Jonas fiddled with his lip ring. “Isn’t that a riddle? Or one of those lateral-thinking puzzles, like, ‘There’s a plane crash. Where do they bury the survivors?’ I know it’s one of those, but I can’t remember how it goes.”
“Maybe, but it’s a thing that happened too.”
Jonas shrugged. “I give up. I can’t think of it. How did the drowned man get in the forest?”
Matt rubbed his fingers through his ashy hair. “What was his name? It was definitely Miller. Forget his first name. Logan, or something like that.”
His father wasn’t kidding. Jonas had the urge to pull out his phone and search Miller Shivery, MN, drowning, but he thought Matt might feel the same way about phones during dinner or conversation as Sara did, which was, “Don’t use them.” Because this was the longest conversation he could remember having with his father, Jonas erred on the side of caution and politeness. What little good that did. The conversation switched to Jonas’s interest in extracurriculars (he had none), and by the time they returned to Lamplight, Jonas had forgotten about the riddle that wasn’t a riddle.
Chapter 2
Noemi
Noemi hadn’t known anyone who’d been kicked out of high school before, and when Matt had told her that was why his son would be coming to live with them, she’d privately concocted an image of Jonas Lake as a bully and a troublemaker. She didn’t need a reason to dislike him—she assumed the worst of most strangers anyway—but this colorful bit of backstory had helped.
She imagined he would be something like Gaetan Kelly. It was nothing short of miraculous that Gaetan hadn’t been expelled, so Jonas must have been truly nightmarish to have been ejected from his school. This portrait of her new housemate might have made other people apprehensive, but not Noemi. She wasn’t afraid of a sixteen-year-old boy, no matter how many teeth he’d knocked out of other people’s mouths. Instead, she resolved to make him feel as unwelcome as possible, lest he get the idea that Lamplight was his home too.
It turned out that Jonas was tall and lanky and didn’t look like he could beat anyone up. He little resembled his pale, bespectacled father but had a similar unassuming air as he stood fidgeting in Noemi’s bedroom when they first met, flushed and quiet. That he failed to be immediately unpleasant or hateable made her dislike him more. He had a lip ring that didn’t make him look tough, which she assumed was its intended purpose.
After some growing pains, Noemi had made room for Matt in her life: he was there because he made her mother happy. Jonas had been inflicted upon them because of his own childish misbehavior, and she could not forgive him for changing the shape of their lives.
“I still wanna meet him,” Lyle said.
Noemi’s best friend, Lyla Anderson, sat beside her on one of the stone benches at a riverside smoothie shop named Blended. The girls ordered the same thing every time—strawberries and banana with yogurt for Lyle, strawberries and kiwi, no yogurt for Noemi—and talked about things that weren’t the Miller drowning…usually people they disliked.
In the last weekend of summer before school began, this meant Noemi’s new housemate.
Lyle plugged her straw with her finger and lifted a pillar of pink smoothie out of her cup. “I can’t believe someone as nice as Matt would raise a crappy kid. Who knows why he bashed some guy’s head in? Need I remind you of the black eye you gave Gaetan Kelly in first grade? Maybe he’s a Gaetan-punching kind of expellee.”
“Need I remind you that Gaetan Kelly is a creep who deserved to be punched for putting his hands on you?” He had jabbed Lyle in the forehead during recess, teasing that her fair eyebrows were “invisible,” until Noemi nestled a fist under one of his dark ones. She had seen him pull other boys’ chairs out from beneath them or put gum in girls’ ponytails, and she wouldn’t let him go that far with Lyle.
“I’m not criticizing. You cold-clocking Gaetan is one of my most treasured memories.”
“Matt is a loud chewer,” Noemi said.
“So you’ve said.”
“You know how I feel about mouth sounds.” Noemi squeezed her cup a little too tightly, and the lid popped off. “As much as I like Matt, I still have trouble being around him when he eats. Which is a problem when you live with someone. Even if Jonas is a decent person, he’s bound to have some habits that become grating when sharing a roof with him.”
“You’re looking for reasons to dislike the kid.” Lyle noisily slurped her smoothie through a wide grin.
“Very mature.”
“Ack!” Lyle clamped a hand over her mouth. “Cold,” she complained, voice muffled through fingers. “My teeth.”
“Serves you right.”
“You afraid he’ll forget to refill a Brita pitcher or something?” Lyle folded her legs on the bench. Bony knees poked through large tears in her jeans. “And you accuse me of ‘vigorous chewing’ all the time. Does that mean you hate me?”
Noemi tsked. “Didn’t say I hated anyone. I’m just not interested in being Jonas’s friend.”
“Well, that’s nothing new.” Lyle pulled her cell phone from the shaft of her boot and began flicking through photos. “In lighter news, I was thinking about dying my hair this color.” She brandished her screen to show Noemi a picture of a girl with grass-stained hair.
“Your hair’s light enough. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“That I know.” Lyle fluffed her platinum bangs and rolled her eyes upward. “It’s just that I didn’t know if you had any photos planned soon, and I wasn’t sure if a color change would be a problem.”
During her sophomore year, Noemi had discovered the thrill of photography. She’d apparently shown enough promise that one of the school’s art teachers had let her borrow a camera far more expensive and professional than anything Noemi or Cesca could have afforded.
Noemi took mostly outdoor photos, self-portraits, pictures of Lyle or Amberlyn Miller. Even a few of Cesca. The girls would raid Cesca’s closet or page through the racks at a local consignment shop for the right wardrobe. Noemi styled her friends’ hair and makeup, but it had always been collaborative, at least to some degree.
When Noemi had brought the camera back to the AP art teacher at the end of the school year, the woman told her she could sign it out over the summer.
“You don’t need my permission to dye your own hair, Lyle.”
“Right. No, I know. Thought maybe it wouldn’t pop enough in outdoor photos. Just wanted to check.”
“It’ll look fine. You going to do it yourself?”