Cold Kiss

the low hum of her TV for a half hour after that. I had just crept down the stairs to the kitchen when Jess called. I’d forgotten my phone was in the pocket of my hoodie, and it sounded so shrill in the silence, I’d flipped it open without thinking.
    And wound up here, huddled in the butler’s pantry, which Mom uses as storage for pretty much anything she doesn’t want to haul up from the basement or find cluttered in the hall—Christmas lights, Robin’s sports stuff, the box from the new toaster, lightbulbs. At least there’s a window.
    “All I know is, no homework talk tomorrow night,” Jess says sternly. “Even from Dar. I know she’s freaking about her lit project, but I am not discussing dead nineteenth-century white men on a Friday night.”
    I just hope we’re not discussing dead twenty-first-century ones instead.
    “Speaking of Friday, it’s after midnight now.” I yawn, trying to make it sound natural. “I have to go to bed.”
    “Me too.” Jess sighs. “Okay, see you tomorrow. And if you think of anything you want me to bring tomorrow night, tell me at lunch, huh?”
    “Gotcha,” I say, and click the phone shut the moment we say good-bye.
    It’s cold tonight, colder than it’s been for weeks, and I shiver in my hoodie as I run across the yard and slip through the hedge. My heart is already a loose fist, knocking clumsy and hard in my chest. I hate being nervous when I climb the stairs now, but Danny has changed so much since that first night, kneeling beside me in the cemetery, clinging and kissing and smiling the smile I loved so much.
    A stray branch smacks my thigh as I wriggle through, and I stop in my tracks. The side door to the garage is wide open, and as I watch, it creaks wider in the wind. No.
    “Danny,” I whisper as I run inside. The stairs are pulled down; the broomstick I’ve used to push them up into place the last few days is snapped in half on the gritty cement floor.
    I know he’s not up there. I can feel it, a howling emptiness that nearly swallows me, but I clatter up the steps anyway.
    The loft is just as empty as I imagined, the stubs of candles left unlit on the floor, the blankets on the mattress heaped carelessly against the wall. Danny’s colored pencils are strewn all over the floor, half of them broken, amid used sheets of paper.
    I’m shaking as I kneel and pick one up. The tree again, slashed dark and angry against the cheap copier paper. It’s all there in the pages he left behind—the tree, a flickering candle, the snub nose of Becker’s car, my face, my mouth, my hand. And there, at the edge of the pile, his mother, his dad, his brother, Molly, with her round eyes and the same loose curls Danny has.
    I drag in a breath, trying to stave it off, but it’s too late. I lean over as I vomit all over the papers, a foul splash of dinner and bile. Sweat breaks out on my brow and the back of my neck, slimy and cool, as I wipe my mouth.
    He remembers. And he’s gone.
    It’s so chilly I can see my breath as I walk the streets. The shocked, blinking part of my brain imagines a trail of mist superimposed in crazy circles over the neighborhood, a child’s scribble on a map.
    By just after one my teeth are chattering, and I’m halfway between my street and Danny’s. The houses crouch along the streets, folded up for the night like sleeping birds on a wire, window eyes shut. I can’t scream for him, and I can’t even run after a half hour—I’m too cold and my leg muscles are cramping.
    It doesn’t usually take so long to walk from my house to Danny’s but I’m being careful, walking the blocks in circles, watching for moving shadows. He may have remembered the accident and the night in the graveyard, but there’s no guarantee he remembers how to get home, or where exactly home is.
    I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and it breaks my heart either way.
    I’m so panicked, the power inside me is churning in sickening waves. Every time a twig snaps or something moves, I startle, and twice a streak of faint gold light arcs away from me, a sudden flash in the dark. Far down at the end of Dudley, where it turns into Lawrence, the globe in a streetlight explodes, and I have to run when the lights go on in two houses at the sound of shattering glass.
    I feel like I could float, fly, so much pure energy is humming through my veins, snaking under my muscles until they’re quivering as I walk down each block. It’s too much,