Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"I don't want to be in a cemetery after dark," I say.
"Scared, little mouse?"
Not of ghosts. But scared? Yes, all the time. So I don't answer Liam's question.
The three of us have ice coffees, and the sun is setting. It's almost starting to get cool, and I wonder whether I'll be cold after dark.
But I have to admit that Liam was right. Oscar needed to get out of the house, and I should have been the one to realise that. I should have been the one to take my brother out, because if he stays in his bedroom for too long he'll hit another depressive period and that won't be good for any of us. I just didn't expect to be heading towards a cemetery at sunset.
Oscar, unlike me, is enthused. Like, actually happy. An Oscar smile is the rarest of them all, and when I see one I want to hold onto it, before it slips away. So I have no choice but to follow my brother and our delinquent friend to a cemetery after dark.
It's the kind of place where once you get through those wrought-iron gates, you forget that you're in New York City. Because the whole world seems to slip away, and there's a sense of peacefulness. The three of us lower our voices as soon as we walk in, as if the dead sleeping underground might wake up if we speak too loud.
"We used to spend the summers haunting cemeteries," Liam reminds us.
"Maybe we were the ghosts," Oscar says.
I had a bright blue bike, and Liam and Oscar had black bikes, and we would cycle the streets of Brooklyn. The three of us got up to all sorts of mischief. But over summer, we were grave hunters, hunting headstones. One headstone in particular. The grave of Liam's great grandfather. And then it all kind of slipped away.
But I remember those times as some of the happiest in my life. My grandmother lived with us and she was healthy and she told stories. Gracie was my best friend, and we couldn't imagine a fight that would drive us apart. And Liam and Oscar were my partners in crime and chaos. I never had an anxious thought, back then. I had that childish resolution of immortality, and thought nothing would ever go wrong.
What I didn't realise, when I built my house of happiness, was that I was building with paper cards. I built higher and higher, thinking that nothing could ever topple it, without realising that I had no foundation, and one tiny tremor would cause the whole thing to collapse. I watched every single card tumble to the ground.
"So what's the plan of attack, Somner?" Oscar asks. "Row by row?"
There's no way we're taking this cemetery row by row, because there are no rows. It dissolves in a maze of headstones climbing on top of each other like weeds fighting for space. There's no rhyme or reason to this cemetery, hundreds of years old and losing its battle against nature.
But Liam takes us down a path, and Oscar and I follow him. The fox presses his nose to the ground, sniffing out his prey.
