voice frustrated. "It was a compliment, really."
"How do you figure that?"
"Because you make me forget how young you are." He struggled to explain, looking away from my glare. "You're
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just--you're just so like me. You know--you take everything in like you've done it a hundred times before. The way your eyes look when you're playing music--I just forget you're only sixteen."
"Aren't you supposed to add 'incredibly beautiful' and 'dazzlingly intelligent' while you're pouring on the unreasonable compliments?" It would have been nice to believe him--but my mind couldn't reconcile stunningly invisible with stunningly desirable.
"I'm being serious. You are incredibly beautiful, though." His voice was earnest.
I shook my head. "Eleanor is incredibly beautiful. I know what I am, and beautiful I am not. I'm fine
