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\f0\fs24 If it had been up to Lizzie, she would have spent the evening exactly where she'd spent the afternoon: cross-legged on her bed with a pillow behind her back and four hundred pages of uninterrupted Ursula K. Le Guin ahead of her. That had been the plan. That had been a good plan. But her mother had appeared in the doorway an hour ago with a look that required no translation, and the book was currently face-down on her nightstand waiting for her return, and Lizzie was standing on the pool deck in the middle of something that seemed to be expanding outward in every direction at once.\par
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It was loud. It was remarkably, impressively loud for a backyard.\par
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Emma's party had hit some kind of critical threshold in the last twenty minutes, the way a fire goes from tentative to committed, and now the whole space had a pulse to it. Music came from Jim's sailboat out on the dock\u8212?she could see the three men on the deck, her father and Bobby's father and Jim, silhouettes tilting bottles in the direction of the sun, which was going orange over the canal and throwing long shadows across the pool. The water in the pool was bright and churned. Six or seven boys had claimed it entirely, splashing with the territorial confidence of boys who had decided a pool was theirs. The girls were mostly on the patio side, gathered around Emma in overlapping clusters, talking in the animated, overlapping way of people who had been looking forward to this specific gathering for two weeks.\par
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Lizzie stood slightly to one side of all of it.\par
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She had a can of soda she wasn't drinking and a towel draped over her shoulder she wasn't using and she was doing the thing she sometimes did at parties, which was watch, because watching was more interesting than participating and required considerably less energy. Emma didn't understand this about her and probably never would, but Emma was currently at the center of eight separate conversations and was not thinking about Lizzie at all, which was fine. Lizzie watched her sister hold court near the pool steps\u8212?Emma in the green swimsuit she'd deliberated over for three days, sun-bright and completely at ease, laughing at something Mai Lin had just said\u8212?and thought, not unkindly, that Emma genuinely couldn't imagine anyone not wanting this exact thing.\par
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From the pool there was a concussive boom of water and then a wave sloshed over the coping onto the deck.\par
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"Marcus!" Three voices said it at once.\par
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Laughter followed, including, reluctantly, from Lizzie.\par
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Marcus surfaced with his arms out, grinning without remorse, and she could see cousin Devin shaking his head with the weary tolerance of a sixteen-year-old who had been dealing with Marcus since birth. Tyler, the middle one, was already retaliating by splashing in Marcus's direction, which caused a general escalation, which caused two of the older boys to drag themselves up onto the coping to avoid the crossfire.\par
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One of them was Bobby.\par
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Lizzie knew Bobby well enough\u8212?he'd been coming around on Saturdays for years, always polite, always deferential to her parents in the particular way of a boy who understood he was a guest. He pulled himself up to sitting on the pool edge and shook water from his hair, and he was talking to someone still in the pool, and then that person grabbed the edge and came up beside him.\par
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Lizzie looked at him.\par
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She didn't mean to look the way she looked. It wasn't a decision.\par
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He was maybe her age, maybe a year older\u8212?it was hard to tell. Blond. Blue-eyed in the fading early-evening light, the kind of blue that looked almost gray in shade and then resolved clearly when the sun hit. Compact and muscular and tan in the way of boys who spent real time outdoors, not just backyard hours. He was laughing at something Bobby had said, his head tilted back slightly, and there was something about his laugh that was\u8212?\par
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Lizzie redirected her eyes to the middle distance and took a long sip of soda she didn't taste.\par
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This was disorienting. She had read extensively about this experience\u8212?it appeared in literature with remarkable frequency\u8212?but she had not previously encountered the actual firsthand version, and now that she had, she found herself unprepared for how thoroughly it disrupted normal cognition. She was a person who prided herself on normal cognition.\par
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She looked again.\par
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He was still there. Obviously he was still there.\par
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She was trying to decide whether to go back inside\u8212?the book was there, the book was reliable, the book did not cause this problem\u8212?when something grabbed her arm.\par
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She startled badly enough to slosh soda on her wrist.\par
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"Come on," Hannah said.\par
