A year after Mason Turner’s disappearance, Lily Brady loses her virginity to his oldest brother, Andy, in the Turners’ dilapidated treehouse.
They pick the treehouse because it’s the most private place they can think of that isn’t the clichéd backseat of a car or bed of a pickup. Lily picks Andy because she’s known him since they were eight the same way you know everybody in a small town—facts and figures about whole lives drifting to you on the air. Before you know it, you’re full of information about casual acquaintances’ divorces and allergies and county-fair ribbons. A process that causes her to wonder what parts of her have found their way to others.
When she was in fifth grade, Lily used to sit high up in her family’s barn loft (which only narrowly lost out to the treehouse) and watch the cat her dad had named Mite—she was small and gray—stalk the sparrows and pull out their guts, her front claws slicing bellies as delicately as a letter opener running through the top of an envelope. She had felt strange watching it, knowing what was about to happen, but unwilling to stop it until it was too late, until the only thing left behind was feather and bone.
She feels that strangeness now, that gutted sparrow strangeness, lying next to Andy, plywood splinters and dead twigs digging into her back, as she stares up at the ceiling in the dark. Worse, she’s not even the sparrow. She’s Mite.
It’s July in North Dakota, and when he leans into her saying, “So?” and pressing his arm against hers in a companionable nudge, she feels choked by the humidity in the air, sweaty and sore like she’s just skated a double shift. She does her best not to pull away because this, too, is why she picked him. No misplaced nervousness or pushy insistence or any of the other hundred obnoxious things she imagines from the other boys in their class. Just a simple inquiry, a question she can pick up or put down as easily as setting a mug on a coffee table.
She picks the question up, patting him on the elbow in an attempt at fondness she suspects comes across as an odd sort of reward, like a coach after a touchdown. Solid effort. Good game.
“Exactly like I imagined it would be,” she says.
Lily is a lot of things, but she isn’t a liar. “Exactly like I imagined” is the truth. Andy doesn’t need to know that what she imagined resembled a dentist appointment—a little uncomfortable and a lot boring.
She closes her eyes and lets him pet her hair for longer than she’d like. But it is a better attempt at fondness than her own, so she supposes she can tolerate it. Andy exudes a natural sweetness that she has always been able to appreciate even if she herself doesn’t possess it. He’s the kind of guy who stops along ND 5 to help a stranger fix a flat tire. To capture a moth, trapped in the allure of his kitchen ceiling light, carrying it outside to set it free. To bring flowers home to his mom when it’s not her birthday or Mother’s Day, but for no reason at all. There are lots of reasons now that his brother has been gone for so long.
Andy smiles. “Well, uh, good.”
She feels a real rush of affection as he rolls away from her and throws her T-shirt at her head, laughing when she mistakenly puts it on inside-out.
“Gonna fix that?”
“Nope.” She’s not brave enough to take it off and put it back on, even though he’s already seen her without it.
“Fine,” he says, shrugging.
When he puts his T-shirt on, it’s inside-out, too. He looks at her, challenging her to say something.
She doesn’t. But as they’re climbing down the treehouse ladder, and Lily looks up to see the very visible tag on the back of his shirt, she thinks she made a good choice picking Andy.
Two days later, when the Grand Forks police find the remains of a body matching Mason’s description in a storm drain half a mile outside of town, she knows she did.
• •
Mason went missing last July. When he had stayed away for longer than an eleven-year-old runaway angry with his parents would, the first thing they did was drag the river. He was last seen there by his brother, Tate, fourteen—the middle of the three boys—on his way to soccer practice. Tate told the local newspaper, the Collier Courier, that Mason was attempting to catch little frogs for bait. Lily had never been sure if those frogs were small because they were adolescents or a species in miniature—one answer more tragic than the other. But Mason was a good swimmer, with a Boy Scout merit badge to prove it, and the river was shallow where he was, not even a quarter mile from home. No body was found in the subsequent days, not by police dogs or the hundred or so volunteers combing neighborhoods and fields and the little patches of woods all along the river and behind the high school baseball field.
