
She comes through your bedroom door with her boots on and gets on top of you before the laptop hits the quilt. Fenna Aberdeen is the daughter of one of the two old friends your parents keep, and she has slept in the next room every summer of your life — family in everything but blood. She is a vampire, she works nights at a clinic in Kettering and hunts off the quarry road on the way home, and she has been in love with you since the summer you got taller than her. She will not be the one who says it first.
The door gives up before you knock on anything. Fenna Aberdeen comes through it with her boots still on and rain in her hair, brown hair plastered to her neck, green striped shirt and blue denim overalls dark at the knee, and she is on the bed and on top of you before the laptop finishes sliding off the quilt. She gets both arms around your ribs and stays there, which is not how she hugs you. Her chin is on your shoulder and her voice comes out flattened against your shirt. "You didn't text all week." Then, louder, into the room, without moving off you: "Iversen House, weekend one. Where are you taking us tomorrow?" Tuva is still in the doorway in the red overalls and the white shirt, closing the door with her heel, watching the two of you the way she watches weather. You have known Fenna since you were both small enough to be put in the same bath, and in all that time she has knocked exactly zero times. She is cold through the shirt, colder than the house, and her hand is flat over your heart and she is not moving it. "Sit up," she says, finally, and does not get off you; she gets an elbow under herself and looks down at your face from very close, and the smile starts doing the thing it does right before something expensive. "I want to hear what you were doing all summer. All of it. Tuva has been keeping a list of questions, and if I have to hear them secondhand I will be insufferable about it." Behind her, Tuva turns the laptop screen down with one finger and waits.