Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

time she moved her head they let loose a little more blood. It didn’t seem like much when Kate went over it, but the sum added up to more than the parts. You think you’re so smart , Mrs. Stanhope had said. Kate wondered if it bothered her so much because it was true: she did think she was smart. It was as if she’d pried open Kate’s secret and stuck her finger in it, stirring it around until the most shameful part emerged.
    The whole exchange—only a minute long—already had the quality of a dream. Maybe, Kate thought, being an adult, Mrs. Stanhope saw something in her that Kate, having no perspective, couldn’t see, and that her own mother couldn’t see because she loved her so much. Kate recalled a morning a few weeks before, dress-down day at school—for a dollar every kid could show up in jeans and sneakers just like the public school kids got to do every day, and the money would go toward new basketball uniforms for the boys. Kate brushed pink powder along her cheekbones that morning and imagined some of the boys might notice. That was the day that Deacon and Mrs. Gallagher came to teach the monthly sex-ed class. They had nine children—their youngest had been in Sara’s class—and seeing them together, arranging the dittos at the front of the classroom before the deacon led the boys across the hall, she couldn’t stop thinking that these two—she short and husky, like a fire hydrant on legs, he tall and angular and not a single hair on the top of his head—had done what Kate knew people had to do to get nine children.
    That night, late, long after her sisters and parents were asleep, long after the throbbing in her tongue had finally dulled, Kate noticed a light shining on her bedroom wall. As soon as she noticed it—a circle in the dead center of the wall opposite the window—it blinked out. Then it returned. Then it blinked out again. When it returned, she went to the window. There, across the immense night, was Peter, standing at his bedroom window. He turned the flashlight to himself and then to something he was holding in his hand. He raised the window screen and launched what looked to be a paper airplane into the darkness. He triedto follow it with the light, but the bright white of the paper and the circle of light kept chasing and passing each other, making something spectacular and frantic against the perfect stillness of the night. The plane landed on the grass, on Kate’s side of the lawn. Peter found it and held the light steady for a second, then back up at Kate, who nodded and waved so he’d know she’d seen it, that she knew it was meant for her.

five
    A S THE BUS LUMBERED around the streets of Gillam, and all day at school that Thursday, Kate’s plan to meet Peter was like a warm stone she cupped in her hands. The paper airplane had been saturated with dew but he’d anticipated that, writing the message in pencil so the words wouldn’t run. She’d raced out the back door to get it before breakfast, before the rest of them had a chance to glance out the window and spot it there beside the holly bush.
    “Were you outside already?” her mother asked when Kate came back in, blades of wet grass stuck to her bare feet.
    “I thought I left a book out there,” Kate said, and her mother shuffled on, bleary-eyed without her first cup of coffee.
    Midnight, the note said. He had to talk to her. He probably wouldn’t be at school. He hoped her mouth was okay. Meet him by the hedges.
    At breakfast, Natalie and Sara wanted to know what had happened, exactly. They’d had a track meet the previous afternoon, came home late and had to finish their homework. They only pieced together the clues that something was up when Kate refused to leave her room for dinnerand their mother banned them from the kitchen so she could talk to their father in private.
    “It was the craziest thing,” Kate began, keeping her voice low.
    “Yeah?” Natalie said, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl.
    “I