He ends the call after a minute, and I put my book back down. “Mom needs me. My thirteen-year-old sister, Marlow, is on a rampage because her vast collection of shoes is nowhere to be found, so I need to go through the Mount Everest of boxes in the garage to save the day. I’m going to have to chug the coffee down straight. Desperate times. But you are not off the hook.”
“Oh?” I brace my feet against the porch.
“Nope. We’re going for that walk in the woods.” He stands up, salutes me, and takes all three porch steps in one leap.
I watch until he disappears back into the woods alongside our house, the wild trees eating him alive. Until it’s almost like I did imagine him after all. A trick of light and heat.
It’s hard to refocus on my book after that. I’ve read Sense and Sensibility so many times—too many times, probably, given how many books exist in the world. Maybe because as an only child, I’ve always been envious of the Dashwood girls. My copy of Little Women is just as exhausted looking, filled with rips and scribbles and food stains. I used to dream about being a March sister—minus civil wars and scarlet fever and other such unpleasantries, of course.
I use my last reserves of energy in this heat to make sure the bird feeder in our backyard is full, and then I top off the birdbath, too. The birds in these woods need the relief as much as I do.
I curl up in the hammock after, the shadiest place in the backyard. And sure enough, soon I hear tires rolling down our long gravel driveway, and a moment later Ginger slides in next to me. I forgot to call her. Noah, too. Not that I ever have to call either of them to make plans. They just appear.
“Hey,” she says, lazily turning over to smile at me. Thousands of little freckles shine like copper glitter on her pale skin, and her hair is lit up a blinding golden white from the sun. So bright I need to squint just to face her. I find her eyes, the greenest I’ve seen in real life. If I hadn’t woken up next to her a thousand times at sleepovers, I’d never believe she didn’t wear contacts.
“They didn’t need me at the diner today and my mom was annoying the hell out of me. Not even air-conditioning made staying home more attractive. I’d rather drown in my own sweat over here with you.”
“I’m sorry. About your mom.”
“Yeah, well. Same old Sophie. She casually mentioned setting me up with the son of my aunt’s sister-in-law’s cousin or something like that. The woman just can’t help herself.”
I was born first, the early baby. Ginger was second, right on schedule for the first and only time in her life. Noah came out late, two weeks after his due date—a September birthday, which meant when the question of kindergarten came up, our moms decided to keep all of us summer babies together, always the oldest kids in our class. Our families understood we couldn’t be separated at that point. Noah’s mom, Beverly, still pops over sometimes for a glass of wine on the porch, but Mama and Mimmy’s friendship with Sophie faded over the years. It turned out they didn’t have much in common other than their pregnancy timeline.
“I would have come sooner but I was waiting for my leopard nails to dry.” She flutters her fingers in my face, the light catching on her shiny collection of mood rings and crystal bracelets. “Noah’s here, too. In the kitchen, whipping up some iced green tea for us. He was talking about cutting up some ginger and limes for infusing when I left him. How did we get so lucky?”
“I don’t know. Our parents conceived around the same moon cycle?”
She ignores me. “I’m telling you, some girl is going to swoop in and snap him up, and where will that leave us? Hm? Making our own infused tea? Ugh. In case you forgot, I’m not straight, so it’s not my duty to lock him in to a monogamous romantic relationship. And besides, we both know I’m not the one his sweet, soulful heart wants, no matter which way I sway. Also, can I say, very objectively, that our boy is growing into quite a heartthrob. He’s got that whole skinny-but-ripped thing going on. It’s bizarre.”
I don’t bother responding. The three of us had our yellow-poop-drenched diapers changed side by side. We played mermaid and merman in the tub together until we turned five and our moms decided it was perhaps time to acknowledge our different genitalia.
Noah is a brother to us. I understand as well as anyone that family isn’t always about blood.
“People moved into the old Jackson house,” I say, knowing Ginger will quickly latch onto this sparkly new tidbit dangling in front of her. Max didn’t have to say where he moved into, because it’s the only empty house in a five-minute radius.
“Oh my god, what? Hanging out with the ghosties? Yikes. I guess no one warned them. I don’t think I could live in a house where humans have died.”
“Lots of people die in houses, Ginger. That’s not so unusual. And Mr. Jackson seemed pretty ancient.” He’s the old recluse who had died there when we were kids. The police found his body during a check-in after he stopped picking up the newspaper from the top of his driveway. He—and the house—had become a source of all kinds of popular local lore.
“Not Mr. Jackson, though I don’t fancy the idea of meeting his ghost either. I mean whoever was murdered. Before him. Or while he lived there.”
“We don’t know for sure that happened.”
“We don’t know for sure that it didn’t happen.”
I shake my head. Sigh. “Anyway. Not the point. There’s a boy who moved in, maybe our grade. He came over asking for sugar this
