Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  And she nearly turned right around when she saw who it was.

  Jude.

  He watched her approach with wide eyes, their dark depths flaring with surprise, and for a second, she thought of the boy she used to see in school, so good at warning everyone away even as he turned to his circle of friends with enough trust to seem another person. She’d learned to disappear in a different way, making herself small, shrinking into the crowd as much as possible.

  Who was she to him now, after their time in the covert? Who was he to her?

  Her heart pounded at she took in the scene: Wynn, her face red as she looked down at the blond boy still splayed on the ground; another boy, dark-haired and grinning, handsome as hell; and Jude—so tall, annoyingly magnetic, more unreadable than not.

  “Don’t worry about it.” He gave her sister a half smile and smirked down at the blond boy. “Karey always walks around totally out of it. Bound to happen sometime.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wynn strangled out. “I was going too fast.”

  “Nah.” Karey waved from the ground and gave Wynn a smile so dimpled and charming it spread outward and had her sister smiling back. “I was just moving too slow.”

  Owen—the good-looking dark-haired boy—yanked him up by the hand. “Man, we keep finding ways to try to lose you, and you keep sticking around. What’s it going to take?”

  “I love you tons, too.” Karey brushed off his board shorts, fishing for the sandal that had flown from his foot. Shaggy, bleach-bright blond hair; sky-blue eyes; and what appeared to be a fondness for actual beachwear—he really was California personified against the pale dust of Glory.

  Jude was watching Marsden, apparently as uncertain as she was.

  “Hi,” he finally said.

  Marsden lifted a stiff arm and waved. “How come you’re not working?”

  “I am, actually. Just getting Roadie and the others at work some takeout; I ran into these guys on the way.” He glanced over at Wynn. “So your sister is also Evel Knievel?”

  Wynn leaned toward him, her eyes widening in recognition. “You’re the boy who—”

  “I’m Jude, yeah.” The panic that crossed his face came and went in a second, covered up by his smile. But Marsden still caught it.

  So his friends had no clue about him going to the covert. She was still just another girl from school, instead of the girl helping their best friend find the last piece of his dead brother.

  She looked over to see Owen and Karey both staring. They obviously had no clue how to take her. They’d all known of one another since they were five and started going to the same school, but out here in the open, she was brand-new to them.

  “Hey, Marsden,” Owen said, his voice careful but friendly. Beside him, Karey’s expression was the same. “How’s your summer going?”

  She tensed as she waited for the rest, for him or Karey to hint that she wasn’t fooling anyone by acting like her mother wasn’t a prostitute. To ask her about being friends with ghosts. But when they just smiled, she made herself nod. “Good, thanks.” Then she turned to Wynn, wanting to leave, sure it showed and unsure what to do about it.

  Her sister was already pouncing, loving the idea of becoming friends with the boy who’d come all the way to their covert in search of her beloved older sister, of becoming friends with the friends of that same boy. “Can you eat lunch at the Burger Pit, too? With me and Mars? Jude, can’t you stay and then just bring back takeout for your friends at work?”

  Marsden’s heart sank all the way to her toes.

  If Jude and his friends agreed, there’d be no escape. She couldn’t ruin this next part of Wynn’s afternoon, given how she’d already fought—and won the battle—over buying a dress in imitation of Peaches and Lucy.

  And her sister’s eagerness to make friends with Jude and Owen and Karey was partially Marsden’s doing—for years, she’d warned her to stay away from guys at the boardinghouse. Which meant these guys were safe, because they were from Marsden’s school, were practically oozing with cool and nice and funny. These guys were friendly in ways that weren’t frightening or wrong.

  The deep clank of a large cowbell rang out, and the front door to the Burger Pit swung open.

  A teenage girl, her face a just-as-attractive-but-in-a-different-way version of Owen’s, stood in the doorway. She wore her black half apron and white Burger Pit work shirt with a nonchalance that nearly made the outfit stylish.

  Abbot, Owen’s twin.

