Page 3

two

“To teamwork,” Betty said, clanking her can of beer to mine.

“To dog poop.”

We drank.

Beer tasted nasty, but her dad always kept a lot of it in the fridge and it was the only alcohol we could get our hands on when we met out here at night. We usually ended up on the rooftop of her garage or mine as our houses were almost right across from one another, but tonight, we stayed on mine.

Betty stuck her hand to my nose. “Can you smell anything?”

I pushed it away without breathing because, “We used gloves,” but you still couldn’t really be too sure.

“Regardless. Dog poop stinks and I did a very thorough job on the Owens’ car.” She lay down on the rough surface of the garage rooftop with a sigh.

“That, you did. Cheers to that, too. I’ve never seen a windshield more thoroughly coated in dog poop.” I clanked her can with mine and took another sip. “Also—is it just me or are we saying dog poop a lot?”

“It’s the beer,” Betty said, making herself comfortable with one arm under her head.

“Could be.” I drank another mouthful, then put the can down for a bit. It had been a long night, all right, but it was still only two in the morning. The sky was calm, and though it was a bit cold for May, we’d put on our thickest Snoopy-themed hoodies to keep us warm.

And, no, they were not identical.

Hers was pale purple. Mine was pale pink.

But the sky really did look beautiful tonight, and I didn’t mind the cold. So many stars that made me think about how small we really were down here. Just a tiny town called Lavender Hill in Oregon, surrounded by woods on all sides, home to a bunch of crazy fucking people who refused to leave well enough alone.

Minutes passed, and the silence of the night, interrupted only by the sound of leaves dancing to the slow wind in the forest that bordered my backyard, was exactly what I’d needed to calm down. There was a good chance that I would regret what we did come morning, but for now, I just took another sip of the beer and smiled.

Fiona didn’t deserve to be treated that way. She didn’t have a single friend to hang out with. I’d gotten lucky with Betty, but there was nobody in school who wanted to be friends with my sister, and when that Owens girl invited her to the party, I thought we’d finally made a breakthrough. Finally people were starting to forget and give her a break. They were done being fucking assholes.

And then I’d seen that footage.

I knew people bullied her, but nobody dared touch her—until now. I was known for breaking teeth and I had no problem with getting my knuckles bloody—they healed again anyway. And fast .

The unspoken deal was that they didn’t touch her, and now they had. They threw their drinks at her while she stood there, helpless, alone— fuck!

No wonder she’d been clutching her jacket the way she had when she came back.

God, the thought of her facing that all alone, not knowing what to do…

Yes, tomorrow I might regret what I did tonight, but for now, I relished in the memories of how I’d ruined the bikes of all those ten kids who’d been in the video, and how Betty and I had gone around to collect dog poop from every yard in town until we had a full bucket, and then proceeded to coat cars and windows and front doors with it. I even slashed the tires of a couple cars in the houses of those kids—obviously not their cars, but their parents should have taught them better, so now they paid the price, too.

The morning was going to be a mess because everyone would know. And if they didn’t, everyone would find out. People had cameras these days, and we had put on our hoodies, but you could probably tell that it was us.

Most importantly, I wasn’t trying to hide. They could throw me in jail for all I cared—so long as those little fuckers understood one thing: do not mess with Fiona Dune.

Or do—and face the consequences.

“I think my dad got in a fist fight because of me today, too,” I said after a little while because I was tipsy, and I just wanted to get that off my chest.

“Did he hurt them good?” Betty asked.

“I don’t know. He said he fell.” Of course, he did. He wouldn’t want me to feel bad about it. To feel guilty.

But the joke was on him because I already did. The guilt ate at me so viciously, so fast, I had never been more certain that leaving was the best thing for everyone.

People I cared about suffered when I was near them. Dad barely had jobs despite how good of an engineer he was—the last job he took was in construction.

Fiona…well, that wasn’t going to get any better following what I spent the past two hours doing.

And Betty, too. She was the most creative person I knew, and I didn’t even mean how well she rocked the blue hair and how perfectly she painted her face every day. Dog poop was her idea, and it was great! She was kind, and she always had your back, but she’d had people to talk to, at least, before we started hanging out regularly in fifth grade. Now she didn’t.