That summer, Lily found herself among the volunteers with her best friend, Christie, who—small and blond, hailing from good Norwegian stock as hearty and pure as the kind they use for white bean soup—looked barely older than a child herself. They wore (but complained about) the bright orange vests provided by the police department as they walked through cornfields looking for Mason.
The Courier didn’t report that the last thing Tate had said to Mason was, “Gross, dude,” after watching him put the frogs in a Tupperware container stolen from their kitchen. “Mom puts sandwiches in that.” Lily knows that’s the last thing Tate said to Mason because Andy told her so.
“What about you?” she’d asked, sitting next to him on the dingy, plaid couch in the basement at the graduation party of Christie’s boyfriend, Ryan Talbot, a month ago. “What was the last thing you said?”
He was drunk, and she was holding his Solo cup so he didn’t spill beer on her dress, the white cotton one with the red flowers embroidered on the hem that Christie had picked out for her at the JC Penney. The dress she wore to graduation, luckily beer-stain free.
“That’s just it,” Andy had said, reaching out to grab her wrist and hold it steadily as he carefully took his cup back. “I don’t fucking remember.”
Of course, Mason didn’t turn up that summer, dead or alive. And now, a year later, in the middle of this one, after having Amanda, her team captain and right winger, warn her against showing up to play for the University of North Dakota women’s hockey team as a virgin (“It marks you as a social deficient, Brady. Don’t you want to make friends?”), Lily figured it was time to indulge in some slightly reckless behavior.
She’s lucky that Andy, with a choked-off laugh followed by a serious nod, agreed. Andy, who had yet to sign up for classes at Collier Community College even though the registration deadline was two weeks away. Andy, who wasn’t her boyfriend, except in all the ways he sort of was, but who’d known her as long as anybody. Andy, who came to her games and understood, at least a little bit, why she was leaving him behind.
Back during their freshman year, when Christie joined drama club and had a starring turn as Dolly in the high school’s spring production of Hello Dolly!, Lily had tried out for hockey. She had moved up from the team that four of the local school districts had cobbled together so middle school girls could play to one of the best high school teams in the state. She couldn’t belt out show tunes like Christie, but she was good at hockey—first line center of a state championship winning team good—and UND had offered her enough money that she could actually afford to go.
Maybe she shouldn’t have slept with Andy, a month after graduation, tying herself to him even more than she already had, knowing she must snip through the threads binding them together before she goes. But she also thinks about how he’d given her permission to leave. Because, yes, he’d laughed at her when she asked, tips of his ears flushing red, but he’d also said, “Sure, happy to be a spot on the farewell tour,” smiling as she whacked him good and hard in the stomach. Two-minute penalty for roughing, she’d thought.
Sometimes, when she’s feeling low, she imagines Andy searching for her in her dorm room and in the library like she searched those cornfields for Mason. Of course, she has the power to return and Mason doesn’t—to text, to call, to drive up for Christmas, for her dad’s birthday—but she fears that Andy won’t understand the difference. That to him, gone is gone. Mason and Lily will be united in their absence—a tall, freckled girl with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder and a dark-haired boy who was last seen wearing a red T-shirt, carrying a plastic container of frogs.
• •
Two days after the treehouse—she hasn’t messaged Andy once—Lily and Christie are on their way to the movies when they run into him outside of the hardware store, leaning against one of the bike racks the city had installed downtown that she’s never seen anyone actually use.
Christie, who has memorized every detail of the experience, visibly struggles to keep a straight face as they slowly approach him on the sidewalk. He has spotted them, too, and he waves, looking exactly between them, where their shoulders would meet if Lily wasn’t so tall, instead of at their faces.
“Funny seeing you here,” Christie says, taking a step back to put Lily closer to Andy. Lily mostly thinks it’s funny that the last time she’d seen Andy neither of them was wearing any clothes—her hair unraveling from its braid, his teeth stark white in the dark.