  Just as with her brother, Marsden knew her, yet didn’t at all. The other girl was all pixie-cut black hair, watchful dark eyes, and sharp-edged humor stuffed into a human form that radiated fearlessness. Abbot seemed everything Marsden didn’t know how to be.

  “Wow, you guys actually managed to get out of bed before three in the afternoon.” Abbot grinned. “What happened?”

  Owen mock scowled at his sister. “You promised us a free lunch, and that’s the only reason why I can deal with you this early.”

  “You’re such the lesser half it’s not even funny. I saved a table in the back, by the way.” Owen and Karey headed inside, calling over their shoulders that they were starving and to hurry, and Abbot turned to look at Marsden, her expression slightly quizzical before recognition hit. “It’s Marsden, right? How’s it going?”

  “Fine, thanks. You?”

  “Everything’s great. Just hanging out?”

  Marsden’s shoulders stiffened a tiny bit. “Yes.”

  “Cool.” Abbot turned and gave Jude a huge grin. Marsden saw how it reached all the way to her eyes, came blasting through all her features to make her even prettier. She also knew then, without a doubt, who had taken the time and care to make him those friendship bracelets he wore so faithfully. Loops of string and a few hours of effort, but they reminded Marsden of who she was not.

  Abbot reached out and pulled him into a hug. “Roadie sent you out again? Maybe he doesn’t trust you around the inventory but can’t say.” She let him go and winked. “Unless it’s just been too long since you’ve seen me.”

  Jude smiled back. Marsden might have let her eyes roll.

  “Just the regular lunch order from the shop, thanks,” he said. “I already called it in. And it’s a double order of the cheese tater tots for Roadie this time—dude nearly cried when I forgot the last.”

  “It’s all probably nearly ready, anyway; I’ll go check the front counter for you. Too bad you can’t stay to eat with us, though—I’m on my break and everything.”

  Jude glanced at Marsden, who had never been more uncomfortable in her life. Were she and Wynn included in the other girl’s invite? Was it her way of saying to please leave? She didn’t know Abbot well enough to read her the way she could Shine and Nina and the rest of the girls at the boardinghouse, the way she knew how to be slippery to avoid being with them.

  She wanted to leave, and badly. But Wynn was still expecting lunch, not just with Marsden but also with everyone else—“everyone else” now including Abbot. Adding to the fun was the likelihood of Jude having to get back to Evergreen, leaving her to deal with his friends on her own.

  Her sister was already locking her bike to the rack at the front of the restaurant, about to head inside.

  And Marsden willed the Burger Pit’s dried-up, sun-beaten sidewalk to crack open beneath her feet and swallow her whole.

  “I don’t have to take off right away, actually,” Jude said. “Roadie got an emergency call about a shipment and had to go check it out—he’s going to be delayed. I just figured it was already too late to call you guys and get you to hold off on the food.”

  “He won’t care about a cold lunch?” Abbot slid her gaze to Marsden and then back to Jude again. Her expression gave away nothing.

  Marsden couldn’t decide if she was more relieved or skeptical or annoyed at Jude’s rescue. Maybe she was all three.

  Jude shrugged. Well, what’s the guy going to do about it? Then he flashed Marsden a grin so sweet that it momentarily left he
r disarmed. In that single second, he was neither the angry boy from the school hallways nor the boy in the covert devastated by a ghost, but someone else entirely, and she felt a wave of pity for Rigby, for what he’d never know.

  “So let’s go,” he said to her, “before your sister takes off running through the restaurant and mows down half the diners.”

  eighteen.

  Sitting beside her in the booth, Marsden watched Wynn struggle happily with her Burger Pit Cheesebigger and grudgingly accepted that, over the course of a single lunch, her little sister had fallen head over heels in love with a bunch of teenagers.

  Marsden poked at the tray of chili tater tots on the table in front of her, sipped her Coke, and mentally reviewed what she’d learned about Jude’s friends, cheat sheets that hung in her mind like bright white laundry from a line.

  One thing she’d discovered: If she’d ever wondered how much he’d leaned on them in the immediate days after Rigby’s death, or doubted exactly how much they needed him, she needn’t have bothered.

