She tried again. Emilie didn’t hit any of the circles on the target, but she did hit the target. Her arrow smacked the black circle, then fell out and onto the ground.
“I hit it! Horribly, but still!” She lifted her hand for a high five.
“No high-fiving,” Jeremy said. “When you make a good shot, you say, ‘West-by God!-Virginia!’ ”
“West, by God, Virginia?”
“No, it’s West! By Gawd! Virginia!” He put ludicrous emphasis on the God in a mock West Virginian accent that was not flattering to West Virginians or any other people on planet Earth.
She tried it again. “West—by God!—Virginia! Better?”
“Much. Now shoot the target again and try to make it stick this time.”
She released her arrow two feet to the left of the target. “I quit.”
“Don’t quit,” he chided. “You want to boop death, remember?”
“Gotta be an easier way to boop death than this. Jeremy?”
He seemed to be elsewhere. He was looking up at the sky. Here in the country, miles from any town, the stars were out in full force. The stars and the old beat-up moon. The air was crisp and smelled lightly of distant smoke from a fireplace. He breathed in and smiled.
“On cold nights like this, we’d sit by the fire and read to each other until it was time for bed. Just the three of us. We were halfway through The Wonderful Wizard of Oz when we left. Your sister’s probably still waiting for us to come back and finish reading the story.”
Emilie’s stomach ached with longing. She wanted to sit by the fire with her sister and read books out loud, wanted it so much it hurt.
“I hope she likes me,” Emilie said.
“She’ll love you. That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. Come on. Let’s go dig your arrows out of the garden.”
“So Rafe’s dad taught you how to do this?” she asked as she found one of her arrows in the high weeds.
“He did. I must’ve shot about ten thousand arrows the first month we were friends. I was trying to catch up with Rafe. He was better than his father by fourteen. Not that either of them ever admitted that.”
“How’d you and Rafe meet? I asked Rafe, and he just said”—and here she lowered her voice an octave and made herself sound a little surly—“ ‘School.’ ”
“Was that your Rafe impression?” He yanked an arrow out of the ground.
“School,” she said again, trying to sound even more like Rafe. “I almost had it there. School.”
“Uncanny.”
“So?”
“First day of high school. We sat next to each other in World Civ.”
“Best friends immediately?”
“Stuck together like glue,” he said as they walked back to the shooting line. “Everyone thought we were the odd couple. Everyone but us.”
“Why odd?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Jeremy said. “I have a great-uncle who’s an earl. Rafe has an uncle in prison named Earl.”
She laughed.
“We didn’t care about any of it, though. Mum was a music professor at WVU, concert pianist. Bill was an electrician, very blue-collar and proud of it. He didn’t even want Rafe to go to college, much less art school. When Mum started encouraging his talent, telling him she could help him if he wanted, his dad wasn’t happy. Thought we were putting ideas in his head.”
“Some ideas are good to have in your head, aren’t they?”
“It was more than that. He liked it better at our house. Never wanted to be home.” He smiled, and Emilie could tell he was replaying a treasured memory. “I remember the first time Mum made me practice piano when he was over…Humiliating. I told him he could go upstairs and play Xbox or whatever until I was done. He didn’t want to. He sat on the sofa in the music room, sketching in his notebook while I played. That became our after-school routine. I’d play piano while he sketched me or Mum or our dog. He’d never heard much classical music before, but in two weeks he was addicted to it. Ludovico Einaudi released his album Divenire that year, and we listened to the CD so much Mum had to buy a second one so we’d stop stealing hers. Rafe’s favorite was track six, ‘Primavera.’ ”
“So…you were best friends in high school, and then you got lost together but not really because you said you could’ve come home but didn’t want to. Hmm…”
She shot another arrow and missed the target again. But she didn’t mind. She was getting much, much closer to hitting the target she was actually aiming for…
“Hmm? What’s hmm?” he asked.
“If I got lost, I’d want to go home. But you said you two didn’t. Therefore, I hmm.” She raised her bow. Jeremy took her elbow in hand and moved it up a few inches again.
“If you’d met Rafe’s dad, you’d know why he didn’t want to go home. No hmm necessary.”
“That bad?” She shot another arrow, and at least this time, it hit the white of the target. And it stuck.
“Bobbi told Mum that the day after Bill’s funeral, she went out and adopted a cat.”
Emilie had met the cat, a brown tabby named Big Al, who had his own chair at the kitchen table. Luckily, he showed no interest in Fritz, asleep in his carrier. Too fat and happy to go hunting.
“Lonely?”