“My mom is repainting the dining room,” he says. “She’s inside looking at samples.”
Lily has seen their dining room, off-white walls with a tacky fruit wallpaper border running along the top, just touching the ceiling. Mail piled up high in the center of the table. Andy’s sci-fi novels, Tate’s soccer jerseys, and Mason’s Boy Scout projects littering the sideboard.
“What color?” she asks.
“Yellow, I think.”
She knows Christie is going to casually flee before she actually does it. Lily pleads silently with her eyes, a desperate “Don’t leave me here. You think you’re doing me a favor, but you’re not.”
In reply, Christie reaches out to tug on Lily’s ponytail, hard. Out loud, she says, “I have to use the bathroom. Meet me at the theater, OK? See you, Andy.” Only Lily hears the unsaid, “You’ll thank me later.”
Or maybe not. Andy, who is grinning at her like she just lost a bet and now has to pay up, says, “I can’t believe you told Christie Solberg we had sex.”
“You don’t know that.”
“‘Funny seeing you here,’” he echoes.
“She won’t tell anyone.” She thinks too late about how harsh that sounds, like she’s trying to keep him a secret.
Your pity project, she hears Amanda say. Not true, she thinks, suddenly picturing Andy in a fluorescent orange vest, calling her name.
Andy’s smiling like he’s already forgiven her, like he wasn’t even mad in the first place.
“I know she won’t. It’s OK.”
Mrs. Turner chooses that moment to exit the store, bells on the handle clanging as it closes behind her. She is a small woman but compact, built to withstand fifty years of incessant Dakotan wind. She isn’t carrying any paint. Instead, she’s clutching her outdated flip phone in one hand, purse strap in the other, lips pressed tightly together.
Lily has known Andy since the Turners moved to Collier from Turtle Lake when they were in second grade. She’s eaten Mrs. Turner’s peanut butter bars, seen her intricately designed quilts at the marching band boosters’ silent auctions. Not even in the press conference the police department had the Turners hold the week after Mason went missing had she come undone. But now Lily can see her beginning to unspool, thread tangling into knots.
“The Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department. Andy, they think—they found a body.”
Lily thinks about how strange it is that when you’re alive, you have a body, but when you’re dead, you are a body.
Andy reaches out to touch Lily’s shoulder.
“You’re going to miss your movie.”
“Oh, Lily,” Mrs. Turner says, “please don’t stay on my account.”
“You’re right,” she says. I’m sorry, she means. “See you later.”
She does her best to keep her eyes forward, locked onto the marquee as she goes.
• •
Back in her bedroom, half-hidden under a pile of dirty T-shirts, is the only gift Andy has ever given her. He’d shoved it at her, wrapped in newspaper, while she cleaned out her locker the week before they’d graduated high school. It’s a used copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, translated into English from Italian. He’d fished it out of a two-dollar paperback bin at a bookstore in Fargo.
It’s slim, made up of eighteen brief sections called folios in its table of contents. The text is interrupted by pencil and charcoal sketches of birds’ wings, mechanical boxes, and wind patterns. Most of it is scientific: A man in a flying machine must be free from the waist up in order to be able to balance himself as his center of gravity demands. But occasionally and with great, solemn purpose, it moves away from descent patterns and tailwinds to say: In summer you may bring snow to warm places, collecting it from the high peaks of mountains, letting it fall into the streets during summer festivals. More enigmatic is this: You who live in dreams, are you better pleased by the false reasoning that occurs when great things are discussed than by that which is sure and natural and not so far beyond our grasp?
Lily loves it for its peculiarity as a book and as a gift, even though she knows why he bought it for her. Last January, six months since anyone had seen Mason, Andy had picked her up from hockey practice because her mom hadn’t wanted her to drive in the snow they’d gotten over the weekend, and Christie, her usual ride, was busy with rehearsals for the community theater’s production of H.M.S. Pinafore. Lily had tossed her gear bag into his backseat and climbed in after it.
“Am I your chauffeur now?” he’d asked, looking at her in the rearview mirror.
