Chapter 5

~Bella~

When I was little, I used to twirl my hair around my finger until I cut my circulation off. Knuckles tangled up in a knotty mess, inevitably pulling strands loose as I worked myself free. My mother used to tease me about being half-bald as a kid and called it my nervous habit. I did it when I was sleeping. When I was eating or reading or hiding.

In all reality, it was my anxiety. Which meant I'd been anxious my whole damn life.

I spun a curl around my finger while I watched the fawn. It was smelling the edges of the living room, nosing deep into the cushions of the faded couch. Sniffling every dusty corner and every creaky piece of furniture, sneezing all over the place. It paused in the hallway, glancing around with its nose in the air before it looked back over its shoulder at me. Hooves at the very edge of that spot on the carpet as though it didn't want to go any further.

"Where's your mom?" I asked as I leapt over that spot in the hallway, headed for the kitchen. The fawn leapt over it right after me, scampering at my heels. I filled a pretty china bowl with water and set it on the floor at my feet. The glass was painted with roses, rimmed in gold, delicately fragile and only for company use. Which meant that it never got used at all.

This little thing might be a fairy. Or a skinwalker. Or a figment of my imagination, just like that tornado. Whatever it was, it probably qualified as company.

There was a can of powdered baby formula in the pantry, stashed on the back shelf, way past expiration. While I warmed up some water, I dropped a few strawberries into the empty bowl because I had no idea what else to give it. The fawn licked the strawberries into a mash and pressed its sticky sweet nose to the backs of my knees as I mixed the formula. It left pink smears across my skin under the hem of my nightdress when I poured the warm milk right over the strawberry mash.

As the fawn ate, I glanced out the window. The trees were blown half-naked, the grass pushed flat, the landscape bare enough to get a good view of that lonely house across the way. The sky was stained sunset colors, pink and yellow and baby-boy blue, and the black shadow of the house was suddenly illuminated from within as the lights went on.

There was someone in there.

Moving.

I tried to remember the last time I'd seen anyone in that house, but it had been so long. Millie and Jack hadn't made it much beyond my twelfth birthday. They were shuffled off to a nursing home while their house was left to rot on its own. I had no idea if it had sold or was being rented out, hadn't even bothered to look for a sign or the sudden presence of a vehicle there, too wrapped up in my own misfortunes to worry about someone else's.

The back door of that old, abandoned house opened, and I ducked. Instinct. It had me crouched against the cabinets, gripping the edge of the sink with both hands. I edged forward to peek back over the window sill just in time to see someone emerge from the house. A man. Tall, broad-shouldered, and barefooted. I leaned further over the sink, nose to the glass, as I peered through the window pane, trying to get a good glimpse at this new neighbor. He hesitated just before he stepped into the last fading rays of sunlight, toeing the line that slashed the shadows across the porch. As he finally stepped across, I got a decent look at him.

A ragged mop of rusty hair.

A straight back and broad shoulders.

An eyepatch.

The deafening slam of my front door startled me breathless and sent the fawn skittering, slipping on the flower-patterned linoleum as it upturned the bowl. It cowered beneath me, trembling between my knees as I turned to find Jasper standing in the hallway, right over that spot on the carpet like he didn't even care. He was wearing the same faded flannel shirt he'd worn twice this week and looked like he had been out in the fields all day: sun-baked and windblown. Hands in his pockets, hay between his teeth, and that long, feral hair falling in his face.

He was eyeing the fawn, looking suspicious.

"What'cha got there?" he asked slowly, raising his eyes to mine as the fawn peeked out from between my legs, the hem of my nightdress caught in its ears. Its nose was flaring, still covered in strawberry mash as it craned toward Jasper, sniffing the air, but not leaving the safety of the space between my feet.

"I found it. Or... it found me."

"Where's its mother?"

I shrugged, watching as Jasper dropped to his knees, one hand held out in front of him. Even though his skin was baked brown by the sun, the palm of his hand was a soft pink. He curled his fingers and spoke softly, beckoning toward the fawn. "C'mere, little guy."

"It's a girl," I said as the fawn took one hesitant step, nose still flaring, the hem of my dress slipping back over its ears.

"How'd you guess that? You look between its legs?" Jasper squinted up at me with a slight grin on his face. He knew well enough that I hadn't. If Jasper was anything, he was the one who did the dirty work around here, like looking between the legs of animals. He was two years older and twenty years smarter than I was, lean and sleek and beautiful, good with his hands, an easy smile when he wasn't scowling at my broken fence lines or the overgrown ivy up the side of my house. I hated that scowl. Jasper was taking care of his sick mom and four little kids because his dad was a deadbeat who skipped town with a girl not much older than Jasper himself.

He had enough on his plate without my mess on top of it.

"Why are you all the way out here? Your mom put you up to this?" I narrowed my eyes at him. Alice Whitlock had made it her mission to see me clothed and fed and warm in the absence of my own mother. I'd seen Jasper more in the last six days than I had in the last six years.

"Can't believe this place is still standing." Jasper ignored me, raising a fist to rap his knuckles against the doorframe. I was surprised the house didn't groan. "Some storm, huh?"

"Yeah, some storm."

"You got a new neighbor cross the way." He hooked a thumb to the right, tilting his head in the direction of the not-so-abandoned house before arching an eyebrow and scanning me, foot to forehead. "You better start dressing decent."

I glanced down at myself. I didn't know what he saw exactly, but if you asked me, I looked like a goddamned disaster. Blown bare like the trees. Sagging like the porch. Flattened like the grass. I hadn't bothered to brush my hair yet. Hadn't washed my feet or my face. The ribbons that were strung through the neck of the nightdress had been blown loose, fluttering around my shoulders, and the cotton was dirty around the hem. I hadn't taken it off in six days.

I fisted the nightdress in both hands, stuttering around threatening tears and that traitorous wobble in my throat. "It was hers."

"I know that. I've seen her in it. It's pretty, something real old and sweet about it that reminds me of my Nana." Jasper's smile melted back into that scowl, eyes darting toward the newly occupied house on the horizon. "But I don't want a stranger looking at you in it."

"No one is looking at me," I mumbled.

"I am. And I can see right through the damned thing."

I snuck across the field at midnight.

The light in the old house had gone off an hour ago, and even though I tried to leave the fawn, it had no intention of being left. It picked its way nimbly through the darkness beside me, glow-in-the-dark spots of white through the gloom. I was still in my nightdress, still barefoot, impaling my feet on the shorn off grass.

I fell twice. Tripped in the dark but kept going.

The fawn pranced around the yard while I peered in the window of the downstairs bedroom, but I couldn't see anything through the gloom. I tiptoed onto the porch but only leaned up against the backdoor, ear to wood, listening for the sounds of breathing. The lonely house felt different. No longer an ignorable anomaly on the horizon, but something that suddenly held a whisper of promise inside. A dormant heart shocked back to life.

The flagpole in the yard, the one that had stood empty and forlorn for years, wasn't empty anymore. Now crowned with an American flag, it hung limp in the still of midnight, the stripes bent and the stars all broken up. There was an overgrown clump of milkweed at the base of the pole, big bunches of pink flowers with pale fleshy leaves, a mere brush or broken stem oozing sticky, white wounds.

The ground was burning, or I was, or the whole earth was on fire, standing there at the base of the flagpole in that freshly dug up dirt. My soles itched, the scratch of a walked-over grave tickling my feet, as I pulled one of the ribbons the rest of the way from my nightdress and tied it around the flagpole like an apology. Picked the fawn up and made my way home. Didn't sleep at all that night.

Soles sticky with the blood of milkweed.

Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

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HB&PB