Chapter 25

Thursday is the Fourth of July, and Cleo’s eye makeup knows it. She has blue stars dotting the lids of both eyes, red lines swooping along her lashes and flaring up toward her eyebrows.

“America has some considerable shit to answer for,” she says, closing a hand around my wrist and dragging me toward a funnel cake stand at the very tip of Navy Pier. “But lord knows I can’t pass up a firework.”

“You do this a lot,” I say, breathing in the sugar-sweet night air.

“Do what?”

I hold up my arm, still gripped in her small but mighty hand. “Yank people around.”

“Woof.” She drops my wrist. “Sorry. Don’t mean to—it’s just, I’m usually going in the right direction.”

“What about the time,” Mick says, him and Silas stepping into line behind us, “that you got us so lost in Arlington we were forty minutes late to dinner with my grandparents during family weekend?”

“You can’t get lost in Arlington,” Cleo says, staring up at the menu. “You just use the Lincoln Memorial like the North Star.”

“That’s just... not true,” Mick says. “At all.”

Cleo looks back at him. “Should I get apple pie topping or cinnamon sugar?”

“Why not both?” Silas asks.

“Oh,” Cleo gasps, widening her eyes at him. “Oh, I love you. Yes.” Then she adds, “Not in the romantic sense,” and glances at me in a way that I thoroughly do not enjoy.

“What are you getting, Audrey?” Mick asks, drumming his fingers on one bicep, his arms crossed as he stares up at the menu.

“Classic powdered sugar,” I say, and Cleo groans.

“You would. I bet your favorite doughnut flavor’s plain glazed, too.”

It... is. “Because it’s the best one.”

“Well, I’m getting rainbow sprinkles,” Mick says.

Silas eyes him. “I don’t think that’s an option.”

But Mick points over his shoulder, where a six-year-old in pigtails holds a funnel cake smothered in sprinkles.

“That’s for kids,” Cleo says, just as they call her up to order.

“Which is what I am,” Mick tells her solemnly, “at heart.”

“You?” I ask, glancing up at Silas. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a white short-sleeved button-down over a T-shirt. Those same abominable hiking sandals from the plane in Los Angeles. His hair’s a little wet, like he showered before coming here.

“Oh, caramel sauce for sure.” He combs a hand through his curls, trying to tame them at the nape of his neck. “Lily would kill me if I got anything else—my sister.”

I remember, but I don’t tell him that.

“She’s super into all those baking shows,” he says as we step forward in line. “Taught herself to make the perfect caramel sauce last summer before I left for school. Now she wants me to order it out at every opportunity so I can report back how much better hers is.”

“She wouldn’t know, though, if you got something else.”

He looks at me, narrowing his eyes in a good-natured way. “Are you trying to rob my thirteen-year-old sister of a moment of glory, Audrey?”

I hold up my hands, a peace offering. “I’m just saying you should get what you want.”

His eyes linger on mine for just a moment, something inscrutable flickering across them, before he looks away. “It is what I want now,” he says. “She’s got me trained like one of Pavlov’s hounds.”

“What can I get you?” the funnel cake guy calls out to us, and Silas motions me ahead of him. He’s been true to his word, to what he said back in that classroom in Austin: the way Silas acts around me is easy and friendly and perfectly polite. Not a word or a glance out of place. The problem isn’t Silas, it’s me. It’s me, stepping around him and imagining what it might be like for his hand to reach out as I do it. To graze the small of my back.

“Let us have a bite,” Mick says, crowding my space as soon as I turn away from the window with my funnel cake. He holds his own besprinkled cake to the side while reaching for mine and ripping off a piece.

“Hey!” I say, in the same moment that he lets out a yelp.

“Oh my god.” With his mouth full of cake, it sounds like ormagore. He unhinges his jaw and fans his hand rapidly in front of his lips, giving us a full show of half-chewed dough. “It’s hot.”

“You’re a mess,” Cleo says, reaching around him to rip off a piece for herself. I try to swivel out of her way, but I’m not quick enough.

“I thought this flavor was boring,” I say, watching her blow on the sugar-dusted chunk of cake.

“You said it was the best one.” She chews thoughtfully as Silas comes to stand beside us with his own caramel-slathered plate. “I need to see for myself.”

“And?” Silas says. He looks between her and Mick, who’s sticking his tongue out like the hot July air could un-burn it.

“Mmmmm.” Cleo tilts her head back and forth. She motions toward my cake. “You try.”

Silas looks up at me, his eyes bright in the glow of the funnel cake stand. “Can I?”

And my head nods on its own, my arms extending the plate toward him. I have a flash of Ethan in the dining hall at the Summit School, standing up to get me my own fork so I could have a bite of his lasagna. It’s cold and flu season, he’d said. He could kiss me but not share utensils, like the germs were somehow different. I wonder what he’d say if he were here now, watching three separate people put their hands on my food.

“Don’t burn yourself,” Mick warns as Silas lifts the bite to his mouth. But instead of burning himself, Silas commits the cardinal sin of powdered-sugar consumption. He inhales.

The aftermath unfolds in slow motion: the sugar going up his nose, the pitch of his body as he lurches forward, the gasping cough that sends an enormous rush of air in my direction. The powdered sugar from my funnel cake lifts in the gale of Silas’s breath and splatters all over my dress.

“Oh my god,” Silas says, his voice raspy and strained. Cleo howls with laughter as he steps toward me, one hand outstretched. “I’m so sorry.”

I look down at myself. There’s sugar all over my chest, down my cleavage, fanning my shoulders like freckles.

“Are you okay?” Silas asks, hand falling to his side as he leans closer to me. I look up at him. Draw a breath. His eyes dart back and forth over mine. “Audrey?”

When I jerk forward and blow, the remaining sugar flies off my funnel cake and promptly coats Silas’s T-shirt. It lands on his cheekbones, his chin, in the dip of his collarbone. When he blinks at me in shock, it snows off his eyelashes. There’s a single beat of stunned silence, and then he starts laughing. Chin tipped back, the length of his sugar-flecked throat exposed. I do, too—surprising myself with it—loud and unlike me.

“Audrey,” Cleo says, sounding breathless and thrilled. “You little minx.”

“Now we see why she wanted powdered sugar,” Mick says, reaching over with a napkin to brush off my shoulders. I take it from him and start working on my dress, laughter still hiccuping out of me. “It’s a weapon.”

“For real.” Silas swipes at his shirt collar, sugar raining onto the boardwalk between us. He finds my eyes in the dark and grins through sugar-dusted lips. “You’re full of surprises.”

I shrug. Think, So are you.