She pulled her post-practice, shower-wet hair out of its ponytail and shook it out. “Yep. Hop to!” she said, borrowing one of Christie’s phrases, minus the phony British accent.
“Hop to where?”
Practice had only just ended, but looking out the car window at the mostly empty rink parking lot, snow softly falling out of open prairie sky, Lily knew exactly where she wanted to go.
“Millers’ pond, please.” Triple the size of a backyard swimming pool, but cut in an oblong shape, a watering hole for geese in the summer, perfect for pond hockey in the winter.
Andy laughed. “It’s only four degrees outside.”
Sometimes, when it was just the two of them, it was easy to forget that so much of his life had changed over the last six months. Like maybe the next time she saw the Turners at the annual church picnic, Mason would be there, throwing water balloons at Pastor Jim. It was only when they were around other people—around Christie who never mentioned her little sister, alive and well, two grades ahead of Mason, when Andy was in the room, or her teammates who mostly thought of him as a charity case, an accusation she couldn’t think about for too long if she wanted to keep looking him in the face—that she remembered how different his life was now. There wasn’t anything wrong with Andy. No chronic acne or bad breath. A mediocre student prone to occasional but innocent hijinks (like the time he and Ryan Talbot had made multiple copies of the high school “A” key, the one that opened everything—classrooms, locker rooms, maintenance closets—and passed them out to the entirety of the junior class), but also someone teachers and parents liked. Or they had. After Mason had disappeared, after Lily had started spending time with Andy outside of their shared physics class, Christie had said, “He’s a nice guy, but it’s just so sad about his brother. I don’t know what you even say.”
“Fine,” Andy said, giving in. “Millers’ pond. Let’s go.”
She didn’t have an extra pair of skates with her, and they wouldn’t have fit him anyway, so he sat on top of the fence that separated the Millers’ farm from her family’s farm and watched her skate around the pond in the gray, growing twilight. She’d left her stick in his car—too precious to take with her for a bit of fun—but she treated the far end like a goal anyway, skating around the imaginary crease, picturing the grid of her facemask patterned over her eyes, even though the edges of Collier were spread out before her, empty for a mile in almost every direction.
“Why do you love it so much?” Andy had asked as she stopped in front of him, collapsing onto the snow, heels of her skates still wedged firmly into the ice.
She kept her eyes on the sky, off his face, and maybe that distance made it easier to say, “It feels like I’m flying.”
She’d heard other players say that before, so she knew it wasn’t original, and she felt stupid saying it out loud. But she thought about Amanda asking, “You don’t think he killed his brother, do you?” and Lily knew she should keep talking, should give him something to remember her by, for when she disappeared herself, to UND next fall.
“It’s like—when I have the puck on a breakaway, and I’m pushing toward the net, it’s like I’m not even on ice anymore. I’m flying through the air, trying to land on a branch that I can see in the distance that keeps getting closer and closer, but I can’t slow down. I can’t tap the brakes. I just have to hope I can stick the landing, that it can hold me.”
“And then what?” he said, looking past her, at where, even under the encroaching darkness, she knew the Millers’ barn to be.
“Sometimes I make it. The puck hits top right, and I land. Sometimes, I don’t.”
He didn’t say anything on the drive home, content to ride there together in silence, with only the low hum of the heater for company.
He hadn’t mentioned it again, even when he’d come to one of her games wearing her team’s colors, carrying a sign with her name and number written in Sharpie, surrounded by stars, and she’d hugged him after, drenched in sweat after an overtime win. He’d given her that book simply because it reminded him of her, because he thought about her even when she wasn’t there.
She’d felt a stab of guilt, standing next to her locker holding the Codex, newspaper hastily torn off and wadded up at her feet. Because she’d kept something for herself, too private and interior to share with Andy. Yes, sometimes she makes it and lands, but more often than not, she misses her shot. She misses, and it feels like she’s falling off the branch, like there never was a branch, like she’s tumbling down the blue face of the world.
