“She’s always been weird, the girl. Pretty, but weird.”
I wanted to bathe in my own loneliness, swim in the knowledge that my mother had looked me in the eye and decided I wasn’t enough. Drown in my sorrow. Be left alone.
As I reached to turn the radio off, Edie pouted. “But it’s my favorite song!”
Of course it was. Of course.
Slapping my window with my open palm, I let out a wrecked whimper. I shuddered violently at the unfamiliar sound of my own voice. Edie, behind the wheel, sliced her gaze to me, her mouth still curled with the faint smile that always hovered over her lips, like open arms offering a hug.
“Your dad grew up on Depeche Mode. It’s one of his favorite bands,” she explained, trying to distract me from whatever meltdown I was going through now.
I struck the passenger window harder, kicking my backpack at my feet. The song was digging into my body, slithering into my veins. I wanted out. I needed to get out of there. We rounded the corner toward our Mediterranean mansion, but it wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t unhear the song. Unsee Valenciana leaving. Unfeel that huge, hollow hole in my heart that my biological mother stretched with her fist every time her memory struck me.
Edie turned off the radio at the same time I threw the door open, stumbling out of the slowing vehicle. I skidded over a puddle, then sped toward the house.
The garage door rolled up while thunder sliced the sky, cracking it open, inviting more furious rain. I heard Edie’s cries through her open window, but they were swallowed by the rare SoCal storm. Rain soaked my socks, making my legs heavy, and my feet burned from running as I grabbed my bike from the garage, flung one leg over it, and launched toward the street. Edie parked, tripping out of the vehicle. She chased after me, calling my name.
I pedaled fast, cycling away from the cul-de-sac…zipping past the Followhill house…the Spencers’ mansion darkening my path ahead with its formidable size. The Coles’ house, my favorite, was sandwiched between my house and the Followhills’.
“Luna!” Knight Cole’s voice boomed behind my back.
I wasn’t even surprised.
Our bedroom windows faced each other, and we always kept the curtains open. When I wasn’t in my room, Knight usually looked for me. And vice versa.
It was more difficult to ignore Knight than my stepmother, and not because I didn’t love Edie. I did. I loved her with the ferocity only a non-biological child could feel—hungry, visceral love, only better, because it was dipped in gratitude and awe.
Knight wasn’t exactly like a brother, but he didn’t feel like less than family, either. He put Band-Aids on my scraped knees and shooed the bullies away when they taunted me, even if they were twice his size. He’d given me pep talks before I’d known what they were and that I needed them.
The only bad thing about Knight was it felt like he held a piece of my heart hostage. So I always wondered where he was. His wellbeing was tangled with mine. As I rolled down the hill on my bike, toward the black, wrought-iron gate enclosing our lush neighborhood, I wondered if he felt that invisible thread attaching us, too, if he chased me because I tugged at it. Because it hurt when one of us got too far away.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Knight screamed behind my back.
Edie had caught up with him. It sounded like they were arguing.
“I’ll calm her down.”
“But Knight…”
“I know what she needs.”
“You don’t, honey. You’re just a kid.”
“You’re just an adult. Now go!”
Knight wasn’t afraid to get confrontational with adults. Me, I followed rules. As long as I wasn’t expected to utter actual words, I did everything by the book—from being a straight-A student to helping strangers. I picked up trash on the street, even when it wasn’t mine, and donated a selection of my gifts every Christmas to those who really needed them.
But my motives weren’t pure. I always felt less-than, so I tried to be more. Daria Followhill, another neighbor my age, called me Saint Luna.
She wasn’t wrong. I played the role of a saint, because Val had made me feel like a sinner.
I pedaled faster. The rain slushed in sheets, turning to hail, pelting my skin with its icy fury. I squinted, passing through the gates of the neighborhood.
Everything happened fast: Yellow lights flashing in my face. Hot metal grazing my leg as the vehicle tried to swerve in the other direction. A deafening honk.
I felt something hurling me back by the collar of my tweed jacket with a force that almost choked me, and before I knew what was going on, I’d collapsed into a puddle on the side of the road.
Just then, the sound of my bike exploding rang in my ears. The assaulting car shattered it to pieces. The seat flew inches from my head, and the frame glided in the other direction. My face hit the concrete. Dust, wet dirt, and blood coated my mouth. I coughed, rolling around and fighting what felt like the weight of the entire world to find Knight straddling my waist with his legs. The car careened to the end of the road, taking a sharp U-turn and zinging back past the gates of the neighborhood. The hail was so bad I couldn’t even see the shape of the vehicle, let alone its license plate.