She had arrived at the home fourteen months ago, and had decided within her first week that Eli Carter was her best friend. A decision she made entirely on her own, and announced to him one Tuesday morning over breakfast, as if reading from a list. "You're my best friend now," she had said, stabbing a piece of toast. "You don't have to say anything." He hadn't. But he'd smiled, just barely, and that had been enough for June.
June was ten, with wild red hair that refused to be tamed by any braid Sandra Pruitt attempted, and the kind of fearless energy that existed in complete opposition to Eli's stillness. Where Eli slipped through rooms, June burst into them. Where Eli went quiet, June got louder. She asked questions of adults that made them blink. She climbed the old oak in the yard higher than any of the boys dared. She had once, memorably, told a visiting social worker that his clipboard was "a very serious piece of paper for a man who doesn't know anybody's name," and Mrs. Pruitt had to turn away to hide her face.
It was June who had noticed him slipping out the side door that afternoon, and it was June who appeared at his elbow five minutes later, holding a broken umbrella that did approximately nothing against the rain. One of its ribs stuck out at a wrong angle, and the fabric sagged in the middle, collecting water and dumping it in unpredictable directions.
She's going to lose her mind when she finds out you're out here, June said, squinting against the wind.
She won't notice, Eli said.
She always notices.
She notices you, Eli said quietly. "She never notices me."
June had no answer for that, because it was true, and she knew it. She stood beside him in the rain, the useless umbrella tilted at an angle that managed to redirect water directly onto her left shoulder, and together they watched Cedar Hill Road disappear into the storm. The rain hammered the gravel. The oaks thrashed. June's red hair, already escaping its braid, plastered itself to her cheeks in wet curls, and she didn't bother pushing it back.
Why do you come out here? she asked, after a while. Not accusing. Just curious, in the way June was curious about everything, as if the world were a drawer she intended to open.
Eli shrugged, a small movement under his thin jacket. "It's quiet."
It's quiet inside too, when you're in a room by yourself.
Not the same, Eli said.
June considered this, the way she considered everything, with her whole face. "Because inside, the quiet is somebody else's," she said. "Out here it's yours."
Eli looked at her then, properly looked, which he did not do with many people. June was grinning, rain running down her nose, her broken umbrella doing its loyal worst. He almost smiled. He did not say that she was right, because Eli rarely said things like that out loud, but something in his shoulders loosened, the way a knot loosens when nobody is pulling on it.
June had arrived on a bus fourteen months ago, carrying a duffel bag with a broken zipper and a glare she had practiced in the mirror, or so she later told Eli, who believed every word of it. She had spent her first week learning the home the way she learned everything — by walking into every room and asking every question — and by the second Tuesday she had announced her decision about Eli over breakfast toast, as if friendship were a thing you could simply declare and have it be true. Eli had not argued. He had not known how to argue with a person who looked at him and saw someone worth choosing. In the months since, June had taught him things he had never thought to learn: a clapping game so fast it made his hands ache, the best branch of the old oak for sitting where nobody could see you unless they knew where to look, and the fact that Mrs. Pruitt, for all her rules, kept a tin of biscuits in the kitchen cupboard for children who had bad days and didn't want to talk about them. June had bad days sometimes, though she never called them that; she called them "loud days," and on loud days she talked twice as much, as if words could fill whatever hole the day had left in her. Eli had learned to listen on loud days without trying to fix anything, which was, June told him once, the whole reason he was her best friend. "You don't try to make it better," she had said. "You just stay." Eli had not known what to say to that either. He had stayed.
You're soaked, June said.
So are you.
My umbrella is broken.
I noticed.
They stood there a while longer, two small figures at the edge of the parking lot, while the storm did its work on Cedar Hill Road. June talked, the way she did, about the spelling test tomorrow and about Ben hiding his peas in his napkin at lunch and about how Maya had taught her a clapping game that was impossible to learn, and Eli listened, the way he did, without interrupting, because June's talking was one of the few sounds in the world that didn't ask him to be anything other than what he was.
That was when they heard it. The sound came first, a mechanical cough, a sputter, a deep grinding complaint that rose above the rain, and then died into silence.
A moment later, a figure emerged from the curtain of water on the road: a large motorcycle, its engine dead, being pushed by hand toward the gravel shoulder, and behind it, pushing with both hands on the handlebars, a man.