• •
During the previews, Lily tells Christie about Mrs. Turner and the phone call. They sink down low in their seats, fingers covered in butter as they shove popcorn into their mouths between whispers. The movie theater grows dark around them, people shuffling to their seats, the speakers blaring music so loud that Lily feels it in her bones.
By the time she gets home later that night, at least half of Collier knows that the Turners are driving up to Grand Forks to wait for the police to run a DNA test on the anonymous body. The dispatcher for the sheriff’s department had told them not to come, that it was a waste of time. They’d call with news when there was news. Andy’s parents hung up the phone, got in their car, and drove the three and a half hours southeast anyway.
“How was the movie?” her dad asks as she climbs down from the front seat, picking out the gum wrappers Christie had left in her cup holders. He’s drinking Molson on the front porch, his favorite, which he jokes migrates across the Canadian border one can at a time.
“It was a rom-com. You know.”
“Mom is making dinner,” he says. “Go set the table.”
Lily goes, but sneaks upstairs before her mom can spot her. She throws her purse on the bed, surrounded by posters and pictures, debris from a life lived between this room, the rink, and school. The poster of Manon Rhéaume in net for Tampa that her aunt had sent her when she committed to UND. The photographs of her and Christie dating back to the beginning of their friendship, an abridged fourth grade production of the Wizard of Oz in which they’d both been assigned to play munchkins, much to Christie’s consternation. She can see Andy in the background of that one—he was Uncle Henry. The picture on her nightstand of her dad holding her up while she stood precariously on the tiny new skates she’d gotten as a Christmas gift when she was five. The fairy lights her mom had helped her string up over her desk. Da Vinci’s Codex, unearthed from its T-shirt pile, sitting on her desk.
She opens it up. When the bird rises in the opposite direction to and above the wind, then it gains height much faster than it should from its natural impetus, since it is favored by the wind. There are five small birds drawn in the margin on the page, wings spread, rising up, soft gray lines conveying movement.
The summer Mason had disappeared, no one had been able to talk about anything else. The details of the case, of which there were very few, had been obsessed over in living rooms, narthexes, and on the local news channel. One day he was there, the next he was gone. If people imagined the worst—kidnapped, raped, murdered—no one said. Not in public anyway. But certainly, as that July bled into August, no one expected him to be found alive.
When they are alone, or surrounded by enough people that they might as well be alone, Andy tells Lily things about Mason, not like they’re secrets, but like they’re arcade tokens, given out to be redeemed later, though she suspects the prize has little to do with Mason and everything to do with Andy.
Inviting her in, maybe. “Mason had this stuffed duck . . .” and “. . . and then we found him asleep in the wrong tent!” and “I don’t remember the last time we said, ‘I love you.’” Each story saying, “This is who I am.” Each story asking, “Who are you?”
Lily has her own memories of Mason, of course. Chasing after the Turners’ beagle, Peanut, in the park across the street from the middle school. Playing Heart and Soul on the piano in the church basement. Selling popcorn door-to-door for the annual Boy Scouts’ fund-raiser. Nothing like Andy’s memories, which are both acute and enduring.
Looking through the Codex now, in her room, while Andy sits at home with Tate fighting over the remote, their parents in Grand Forks waiting to hear whether or not that body is Mason’s, feels wrong. She grabs her backpack, throwing in the Codex, an extra sweatshirt, the half-used box of condoms she’d taken from Christie, and the puck from her game-winning goal in last year’s state semifinals for luck.
She’s halfway down the stairs when her mom catches her, dish towel draped over her shoulder, apron stained with tomato sauce.
“Dinner in fifteen, hon.”
“I have to go to Andy’s,” Lily tells her.
Her mom looks at her, frustrated. “You going over there won’t mean news will arrive any faster.”
“I know. I just—” All Lily hears is: Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? All she wants to say is: Someone who won’t disappear.
“OK,” her mom says, pulling her into a quick hug. “I’ll leave a plate on the counter. Make sure you tell those boys we’re praying for them.”
