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The first thing Hunter notices about MoonDancer’s house, the first time he visits, is the cold. The quiet. The shadows.
It’s weird, though, because the cold, the quiet, the shadows, they weren’t put there on purpose. He’s been in houses where they were purposeful, and the Brown house is almost incidentally cold. Quiet. Shadows.
There’s blankets on the couch and candles on every bookshelf and dozens of sweaters in MD’s closet, but all the same. It’s like someone left a dark handprint on this house, and they don’t know how to get rid of it. Like sweeping it under the rug and covering it with afghans never worked, but they don’t have any other option.
It’s jarring. His house is loud. Loud and warm, sweating-in-winter warm. The kind of warm that’s like a good mug of hot cocoa and reading a book facing away from the clock. The kind of warm that doesn’t let you wonder what comes next. MoonDancer’s house is almost terrifyingly opposite. When he’s there, he knows the time every minute, every hour.
MoonDancer’s room is the only place where he finds a shadow of orange heat. It doesn’t escape his notice, though, that it only starts popping up after he starts visiting. He’s left a few things at MD’s house – a sweater, a necklace with one of those stones with a hole in them strung on it. A bundle of twinkle lights from Christmas. A cookbook. He traces his fingers over these spots of reddish-brown when he visits, and he takes comfort in them.
MoonDancer has tried his best to explain to Hunter how elven hair works, why his hair was curlier as a child, why it’s straight now, but Hunter thinks that maybe a part of her is holding back because Hunter might be the only person she knows that isn’t able to know her every thought at a glance.
He finds himself mostly okay with it.
It takes a lot of poking, a bit of prodding, to get MoonDancer to tell him her birthday. When she does, he realizes that it passed about a week after Hunter picked her up on the side of the road, middle of June and dry.
He counts down the days for it to come around again, and wakes him up with one of those obnoxious noise makers and a promise of tomato soup for dinner, with her favorite grilled cheese. The smile springing to MoonDancer’s face, the way her bangs curl slightly, makes it worth it, even though he spills soup on himself later and ends up with a burn the size of his pinky nail on his stomach.
Hunter doesn’t know Ida Brown very well. How well should a person know their best friend’s parents? Is it, like, a sliding scale thing? Something that comes with time? He probably knows more about her than she thinks he does – which is to say, MoonDancer tells him a lot.
Hunter doesn’t know Ida Brown very well, but the cracked skin on her knuckles and the heavy bags beneath her eyes speaks to something Hunter recognises in his dads, the unfailing love a parent has for their child. He doesn’t think he’s a very difficult kid, but all the same, a kid is a kid, and kids are hard to raise.
He thinks perhaps Ida Brown has given herself a thousand times for her child, and has never even thought to keep track.
She remembers what kind of tea he likes, the amount of sugar he takes. She remembers not to put mayo on his sandwiches, because he’s deathly afraid of white sauces. She remembers a million tiny things, and she goes to bed before MoonDancer, which he knows on account of the amount of times he’s slipped in through the window and curled up beside MD in bed, holding her close and thinking he will never understand this thing pulsing beneath his skin.
The thing is.
The thing is–
MoonDancer Brown is a scared person. He’s an unpleasant gradient of a person. She snaps and she doesn’t let Hunter paint her fingernails, always insists on doing it herself. She tugs his hair and his breath smells weird in the morning.
But –
MoonDancer Brown is also a wonderful, exciting person. He teaches Hunter dances, turns on the radio in the middle of the night, quiet and static. He gives Hunter advice on outfits, even though she wears, like, the same sweatshirt and shorts every other day. She holds him while he shakes and lets him sit in silence when his house, his warm and loud house, gets hot and deafening.
There was this weird feeling beneath his skin for years. He didn’t even recognise it until after they met. It’s as if MoonDancer restrung his tendons, as if she tapped her fingers on his scalp and sprouted new synapses beneath the pads of her fingertips. It’s so weird. It’s like that French thing, – the French term for “I miss you”, tu me manques – it translates to “you are lacking from me”. It’s like a piece missing, a piece he didn’t even know he was waiting for.
It’s fucking weird.
Hunter doesn’t know many things. He doesn’t know why MoonDancer’s house, so filled with things that are supposed to be warm, still tastes like snowmelt from the top of a mountain. He doesn’t know why tape recorders work. He doesn’t know why Claudia insists on putting cinnamon on her broccoli. He doesn’t know how MoonDancer has managed to wedge herself into every part of his life, has gotten her keys alongside his own in the key-pot when she doesn’t even live at his house. He doesn’t understand why he sleeps best curled up on MoonDancer’s tiny-ass twin bed, her breath making puffs against his neck.
He doesn’t get it, he really doesn’t, but all the same –
The first thing he notices about MoonDancer, walking on the side of the road, flip-flops clacking and grocery bags hanging low in his hands, is the way he almost seems to make room for someone else, walking beside him, taking one of the grocery bags from her hands.
Hunter’s foot is on the brake pedal, his window rolled down, his voice booming out of the car before he can start to wonder why. All he knows is he’s got a free hand and those bags look awful heavy.