Free The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman Page B

half-moon of freckles on his left shoulder.
    Max was nearly as bad at getting jokes as he was at making them, but he was ticklish, especially on the bottom of his right foot, and when he laughed, his face turned pink.
    Max liked to lie on his stomach and let me trace messages across his bare back as he guessed what I was trying to say. X marks the spot , I wrote. Max and Nora, sitting in a tree , I wrote. I love you , I wrote. He always guessed wrong, and when he did, he twisted beneath me, propped himself up on his elbows, and kissed me, once for each secret message. “Now you guess what that means,” he always said.
    Max and I barricaded ourselves in his room whenever we knew Adriane and Chris would be out. We locked the door, curled up together on his sagging mattress, and watched movies and ate Oreos and listened to moody indie rock, and a few times, when I told my parents I’d be sleeping over at Adriane’s, we stayed there, together, in the dark, until morning.
    Max never came to my house. He never met my parents. And he never talked about his, except to say they lived in San Diego, and it was the longest they’d lived anywhere, as if they’d waited until he was out of the house to finally make a home.
    Max never knew about my brother.
    Max hated Adriane, and the feeling was mutual. She teased him about his glasses and his shaggy hair and the way he gravitated to my side and took my hand as soon as he entered a room,and he blanched every time she described some aspect of her sex life, which she only did to make him squirm. He thought she was dumb and desperate; she thought he was boring. Both were careful never to make me choose.
    Max blushed. When he was thinking about kissing me, when I crept up behind him and pressed my lips to the base of his neck, and always when he lied, which he did infrequently and poorly and almost exclusively to spare someone’s feelings and never to me. He blushed when, three months after our first kiss, he took off his glasses, blinked owlishly for a few seconds, then told me he loved me. “You tell me that here ?” I said, shoving him, because we were standing in front of the Walmart, which I would now be obligated to think of as a sacred space, and then I laughed and I kissed him and I said, not for the first time but for the first time like this, “I love you, too.”

22
    Despite how it felt, we weren’t together all day, every day. Life went on. Snow fell, my parents continued to ignore me and each other, Adriane plotted our Parisian adventures while I kept pretending that some fairy godmother would appear to supply the plane ticket I’d never be able to afford but now had to, because going to Paris meant going to Paris with Max. Chris and Max spent more and more time locked up in the Hoff’s lair, poring over the Book, laboring to match symbol to word and word to meaning. Using the fragment of the alchemical formula—for that’s what the hidden pages had turned out to be—they’d managed to piece together a rough language of glyphs. Applying it to the Book was painstaking, as page after page defied meaningful translation, and then, always, just when they were about to give up, the symbols would yield a line that almost made sense: Deus in natura se obscurat et celata eius corripimus. God hides in nature, and we plunder his secrets . Max, not good with frustration, snapped whenever the subject came up, so I stopped asking him about his research and stopped boring him with mine. I’d gone back through the letters that led up to the Petrarch revelation—I just wasn’t the kind of person who could skip to the end of a book to find out what happened—and backtracking turned out to be the right call. Because, as even Adriane would have admitted, things were finally getting good.
E. J. Weston, to her full brother John Fr. Weston, greetings .
How you would laugh to see me! Stars sparkle in my eyes, melodies trill in my ears, a soft breeze lifts my steps. Love, which for so