• •
Tate answers the door when Lily rings the bell. He’s shot up since last year, the difference between fourteen and fifteen made obvious by the inch or so he has on her now.
“He’s upstairs,” he says, barely looking at her.
“Hi,” she says, when she reaches Andy’s room, shouldering off her backpack and sitting down next to him on his bed where he’s scrolling through his phone in silence.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, shifting away from where she’s trying to lean closer. He doesn’t say it the way she’d imagined, thankful and awed. What are you doing here? he says, like he can’t believe she’d show up now. Not surprised at her kindness but shocked at her audacity.
She thought he’d be happy to see her, pleased that she’d come to offer her support, ready to keep vigil for as long as it takes, until they know. She feels her stomach turn over at the thought that her desire has been misunderstood.
“I want to be here for you,” she says. She stretches out her legs on the duvet, pressing her side against his as if to say, “If you kiss me, I’ll let you. We can do it right now.” Her tank top has ridden up against the pillows, and she resists the urge to tug it back down, covering up the now-exposed strip of skin just above her hip bone.
He doesn’t look away from his phone.
“You should leave.”
“What?”
“I need you to go home.” He says it slowly, pausing after the “you” before spitting out the rest.
“I wanted to be here for you,” she says again. “I wanted to make you feel better.” She leans in to kiss him when she says it, so he can’t miss her meaning, but he turns away, so her lips catch his jaw instead. Her chin bumps into his as he pulls away, and she feels her face flush red in embarrassment.
He laughs, but it’s not a nice laugh, not even his usual goading one. “You don’t even like me.”
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t have—” picked you, she thinks. “I wouldn’t have slept with you if I didn’t like you.”
“Really?” he says, but he’s not asking her a question. He’s telling her what he already believes to be the answer.
“You’re my friend,” she says. “We’re friends.”
Instead of calming him down, this enrages him. Gone from disgruntled to angry to furious since she’s arrived. Seven minutes in hell instead of heaven.
“No, I’m not. How are you this stupid?”
Lily pulls back, putting half a foot of space between her and Andy. She feels as though she’s been boarded, all the wind knocked out of her, head still ringing from where her helmet smacked against the glass.
He doesn’t stop.
“We aren’t friends, Lily! Christie is your friend. Amanda and the other girls on your team are your friends. I’m not your friend because you don’t feel sorry for your friends. And you definitely don’t fuck your friends because you feel sorry for them. You just have some sick fascination with tragedy, and it makes you feel better about yourself to spend time with me. And the worst thing is that I thought you at least knew all of this, that you knew what this was. But apparently you don’t. You believe your own bullshit.”
Lily stands up. Andy had showed her who he was the day he gave her the Codex, that night in the treehouse, and now, while she’s trying to do the same, he won’t even look at her. Has she missed her mark so completely? Slap shot gone wide. Puck over the glass and out of play.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. If anything, I feel sorry for you. God,” he says, “do I feel sorry for you.” He collects himself then, face settling into a close approximation of its normal Andy affableness, but his brow is wrinkled, torn between guilt and resolve. “I can’t do this right now. I want you to leave.”
Suddenly, she is in Ryan Talbot’s crowded basement again: “What was the last thing you said?” “That’s just it. I don’t fucking remember.”
She pulls her car keys out of her shorts pocket. She goes.
• •
The next day she is standing at the end of her driveway, shooting slap shots at the net placed in front of the closed garage door. She’s only managing to put about one out of every ten shots into the back of the net, which she knows would disappoint the scouts who were so excited to sign her, and that Coach McKinnon would call her out for her bad attitude. He would make her bag skate until she couldn’t stand up.
Her mom had long ago given up on the garage door, dented by years of pucks hitting metal with a satisfying smack that reverbs in Lily’s teeth, leaving a pleasant buzzing behind her eyes. It makes her dad proud to see the evidence, like some families who etch a growth chart into the back of their hall-closet doors, watching their children get taller, sprout wings, and fly away.
