Now, lying in the dark and waiting to hear something from him, it seems impossible that he’s been in her life for less than a month.  She can’t remember what it was like to spend a day without him in her world.  Ren doesn’t think of herself as romantic.  She’s not all silly and swoony like her sisters.  Boys say nice things to get what they want and every now and then she lets one of them kiss her. Oscar, on the other hand, still hasn’t tried a damn thing.  She doesn’t know how to ask him to.

There it is.  The sound begins low and ends on a high note.  Ren smiles and goes to the window.

“Where the hell are you going?” Brigitte hisses from her bed.

Since August still hasn’t gotten around to cleaning out his parents’ ancient crap from the extra rooms, Ren gets to be stuck in the smallest bedroom with her two sisters.  The three beds take up so much room it’s tough to walk across the floor without bumping into a freaking mattress. As Bree complains at least once a day, “This sure as shit ain’t the lifestyles of the rich and famous.”

“Can’t sleep,” Ren hisses back.  “I’m just gonna go up to the brothel and see what Monty’s up to.”

“Bullshit,” Brigitte answers, a little too loudly.  Ava stirs in her sleep and lets out a catlike whine.  Bree lowers her voice.  Slightly.   “Monty’s either out getting busy with some local airhead or else he’s drunk on that beer he stole from the Consequences Convenience Store yesterday.”

Right outside the window, Oz lets out another whistle.

Brigitte hears.  She vaults out of bed and pads over barefoot, pressing her face to the window.  But Bree always takes her contact lenses out before bed and Ren knows she can’t see anything out there.

“Who’s that?” Bree frowns into the darkness.

“An owl.”

“Like hell.”

Ava suddenly sits up in bed.  She must have been just pretending to sleep.  She sighs and uses a rare serious tone.  “Careful, Ren.  I mean it.  Lita’s hair is already standing on end.  I heard her this afternoon, whining to Dad about Oscar.”

Ren feels uneasy.  “What was she saying?”

“That Aunt Mina better haul her saggy ass back here and retrieve her hellraising little thug.”

Ren exhales, relaxing.  “Oscar hasn’t exactly raised hell.  She must be confusing him with Monty.”

Bree grunts and crosses her arms.  She starts chewing on a fingernail.  “She’s afraid.  Lita, I mean.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe she thinks you’ll wind up bearing Oscar Savage’s love child and tarnishing the family name.”

“More than it’s already tarnished,” Ava agrees.

Ren isn’t especially moved by her mother’s distress.  “She’s just making noise because she’s got nothing better to complain about at the moment.  Lita still thinks one or more of us will be her meal ticket back to Hollywood.  To her, any exposure is good exposure.”

Brigitte sighs as if she’s being forced to explain physics to a five-year-old.  “Unless it involves the sexcapades of two kids, both with the last name of Savage.  Get a clue, Loren.  The wrong people get wind of this and we’ll look even shittier than we already do.  I can see the headlines: Deranged Famous Family Now Inbreeding.”

“That’s messed up, Bree.  We’re not even really related for crying out loud.”

“You think that will matter in the realm of the tabloids?”

Ren turns away, troubled.  Brigitte may seem like a spoiled brat most of the time but every once in a while she manages to hit the nail on the head. Ren doesn’t have an answer for her.  She’s had enough of her sisters for now.  Oscar is out there waiting in the darkness, waiting.

“We’re just friends,” she says, flinging open the window.

“Just friends,” repeats Brigitte in a mocking singsong before hopping back to her own bed.

“Just friends,” parrots Ava with a yawn and then rolls back under the covers.

Ren is still wearing the same cutoff shorts she’s worn all day.  But she exchanged her loose button down shirt for a form-fitting tee.  The night air smells of rain.  Miles to the east the mountains are masked by darkness, an absolute kind of darkness with no moon, no stars.  A flash of lighting parries with a groan of thunder as a summer storm approaches.

Oscar is closer than she thought.  He catches her as she stumbles on her way out the window.  His strong hands linger on her waist longer than they need to and his breath is close to her ear.

“Thought you’d probably be asleep by now.”

“No you didn’t or you would have come.”

“I’d have come anyway, Ren.”

They are inches apart and she can’t breathe.  Is this how it happens for every girl?  There’s an ache that’s nearly painful, something she can’t solve by herself and doesn’t even know how to talk about.  Oscar pushes a few strands of hair from her forehead.  They’d spent the day together, as they’d been spending every day together, but it isn’t enough.  They are like opposing magnetic ends, always finding their way to the same space in the dreary landscape of Atlantis.

Today August had decided he needed some tools and the town of Consequences was the nearest place to shop.  Lately the Savage patriarch had become something of a hermit, adopting a scraggly beard and spending most of his time either up in the stifling attic or out in the old barn with Spencer.  The barn was built as a set prop; it was never meant to be a true barn and it was in desperate need of a makeover if it was going to start housing more animals like August wanted.  He’d hatched some kind of half-baked scheme for boarding horses.  Ren didn’t pay much attention to the details.  Of course Lita had nothing but horror for the whole endeavor.

Spencer tagged along with them this afternoon.  Ren didn’t mind because Spencer wasn’t in the habit of taking an interest in other people.  Her younger brother lounged in the bed of the pickup the entire time and stared up at the sky thinking inscrutable Spencer-type things that probably involved being twenty miles away from the nearest human being.  She’d let Oscar drive.  Within two days after his arrival, Ren had taught Oscar to drive a stick shift and he was actually more comfortable behind the wheel of the old clunker than Ren was.  Several times his smooth fingertips grazed the skin of her thigh as he reached for the stick.  Too often to be wholly accidental.  She didn’t flinch.  She didn’t encourage him either.

Once they were in town, Spencer disappeared into the hardware store.  There was a vending machine by the gas station on Central Street where they grabbed some cold sodas and chips.  Ren and Oscar wandered around, licking their cheese-covered fingers and laughing together with sticky mouths, not aware that anyone else even existed.  For all they knew the entire populace of Consequences had been reduced to ash by some cosmic apocalypse.  They sat on the pickup tailgate, side by side with their hips touching while Oscar talked in an excited voice about caves.

Hanging out in the back of a pickup truck in some small town that didn’t even warrant a map dot, beside the boy she was falling in love with, Ren felt as far away from Hollywood as she could get.  It was a good feeling.

Then a woman resembling a muskrat, tiny and matted, stopped right in front of them.  She smelled like she’d perfumed herself with nicotine.

“You’re one of those Savage girls,” she said in a monotone that hinted at nothing.

“I am,” Ren answered warily.  Long accustomed to being known for what she was - or rather what her family was - than who she was, she was prepared to be annoyed.  Ever since they’d moved out here to Atlantis they’d been treated with polite suspicion by most of the locals.  Most had no memory of Rex Savage or of the golden era of cinema that briefly made the area a place of interest.  They only knew a bedraggled family with a famous name had moved into their midst.

The woman shifted her gaze to Oscar.  “But you’re not one of them boys, are you?”