Page 53 of Everything All at Once

We said good-bye to them and drove Sam back to Magic Grooves to get his bike.

I left the car running and walked Sam to his bike, which was chained up at the side of the building.

“Thanks for meeting us,” I said.

“Anytime,” he replied. He unlocked his chain and wound it around the middle bar of the bike, then straightened up. “I hope your aunt’s letters keep bringing us together.”

“I’m sure they will. She loved it down here.”

In the car I watched him bike away down the road, and Abe and Em made kissing noises and hummed the old song about love and marriage in trees.

“Lottie loves someone,” Em said in a singsongy, incredibly annoying voice.

“I don’t love anyone. I’ve known him for a week,” I said.

“Lottie hasa crushon someone,” Abe amended.

But that didn’t feel right either. That was too glib a word to describe it. Everything was too complicated to accurately explain. Did I have feelings for Sam? I didn’t know. It was all jumbled in my head, like there was too much information to process and not enough room to properly sort it out.

I ignored Em and Abe until they got the hint and left me alone.

That night I hooked the record player up in my room and listened to “Time in a Bottle” on repeat, feeling like it was trying to tell me something I didn’t yet have the capability to understand.

“Alvin?” Margo asked, her voice seeming exceptionally small in the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“What do you think you would have wanted to do? If you weren’t going to be thirteen forever?”

“Oh,” he said. The question made him instantly sad. A month ago, a year ago, if you had asked Alvin Hatter whether he had wanted to live forever, the answer would have come quickly.Of course! Who wouldn’t want to live forever?

But the reality had sunk in quickly.

Their parents were gone.

Their grandfather was dead.

The only place they were truly safe was a rather drafty and spooky house in the middle of endless, lonely woods.

Everything felt miserable and spoiled.

He would have given anything to give this curse of a gift back. Let the Overcoat Man have it! Let the Everlife Society claim it for their own! Alvin didn’t want it at all.

But he couldn’t say that to his sister.

He was, after all, the older one.

The eternal thirteen-year-old to the eternal eleven-year-old.

He had to be positive, for her sake.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said after a minute, trying hard to make his voice light and airy. “I can still do so much now. And I have more time to do it too. So that’s pretty cool.”

Margo’s reply came much, much later. They had burroweddeeper into their separate sleeping bags. The moonlight tried its best but couldn’t make it through the filthy windows. It was very quiet in the house. It was a breezeless night.

Just one word floated over into the darkness, reaching Alvin at the very edge of sleep. It would follow him into his dreams:

“Liar.”