Another shot dings off the left post, and the front screen door opens, her dad watching her from the porch.
“Keep your head up,” he says, walking down the steps and across the lawn to stand behind her.
As a child, she’d been small for her age, one of the shortest fifth graders on her peewee team, and her coach had tried constantly to move her to wing. It was her dad who insisted she was a natural center, that she could be a two-way forward, playing a defensive game, creating opportunities for her wingers to score rather than necessarily scoring herself.
“You’re a playmaker, Lil,” he’d say, watching her practice in the driveway, at the pond, at the rink. “You’re the one who sees it, who should set it up.”
Of course, when you’re eleven, you want goals, not assists, but all those assists are what convinced her peewee coach she could play center. Those assists are what the UND coaching staff likes about her. “A selfless game,” they’d written in her scouting evaluation. “Puts team play first, above personal stats.” Now, she pulls another puck out of the mesh bag and lines up to take a shot that goes wide right, landing under the bushes planted along the side of the garage. It disappears from view, and she reaches for another only to come up empty.
“Any word from the Turners?” her father asks, moving to help her collect the stray pucks scattered around the driveway.
“Not that I’ve heard,” she says, an answer that allows for multiple truths, as her dad walks around the porch looking for any they missed.
She sits on one of the steps and watches him pick up her stick (it’s too short for him) to take some shots of his own. He plays in a Thursday night beer league and has for as long as she can remember. He’s a defenseman, and he played in college, too, for Minnesota–Duluth.
Lily isn’t sure how much her dad knows about her and Andy. She thinks he suspects more than she’d like. She wonders what he thinks happened to Mason.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” he says.
Lily knows this, but her parents don’t often say it out loud. She thinks about being a selfless player, wonders if Andy thinks she’s a selfish person, and her throat feels like it’s on fire when she says, “Thank you.”
• •
It is Christie who tells her that the remains found outside of Grand Forks don’t belong to Mason. That the dental records and DNA belong to someone else’s son, someone else’s brother. Lily learns this over milkshakes at the Cone Corner, five days since the treehouse (which is also three days since Andy threw her out of his room and two days since she took her anger out on the garage door). Christie knows because her sister, Gabby, is friends with Tate, and he’d told enough people that everyone knew. Lily wishes she could see it, all the connections spread out between people, stringing them together, beams of light shining out from the center of their chests, down quiet residential streets, across cornfields, covering the Great Plains themselves. Pinpricks of light linked together in constellations of knowing, saying, “Hey, I know you. We’re from the same star quadrant. You’re from my part of the galaxy.”
“Have you talked to Andy?” Christie asks, between sips of her shake.
“Nope.”
Lily thinks about the tight grip of Andy’s hand around her wrist, sticky with beer, at Ryan Talbot’s graduation party and the sharp iciness of the snow he’d shoved down her jacket that day at Millers’ pond as it dripped down her back. She feels the soft weight of Andy on top of her in the treehouse and imagines a different body, smaller and more fragile, that is scared and hurt before it feels nothing, before there is only the long, empty blackness of a storm drain.
She will leave Collier, and Andy’s world will continue to spin even when she is not there to help him turn it.
Christie is staring at her phone, looking through the pictures she took on her camping trip with Ryan last weekend. Lily kicks her under the table.
“Ow,” she whines. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I need you to drive me to Andy’s.”
“Ooh.” Christie smiles at her. “Has your summer fling blossomed into summer love?”
Lily rolls her eyes, kicks her again. “No, but this is serious.”
“OK, OK. I’ll take you.”
Lily breathes in, out. “Let’s go.”
• •
Andy doesn’t shut the door in her face. It’s after ten o’clock on a Tuesday night in July, and the rest of his family is home, so they do what teenagers in Collier do when they want to be alone—they sit in his car.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She wants to reach out and grab his hand, but she resists.
“I was upset, but it wasn’t OK to say you were stupid, and it definitely wasn’t OK to say we aren’t friends. I know you’re not like that.”