  They loved one another like family. A real and normal one.

  Owen, all dark eyes and summer-tanned skin and a jawline that might as well have been chiseled from stone. Seventeen years old on the surface but ancient underneath, he was the worrier of the group, the one who tended the foundation of their friendship. He was so protective of those around him that he was often the one left in danger, a mother bear charging a hunter without pause to save her cubs.

  Karey, with enough dimples to prove that life was, indeed, unfair. His smile was beatific and blameless, nearly as bottomless as the sea. Marsden would have thought him a goof, a misplaced beach bum stumbling happily from one foaming surf to another, if she hadn’t caught glimpses of his cutting intelligence, a keen awareness he seemed to not mind hiding.

  And Abbot, who insisted their lunches be on the house, who gave her sister brand-new boxes of crayons to use on the paper on the table, who teased her the same way Dany sometimes did. She was, for Wynn, fun and lighthearted in ways Marsden could never be, as confident with her looks as any of Nina’s girls—again, nothing like her dull and plodding big sister.

  And she was close to Jude in a way that left Marsden envious, left her chest shot full of small holes and tiny aches. She knew it was jealousy and hated herself for it, for wanting that same kind of closeness to a boy she barely knew and wouldn’t even want to know, if she were being smart. And safe. And logical. She was hiding something from him that he would hate her for if he knew. Not that she had a choice about doing it.

  And maybe she wasn’t always those things.

  Maybe, sometimes, she didn’t really want to be.

  Which bothered her—a lot.

  She stuffed a tater tot into her mouth, relished the rude sting of chili pepper against her tongue, and prayed for Wynn to eat faster.

  “By the way, Jude, listen.” Karey burped behind a salt-dusted fist and poured more ketchup on his potatoes. “Langston is bugging me to get you to stay over for a couple of days. He says he’s still waiting to beat you in that Atari tournament you guys started a while ago.”

  Jude stared at him, then lifted one brow. “Your little brother says he’s still waiting to beat me at Atari? So I’m welcome to stay over at your place for a while?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For a tournament. That we started. Last summer.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t,” Jude said in a low voice. “It’s fine.”

  “But he really—”

  “You guys, just . . . drop it.”

  Just like that, the restaurant around their booth faded—the clang of silverware, the chatter from other diners at other tables, dialed to low—and a tension as thick as the river’s mud swam in.

  It carried with it the presence of Leo Ambrose. Marsden felt as if he were suddenly seated right there at the table with them.

  Karey slowly shoved three tater tots into his mouth at once. She saw his eyes go to Owen—once, and quickly, as though unsure of what to do next—before going back to Jude. “C’mon. It’s just Langston. And Atari.” Beside him, Wynn drew another cat on the paper that covered the table, oblivious to the conversation.

  “Except it’s not,” Jude said, sounding terse.

  “I think it’d be nice for Langston to get to hang out with you.” Abbot stirred her Fanta Orange with her straw. “Think about the poor kid, with someone like Karey as his only role model.”

  Karey coasted a tater tot along the table so that it fell into her lap. “I can re-create the periodic table in my sleep. Langston is blessed, I tell you.”

  Jude picked up his burger and proceeded to not eat. “Tell Langston he wins by default.”

  “You’d get a break from your old man,” Owen said quietly. “He’ll have space to adjust.”

  The discomfort Jude couldn’t hide . . . Marsden felt it herself. She hadn’t known how much he hated being pitied. She wondered if her being there made it worse for him, or easier, or if it made any difference at all. If he would have walked out already, still bent on escape, if not for feeling bad about leaving her and Wynn behind.

  “Home is fine,” he muttered. “Leave it, you guys.”

  Suddenly, Wynn leaned forward, the hem of her Scooby-Doo T-shirt dragging through the mound of ketchup on her plate, and whispered loudly to Marsden: “I have to use the washroom, but I don’t know where it is.”

  “I’ll show you.” Jude was up like a shot. His eyes met no one’s. “Need a refill for my Coke anyway.”

