Page 12 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
We’d play at gods in his yard—me always Athena, the most powerful woman of all. If I’d been Miller I’d have picked Zeus, no question, the king of the gods. But Miller liked Hermes best—quick-witted and wily, light on his feet, the only god to straddle both worlds. We made weapons from fallen branches and smacked them against each other, laughing at thecrack. We had our ownkind of power, just for the two of us.
We got older and things changed around us, but we stayed the same: I read the world through Miller’s reception to it, and he showed me what to do by always doing it first. We heard each other in that language between two people who’ve never known a life without the other in it. He didn’t have to speak to tell me he was upset. I didn’t have to show him my hurt for him to believe it was there. When we fought, there were no teeth to it—Miller was like air, a given. He’d be there the next day, and the next.
He grew up bony and blue-eyed and pale as river mist, all dark hair and delicate lashes. I was the mess of us—dirt under my fingernails and scabbed elbows and curly hair that never cooperated. We lived just blocks apart and spent sun-soaked summers rollicking from my woods to his attic bedroom to Vera’s kitchen for snacks. We were like wedges of the same fruit, the skin between us nearly translucent. Our lives blurred together.
There were others, of course. Maren, who I met in fifth grade, and Sawyer, and Miller’s friends from all the activities he buzzed between: piano lessons, classes at the library, Boy Scouts (short-lived). But Miller was different, not so much my friend as a part of my own self. I knew it was the same for him.
Which only made what happened all the worse.
Freshman year was the first time I’d felt invisible in my life. Miller, Maren, and I had gone to a tiny middle school where everyone knew one another. But Switchback Ridge High was the river every other tributary flowed into, and there were three hundred kids inour class. We sat in the lunchroom like sailors in a life raft. Then Maren started spending her lunch period in the art teacher’s darkroom, and Miller’s whip-smart, bespectacled friends used lunch to tutor the football team. Like so many times in our lives, it was just Miller and me.
Which had always seemed okay, when our world was so small. When we loomed large within it. But here, at Switchback Ridge High, it suddenly felt like there was a whole gem-bright side of life I was missing out on. I wanted to join it and I didn’t know how. And, of course, there was Declan Frey.
The first time I saw him was at a pep rally. The Switchback Ridge athletic department wasn’t much to look at, but our basketball team had made it to state the year before. Declan was the captain, and that fall he had really come into himself: six foot three, finally a senior, already signed with a scholarship to an East Coast school. He reminded me of a jungle cat, that first time I saw him—his long, powerful limbs and the graceful way he moved. The threatening elegance of him. My heart cracked open like an egg, pooling in my stomach.
I got pretty into basketball after that. Miller came with me to the games, glancing up every now and then from whatever book he was reading to watch me watch the court.
“This is new,” he said in his mild way. We were at our second game of the season, halfway up the bleachers.
“What is?”
“Sports.” His pointer finger held his place on his page. As a kid, he’d trace every line with his fingertip when he read. He’dgrown out of the habit, but sometimes it still twitched out of him. “You’ve never really cared about sports.”
“The team’s just so good,” I said, feeling like they were the stupidest words I’d ever uttered out loud. “It makes it fun to watch.”
Miller glanced at the court, where Declan made a basket from an impossible distance, then back at me. He nodded and looked down at his book. I didn’t give a single, solitary shit about basketball, and he knew it.
That first semester, I only ever saw Declan on game days or at a distance. He was a senior, and our classes weren’t even in the same part of the building. But every sighting confirmed my suspicion: he was perfectly made, faultlessly coordinated. This was true, I would come to learn, every time and every place except for one. Pottery class.
It was an elective Declan needed to graduate, an easy A he’d set like the cherry on top of his basketball scholarship. It was my only class that wasn’t all freshmen, spring semester, January to May. When he walked in that first day my stomach dropped out of my body, and when Mrs. McMahon assigned him the seat across from mine, I had to scoop it back up off the floor.
He was different in that room, or so I let myself think. Dressed in slacks and a button-down for game day, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The crude way he tried to shape his very first pinch pot made me fall in love with him even more, his athlete’s hands covered in wet clay. He was so defenseless there that it endeared him to me, fooled me into thinking he was like me. He was exposed in that art room, plainly bad at something. I mistookhis clumsiness for vulnerability, kindness. It wasn’t, but I wouldn’t know that until later.
He called me “Flower,” which was a brainless nickname. I blushed under it anyway, and by the time April came and he mentioned the party, I was a goner. He didn’t invite me, exactly. He mentioned it to a friend, sitting at an adjacent pottery wheel. But he said itin front ofme. He knew I was listening, I was sure. He smiled at me after, and it was like he’d sunk his teeth into my arm—the idea of this party latched on and did not let me go.
“I don’t know,” Miller said. We were walking home, same as we always did. “How would we even get there?”
Declan lived on the opposite side of town from us, a ten-minute drive. But we were only freshmen and didn’t even have learners’ permits. “We’ll bike,” I said.
“In the dark?” Miller looked at me, and as it usually was with him, I felt like he was asking me something else entirely.
“Please, Miller.” I grabbed his elbow, shook it. “Don’t you want to make more friends? Not sit alone at lunch every day?”
“I don’t sit alone,” he said, but he didn’t look at me then. “I sit with you.”
Time had made Miller different: he was still that little boy in tears over the dead bird, but hidden now. I’d watched the change over all three years of middle school, Miller folding himself into smaller and smaller versions that became harder and harder to see.
In fifth grade we’d had a class hamster, Dumpling, that traveled to different rooms to be “adopted” by a new class every quarter. Miller cried when it was our turn to give Dumpling up, and our teacher, stricken, asked what was wrong.I’ll miss him,Miller had said. And of course he would. It was that simple—Miller was grieving. But Aiden Sharp had the whole class laughing in two minutes flat. What kind of loser cared so much about a rat?
I stole Aiden’s brownie at lunch and smashed it under my shoe, but the damage was done. Miller zipped into himself, saving his big feelings for the times we were alone.
I knew all this, and still, I pressed on.
“We could sit withmorepeople,” I said.
It wasn’t why I wanted to go to the party; Declan and his clay-speckled forearms and his lithe, towering body had consumed my brain like a virus. I didn’t say it out loud, but I felt it sharp as a splinter:This is my chance. For what, I wasn’t exactly sure. But Declan was leaving soon. And what other option did I have?
“I won’t know anyone there,” Miller said. We were the exact same height at fifteen, the shadows of our strides falling together.