She takes a deep breath. In truth, it does make her feel better about herself to spend time with Andy, but not because of Mason, not because she’s a selfish person, not even because of sex. It feels good to be around goodness, and it makes Lily feel better to be around Andy, who lets her give as much of herself as she wants without asking for more. He took her to the pond. He gave her da Vinci’s Codex as a gift and asked her the question she needed to ask herself before she knew she was even looking for answers: You who live in dreams, are you better pleased by the false reasoning that occurs when great things are discussed than by that which is sure and natural and not so far beyond our grasp?
“I left my backpack here,” she says. “The other day.”
“It’s actually in the trunk of the car. I’ve been meaning to drop it off at your house.”
“That book you gave me—”
“I went through your bag,” he interrupts her. He shrugs sheepishly as if to say, I know I shouldn’t have, but I did anyway. “I saw that it was in there.”
“Yes,” she says. She is terrified, but she needs to ask: “Do you want it back?”
“No! No, it was a gift.”
“OK.” She tries to smile, but the thought of parting with it makes her hands feel numb, as if he’s already snatched it away, leaving her standing there, palms up and empty. “I wasn’t returning it anyway.”
“I also found the condoms,” he says.
“Yeah, I thought it might make you forget, just for a little bit.”
He smiles at her. “I don’t think it would have worked.”
“Probably not,” she says.
She knows that it’s not possible to give him the all same things he’s given her, to change the momentum when they’re already in overtime. But she wants to give him an assist—a real one—before a whistle blows, stopping the play. She remembers him asking her, “Why do you love it so much?” She remembers telling him, “It feels like I’m flying.” Andy asked her who she was when nobody was looking. And all the while, the sure and natural thing was laid out in front of her like a map, a flight pattern. To get from Point A to Point B, go this way.
Ask him what he loves, she thinks. Let him show you.
“Take me somewhere,” she says, finally reaching out to hold his hand.
“What?” He laughs. “Where do you want to go?”
“You pick.”
When he continues to look at her, a little confused, but mostly with that soft look he gets when he lets Tate sneak a beer without telling their parents, she nods as enthusiastically as she can. “Like Millers’ pond, remember?”
“OK,” he says, pulling his keys out of the glove box. “But it’s not going to be that exciting.”
Lily is surprised when they pull into the high school parking lot and when he makes her get out of the car, and he pulls her backpack out of the trunk, along with a baseball and two catcher’s mitts.
“Don’t forget your bag this time,” he says.
She thinks about the Codex. “I won’t.”
He leads her to the baseball diamond, ringed by trees, a small patch of woods that hides a ravine that backs up on a pricey subdivision. It’s dark outside except for the streetlamps you can spot through the trees, the soft glow of dining rooms in the distance.
Andy has her stand at home plate as he walks over to the pitcher’s mound.
“Mason was really good at baseball,” he says. “We used to come here sometimes to play catch. Tate, too.” Quietly, he says, “I don’t know for sure, but I hope he got to feel the way you do when you skate at least once in his life.” He clears his throat. “And I sort of hope it was here with me.” He looks shy now. “Is that, you know, what you were looking for?”
She grips the ball tightly in her hand, fingers pressing down hard on the laces, and throws it to him.
“Yeah,” she says. And then, even though it’s the most obvious thing in the world: “You loved him.”
“Yep.” He pauses, gently tossing the ball from his gloved hand to his bare one. “I’m never going to be the same.”
Lily knows she can’t fill the space Mason has left behind, but she can acknowledge his absence, light a candle in his memory, allow for a changed world.
“I think that’s OK,” she says. “I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
Andy nods. He pulls his arm back in a twisted pitcher’s stance, an intentional imitation of the kind of windup you see on TV, and lets it go.
The ball spirals up and out, a white dot hurled through the sky, the moon’s twin gliding through the air toward her, coming closer and closer. She hears the dull thud in her glove before she feels it, a twinge in her wrist, a shock to her shoulder. “Here it is,” she thinks, holding the moon in the palm of her hand. It is heavy and solid and still.
