A Million Junes Read online

  I’m a little offended. And guilty. Also curious, and shaky with adrenaline. Like I’m about to jump off a diving board or crest the peak of a roller coaster.

  “Well,” I say, not so much returning to my senses as chasing them down with a hatchet. “Good luck.”

  Saul nods, and I turn a corner toward the outer ring of pink and blue mirrors. I watch him in the reflections in front of me as I go. He’s trailing me a couple of yards back, the faint trace of a smile curving one corner of his mouth. I stop and face him. “What are you doing?” I say. “You can’t follow me. That’s cheating.”

  “Who says you’re going the right way?”

  “If I’m not, then why are you following me?”

  “I’m not,” he says. “This happens to be the right way. I’m just trying to get out of here. It’s purely coincidence.”

  “Fine. Then you can go in front of me.”

  He shakes his head. “Are you kidding? I’m not going to let you cheat off of me. You bit me and didn’t apologize.”

  “That was self-defense,” I say. “At that point, there was still a ninety-nine percent chance you were the ghost of an English serial killer.”

  A slow smile spreads across his face, and for a second we’re silent. Another thrill bubbles up in my chest. My midsection feels like a shaken-up champagne bottle, fizzy and light.

  “Fair enough,” Saul says.

  I start moving again.

  He gives me a few yards’ head start before he follows, and again my eyes keep rebounding toward his reflection. Whenever he catches me peeking, a microscopic river of embarrassment jolts through my atoms, and the corner of his mouth twists up in a quiet way, like we’re sharing an unspoken joke whose punch line is our families hate each other, ha-ha!

  Or at least that’s what the punch line is for the few moments before I take a distracted yet forceful step and slam my face into a mirror. Saul lets out one rough laugh, then jogs over to where I’m clutching my nose and groaning. He ducks his head to get a better look. “You okay?”

  “Could be worse,” I say, still covering my nose. “A cartoon anvil didn’t fall on my head.”

  “Lemme see.” He pulls my hand away from my face, and his dark eyes zigzag over my nose, which hurts way less than my dignity. Now we’re really close, and I can smell his wintergreen toothpaste and his laundry detergent, and something else that’s warm and a little earthy.

  He brushes his fingertips over my nose. “That hurt?”

  If his voice had a taste it would be like one of those artisanal chili-pepper dark chocolate bars. If it were a color it would match the eyes that are currently boring into mine.

  A memory resurfaces: his name at the top of the MARRY column in the KISS/MARRY/KILL chart Hannah wrote on her closet wall in seventh grade. The image doesn’t quite exterminate the butterflies in my stomach, but it does remind me that if Greg Schwartz turns up dead, Hannah will need a very good alibi.

  “Doesn’t look broken or anything,” Saul says, narrowing his gaze to peer at me through the neon light.

  It’s probably my turn to talk, but his hand is warm on my shoulder and we’re standing, like, six inches apart, and the vast majority of my brain has already rejected the memory of face-planting into a smudgy fun house mirror so that it can fully devote itself to screaming, I WONDER IF SAUL ANGERT’S MOUTH TASTES MORE LIKE COOL MINT OR SPICY CHOCOLATE.

  Finally, Saul releases my shoulder, and it’s then that I notice the fullness of the noise in here, the eerie music and wash of voices pulsating from everywhere. I spot the barely visible gap where one mirror flares right and another just left to hide the opening between them. I lean to the right until the two separate in my vision. “Hey, guess what,” I say.

  Saul stares at me for a long moment. “What?”

  “I win.” I slip between the panes and out into the buzzing night. As soon as I set foot on the asphalt, my eyes land on Hannah and the bowlegged boy beside her.

  “June freakin’ O’Donnell,” Nate Baars calls to me.

  Saul’s shoulder bumps mine as he emerges behind me, and all the fizz in my chest turns to lead and sinks. He lowers his mouth beside my ear and murmurs, “O’Donnell, huh?”

  But he doesn’t say it like it’s an accusation. He says it like a joke.

  He brushes past me to meet Hannah and Nate, then looks back with a faint, mocking smile.

  He said it like he was waiting to, like he knew who I was the whole time.