  Wynn hopped down from the booth and followed Jude down the aisle.

  “Hold up, dude, we’re getting refills, too.” Owen and Karey scrambled their way from the table to catch up. Their intentions—to corner Jude in another attempt to keep him safe from his father—were, to Marsden, as loud and clear as the clank of the Burger Pit’s cowbell hanging over the front entrance.

  “So, hey, I didn’t know you and Jude were hanging out.”

  She turned and faced Abbot.

  On Owen, the twins’ shared beauty was a study in classic good looks, a painting where each stroke was preordained, made to flow only one way. Words like handsome and elegant and smooth suited Owen perfectly.

  But on his sister, that same beauty turned sharp, its edges hard and precise and without give.

  “We’re not really.” Marsden knew the best lies were half-truths. She picked up a fork and toyed with it, hating that she was nervous.

  The other girl nodded, absentmindedly tracing one of the doodles on the table. It was one of Jude’s, a bouquet of flowers he’d drawn for Wynn at her request. Their lines were messy, and not too sure of themselves, but there were tulips, daisies, lilies—Jude’s world when he was at work.

  “Do you guys just know each other from school?” Abbot asked. “Or something else?”

  The question shouldn’t have bothered Marsden, but it did. Especially if she admitted she’d been wondering the same things about Abbot.

  And what about you two? Just how close are you guys? How close have you ever been?

  “Just school,” she finally said, reminding herself Abbot was only worried about Jude, was as protective of him as Owen and Karey were. It wasn’t her fault that Marsden found her intimidating. That Marsden was also painfully aware of who she herself was in this town, who Shine was, and all the labels that came with those things.

  How could Jude ever consider anyone like her?

  “Can I say something without making you feel bad?” Abbot’s gaze held none of the subtlety of her twin. “Because I really don’t mean to. And normally I wouldn’t say anything at all, because it’s none of my business, what Jude does. . . .”

  It was clear that Abbot did think it was her business. That she had a say in what Jude did.

  And that Marsden did not.

  But Abbot hadn’t been there to see him that day in the library, when eight-year-old Jude had come running in to find Rigby, his cheek on fire. She wasn’t the one he’d gone to see at t
he covert, his eyes miserable and vulnerable, needing something. She wasn’t the one trying to hear the dead for him, even if her reasons for doing it weren’t entirely selfless.

  Marsden set her fork down. “It’s not any of your business, no. But I know you’re just worried about him, and that’s why you’re wondering how to tell me nicely to leave him alone.”

  The older girl’s eyes went flinty and cold. “His brother just died. Jude doesn’t need anything else to deal with right now.”

  It struck Marsden then, the particular construct of their group, the thing that made them work—if Owen was the foundation, Karey the brains, and Jude the heart, then Abbot was the fighter. The warrior.

  She’d almost regretted figuring it out. Abbot being jealous was baseless; Abbot being protective was something else. Rigby’s note, still hidden away in her room, was a grenade with a half-pulled pin.

  “I know about Rigby,” Marsden said. “Everyone does. Just like how I know you guys know about his dad drinking again. Why you’re just as worried about that.”

  She’d caught Abbot by surprise, her knowing about Leo—the other girl’s eyes widened, and she sat back in her seat—but the victory was hollow, sour.

  “I never thought he’d ever tell anyone,” Abbot said.

  “Outside of you and your brother and Karey, you mean.”

  “He never had to. We’ve always known everything, right from the start.”

  Except about her, and their searching the covert—another meaningless victory.

  “Jude’s not weak or anything.” Abbot’s face was softer than Marsden had yet to see it, more like her worrier of a brother’s than a warrior’s. “Even with Rigby not here for him. But maybe he should be, for a while. Just . . . don’t be someone else disappearing on him.”

  The moment was over. Wynn slid back into the booth, a cookie from the cow jar clutched in her hand. Owen and Karey were arguing in thin code over who they thought were regulars of the Burger Pit’s side business. Jude—dark eyes apologetic for having left her at the mercy of his most ferocious friend—passed Marsden a fresh soda.