“How do you know your mind isn’t mature?”
“I’m speculating,” said Stephen. “Of course, it’s quite probable that being scared and uncertain and stupid is something you never grow out of, and I just want to think there’s some way for other people to do it.”
Berthe blinked at him, startled into speechlessness by the idea of Stephen being scared or uncertain.
He looked the same as ever, inhuman-bright eyes steady behind his glasses, wearing a T-shirt that seemed to be about robots, his face pale and thin and thoughtful.
“I’m glad I can’t drink from you,” Stephen told her. “I don’t want to be a monster with you.”
“You’re not,” said Berthe. She didn’t like words as much as Stephen did, couldn’t frame the right things to say the way he could, but she smiled at him and said awkwardly, “It’s personal for me, too.”
Stephen smiled back. She thought he might cross the room to her, but of course he could not get past the sunlight, the rays between them like iron bars.
It was three weeks more until Leela told Berthe what she had already told Natalie: that she was gay. After Berthe told Leela that she loved her, was glad to know anything about her friend that Leela had to tell because she loved her, and nothing would change that love, Leela let her know when she was planning to tell her parents, and that she wanted a sleepover at Natalie’s house afterward. On the night of the full moon.
Berthe had to say no and hurt Leela with awkward lies. Berthe knew that in the human world, there was no excuse for what she was doing.
“You did get back to your family,” she said to Stephen as the sun was sinking behind his blinds, and her whole body wavered on the edge of the abyss. “Didn’t you?”
“I did,” said Stephen. “I got back to them, and I got to stay with them for two years. But after that—it was beginning to be obvious I wasn’t aging, and hunting was so hard to hide. I couldn’t stay with them.”
Berthe could not talk to him any longer. She had to run up the stairs, lock the door behind her, and feel pain twist her body into a whole new shape, casting her humanity far, far away. She lifted her face to the shut-out moon and howled because it would not stay.
The next day she did not stop for tea or Stephen, just threw on the clothes she had left outside the door and pushed her battered body, used all of her inhuman speed, for the task of getting coffee and pastries from Leela’s favorite place. She ran all the way to Natalie’s house and rang the bell with the sun still tentative and new in the sky.
Leela opened the door and looked at her, and for a moment there was a silence of hurt and hesitance, a possibility that the door would be shut in her face, but instead Leela reached out and drew her inside.
The three of them spent the day together, talking about how it had gone and what Leela was thinking and feeling, and planning out things they might want to do next, discussing movies and sports and coming back around to Leela because this was her day.
They walked around town until evening came and they got to a certain coffee shop and went in to find crowded tables and people who looked like they were in for the long haul, student types with their laptops.
Stephen, with a book and a coffee cup he had not touched, wanting to be with people even though he didn’t speak to them. Stephen, who had made his house something like a home for her—somewhere he had chosen to always let her in, whenever she came—but who had been too scared to stay in his own home, had told her that he felt eternally young and scared, so scared that the only thing he could think of to do was spend all his life in hiding.
“I see a table,” she said to Leela and Natalie, and marched up—the idea of it, of her marching up to a table where a boy was. “Hey,” she said as Stephen blinked inhuman-brilliant eyes behind his glasses and let his book fall onto his saucer. “Can we join you? This is Leela and Natalie. Girls, this is my friend Stephen.”
Leela turned out to have read Stephen’s book and discussing it with him made them both smile. Natalie drew Leela to the register, on the blatant pretext of wanting another cookie, to discuss Stephen and Berthe with her, and Berthe stayed behind to discuss them with him.
“Won’t they wonder about—where I go to school?” Stephen asked, apparently nonplussed and pleased enough to come close to Berthe’s level of conversational flailing.
“Tell them you’re homeschooled,” said Berthe, tactfully not adding that the way Stephen talked, they might be assuming this already—though either she didn’t notice how he talked was strange anymore or he was talking a bit more normally. “Or maybe a college guy taking a year out. Very glamorous.”
“Do you really think I look old enough?” Stephen asked, sounding almost shy.
“Definitely,” said Berthe.
“Dad,” Berthe said a couple of weeks later. “Next time you have a little space between jobs, I was wondering if you could help out a friend of mine.”
“Space between jobs, what are you talking about? I work my fingers to the bone keeping you in designer clothing and handbags,” her dad told her, pulling on the hood of her sweatshirt. “Is it Natalie or Leela? Leela needs a bookcase set in her wall—I’ve been saying it for years.”
“It’s another friend,” Berthe said. “Um. A boy. Stephen. Is his name. He has porphyria.” And here she turned her face away, because she’d never lied to her dad before. “He’s sensitive to sunlight. And he works at a call center—he doesn’t have a whole lot of money. I thought if we could put shutters on his windows downstairs . . .”
Her dad was quiet for a little while. “Is that where you’ve been, some nights you’ve been home pretty late? Or rather, pretty early in the morning?”
“If the boy can’t go out during the day, it’s different,” her mother said, as quick to sympathy as she was quick to anger, and her dad looked at her and then pulled Berthe into a hug.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“You should bring this Stephen around for dinner,” said her mother. “What does he like to eat?”
Berthe could not tell her mother that Stephen liked to eat people. She could not tell the people who loved her best in the world what she had become.
But she wasn’t like Stephen. She was going to grow up, and maybe that meant becoming a little less scared. Maybe by the time she was ready to go to college, she could tell them. Maybe she could think about telling her friends.
Leela and Natalie assumed Stephen was Berthe’s boyfriend, that he was a little weird but nice, that he and Berthe fit, though being at opposite ends of some spectrum. Her parents clearly thought so as well. They all thought they knew what was going on.
They knew nothing about his weird staring and wonderful rescue in the coffee shop, or his silent presence in the woods. And Berthe knew nothing about romance.
He liked her, she thought. But he never did or said anything like that: he was the boy who had quietly left his home to spare his family, who did not talk to other people at all, who kept hidden.
Berthe rather self-consciously wore a T-shirt that said TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ she’d bought, because it made her think of Stephen and also said something about herself, on the night of the next full moon.
It made Stephen smile his small, crooked smile as he opened the door, but he didn’t comment on it. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do if he didn’t say anything: Stephen always knew the right thing to say.
“See you in the morning,” she told him, for want of anything better, and smiled back.
She took off her shirt in his hall, folding it neatly, took off the rest of her clothes as well and realized for the first time that he could probably hear her getting undressed. She went into his bedroom with her cheeks burning.