Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

considered what I’d do after my shift. Most times, if my shift ended before Grace was done with school, I would linger in the loft of the store with a book rather than go home to the Brisbanes’ empty house. Without Grace there, it was just a place to wait for her, a dull ache inside me.
    Today, the ache had followed me to work. I had already written a song — just a piece of a song — Is it still a secret if nobody cares / if having the knowledge in no way impairs / your living — and feeling — the way that you breathe / knowing the things that you know about me — the hope of a song more than anything else. Now, I perched behind the counter reading a copy of Roethke, my shift about to end and Grace tutoring until late, my eyes drawn to the tiny flakes of snow drifting outside instead of Roethke’s words: “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?” I looked down at my fingers on the pages of my book, such wonderful, precious things, and felt guilty for the nameless wanting that plagued me.
    The clock ticked to five. This was when I usually locked the front door, turned the sign to CLOSED — COME BACK SOON, and went out the back door to my Volkswagen.
    But this time I didn’t. This time I locked the back door, picked up my guitar case, and went out the front, sliding a little on the ice coating the threshold. I pulled on the skullcap that Grace had bought me in a failed attempt to make me look sexy while keeping my head warm. Stepping out into the middle of the sidewalk, I watched tiny flakes float down onto the abandoned street. As far as I could see, there were banks of old snow pressed into stained sculptures. Icicles made jagged smiles of the storefronts.
    My eyes smarted with the cold. I held my free hand out, palm up, and watched as snow dissolved on my skin.
    This was not real life. This was life as watched through awindow. Life watched on television. I couldn’t remember when I hadn’t hidden from this.
    I was cold, I had a handful of snow, and I was human.
    The future stretched before me, infinite and growing and mine, in a way that nothing had ever been before.
    Sudden euphoria rushed through me, a grin stretching my face at this cosmic lottery I had won. I had risked everything and gained everything, and here I was, of the world and in it. I laughed out loud, no one to hear me but the audience of snowflakes. I leaped off the sidewalk, into the bank of graying snow. I was drunk with the reality of my human body. A lifetime of winters, of skullcaps, of collars turned against cold, of noses turning red, of staying up late on New Year’s Eve. Skidding in the slick tire tracks in the road, I waltzed across the street, swinging my guitar case in a circle, snow falling all around me, until a car honked at me.
    I waved at the driver and jumped up onto the opposite sidewalk, knocking the crisp snow off each parking meter as I came to it. My pants were frozen with snow stuffed into my shoes, my fingers numb and red, and still I was me. Always me.
    I circled the block until the cold had lost its novelty, and then I doubled back to my car and checked my watch. Grace would still be tutoring, and I didn’t feel like running the risk of getting to her house and finding one of her parents instead. Awkward didn’t begin to describe those conversations. The more obvious Grace and I became with our relationship, the less her parents found to say to me. And vice versa. So instead I headed toward Beck’s house. Even though I couldn’t hope for any of theother wolves to have shifted, I could pick up some of my books. I wasn’t a fan of the mysteries that filled Grace’s bookshelves.
    So I followed the highway in the dying gray light of day, Boundary Wood pressing up against the shoulder of the road, until I was on the deserted street that led to