  Five

  “HOW is it I went in after you and I’ve been out for, like, fifteen minutes?” Nate half-shouts at me, because he half-shouts everything. “Whooped your ass, girl.”

  “So you guys met,” Hannah stammers and gestures toward Saul and me as we awkwardly join them.

  “No,” I say at the same time Saul says, “Yes.”

  I think I was wrong; it was hornets in my stomach, not butterflies, and now they’re migrating toward my face. Saul’s gaze meets mine, and his coal-black brows pinch together, wrinkling his forehead. We both mumble some variation of sort of.

  Nate guffaws. “You guys don’t know each other?”

  “We haven’t formally met,” Saul replies. He holds out his hand to me. “I’m Saul.”

  “Oooh, that’s right,” Nate says. “Your families hate each other. Dude, this is Junior.” Then, as if worried Saul might mistake me for one of the other Juniors whose family the Angerts hate, Nate adds, “You know, like Jack O’Donnell IV.” And then one final clarification: “She lives in the haunted house.”

  Dryly, Saul feigns shock. “Oh, that O’Donnell.”

  I can’t tell if he’s mocking Nate or me. His pupils stretch and shrink as they take me in: tiny telescopes honing in on a predator, or maybe prey. Fine—good. If he hates me, that will make it easier for me to hate him too. Like I’m supposed to.

  He’s still reaching out to me, and Hannah nervously titters, so finally I take his hand. I’m hoping for a floppy palm, preferably slick or sticky. Instead, his hand is a lot like his voice: both leaner and rougher than you’d expect from his almost sterile appearance.

  Not my type, I think.

  Your best friend’s childhood crush.

  The son of your dad’s mortal enemy.

  “Nice to meet you,” Saul says.

  A voice like late-summer corn husks.

  Laugh like brewing coffee.

  Hands like sun-warmed sand.

  “You too.”

  Hannah laughs nervously again, then Nate claps his hands together and barks, “Well, that was weird.” Saul barely acknowledges him, and I study my shoes and wonder how Nate managed to get him here when the two of them seem to be the sort of cousins who’ve never met. “Anyway, what do you kids want to do next? Ferris wheel? Scrambler? Carnival-food binge session?”

  I look to Hannah for some assurance that she didn’t promise our night to Nate Baars while I was in the House of Mirrors. She sways on her feet, one hand on her hip, as she scans the carnival, studying everything but Saul and me.

  Dear god, she promised our night to Nate Baars.

  “Actually,” I start, “I’m, um . . .” Not allowed to hang out with you.

  “Scrambler?” Hannah says abruptly, voice high and wobbly. She looks faintly green and less faintly miserable.

  “Scramblaaaaah,” Nate wails and then—no exaggeration—whoops and gallops toward the line. Saul strides past us with his hands in his pockets, leveling a glance over his shoulder. I grab Hannah’s arm and hold her back from the group, infusing my glare with the heat of a thousand Junes.

  “The moon, Junie!” she hisses. “I’ll owe you the moon if you go along with this.”

  Glancing between her and where the boys are walking ahead of us, I feel my resolve crumbling under my curiosity. “Fine,” I say. “The moon, a million dollars, and one solid kick to Nate�
�s crotch.”

  Hannah drags me after them into the queue just as Nate’s launching into an unnecessarily long story about his weekend that roughly amounts to: I climbed a rock; I jumped into a lake. Saul just sort of nods along, his expression lacking any sign of interest. Even the way he moves seems contained, cautious, thoughtful compared to how Nate bounds and gambols.

  I try and fail to picture clean-cut Saul Angert among the mucky bike racks and beat-up kayaks attached to the cars in the Five Fingers High parking lot.

  Though they’re both lean and dark-eyed with weirdly elegant posture, it’s equally hard to reconcile Saul as the son of Eli Angert, several of whose books I read for a Michigan literature unit last year. Mom and Toddy had offered to write me a note to get out of it (“As you know, our daughter’s allergic to Angerts . . .”), but I was too embarrassed.

  So I read (and appropriately loathed) Eli’s books about Men Learning to Be Men: full pages describing brown liquor in crystal glasses, paragraphs devoted to the silence of the woods, diatribes about mercy-killing injured does, and more than one passage juxtaposing a masturbation scene with a sermon on the brutality of nature.