My mom was gone, but would she have had to go through the same shit if she had still been here? Being a teacher at our elementary school, I couldn’t even imagine what the kids would put her through—and for what?!

I doubted anybody even knew why they called me names and why they made fun of me and why they hated me and everything of mine with such passion. I bet it just stuck. I bet if I stopped and asked them, especially the kids in Fiona’s class, they would have no fucking idea. They’d just heard the adults talking, that’s all.

All because I’d been stupid enough to tell the fucking truth.

“Let him handle it,” Betty said in a minute. “And let those fuckers harass us—I enjoy coming up with new ways to make their lives a living hell.”

“I’m eighteen, Bet. They could put me in jail.”

She snorted and turned to me, her wide amber eyes full of mischief. She wasn’t wearing her usual makeup right now, which I adored, but I adored this face on her even more.

“That’s what I’m saying, woman. Let them! Do you have any idea what I’ll do to that place if they lock you up?” She genuinely looked excited about it, and even though I loved her more for that, it also scared the shit out of me. I’d cost people enough already.

“Sometimes…” I started, but my voice trailed off.

I turned to the sky again because the stars twinkled like they understood.

And also, I didn’t want Betty to see the tears pooling in my eyes.

Fuck, I was so emotional today and I hated it when I wasn’t in control of myself.

“Sometimes you wish you could just disappear?” Betty filled in for me after a moment.

I smiled to myself. God, I loved this girl. “Sometimes.”

“Me, too. I think everybody has that thought at least once a week,” she said, and she was trying to make me feel better, but I kind of believed her. Books were my second bestest friends—because she came first, she told me—and I found myself between the lines of all kinds of stories all the time. It was nice to know I wasn’t alone in what I thought or felt or went through.

Except nice didn’t erase this guilt that made me feel like I was suffocating on thin air. Nice didn’t actually make anything better.

“Thanks for tonight, Bet. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Don’t thank me. This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

I looked at her. “We put fifty bags of food colorant in Mike’s pool last week.”

“Exactly—last week,” she said. “That’s ages. ”

“It really isn’t.” But I was smiling, and I knew that was her goal.

Besides—Mike was a dick who had been chatting up other girls while taking Betty on dates. We’d spent almost all our savings on those food colorants, but it had been worth every penny when the neighbor’s kids posted the video of Mike’s face when they woke up in the morning and found their pool had turned red.

Because the girl Betty had caught him texting was a red-haired girl from the town next to ours.

“Do you ever think about him, Nil?” she asked a little while after she finished her beer.

My stomach twisted and turned and all those butterflies that suddenly took flight inside me were awful.

All the while my face remained expressionless.

“Not really,” I lied. Because the truth was all the damn time .

“Do you think maybe if you went back into the woods that you could find him again?”

I sat up, every inch of my skin covered in goose bumps. I pretended it wasn’t, though, but I suspected Betty could see through my bullshit.

“You’re the only person who ever believed me, did you know that?” She did know this because I told her so repeatedly.

“They’re dickheads, babe. Of course, they don’t believe you. They believe a dude is sitting in the clouds somewhere, watching them and playing puppet master with them all day.”

“Hey, I believe in God, too.”

“But you’re my friend, so you don’t count.” She shrugged.

I laughed. “Thanks, Bet. For serious. Thank you.” Just for existing.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, then looked away like she normally didn’t. I thought it was strange, but I didn’t pester her about it because the beer had gotten to my head. “But seriously, you should consider going back,” she insisted. “It has been…how many years?”

I pretended to think about it, like I didn’t count every single day. “Thirteen.”

“That’s a long time.” She whistled. “If you ever want to, I’ll go with you.” And she would, I had no doubt about it.

I leaned in and kissed her cheek. “If I ever want to, you’ll be the first to know.”

The nightmare started like it always did. I was surrounded by snakes and they were all coming to get me, and I was all alone in the woods with nowhere to hide.

Pretty standard stuff.

Then they bit me, all of them at the same time, and nobody came to save me. I screamed and screamed when I fell to the ground and I tried to get them off me. So many. So real, the whole thing, even though I always knew that I was dreaming. I always knew. It just never made any difference.

When I woke up, I was breathing heavily and covered in sweat from my head down to my toes.

