What are you hiding from?” It was a strange question coming from someone you didn’t know. Too intimate for a first conversation, especially if you were huddled under bleachers. So intimate, in fact, that a person couldn’t be blamed for losing her heart to it.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t those words that stole Ashna’s heart. Maybe it was the strangely shaped eyes, one slightly smaller than the other, and the utter lack of feeling in them as he said those words. A question so personal with not a flicker of anything.

Nothing.

Ashna watched eyes. Studied them. As Green Brook High’s star goalkeeper, scanning eyes and body language across the pitch was what she did. A goal took seed long before the ball hit the net, stretching it back against its knots. Or in her case, before her gloved hands slapped around the ball before it got near that sacred net. This season alone she had prevented forty goals.

His eyes held nothing.

Whose eyes held nothing?

Whose clear—what color were his eyes? She couldn’t tell in the shadows—held nothing? At first she thought they looked almost black, like her own. Then she scooted out from her crouch under the bleachers and he straightened up, and the beam of stadium lights fell across his face. Emeralds glinted in the shadows.

There was this stained-glass window in the Sagar Mahal, the Sripore palace that had been Ashna’s home until she was ten, all in shades of green. Glass chips from the palest jade to the deepest moss and everything in between. Gold filigree edged each piece. At night the glass pieces seemed lifeless. In the day, the sun infused them with light, turning them into gemstones so luminous Ashna could stare at them for hours, mesmerized.

“Hello?” He waved his hand in front of her face. “Did you have a seizure or something? Are you OD-ing?”

“OD-ing?” Yes, that was the first word she ever said to him. In the two and a half years that followed—the best years of her life—he would insist it’s what swept him off his feet. That absurd word, said with enough incredulousness to cover all the questions she’d had at the sight of the first person who had found her in a hiding place she’d counted on for a year and a half without being found.

The real miracle was that she had never doubted that she really had done that. Swept the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen off his feet. How could she have doubted it, when the air became saturated with sensation every time they got near each other? The earth softened beneath her feet when he laughed. Eyes that had seemed lifeless until that laugh filled them with light, Fourth of July fireworks over the bay.