Niamh studied the flask, her face stony.
“Come on, you two,” I said in a quiet voice. “Talk it through, or let it go. Holding grudges isn’t going to solve anything.”
Lara folded her arms. “I’m not the one who—”
Juliette and I both gave her a sharp look, and she cut off midsentence.
Niamh sighed, turned the flask around in her fingers a couple of times, then brought it to her lips and tipped her head back.
Juliette and I glanced at each other with relief. A temporary truce, sealed with a vodka shot. I didn’t even have to break into a solo performance of “Give Peace a Chance.” I counted this as a win, if there ever was one.
12
“Dylan, come out of the water right now,” I said, in what was supposed to be a “firm parent” voice. It had a tinge of panic in it, though, and was probably a touch too high-pitched to strike fear into anyone’s heart. I was torn between not wanting to take my eyes off him in case he drowned, and trying to watch what I was doing with Crista. It’s hard to delicately clean approximately twenty pints of blood from a mystery wound without glancing at your hands every now and then.
“No.”
“Dylan!” So help me God.
“Wanna play! Wanna swim!”
“Ouch, Ollie,” Crista yelped through her tears, pushing my hand away. “Stop.”
“I have to get the blood off.”
“You’re hurting me.”
“It’s only gonna sting for a second, I promise.”
“You’re not cleaning it right. You can’t clean blood with a napkin. It’s going to get sepsis.”
Well, a napkin was all I had. And how the hell did she even know what sepsis was? I ignored her, and turned back to the lake. “Dylan Thomson, if you don’t come here in the next five seconds …” I didn’t finish the threat, because I didn’t know what an appropriate punishment for someone who wasn’t even three years old was. This was only my third day here, and my first day looking after my cousins without an adult nearby. Usually I’d threaten to grab Aunt Linda or Uncle Roy. But they were out God-knew-where with my parents. So here I was, trying to run a dictatorship while my two citizens were staging a coup.
The napkin began to fall apart. It was dark red, and so were my hands, and I was starting to think I might vomit. What the hell had Crista done? Should I take her to a clinic? Would she lose her leg? Should I call Aunt Linda? Or 911?
A shadow fell over us, and out of nowhere, someone was kneeling by my side. “Hey,” the someone said. “Do you need a hand? It doesn’t look like the napkin’s gonna cut it.”
Crista and I glanced up as one. Our Guardian Angel was a guy about my age, with thick dark hair that curled a little at the ends, light brown skin, and a first-aid kit.
I said something that didn’t even slightly resemble English.
“Dad forces me to bring the kit every time I take Kane here,” the guy said, unzipping the bag and fishing through various wipes and bandages. “That’s my little brother. He’s right over there, in the water. This is the first time the kit’s come in handy, though.”
Speaking of firsts, this was the first time I’d ever seen Crista shut up. She was staring at the guy like he’d ridden in on the back of a unicorn. I had a nasty feeling I was looking at him in the same way.
The guy held up a pack of disinfectant wipes. “Is this okay?” he asked.
Was water wet? Was the day hot? Were his freckles perfect? Of course it was okay. Nothing had ever been more okay in all of human history. Someone needed to write a ballad about how okay this was. I needed a picture of this, to submit to the Oxford English Dictionary, to substitute in for the definition of “okay.”
I think I managed a faint nod.
“What’s your name?”
He wasn’t asking me, unfortunately.
Crista was totally solemn. “Crista.”
“Isn’t that a pretty name? I’m Will. Crista, is it okay if I clean off your leg? It looks like it must hurt a lot.”
Crista also managed a faint nod.
Will glanced up at me. “If you wanted to go and grab Dylan, I can hold the fort here for a sec.”
Wait, did he know Dylan? Did he know me? Had we always known each other? Suddenly, I remembered how many times I’d screamed Dylan’s name across the shore. Right. That made sense.
“Yeah,” I choked out. “Thank you.”
Then we really looked at each other, and it was like being locked into place. Like I couldn’t have blinked if someone was offering me a winning lottery ticket to. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt like this looking at a guy. But it was maybe the first time a guy had stared at me in the same sort of way.
“Anytime,” he said. And smiled.
“I still don’t get what the difference between major and minor is supposed to be.”
I kept my eyes on my bass without pausing in the plucking. “I’m not listening to you.”
Will made a point of turning his textbook upside down, and tipped his head at a 90-degree angle. He was sitting backward on one of the metal chairs, crossing his legs at the ankle in front of him. His hair was a little too long, hanging in his face in dark, wavy tendrils.
“Seriously, Ollie. How do you decide one note is sad and another is happy?”
I paused in disbelief. “You don’t have minor notes. You have minor scales and chords.”
“But aren’t the minor notes the black ones?”
Now I felt as baffled as he looked. “Black notes? Do you have synesthesia or something?”
“Huh?”
“Like hearing and tasting color?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Will said, jumping to his feet and striding over to the piano. He played several notes in ascending order. “Black note. Black note. Black note.”
Suddenly, it clicked. He was talking about piano keys. He was even more screwed than I’d thought. I burst out laughing and dropped my bass to join him at the piano. “No, hold on. Okay, these, all of these, are keys. Piano keys.”
Will threw his hands up, frustrated. “Well, I don’t know!”
“Clearly not.” I smirked. “Multiple notes make up chords. You can play a chord in one hit, or rolling, like this …” I played a C, E, and G with a quick wrist movement, “and it’s the notes in the chords that make it major or minor. So this is a major chord. You can hear it, see? It sounds happy?”
“Are you sure you aren’t the synthetic one?” Will asked.
“Synesthesia.”
“Po-tay-to po-tah-to. I don’t see how that sounds happy. It just sounds … I don’t know. Blah.”
Will hadn’t exactly made a habit of joining me in the music room at lunch—that probably wouldn’t go unnoticed by the basketball guys—but he’d followed after me occasionally over the last few weeks. Today being one of those occasions. He always told the others it was to get one-on-one tutoring from me, and no one seemed too suspicious.
In our defense, it wasn’t exactly the scene of a depraved porno when we shut the music room door. Or, unfortunately, even a regular, nondepraved porno. He never made any attempt to touch me, or sit too close, or throw me a loaded compliment. We just hung out, chatting about music, or life, or nothing at all. Even though I couldn’t forget the fact that he wouldn’t admit he liked spending time with me to his friends, I gave in and let him join me every time he flashed that smile. Aunt Linda would be proud.