  You could take the average Five Fingers boy, age him up forty years, and get an approximation of Eli Angert. But I can’t understand how a boy like Saul could be born in a place like this, or what would bring him back once he escaped.

  At the front of the Scrambler’s line, a man with pitted cheeks and a straggly ponytail checks our admission bracelets, and a stroke of benevolent genius hits me.

  “Hey, Saul,” I say, pulling my backpack off my shoulders as the four of us cross the metal platform to some open cars. “Ride with Hannah? I wanna get a picture of her on the ride, and it’ll be easier from another car.”

  He shrugs and pulls his hands out of his pockets, only to stick them right back in when he realizes he has nothing to do with them. “Sure.”

  Hannah shoots me a mortified look. It was a sort of mom-y thing for me to do, I know, but I wasn’t the first person to make this night uncomfortable.

  “I’ll ride with you, Han,” Nate offers.

  Hannah’s eyes widen, and she opens her mouth like she’s about to excuse herself from the ride entirely.

  “Saul already said he would,” I say and grab Nate’s leathery elbow to steer him into the car across from Hannah and Saul’s. I rest my backpack on my thighs, and once we get the lap bar down, I rifle through my bag for my phone to maintain the pretense of taking a picture.

  “Smile!” When I glance up, I find Saul’s eyes already on me. A spurt of heat blooms in my chest.

  Oh no. I definitely think he’s hot. And worse, I want him to look at me.

  Meanwhile Hannah’s grimacing with anticipation of the picture I’m about to take, so I force my eyes to my screen and snap a few. Saul’s not smiling in any. He’s just staring intensely at the camera.

  “Good?” Han calls to me.

  “Good.” I will my voice steady. “You guys look like you just found out bacon doesn’t exist anymore, so good.”

  “Don’t eat bacon,” Saul says. “Vegetarian.”

  “There is no such thing as a vegetarian in Five Fingers,” I say.

  He lifts one shoulder in the barest of shrugs. “I know. That’s why I was exiled.”

  Hannah laughs, a bright sound that makes Saul crack a partial smile. When his eyes flick toward me, they burn my skin, and I’m horrified and embarrassed and guiltily thrilled.

  I swivel in my seat toward Nate and wait for my blush to fade, my heartbeat to slow. “Smile,” I say, and Nate flips off my phone.

  The metal arms of the Scrambler screech to life, the ghoulish music resumes mid-note, and we start to spin. I catch the tail end of a gravelly laugh hidden in the noise.

  I feel it in my stomach as neon colors whip around us.

  Because I have an insta-crush on Saul Angert. Because I am a horrible friend and a traitor to my father. Because when Angerts and O’Donnells get together, Bad Things happen.

  Six

  BY the time we’ve disembarked the Scrambler, I’m still not sure Hannah has looked Saul in the eye, and her misery has become more blatantly visible. I grab her elbow and say, “Would you run to the bathroom with me?”

  “God, yes.”

  As soon as we duck between the port-o-potties into the shadows of the parking lot, Hannah blurts, “This reminds me of when I had that hot dentist.”

  “The one whose hand you accidentally licked?”

  “Saul keeps trying to make conversation, but, like, there’s a giant invisible hand in my mouth, and I’m suddenly deeply convinced I still have braces.”

  “Open,” I say. Hannah sticks her tongue out. “Oh shit, Hannah, they’re back! Your braces are back! You have haunted teeth!”

  She sighs. “This is terrible. I’ve set off a chain reaction that culminates in my dying alone, in a doily-covered apartment, beneath a pile of coupons.”

  I kneel on the asphalt and dig through my backpack for Dad’s old flask. Hannah glances anxiously between it and the crowd beyond the port-o-potties, then rubs the spot between her brows. “Will that make me puke?”

  I wave a hand toward a sign that reads, DEEP! FRIED! CANDY! “Everything here will make you puke.”

  She sighs, swipes the flask, and takes a quick swig. “Okay, now put that away before we get arrested.”

  I laugh, though I’m pretty sure she’s not kidding, and take a long sip myself before tucking it back in my bag.