Fuck, that was intense.

Had I screamed?

My heart stood still for a moment and I strained my ears…

Nobody was running out of their bedrooms yet, so I determined that I hadn’t made a sound this time. Good.

Now, I just needed a moment to calm down. I’d been here before, so many times. That nightmare was awfully real to me because it had happened. That day had actually happened—or so my brain insisted. It wasn’t the same thing, obviously—I was still here. But the woods in that warm late August day, the rich colors of the trees, the smell of pines in the air, the warm sunlight streaming into the meadow where I liked to sing and dance by myself.

All of those things were the same in the dream as they had been in real life.

The meadow was far from our house, but back then it hadn’t felt so far to me. Mom and Dad always said to stay close, and one of them was always near the back to watch me play. But then one day I’d been very sad after burying a snail I’d stepped on accidentally while playing. Dad was sitting in the back, reading on his tablet and watching me, until Fiona, only a few months old, started screaming, so he went to check on her. Mom had gone to get groceries, and so for a few moments, I was all alone.

And in those moments, I thought I saw a squirrel watching me.

In need of a distraction to get rid of the guilt for killing the snail, I chased it.

That’s how I accidentally came upon the meadow.

I told my parents it was much closer than it actually was, of course, and I went back for weeks without trouble. I never stayed long as to not worry them because I thought myself all grown up already. I would turn six years old in just a few more months, after all.

On that specific day I still had nightmares about, I danced in the sunlight for a while, and I made a tiara of the pretty wildflowers—and I got bitten by a snake right over my ankle.

Brown—that’s all I’d seen moving near my foot. Brown scales just for a second, and then nothing. I’d screamed so much I could feel the pain in my throat even today. That’s why my hands were around my neck as I watched the sun climbing in the sky from my bedroom window now. Except I’d been so far into the woods that nobody could hear me, and the snake was maybe gone, but maybe it would come back.

The problem was that I couldn’t move. Within minutes, it had paralyzed my right side completely and I hadn’t even made it out of the meadow.

When I’d had no more voice left to scream with, I’d stopped. I’d rested my head on the grass and I’d closed my eyes and I’d waited to die. Even though I’d been young, so young, I knew it was over for me, and all I could think about was Mom’s smiling face.

Maybe because it brought me comfort. Maybe because she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Maybe because I still felt her kisses all over my face any time I closed my eyes.

Alone, I waited.

Then he came.

I heard the twigs snapping underneath his feet as he approached, and my eyes opened only barely. I thought for sure it was Mom coming to get me, but instead I saw the face of a boy—the most unusual boy I had ever seen.

Pale face, golden hair combed back, golden eyes and red lips—and his ears were pointy, too. He approached me slowly like he expected me to jump him. Like he couldn’t tell that I couldn’t move my body at all.

“Who are you?” he said, and his voice was soft. That’s what I remembered— soft.

“N-Nilah,” I said, stuttering because my jaws were so hard to move, too.

“Why are lying there?” the boy asked, then spun around in a circle, looking at the trees surrounding us. The clothes he wore were strange, too, dark red and threaded with gold everywhere. “Where are your parents?”

“Snake,” I thought I said. “A snake bit me.” Or maybe I said something else—this part I remembered poorly.

But the next, where the boy kneeled in the grass and pushed the blades away, then looked down at my body until he found my leg—this part I remembered perfectly.

He was otherworldly. An animation, like the ones that played on TV. I’d seen enough videos to think he wasn’t real, that it was just for videos, like Mom said. None of that stuff you see on YouTube is real, honey. It’s just for fun!

Except this wasn’t fun, was it?

Especially when the boy said, “Why aren’t you healing?”

“I…I-I-I…” I couldn’t speak, and not only because I didn’t know what to tell him. I wasn’t healing because it was venom . Mom had told me what that was, and that there could be venomous snakes out in the woods, but I’d never once seen a snake before. I thought those weren’t real, either.

“Can you not heal?” the boy then asked, and this time all I did was shake my head.

A moment ticked by and he was thinking. Those golden eyes were on the ground between us, but he was locked inside his head.

“Do you want me to heal you? I think I can,” he finally said.

