Page 13 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
You’ll know me, I should have said.
“We’ll know Declan,” I said.
08
We biked to the party in the dark. Dad thought I was at Maren’s and Willow trusted Miller too much to worry where he’d be. He was wearing dark jeans and a black hoodie, like we were going to commit a burglary.
“Are we going to drink?” Miller asked when we dropped our bikes on the front lawn. All the lights were on in Declan’s house, a pristine cabin on towering stilts with a wraparound porch. The question was another symptom of the change in Miller—it wasn’t always him, now, doing things first.
“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my hands together. It was early spring and ten o’clock, cold as winter. Miller’s cheeks were pink and windburned from the ride over. “We’ll just see what happens, I guess?”
I was trying to sound confident, but from the way Miller looked at me, it clearly wasn’t working.
“Right.” He looked up at the house. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “We’ll see what happens.”
Inside it was humid and loud. Everyone breathing the same air, music thumping through the soles of my sneakers. We wriggled through to the living room and I had the sinking feeling that Miller had been right—we didn’t know anyone here. I recognized faces, could’ve named ten people, maybe. Declan was nowhere in sight. Miller’s expression was neutral when he looked at me, which was a gift I didn’t deserve.
“Let’s get drinks,” I said, just to say something. He followed me wordlessly to the sticky-floored kitchen and took the room-temperature can of beer when I held it out. I opened my own, taking a long drink. It was disgusting and tasted vaguely like bread and burned a little on the way down. I took another sip anyway. Miller didn’t open his, just let his arm fall to his side and kept it there against his palm. Like it was a rock or a textbook, something he’d keep in case he needed it later.
We moved back to the living room, if only because its vaulted ceiling made the air a little cooler. Miller started scanning the bookshelves above the fireplace. My beer was almost gone and I was starting to feel cored-out by my own humiliation when I heard Declan’s voice.
“Flower,” he said, and when I turned he was there.
His face was flushed, a crooked smile on his perfect mouth. He moved in a pack, just like he always did, even in his own house. I recognized the four guys surrounding him from the basketball team.
“You made it,” he said, and I accepted the words like a trophy.He did want me here. “Let me get you a beer.” His words were loose and languid. Relaxed, I thought.
When he cracked the tab and handed it to me, beer dribbled in a thin line across my palm.
“Ro,” Miller said. I turned and he was grinning, a rare show of feeling for the careful, muted person Miller had become. He’d put his beer down somewhere and was holding a book—tattered, the jacket torn at one edge. On the cover: a man on a flying horse, his arrow nocked against an ink-black sky. Heracles, maybe. Miller would’ve known.
“It’sMythology,” he said. “A first edition.” He opened the cover and pointed to the thin, black scribble inside. “Signed, too.”
His face was lit up and totally open, defenseless. I remember that the most, the way he looked at me—like he knew I’d understand him, like he was safe. It was the last time he ever looked at me like that.
“Cool,” Declan said, drawing out theo’s in an exaggerated display of sarcasm. His friends laughed, and Declan reached one of his long arms toward Miller. Just like he’d tip the other team’s ball away from the basket, he tipped the book out of Miller’s hands so it toppled to the floor. Miller jerked inelegantly to catch it, and missed.
When he picked it up and straightened to look at me, his cheeks were red. There’s so much I could have said, but I only told him, “Not now.” He blinked rapidly, and I had to look away.
“There’s a whole library in the office upstairs,” Declan said, and as he did his hands landed on my waist. “Knock yourself out.”
I looked down at his fingers, curled at the bottom of my rib cage where my T-shirt met my skirt. I thought of them smudgedwith dried clay in Mrs. McMahon’s class, and how much bigger they looked on my body. My brain felt fuzzy and slow. When I looked up, Miller’s eyes were moving from Declan’s hands to my face.
“Are you okay?”
He asked it right there in front of all of them, no coding to it at all. A cleverer friend would have hidden the question in a different one—did I want water? Did I need some air? But Miller wasn’t clever, he was only Miller: honest and unguarded and, in that moment, unsure. I didn’t know if I was okay, but I knew I could never say so plainly if I wasn’t. Declan’s fingertips had dipped below the waistband of my skirt.
“Chill, Miller.” I said it on a laugh that wasn’t my own. My voice was high and sharp-toothed, something that belonged more to this moment and this place than it did to me. “I don’t need you to protect me.”
Declan made a noise like air hissing through a cracked window. When he pulled me closer to him, I had the hideous thought that I’d said the right thing. His friends were laughing.
“We’re not kids anymore, okay?” It was a cutting, unnecessary thing to say. But everyone was still laughing, and Miller was holding my gaze, and I didn’t stop. “Just leave us alone.”
Declan’s thumb brushed a line across my hip bone. “Take your fairy tales and go, man.”
Miller didn’t even flinch—he just stared at me. I knew him well enough to know he was waiting for me to say something else, and I should have. Of course I should have. But instead I took asip of my beer and turned in Declan’s hands so we were facing each other.
Later, when I glanced over my shoulder, Miller was gone.
