“Aren’t you going to ask what it is?” he says, half-smiling.
He looks at my lips again, a split second.
I think I know the secret, and I’m also certain I must be wrong.
“What’s your secret, Levi?” I ask.
“June,” he says. “I’ve become—”
There’s a clatter from the spiral stairs. A racket. A ruckus.
I nearly have a heart attack and my state doesn’t improve as a pair of high heels is quickly followed by legs, then the entirety of a woman stomping down the metal staircase so loudly she must be trying to raise the dead.
She comes down just far enough to see us, bending over and peering through the balustrade.
“Library’s closing in five minutes,” she calls.
“Thank you,” Levi calls, somehow still calm as a cucumber.
I, on the other hand, am rattled as fuck.
She stomps back upstairs and I close my eyes, willing my pulse to even out.
Levi’s hand is off my knee and we look at each other, again, but whatever happened is over.
“I didn’t realize it was that late,” I say.
“Neither did I,” he says, and stands. He puts his chair back. I take the microfiche from my reader, slide it into its envelope.
Levi holds his hand out to me. For a split second I nearly take it, and then I remember. I hand him the microfiche, and he smiles.
“I was looking to help you up,” he says.
“Ah,” I say, and put my hand in his.
He pulls me up. Together, we put our things away, pack our maps, leave the room. We leave the library through the back door, into the parking lot.
“When next?” he asks, walking me to my car even though it’s twenty feet away.
“For this?” I ask, unnecessarily. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Going through microfiche logging records,” he says, smiling. “See you here, June.”
With that, he smiles, nods, and walks away and I get into my own car, my mind swirling.
I can’t have misread that, I tell myself. That’s impossible.
I close my eyes, lean against the headrest.
Unless I did.
I give myself a few minutes before I finally start my car and drive back to my parents’ house.A week goes by, Thursday to Thursday. Most days I meet Levi in the basement of the library and we put the puzzle together, piece by piece.
In the meantime, he puts a bulletin out, telling forest rangers to watch for anyone with a chainsaw, just in case they weren’t already. He posts rangers around the wilderness areas we think the vandals might be likely to look. He puts out a call for hikers to report any freshly felled trees they might find.
And nothing else happens. There’s not another hand on my knee. He doesn’t offer to tell me a secret again, doesn’t put his arm around me. Proof that I read it wrong, somehow, that my childhood crush has rattled my brain and muddied my thinking where Levi is concerned.
Kid. Sister.
Then, a week after our first library meeting, he calls me before I’ve even gotten out of bed.
“There’s been another one,” he says, his voice grim.Chapter NineLevi“Was this one a champion?” June asks, rifling through her backpack in the passenger seat.
“She wasn’t,” I say, one elbow on my open window, watching the car in front of me. It’s one of the last Fridays of summer before school starts again, and that means tourists on the Parkway.
Lots of tourists. Millions of tourists, driving at mediocre speeds, slamming on their brakes before every curve, slowing to look at spectacular views instead of pulling over at the viewpoints that the Forest Service has so generously provided them with.
“It was old, though,” she says, then looks at me for confirmation.
“It was,” I say.
“Do you know how old?” she asks, squirting sunscreen into her palm.
“I don’t,” I tell her, navigating another curve behind the world’s slowest sedan. “It was reported by a couple of backpackers who found it looking for a good place to set up camp a few nights ago. Good thing they read national forest bulletins, I guess.”
The sedan slows, so I slow as well, downshifting as I glare at the car.
“Same M.O. as the others? Trunk chopped into pieces?”
“Sounds like this time they hacked up the roots as well and dug under it a little,” I say.
June pulls down the visor, and then sighs. Probably because there’s no mirror.
“Sorry,” I say, stealing a glance at her.
“Just tell me if I’ve got extra on my face,” she says, already rubbing in the sunscreen.
It’s been a week and a day. Or a week and twelve hours; it was nine o’clock at night when I nearly told her the secret I’ve been denying to myself, when I nearly kissed her, when I nearly crossed that uncrossable line.
Thank God for the librarian who came at exactly the right time.
Really. I’m glad. June is a bridge I cannot cross, a road I cannot drive down. I can’t betray Silas like that.