I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Our Place

I picked the key up off my knee.

The yarn was soft and a little fuzzy, the same red as the blanket in the loft.

"Is this you asking me something?" I said.

"It's me asking." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm bad at it. Give me a second."

"Take your time. I'm famous now. I've got all night."

He laughed.

Then he turned on the step to face me.

"Come live with me at the cabin," he said.

"Keep your bunk for shift nights. Keep everything. Just come home to me the rest of them."

"Say it back" was right there on my tongue.

I didn't use it.

"Yes," I said.

I moved on the last Saturday in July.

It took one pickup load.

One duffel bag, the same one I'd hidden in the neighbor's trunk.

A box of books. The lab laptop. Dodie's starter crock, wrapped in a station towel.

The crew came anyway.

Gavin carried the box of books and complained it was all math.

Dodie carried the crock on her lap the whole way out Goldstream Road and talked to it.

"You're going to live in the woods now. Be brave. Joss will feed you on Sundays."

"I'll feed it every day."

"Sundays are the important ones."

The captain didn't come.

But he sent a thermometer in a paper bag, the kind you screw onto a porch post.

The note on the bag said: So you'll quit calling for my numbers.

Emory had been busy.

There was a new shelf over the table, sanded smooth.

The cocoa mug I'd stolen and the one I'd given him sat on it side by side.

There was a desk under the window now, two planks on sawhorses, exactly the width of the lab laptop.

There was a braided rag rug in front of the wood stove that hadn't been there in April.

"Where'd the rug come from?"

"My mom," he said. "She said if a girl's moving in, the floor can't be bare."

On the wall by the door, next to his coat hook, there was a second hook.

Somebody had burned CARMODY into the wood above it with a hot nail.

The letters were crooked.

I stood there with my duffel bag and looked at it for a long time.

"Dodie did the letters," Emory said behind me. "I told her it was crooked."

"It's spelled right," I said.

The crew stayed for hot dogs on the woodstove and left at nine, honking all the way down the road.

The sky over the burned ridge went heavy and purple.

At ten the thunder started.

Real rain, the first in weeks.

It hammered the tin roof so loud we had to shout.

Then I remembered the last box was still in the truck bed.

The laptop.

I ran.

Emory ran after me.

By the time we got the box inside, we were both soaked through to the skin.

My flannel was stuck to my arms.

His station T-shirt was see-through and plastered to his chest.

He put the box on the new desk and turned around, dripping on his mother's rug.

I was laughing.

He was looking at me like he'd forgotten what was funny.

The rain roared on the roof.

Lightning lit the window white, and on reflex I turned toward the laptop to check the humidity.

Emory caught my wrist.

"No," he said. "No wind tonight."

"I was just going to look."

"I know you were." He pulled me in by the wrist until I was standing against his wet shirt.

"Since April, we've had a fire season."

It was true.

Me in a tent on the flats. Him on the squad. Two days home at a time and never the same two days.

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