And then, just as instantly, the clouds passed and the rain cleared and the sun was out. He looked down at himself, at his feet on the roof. I leaned into him, put my head in the middle of his chest. He was burning up.
He wiped his eyes, pushed his wet hair off his face.
“Novo,” I said. “Tell me something.”
“About what?”
“About you.”
He thought for a minute.
“Like, really. Where are you from?”
I could see it, him weighing things up, choosing the right words. “I’m out past those equations,” he said. “I don’t live in one place. Time and space are the same to me.”
“But you’re real.”
“Yes. Course I’m real.”
“Are you only real to me?”
He put his arm around me. Warm. So heavy, the weight of him. Rock solid, strangely enough.
“I’m not your imaginary friend,” he said. “You didn’t make me up.”
“Oh, I hope not.”
“But I came here for you.”
“You did?”
“I’ve come for you before, Jude. More than once.”
“What do you mean? Have we met before?”
“You’ve seen me.”
“I have? Like I’m seeing you now?”
He shook his head. “I move fast,” he said. “Speed of light has got nothing on me. You might have seen me for the infinitely smallest possible particle of a second. Almost nothing.”
“But—”
“I can’t control it,” he said. “But we are connected. You pull me.”
“How?”
“Do you want a scientific answer?”
“Maybe.”
“We resonate. Our cells speak the same language. At the same frequency.”
“Are you for real?”
“You pull me,” he said again. “It’s called love, Jude. I will always find you.”
I put my hand to his face, stroked his cheek, touched his jaw. “I never believed in all that.”
“In what? Love? What if it’s not a question of belief?” he said. “Just equations. Like your physics.”
“Is it?”
“I wait and wait for you, between times,” he said, while the day carried on as normal, minute by minute, and people everywhere told stories and paid their bills and rode their bikes and tried on sneakers and thought about what to have for lunch. It didn’t make any sense. I tucked my head into the crook of his arm, put my hand on his chest, the tips of my fingers on the pulse at his throat. Novo traced a line down the middle of my forehead, down my nose and over my lips and past my chin. “I’m always with you,” he said. “Even when I’m not.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“A satellite to a planet,” he said. “A moon. If you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“Why me though?” I said.
“Why would you even ask that?”
“Because I want to know. What’s so special about me? I mean, aren’t there other bodies somewhere else, resonating in other times, with the same frequency?”
“No,” he said. “There’s only you.”
“How come?”
“I am a lost cause,” he said. “The original.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re my patron saint.” His smile breaking, the unsticking of his mouth, the clean shine of his teeth. He closed his eyes like a cat at the top of that smile. How does the rest of the world even function without seeing that?
“You’re different,” he said. “Be different.” And then he moved closer and kissed me. Soft, that kiss. So careful. So forever-destroyingly kind. I kissed him back, and the black-dark center of his eyes was fierce and open and hungry, and the quiet between us was something wonderful.
“Stay with me,” I said. “Don’t leave.”
“Easy,” he said, and he kissed me again. “Done, Jude. I’ll do whatever you say.”
We stayed out on the roof while it got dark. We stayed out all night. And later, I looked across the street for the hundredth time at his house. Doors shut, lights out, still and silent. Sunk-sunset glass above the front door, like a protractor, cataract film on all the windows, part salt air, part grime and neglect. Hard to believe Novo had scaled that wall like a lizard a few hours earlier. Hard to believe any of this at all. The house was empty now, and he was here with me. Mrs. Midler’s brand-new ghosts must still be everywhere—lost lists behind the radiators, years of cooking fumes in the kitchen, cobwebs strung like bunting down the hall. I wondered how they’d like sharing their space with this new sudden spell of a boy. I wondered if they were jealous now, of me. He sat up next to me. What did we both see? The farm-dog wind, herding litter into chosen corners. The hung moon, and clouds moving blankly under the stars. Streetlights reflected in old puddles, and the huddled outline of sleeping gulls. Someone’s TV flashing like lightning behind a closed curtain, a living-room storm. And each other, leaning, breathing, waiting. I had no idea for what.
In the end, he put his arms around me, shook his head a little, and smiled, pulling me back down to sleep. The streetlight closest to him buzzed half-heartedly, flickered, catching then losing him, over and over. There, and then gone, a way of life that boy was long used to. The far edges of the sea were on the horizon where they belonged. The moon was high and bright, and I saw it so clearly then. I pictured it, or I thought I did, the join between what was real and what wasn’t, for him. The fault line that he lived on, a fluid, changeable place, like the line between the dry land and the sea.
It didn’t occur to me then that I might one day have to draw that line for myself.
SEVENTEEN
Early morning was damp and smelled of the sea. The palm trees shivered in the breeze, tropical creatures, misfits waiting for the sun to come up. Novo wanted to go diving. We had to get our timing right because of the tides. Sometimes the caves were there and sometimes they weren’t. He said they filled and emptied with the sea.
Everything seemed deserted. Like the whole world was asleep except us. I wondered if Mum and Henry even noticed I was gone.
I said, “Are we actually the only ones up?” and he said, “Maybe.”
“It feels weird, doesn’t it? This early in the day I always pretend the world’s ended, or something dramatic, like everybody’s been wiped out by a plague in the night and it’s all up to me now, like I’m in my very own sci-fi film. I don’t even like sci-fi films. But I can’t help it.”