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Hannah was Emma's friend, not hers, a pretty and slightly curvy girl in an extraordinary one-piece with a pattern of dark jewels at the neckline that had probably cost more than everything in Lizzie's closet. She had the manner of someone who was constitutionally incapable of allowing a social situation to go unimproved, and she had Lizzie by the elbow with the grip of someone who had made a decision.\par
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"Hannah\u8212?"\par
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"You'll thank me."\par
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"I really don't think\u8212?"\par
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But they were already moving. Hannah navigated the pool deck with the breezy confidence of a girl who'd never once been ungraceful, steering around a cluster of boys and a folding chair someone had dragged to the edge, and Lizzie was doing an inventory of every conversational inadequacy she possessed and finding the list alarmingly long when Hannah called out, "Will!"\par
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The blond boy looked up.\par
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He looked directly at Lizzie.\par
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She stopped breathing for a moment, which was a physiological response she now understood was not metaphorical.\par
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"This is Lizzie," Hannah said. "Emma's sister. She loves Lord of the Rings."\par
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There was a half-beat of silence in which Lizzie became acutely aware that Hannah had already let go of her arm and taken a step back and was in the process of a departure so smooth it was nearly invisible.\par
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"Hannah\u8212?" Lizzie said, but Hannah was already gone, absorbed by a group of girls near the food tables with the seamlessness of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and had zero intention of explaining it.\par
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Lizzie stood there. Bobby had drifted off somewhere. It was just her and Will Fontaine on the edge of the pool, the party going loud and bright and chaotic around them, Marcus launching another cannonball into the far end.\par
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"Will Fontaine," he said, and held out his hand.\par
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She shook it. "Lizzie Hayes."\par
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He had an easy, unguarded quality, like someone who hadn't yet learned to be self-conscious. "You actually read it?" he said. "Or Hannah's just doing the thing where she says people have things in common to make them talk?"\par
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"Hannah does that?"\par
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"Constantly." He said it without malice. "So?"\par
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"I've read it three times," Lizzie said. "And the Silmarillion twice, which I'm aware most people don't finish."\par
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Something in his expression shifted. Reorganized. "Okay," he said. "Okay, you actually read it."\par
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"Do you?"\par
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"I've read the trilogy four times and I have opinions about Tom Bombadil that most people find excessive."\par
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And there it was\u8212?that thing that happened occasionally, rare enough to be notable, where the unpromising situation inverted itself completely. Lizzie felt the tightness in her chest release a fraction.\par
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"Tom Bombadil," she said, "is the most interesting problem in the whole book and nobody talks about it seriously."\par
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He turned more fully toward her. "Nobody," he agreed, "because everyone gets stuck on whether he's a god or a nature spirit and misses the actual interesting part, which is that the Ring has absolutely no effect on him\u8212?"\par
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"\u8212?which means either he's outside the power structure that makes the Ring meaningful, or he simply doesn't desire anything the Ring could amplify\u8212?"\par
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"Exactly." He was animated now, water still running down his shoulder, the pool noise and the music from the sailboat and the accumulated roar of thirty-six teenagers reduced somehow to a middle distance. "Because Sauron's whole thesis is that everything wants. That every will can be captured. And Bombadil disproves that just by existing. He rescues the hobbits from Old Man Willow without ceremony, without drama. He just\u8212?does it. Like it's obvious."\par
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"Like it costs him nothing," Lizzie said, "because he has nothing to lose."\par
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"Or everything he has can't be taken." He looked at her with a directness that would have been uncomfortable if it hadn't been so clearly intellectual. "Does that mean he's the most powerful being in the story, or the least powerful? Like, the Ring is the whole axis of the story. If you're immune to it, are you even in the same story?"\par
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Lizzie had thought about this exact question before. She had written two pages about it in her journal and not arrived anywhere conclusive. She sat down on the pool coping, because this was going to take a minute, and he sat beside her, and somewhere behind them Marcus detonated another wall of water and a girl shrieked in protest and everyone laughed, and the sun went lower, and the music from the dock drifted over them, and the party went on being what it was.
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