It sounded like a challenge, so without a word, Rachel tore the taffeta bow out of her hair, working out the stiff, tight architecture of the French braid. It left her hair rippled and loose. She took off her blouse, revealing the sigh of a loose white camisole. She left the short blue satin skirt on but kicked her jeweled black flats up so high that they looked like gleaming dark birds against the October sky.

“Better,” Imogen said.

Rachel had to agree. “Yeah.”

“Your music is pretty,” Imogen said.

Rachel sighed. She didn’t want pretty. That word was bland, and she craved something better. “I want to play like my sister,” Rachel said. “She’s in an orchestra. Actually, she plays in a lot of orchestras.”

“Does she play the cello, like you?” Imogen asked, looking less interested in Rachel’s sister than in Rachel herself. Which was rare.

“The clarinet,” Rachel said. “She’s going to leave someday and do a tour of the whole world, and I’m going to be stuck here. Forever. Alone.”

“What’s your name?” Imogen asked, leaning down to kiss a flower and then taking it apart two petals at a time.

“Rachel Downing.”

Imogen shook her head, red curls clutching sunlight. “Nope.”

Everything about Rachel’s proper upbringing came back to her at once. “You can’t tell someone that their name is not their name.”

Imogen wasn’t having it. She jumped off the fence and landed inside the cemetery with a decisive crash. “It’s like those clothes you were wearing,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them. They just don’t match you.”

Rachel pursed her lips. She picked up the cello again, spinning out a few bars of the Tchaikovsky, her fingers rushing over the dark wood, the indents in her fingertips lighting up with a fresh sting, the notes burning so hard that Rachel almost expected them to leave scorch marks on the air. “How about that?”

“I like it. Why can’t music be your name?” Imogen asked, twirling the idea around like it was another flower between her fingers, something to admire and then take apart. She turned back to Rachel. “But I still need something to call you.”

Rachel thought of the heady feeling she got when she was playing a favorite bit of one of her favorite songs. When the music wasn’t flowing through her like a calm river but pushing toward a destination.

“Rush,” she said. “You can call me Rush.”

Danny: Now

Imogen has been missing for ten days, and whatever I feel for Rush is clouding my ability to find her.

I can’t imagine seeing Rush again and not talking to her. Not touching her. When we sat on Imogen’s bed together, Rush’s leg rested against my arm, two parts pressed that I’d never thought to put together. That felt like a revelation. That felt like enough.