I just look down at her.
“Dogs, then bees, then livestock is number one,” she says. “I looked it up, obviously.”
“Daniel got the snake. Serpens,” I say, because I know the Latin name, of course I know the Latin name. “Because, and I quote, snakes are badass.”
June snorts.
“He was twenty-two,” I say. “This was pre-Rusty. Eli got the dragon with the north star in its tail. Seth got Scorpio because it was his girlfriend’s zodiac sign, and Caleb got the sextant because he’s always been a nerd.”
“Was this before or after he had senior girls fight over whose math homework he’d help with first?” June asks. “When he was a freshman.”
“Caleb?” I ask, confused.
“Mhm,” she confirms. “Mandy Hargrove once slapped Danica Nelson because she interrupted a tutoring session with Caleb. I was there. I saw it.”
“Caleb?” I ask again, and then: “Is tutoring a euphemism for something else?”
“Literal tutoring,” June says. “In the library. When I was a senior. A slapfight, I swear to God. You were in college by then.”
I can’t imagine it. My youngest brother has always been the most straightforward, the most practical. He’s always been utterly determined that he can think and logic his way out of any situation, that if all involved parties simply agree to see reason, most situations will resolve themselves.
From downstairs, the oven timer dings.
“A slapfight over Caleb?” I ask, just checking one last time as I unwind my foot from the sheets.
“You know how some girls get hot for their teachers,” she says, laughing, pulling herself out of the bed. “All that authoritatively explaining sine and cosine.”
“Bizarre,” I mutter, pulling on my boxers and heading downstairs.Ten minutes later, I’m still in my boxers and June is wearing nothing but panties and the shirt I had on until an hour ago. We’re on the back porch in the last of the fading light, plates in our laps, Hedwig running around and chasing birds and squirrels and whatever it is dogs do.
“Oh,” June says suddenly, then looks up at me. “My mom knows.”
I look at her, then past her at the porch, at the small back yard, at the forest beyond it, the warm humid night air drifting over my mostly bare skin, and I can’t bring myself to care.
I just shrug.
“My brother knows,” I say.
“She said she wouldn’t tell Silas,” June goes on. “And I don’t think she will. She never told him when I dated Derek Brandt after he joined the service.”
That gets my attention.
“You dated Derek?”
“Briefly,” June shrugs. “We broke up after like a month for some reason I don’t even remember.”
“Was it because he was a total creep who sold pot to fourteen-year-olds under the bleachers at football games?” I ask.
“No,” June says, thinking. “Wait, I remember. He broke up with me because I stopped letting him copy my biology homework.”
Next time I see Derek, I’d like to punch him, I think, and the violence and anger of the thought surprises me, deeply felt though it is.
“He wasn’t my finest hour,” June says. “You know, we could just tell him.”
“I don’t think Derek needs to know anything about us,” I say, trying to sound light, like there’s not a tightness in my chest at the idea of someone treating June like that.
“Ha ha,” June deadpans. “But maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill here, you know?”
In the backyard, Hedwig yips at something. The moon is just rising and if I look closely, I can see the bats coming out of their homes, darting across the pale brightness.
June is going to break my heart. I don’t need tarot cards or scrying bones or the second sight to see that it’ll happen, because I know. She’ll leave Sprucevale and with it, she’ll leave me, and then it will fall to me to gather myself and move on.
It’ll be easier if Silas doesn’t know. It’ll be easier if I find myself in the wreckage of one relationship, not two.
Right now, I’m at the zenith of the pendulum, the top of the arc. The point when it seems like maybe, this time, it’ll just hover in the air like that forever, defying gravity and the laws of physics.
It never does. This moment won’t last, either, when I have both June and Silas, but I’ll be damned if I don’t try to make it last a little longer.
“Not yet,” I say, after a moment. “When the time is right.”
June just shrugs.
“Sure,” she says.The week after I drive to her house and throw rocks at her window, she spends every night at my house. The next week, six nights, and the week after that, five, and then that number holds steady.
I give her a key. She has a toothbrush, plus several small containers on my bathroom counter that she tells me are her ‘skincare routine.’ I don’t question any of them, but she does smell nice.