The first thing she found was a little plastic insert for pictures. It held a single oval photograph—the girl from Varen’s morning group, part of the woe-is-me convergence that met at the radiator next to the side doors every morning. It was the girl who had handed him the red envelope, Isobel realized, and she thought her name was Lacy. Did this mean she was his girlfriend?
The girl wasn’t smiling in the picture. She had a defiant expression on her round face, as though she were silently daring the onlooker to address her directly. She had mounds of thick black hair that fell past the cut of the photo, though Isobel knew that the black waves ended in coils dipped in red dye. She had full lips, too, painted a deep burgundy, and her eyeliner, drawn with sharp wingtips, made her huge dark eyes seem even larger. Those eyes, combined with her copper skin, made her look like an Egyptian goddess.
Varen’s music ceased without warning. Silence pulsed. Hands fumbling, Isobel snapped closed the wallet and set it back on the table amid the rings, just as he’d left it. She dropped into one of the chairs and crossed her legs, trying to look nonchalant.
He emerged from the back room with his black booklet of CDs in one hand, his jacket in the other. He set the CD case aside and pulled on the worn hunter green jacket, the one with the silhouette of the dead bird safety-pinned onto the back. Stopping at the table, he stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and, turning halfway away, lifted his shirt to hook the chains through a front belt loop.
Isobel stole a glance.
A black silver-studded belt encircled his narrow hips. Beneath the baggy T-shirt, he was thin and pale but strong-looking. She tried not to go pink in the face when she suddenly caught herself wondering if his skin felt warm to the touch or vampire cold.
Isobel averted her eyes. She stared out the store windows instead, but she could still see his reflection in the darkened glass. She stared, watching his every movement as he set to putting the rings on his fingers methodically, one at a time. His arms, sinewy and graceful, moved as though conducting a ritual, and she blinked, unable to look away.
When he was finished, he snatched up his CD case and she snapped to.
“C’mon,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”
“It’s the next right,” she said, “by the fountain.”
The headlights of Varen’s car swept over the tiered fountain as he steered them into her neighborhood, Lotus Grove. He drove a black 1967 Cougar, the interior a dark burgundy, a nice ride.
The Cougar, rumbling, purring like its namesake, rolled to a stop in front of her driveway. Isobel took her time unfastening her seat belt. She stalled, remembering how Poe had come up again at the ice cream shop. That couldn’t have been a coincidence, could it? He had to have been dropping a hint, right?
She’d thought about this the whole ride home. In truth, she’d been thinking about it ever since he’d introduced her to Cemetery Sighs. But she hadn’t yet worked up enough courage to ask. Now that she was at her house and about to get out of the car, however, she couldn’t ignore the now-or-never feeling churning in her gut.
“Listen,” she began. She shifted in her seat to look at him, though he didn’t return her gaze. Maybe he knew it was coming. She took the dive anyway. What did she have left to lose?
“Are you . . . set on doing the project by yourself now?”
He said nothing, only continued to stare forward out the windshield. Isobel waited but, deciding not to hold her breath, took his silence as a yes. She grasped the door handle and pulled, not about to argue that she didn’t deserve it.
“I get off of work at five on Sunday,” he said, and she paused, one foot on the pavement. “Can you meet after that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said. “Nobit’s Nook is a bookstore on Bardstown Road, you know where it is?”
She nodded. She knew where it was.
“I’ll be there at five thirty,” he said.
Sold, she thought. “Five thirty Sunday,” she echoed, and grabbed her stuff, climbing out before he had time to change his mind. She shut the car door behind her, waved, and jogged up the slope of her lawn to her front door. She dug around in her gym bag in search of her keys, but when she tried the handle, she found the door unlocked. She slipped in, careful not to make any noise, since her parents had probably gone to bed sometime around eleven.
Once inside, she fished out her blinking phone and flipped it open. The LCD light lit up, showing seven missed calls—what? Oh crud, Coach always had them turn off their phones before a game, because she hated hearing them go off in the locker room. Had she left it on silent this whole time? Mom and Dad were going to—
“Where have you been?” A familiar voice broke through the darkness. Isobel’s eyes flew wide. She turned and saw her mom sitting at the dining room table and her dad right next to her, neither of them wearing their happy faces.
“And who was that?” her father asked.
9
Intangible Forms
Grounded. That was her sentencing for the rest of the weekend, mostly because Isobel hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfactory excuse as to why she hadn’t checked her phone sooner. When her mom and dad had asked where she’d been, she’d done her best not to lie, saying that the crew had gone out for ice cream after the game and that they had lost track of time. To the question of who had brought her home, Isobel had only shrugged, saying that it had been someone from school. She could tell that her dad especially hadn’t liked that answer, but he didn’t interrogate her any further about it, either.
She wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened at the ice cream shop. She certainly wasn’t ready to tell her parents that she had broken up with Brad. Or even admit that the crew was no more. Not when she’d scarcely had time to process everything herself. Mostly, though, she felt reluctant about mentioning Varen’s name at all, as if, somehow, that could only invoke further disaster.
erged from the back room with his black booklet of CDs in one hand, his jacket in the other. He set the CD case aside and pulled on the worn hunter green jacket, the one with the silhouette of the dead bird safety-pinned onto the back. Stopping at the table, he stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and, turning halfway away, lifted his shirt to hook the chains through a front belt loop.