  “What was I thinking?” Hannah says. “I can’t even talk in front of him. I couldn’t when we were kids either.”

  “To be fair, when we were kids, he was, like, thirty-eight.”

  “Juuuuune,” she groan-laughs. “He’s twenty-one! I’ll be eighteen soon—it’s not a big deal.”

  “Whatever. Let’s get back to your sugar daddy and make sure he gets you into his will before it’s too late.”

  “I hate you.”

  “Love you back.” I kiss my fingers and hold them out to her. Still shaking her head, she does the same. “By the way,” I say as we head back toward where the boys are waiting for the bumper cars, “if you guys get married, should I call Saul Dad?”

  “Jack O’Donnell IV,” Hannah says, “you’re so grounded.”

  Maybe it’s the shot of whisky I took, or the meteor shower glittering across the sky; maybe it’s the group of fifth graders clustered on curbs watching trails of light streak across the black with sleepy awe in their eyes, or how the night air cools and thins, but from this moment on, the carnival becomes something gentler.

  The music mellows, voices simmer. The trees sway as if rocking to a lullaby. And as the four of us meander from ride to ride, Hannah loosens up and acts like herself. She talks about school and tells Saul about how she got into violin. She asks him questions about Tennessee, Vanderbilt, the summer writing residency he just finished at York St. John. She even laughs good-naturedly when Nate makes jokes or just generally does something to suggest he’d like some applause, like jumping over a trash can for literally no reason.

  Each time Nate out-Nates himself, I catch myself meeting Saul’s gaze, like we’re sharing another private joke. It happens so many times I resolve to hang back and walk behind the others just to stop myself from eye-flirting.

  I keep forcing Hannah and Saul to ride with each other “so I can get pictures,” but after the Kamikaze—a pendulum ride with a metal arm that swings you in a loop—I don’t have to force them anymore. It’s evident this pairing is becoming permanent all on its own, which makes my head feel cloudy and my spine burn with an unprecedented and sickening breed of jealousy.

  Fifteen minutes from close, we join the line for the last ride, the Ferris wheel.

  “Okay, not that I don’t love me some Junior,” Nate says, “but I demand a ride with Hannah.”

 
; She blushes and glances sideways at Saul, who shrugs and says, “Sure.”

  I hate it. I hate that Hannah just asked Saul’s permission to ride with Nate, and worse still I hate that I hate it. I shouldn’t care.

  I shouldn’t be here. I should’ve left as soon as I saw him.

  We reach the head of the line, and Nate and Hannah file in first. Their bench rises, and another lowers to the metal ramp. Saul holds out an arm, gesturing for me to go first. I do. Silently. Awkwardly. Miserably.

  He slides in beside me and waits for me to get my backpack into my lap before pulling the scuffed bar down. We’re mute as our bench lifts to lower the next for loading. Both of us look around for a while, studying anything but each other. The possibility of our car detaching and plummeting to the concrete doesn’t gnaw at me like the immediate distress of being alone with him, of feeling Saul Angert’s hip against mine.

  “Did she blackmail you?” he says.

  I finally look at him, and his face is serious. “What?”

  “You clearly don’t want to be here with me. So how’s Hannah keeping you here?”

  “Oh. She asked.”

  “Do you want to know how Nate got me here?”

  “Guns?” I hazard.

  “Yeah.” Saul nods. “Guns.”

  I fight a smile. “Wait, really, how?”

  “He likes your friend,” he says coolly. “He needed a wingman. Shit, sorry—that sounds a lot creepier than the last time I said it to a seventeen-year-old girl, four years ago.”

  “God, this is rapidly becoming a bad teenage retelling of a Shakespearean comedy.”

  “How so?”

  “Hannah’s not into Nate,” I say. “I don’t think they would be a good match.”

  Saul shrugs lazily. “I don’t know. He’s a little goofy, but he’s a good guy.”

  Neither of us says anything. Moments pass, and the silence accumulates, thick and heavy between us. To break it, I say, “Eighteen.”

  “What?”

  “You can rest easy. You said the word wingman to an eighteen-year-old girl. Far less humiliating.”