Twice Shy by Sarah Hogle (ebook offline reader .TXT) 📕

I need to say something, but I dropped my voice in the grass and can’t find it. It’s gone. This is it. My worst fear realizing itself out of nowhere, no warning.

“The picture I showed Maybell! When I was sending emails from the boyfriend I made up for her, which I was actually talking about with this guy I’m seeing earlier today, because good lord, wasn’t that a missed opportunity if you think about it? If I’d called Nev and Max from the Catfish show, we could have gotten on TV. And they probably would’ve paid us. But it looks like you went investigating on your own.”

My pulse accelerates to a dangerous speed, face hot, ears on fire. I try to regulate my breathing but I’m broken, a vast panic of white, wordless alarm, and I’m paralyzed. Even with my mouth open, I draw in too little oxygen and the world begins to fuzz and fray at the edges.

Something wrong is happening to my body.

“Wait,” Wesley says.

She steamrolls right over him. “I still feel terrible about that, but if you—like, are you dating now? ’Cause if you are, it was kinda worth it I guess.” Her nose is an inch from her screen, trying to see. “It’s getting hard to see you. Can you turn a light on or something?”

It’s getting hard to see her, too; I’ve got tunnel vision and Gemma’s a brushstroke of blurring colors. My chest is cold, a solid block of ice, even as unbearable heat radiates from my cheeks. I try to pin my focus on something—Look normal, look normal—but my mind blanks. I can’t focus because I’m panicking. I’m focusing on panicking. It makes the panicking worse.

“Maybell?” It’s Wesley, moving closer. I feel his presence at my back, towering over me, and yet I’m not here at all. I’m drifting and loose, sky expanding until it’s wider than reality, bending the earth beneath me into a ninety-degree curve.

“Um. Um.” I pick up syllables here and there, struggling to piece them together. “Hold on.” I hand him my phone, tuning out Gemma’s loud chattering. I don’t know why I hand him my phone. Got to get out of here.

I am walking away, to anywhere, it doesn’t matter. One foot in front of the other, breathing shaky, this unsteady new life I’ve been slowly building shattered. I can’t tell if I’m walking slowly or if I’m running, because I can’t feel my legs and I’m spinning outside of my body, up and away into the sky. My legs are too wobbly for the task of carrying me, so I sit down and work on putting my soul back inside my body. Come on, come down from there, get back in here.

I’m a bog body now. They’ll find me in a thousand years and someone will look down at my shriveled remains and say, “Maybe she was somebody important.” The name and personality they cultivate for me will be my immortal contribution to this world.

I close my eyes, focusing on my breathing. It’s just me and the wildflowers and the wind, and if I am very, very careful about my movements, I might not be flung into outer space.

The wildflowers around me stir and sigh. The wind says,

Maybell?

Says,

Are you all right?

Just once, I wish the universe would give me something nice without throwing in unwelcome side effects. Wesley just started opening up to me. He’s being caring instead of broody, talking and listening. A friend. Now that he knows my secret, he’s going to slam a door on whatever this friendship might have elevated to, shifting back into the taciturn man I met at the beginning of April. He isn’t going to want anything to do with me. I’ve blown it.

And before you answer, it continues, just know that you don’t have to say yes.

I tilt my head back to see that the wind is moving closer. It has such gentleness for its size, soft as down, still waters running deeper than you’d think. It hides in trees to be alone and yet prolongs treasure hunts so as not to be alone. It gave its bedroom to a stranger and lets her wear its pendant, doodling her make-believe café with a few inaccuracies that have since grown to be canon.

“Hey.” He lowers to the ground, curving over my sprawled form. Haloed by the stars. “You going somewhere without me, Parrish?”

I watch him, heart ticking pitifully, the white, fizzling buzz settling as I come back to myself in increments. “I don’t know.”

He lies down beside me. “Have I ever told you about why I want an animal sanctuary?”

He hasn’t.

Now I’m wondering why I haven’t asked.

Wesley tells me a story about his preteen self, about his slew of brothers and parents, an apple-pie family on a farm. He says that even in a picture-perfect family like his, where the parents did everything right, he still didn’t feel like he belonged. He tells me he butted heads with them about his “vegetarian phase,” which “wasn’t realistic for farm life.” They raised cows, and the first calf he helped deliver was one he named Ruby when he was seven years old. He got attached to Ruby, raising her himself, feeding her colostrum out of a bottle. She had to join the dairy herd when she was two, but she loved Wesley and came to him when called, like a dog. He was her human.

When he was twelve, his parents told him it was time for Ruby to leave. She wasn’t producing as much milk anymore, so they wanted to cull her. He loved Ruby to bits and pieces; she was his cow. He cried hard, begging them to let him keep her, so upset that he got a nosebleed. His mom gave in and said he could keep Ruby. But then a week later, Ruby was gone.

“I kind of lost it,” he tells me, “but Mom explained that they’d found a better home for Ruby on a