Cold Kiss

rumble of his laugh.
    “Wren?”
    I turn around before she can lift her head, pretending to be heading for the kitchen instead of away from it. I skin off my jacket and toss it toward the tiny stairwell leading down to the basement as she sits up.
    “Just getting something to drink,” I say, and head into the kitchen without waiting to see if she’ll follow. I’m taking a diet soda out of the fridge when she pads in, yawning and pushing her hair out of her face.
    She kisses the back of my head, and I close my eyes, waiting for her to say something. I can still feel the night chill on my clothes, on my skin, but as far as my mother knows I’ve been up in my room all night.
    She pulls away, though, and fills the teakettle with water. I lean against the fridge with my soda, hoping she won’t notice if I don’t open it.
    My mom is good at seeing only what she wants to see. About men, about the hair salon she owns, which only crosses the line into profitable once in a while, about the condition of our house, which she’s decided “has character,” since that sounds better than “falling down.” Right now I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to think about why I might have been out of the house tonight, although I know she can tell I have been. She doesn’t always like to examine things too closely, but she’s not stupid.
    “Want some tea?” she says so suddenly that I jump. She’s looking right at me now, and my heart is beating too loud, a steady bass-drum thump beneath my T-shirt and black hoodie. She sets the kettle on the burner, and it flares to life before she can even reach the knob, which is bad news. Mom doesn’t usually let me see her do things like that.
    “No, thanks,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. Tea means sitting at the kitchen table together in the dark, talking, and I can’t do that tonight. I can’t do that at all anymore, not with Mom, because when she wants to, the one thing she can see right into, down to bone and blood, is me. “I’m going to go to bed, I guess. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.”
    There’s nothing more than weak moonlight filtered through the window over the sink, and the faint yellow glow of a night-light in the baseboard on the wall behind me, but even so I can see the betrayal in Mom’s eyes. She knows I’m lying, not about the test or the tea, but about something.
    The blue flame licks higher at the scorched bottom of the kettle, just for a second, hungry and hot, and then she looks away to take a mug down from the cupboard. “All right, babe. Sleep well.”
    I’m careful not to slam the door to my room, but when I get inside, I let the harsh buzz gathered just beneath my skin flicker out, a quick electric jolt that knocks the pile of books off my desk. Basic Principles of Chemistry falls hardest, pages crushed under its open spine, and I stare at it for a minute. I’m panting, my heart still tripping crazily, and instead of picking it up, I step around it to flop on my bed, a tangle of sheets and blue-striped comforter and clothes.
    Across the room, Danny smiles down at me from a framed picture on my dresser. He was being extra goofy that day, making faces at Ryan’s camera as we all hung out on Becker’s front porch, stealing Ryan’s baseball cap and crossing his eyes as he pushed the porch swing into motion with one long bare foot.
    “Point that thing at Wren, you loser,” he’d said, throwing a pretzel across the porch at Ryan to get his attention. “She’s the only one worth looking at.”
    In that picture, which Ryan printed out for me a week later, Danny’s mouth is tilted up on one side in the little smile that was just for me. His whole face softened when he smiled that way, like he’d just remembered this incredible secret.
    Some days now I can’t look at it. The frame spends a lot of time buried in the bottom drawer with my jeans, because it’s the same smile Danny gives me whenever I climb into the loft. Like nothing’s changed. Like I’m his secret, and there’s nothing he’d rather see than my face.
    Sometimes when he sits up to look at me, or when I walk into my room and catch a glimpse of that picture, it’s all I can do not to scream. Scream and scream until my throat is shredded and every window shatters and the room goes up in flames.
    I’ve only set something on fire once. It was one of Danny’s T-shirts, actually, an ancient gray Clash shirt his sister scored on eBay for his birthday. I’d found