Indigo by Gina Linko Page A

had reached for me, without thinking, I’m sure.
    I had recoiled, but I added, “I’ll see Dr. Claude.” I would do anything to keep that hopeless look off of her face.
    Maybe even see what this Rennick knew.
    In my before-life, before Sophie died, I had loved goals, challenges, winning. I tackled Beethoven’s Ninth for contests when everyone said it was suicide. I chose Faulkner off the English list when everyone else veered toward Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates. When Coach told me I had a better chance to go to state in the free or even the medley, I chose the butterfly. It was the hardest for me as a swimmer. I came in second. I did get a first at contest for Beethoven that year, though. But I never did understand Faulkner. I traded him in halfway through the semester for Stephen King and read six of his books over spring break last year.
    Tame it. Control it. It sounded impossible. But didn’t all of this?
    I held the bottle of nail polish in my hand, frozen on my bed with this newfound possibility. I felt lighter as I painted my nails and listened to Rennick’s pebbles bounce off my window. The guy did not give up easily.
    I tiptoed out of my room, unsure whether I was going out there to ask him some questions or to yell at him to just leave me alone. But either way, I was going out there. My mother’s bedroom door sat open. She lay sprawled on her bed, asleep, papers on her chest, her reading glasses still on. Dad slept next to her, snoring loudly.
    I slipped down the stairs and through the kitchen, to the back door. The front door often creaked, and I was glad that I had remembered.
    I unlocked the dead bolt, so quietly, remembering last year with Cody. When Annaliese and I had snuck out of my old house, toilet-papered Cody’s whole front yard on his eighteenth birthday.
    I froze when the screen door opened with the requisite snap. But I didn’t hear anything from above. I turned the knob and walked out. I let my breath out on the back stoop as I closed the door behind me.
    I turned around, and sure enough I heard a footstep near the brush that lined the back of our property, by the garden Mom had planted in Sophie’s memory. I waited. Closer footsteps, the silhouette of someone near the lilacs.
    The air took on an expectant, loaded quality, and I knew he was there. I felt it. And in that moment, I doubted my reasons for coming out here altogether. Did he know anything? Had it all been just a prank? I wavered, unsure. My feelings were so untrustworthy these days.
    He appeared out of the shadows. “Hey,” he said.
    “You can’t be around me,” I said.
    “Listen,” he said, “I know you don’t want to talk to me. I know you’re mad at me. And I shouldn’t have done that with the crawdad. It probably just scared you even more, shell-shocked as you are. But you have got to listen to me before—”
    “Just tell me what you want to tell me,” I said, and I tried to ignore it, but it was there, inside, deep inside like a pilot light switching on, heating up.
    He started to say something, then stopped himself, rubbed at his chin, raked his hand through his hair in a funny motion. My eyes adjusted to the dark now, and I noticed his teeth, how they overlapped a little in the front. An imperfection.
    “Two minutes,” I said impatiently, feeling the heat swirl and grow.
    “You listen to me,” he said gruffly, pointing at me. “I’m going to knock on that door and wake up your parents, tell them I found you ready to hop a train, if you don’t give me a few minutes here.” He looked at me hard, threatening me, although I could see the apology in the shake of his head. But it was what it was.
    I knew he would knock on the door, so I just gritted my teeth. “Tell me what you know.”
    I met his eyes briefly. The moon was low in the sky, a tiny crescent, a thumbnail, as Sophie used to say. It was an inky night, with very little light, especially in the back of myhouse, next to the hydrangeas and the