[New Year’s Eve: Hannah & Jeremiah]
Hannah loved the dress. She loved the color, and she loved the feel of it against her skin, and she loved the slip and slide of it. The raised places when she brushed her hands over her thighs, they made her feel alive, and she wanted that tonight. She wanted to feel alive. She wanted to, for the night, to forget about Si's wish and what she was, what she wasn't. She wanted to live and breathe, and she wanted to just be a woman who looked up and tipped her chin toward fireworks while still feeling the tingle of champagne bubbles beneath her nose. It was her first real holiday, the first as herself, the first one, really, at all, and she wanted it to matter. She wanted to hold on tight with both hands, because it might fly away in the morning. The night was a balloon, one high over her head, and she was a copper-haired girl with her fingers tight around a string.
Jeremiah looked handsome, and she'd told him so when he'd retrieved her. "You look like someone out of one of those old movies," she'd said, "the romantic ones, the ones where the hero is gallant and wears his hair slicked and with a wave, and where he can't look away from the heroine, no matter how crowded the room is." She'd kissed his cheek, and the car was beautiful, and everything was perfect. She wasn't sure if the evening was a book or a movie, because it was something more real than imagination, but it was still too vibrant for celluloid, and she could reach out and touch it. She could almost feel that balloon string gripped tightly against her palm.
Away, away, away, the thoughts of dead girls in gardens. Away, away, away, the thoughts of a family tossed on a maelstrom sea of the past come in tidal waves unexpectedly. Away, away, away, her pained brother's face. Tonight, she would twirl.
She smiled over at Jeremiah, all copper-penny bright and cornflower blue eyes glowing in the dashboard lights. "We can do either," she said agreeably. "Do you think they'd look at us as if we were lost if we wandered into a cafe like this?" she asked him, looking out the window briefly, then looking back once again at him. "Do you think they would think us crazy if we danced between the bistro chairs and didn't care who watched us?" she continued, playfully, and then she reached out and squeezed his wrist lightly. "Thank you for tonight, Jeremiah." She was aware of who he was, who she was, how they'd met, and she knew this wasn't how these stories went, and she was grateful.