Illyria Read Free Page A

for so long that I couldn't tell when they faded into an echo, until the echo itself dropped into silence and Rogan sank back into the half-light beside me.
    14
    "Holy cow." I was crying--when had I started to cry?--not just my face wet but my hands, my shirt, my jeans. "Rogan, that--"
    I stopped. His chin was tucked against his chest, his hands clutching his head as he rocked back and forth, mouth bared in a grimace as he moaned something over and over again, words I couldn't understand. I didn't even know if they were words. He looked ghastly, unearthly; like a picture I had once seen of a body trapped in a lava flow. I stared, too terrified to move, until he turned toward me and I saw his eyes, his own face streaked with tears; and suddenly I understood what he was saying--
    "I made that--I made that--I made that--"
    I grabbed him, hugging him to my skinny chest as we both began to laugh hysterically.
    "That was me!" He almost shrieked, and I covered his mouth with my hand, still laughing. "That was me!"
    "Shut up! Rogan, shhh---"
    He bit my finger. I yelped and snatched my hand back, then fell on him. He held me so hard I punched him. "You're choking me!"
    He relaxed his hold. I rubbed my face against his shirt to dry my tears, then pressed my fist against his chest. His heart pounded so hard it was like another fist hammered inside him and I splayed my fingers, imagining I could hold it, like a baseball, or a stone. He smelled as he always did, of detergent and sweat, his mother's Chanel No. 5, and dirt and chalk dust.
    But he smelled of something else, too. He smelled the way his brothers did, and my older boy cousins; their tree-house smell,
    15
    sweetish and rank, slightly ammoniacal; at once green and earthen. No one had told me what that smell was, and nobody ever would. But I knew.
    "Maddy," he whispered.
    He ran his finger along my chapped lips, then lightly tapped the wires of my braces. I took off my glasses as he tilted his head and brought his mouth close, rubbing his lips across mine. His breath was warm and sour. I stroked his hair, tentatively, drew my hand down to cup his ear then touched his cheek, the line of his jaw. He'd always felt like me, smooth and clean. I had never noticed hair on his face but I felt it now, his skin damp and slightly abraded, like touching a cat's tongue. He angled himself so that he was on top of me and gently pushed me down, so that we were lying face-to-face.
    We stayed like that forever, breathing, sometimes moving. I felt as though my clothes had disappeared, and my skin; as though my bones had uncurled like ferns to twine with his. Finally he stirred and touched my face.
    "Where are your glasses?"
    We sat up. The candle had burned out. The dark underground room felt warmer than it had earlier, and it no longer smelled like dirt and earthworms. It smelled like Rogan. It smelled like us.
    "It will all be different now," he said. His tone absent, as though reciting something he only half remembered. "Will you help me with that stuff for math?"
    "Sure," I said, and scrambled after him to head back outside.
    16
    ***
    ROGAN WAS RIGHT: IT WAS DIFFERENT. NOT ALL AT
    once, and not immediately.
    But the world changed, everything about us changed. Everything about me, certainly.
    The school year ended. It was the summer before high school. Early in July my braces came off. After that I refused to get my hair cut in the ghastly pixie cut I'd had since I was two years old. The stuff Aunt Kate gave me for my skin began to work. My face cleared up.
    And I started to wean myself from my glasses, using them only to read, or when my parents were around. The rest of the time I kept them in an ugly orange case in my pocket, until the day that I forgot the case in my room.
    "Maddy." My mother frowned when she saw me at breakfast. "Where are your glasses? You didn't lose them?"
    I took a deep breath. "I don't need them anymore."
    My mother made the face she made at dinner when someone said they