Unsure of what else to do, I nodded. Yes, I really wanted him to heal me so I could run back to Mom and never leave her side again. I really wanted that.

“Okay.”

Just like that, the boy licked his lips, pulled the hem of my dress to the side, and put both hands over my leg. I saw it but I couldn’t feel it. He was touching me, but I felt nothing at all.

Then the boy closed his eyes.

I couldn’t ask him what he was doing, where he kept his medicine. That’s what I imagined when he said do you want me to heal you —I thought he’d pull out a bottle of syrup and make everything better.

Except all he did was kneel there with his eyes closed, and he wasn’t real. His hands were glowing like he had the sun under his skin, so he wasn’t real.

But the warmth was, though. The warmth that was coming from him was real enough that I felt it all the way to my core. My own eyes closed and then there was something inside me, something that clicked . I remembered the sound of it distinctively. It clicked, and a shadow came over me—or maybe it was light. It slipped inside me with ease, like it belonged there, like it had finally found its place.

Even now, there was no way to explain the sensation properly. There simply weren’t enough words.

Or maybe I just didn’t understand it myself yet.

But a moment later, I could move. My jaws worked and my arms were starting to feel like my arms again, too. And my legs—they were there. Both of them.

“There,” the boy said. “All healed.”

I blinked my eyes fast and looked at his face, at his cheeks that were now red, at his eyes that were even more vibrant, the color so rich it almost looked like real, melting gold.

“How did you do that?” I asked, my voice working again the same as always. I pushed myself to sit up so I could look at my leg.

I don’t know what I expected to find but all I had on my skin was a little blood over my white socks, right there where the pain had been when I was bitten, and a thin red line that looked like a scratch.

Nothing else—just blood and a little scratch.

“With magic,” the boy said.

“Magic?”

“Yes.” He shrugged his shoulders. His cheeks remained red, and he looked… calmer somehow. Satisfied. “Do you not have magic?”

I shook my head. “No.”

I’d heard that word, and Dad had dressed up as a magician and had done his tricks for Halloween the year before, but this boy had no cards and no flowers and no large hat on his head. He didn’t much look like a magician. He looked like a drawing instead.

“Oh. Are you a human mortal?” he then asked.

A human mortal. I’d never been called that before, and I didn’t know what mortal meant, but… “Yes.”

He squinted his eyes. “But your eyes are so blue. Are you sure?”

I didn’t know what to say about my eyes, but I was sure about what I was, so I nodded.

The boy looked sad for a moment, and his red cheeks paled. “Then you can’t tell anyone I healed you. It’s against the rules,” he said.

“What’s your name?” I asked, so caught up in his face, on the way his hands were still glowing a little, that I reached out a hand to touch him. The fact that I’d just been about to die a moment ago was completely forgotten—this boy was more important than anything.

“My name is?—”

Something moved in the trees behind him, and he suddenly jumped to his feet.

He suddenly looked terrified.

“Quick—stand still, and don’t move at all!” he told me, and again, he raised his hands toward me and closed his eyes.

My mouth opened to ask him what was wrong, to ask what his name was again, and how he’d done his magic. Why did he call me a human mortal— wasn’t he a human, too?

But then his hands started to glow and suddenly my breath caught in my sore throat as a wave of warmth fell over me.

The boy opened those strange eyes, brought his finger to his lips and said, “ Shshsh…”

And the next moment, we heard someone’s voice.

“I told you not to leave your mother’s side!”

My heart all but beat out of me when the boy turned and started to run toward the trees. Toward the man who was waving him over.

The man who was right across from me now.

A grownup. Light hair, pale face, golden eyes that pierced the air as he looked around the meadow.

“I was just playing,” the boy said, and when he reached the open arm of the man, he turned to look at me.

Our eyes locked and held for a brief moment.

Then the man looked right at me, too, and I thought he was going to get mad. I thought he was going to go to my mom or something, tell her I’d been bad, and then I’d really be in trouble.

Except… “What are you looking at, boy?” the man said, and those eyes went right past me, like I wasn’t there. Like he couldn’t see me sitting on the grass in the middle of the meadow at all.

The boy said something I couldn’t hear, then turned around and went into the forest. The man took one last look at the meadow before he followed.

I didn’t see either of them again.