Page 39

12

The “Come Back Home” thing was taking place at the home of one of Lowell’s teammates. Hart didn’t know him, but that didn’t matter. He still drove right onto the lawn and put his pickup in park. Heather unbuckled herself from the passenger seat and hopped out. “Find me when you wanna go?” She slammed the door closed before Hart could respond.

He wasn’t sure what he expected this get-together to be. A vigil? A search party? A call-to-action rally? But as he walked through the open front door, all signs pointed to this being just another excuse for kids to come together and drink. Red Solo cups in hand, music blasting, people shouting inane conversations at each other.

He could feel himself shrinking, his shoulders pinned tight, his head ducking involuntarily so he wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone. Hart had never liked parties. And if he was being honest, he didn’t much like people, either. His own fault, for spending all his time with plants. A rager was the last place he wanted to be, and he was already second-guessing his decision to come here tonight. Then something caught his eye. Not Lowell, but the only clue that this party was for Lowell’s sake after all.

Hart squeezed between a pair of people in the doorframe to the living room and stopped at the skinny console table abutting the back of the couch. On its surface, a ream of papers gleamed white and crisp, practically untouched, but it was the word printed along the top in all caps that had snagged Hart’s attention. MISSING , and below that, a photocopied black-and-white photo of Lowell.

Hart had to scan the rest of the sheet to confirm it was in fact Lowell, because he wouldn’t have recognized him from the picture. The Lowell he knew—the boy he remembered from that first day Rose had brought him to the garden—was a short kid who looked fresh out of middle school, thick glasses, unkempt curls shining with a thin film of gel, and pimples. A lot of pimples, mostly over his forehead and peppering his chin. The guy in this photo had none of that. No glasses, blemish-free smooth skin, and a nutcracker-stiff square jaw.

“Hart!” said a voice way too close to his ear. A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and then came a hug Hart didn’t ask for. “Where you been, man?!”

Hart had to wait for the guy to pull back to see that it was Mason who’d accosted him. Lifetimes ago Mason used to sit at Hart’s table at lunch, and come to the garden parties, and laze about the living room whenever Heather invited him over. Lifetimes ago Mason and Hart were kind of sort of friends. Now when he saw him, the most Hart could muster was a half-hearted, “Hey.”

“Didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Mason said. “Did you really drop out?”

Hart’s eyes darted to the doorframe he’d just walked through—the nearest exit. “Yeah.”

Mason’s liquor-glazed eyes shone with both admiration and confusion. “But, like, why?”

Hart shrugged, which was when he realized Mason’s hand was still glued to his shoulder. “Um.” He could barely hear his own voice over the party din. “Reasons.”

But Mason must’ve heard “Rose.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Right, right. That whole thing really sucked, man.”

It was the only moment in their entire interaction where Hart locked eyes with Mason, searching to see if “that whole thing” meant Hart’s relationship with Rose, or if it meant her death. Searching to see if this person he used to hang out with a long time ago had always been this cloying. But Mason went from frowning to smiling nervously, to finally removing his hand from Hart’s shoulder and looking around the room for his own nearest exit. “Chill, man, it’s cool.”

Hart didn’t understand. Was he not being chill? He wondered what he looked like to Mason, what he looked like to all these people. Hart felt so old compared to all of them. Loss and grief had aged him to the point where he couldn’t relate to kids his own age. He didn’t know how to comport himself in social situations anymore. He was awkward, he knew that, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he didn’t need to do much to make other people uncomfortable. Rose had always been good at getting him out of his shell. Without her, he withdrew from people. And he resented them. All these kids around him felt like a cruel cosmic joke when the only person Hart longed for—Rose—eluded him.

Mason took a step back, but Hart couldn’t let him leave, not before getting to the bottom of why he’d come here in the first place. “Lowell,” Hart said, holding up the MISSING paper with two hands. “Where is he?”

Mason snorted. “That’s kinda why we’re all here, dude. Nobody knows.”

“Right, yeah,” Hart said. “But there’s got to be something. Someone must…” He smoothed down the back of his neck as he tried to grasp the right question.

“All we know is, he didn’t come home two weeks ago. His parents called up the hospitals and—nothing. Some people say they’ve seen him around town, though. Some freshman said he saw him down by the skate park a week ago—”

“A freshman?”

“And another girl said she thought she saw someone who looked like him behind the movie theater, but yeah, we’re just trying to get him to come back or whatever.”

Hart was trying to play catch-up with this new info when Mason pulled something from his back pocket. “Kelsey made a bunch of these. Take one.”

It took a moment for Hart to place the name. Kelsey: Mason’s girlfriend. It was a button, about the size of his palm, the kind with a pin in the back. Behind the plastic casing, Lowell’s smiling face stared back at Hart, the words WE ? U LOWELL arcing along its circumference.

Hart looked at the picture on the button, then at the MISSING poster. The boy on the button was the one he remembered. Pimply. Scrawny. “This isn’t the same person.”

Mason tilted his head to look at the button like he’d never seen it before, even though he’d been the one to produce it. “Yeah, it is. It’s from last year’s yearbook.”

But Hart shook his head, forcing Mason to take a better look at the paper. He could not have been this drunk. “You don’t see how these are two completely different people?”

Mason shrugged, already bored with the conversation. “Maybe he had a whaddaya call it? A makeover.”

No. What Lowell had was access to the Wish Garden. And these pictures, taken less than a year apart, were concrete proof of that. Lowell had clearly been misusing the Wish Garden to enhance his appearance. And if he’d changed this much in such a short amount of time, then finding him wasn’t just a matter of stopping him from using the garden—it was about saving his life.

“This is—” Hart began, but when he looked up, he saw that Mason wasn’t standing next to him anymore; he was heading for the back door. Practically everyone in the house bottlenecked the exit, trying to get to the backyard. Though he heard cheering, Hart’s stomach still dropped, dread weighing down his steps as he followed behind everyone. Directly outside the back door a crowd had gathered, cups and eyes aloft. Hart looked up, too.

No one was on the second-floor deck. Its railing was a different story, though. Heather stood on the thin handrail like a gymnast on a balance beam.

“ Fuck ,” Hart hissed under his breath.

Heather chugged from her cup before crushing the plastic in her fist and chucking it at the crowd. The move was met with enthusiastic cheers. Then she proceeded to act out what looked like a sobriety test, putting one foot in front of the other while touching the tip of her nose with alternating index fingers. “Maybe a little jig?” she called down to her fawning audience.

Hart watched, bug-eyed, as his sister practically tap-danced her way across the railing. For a second there, the heel of her left foot slipped and she pinwheeled her arms slightly. Hart’s breath caught in his throat, even as Heather regained her balance and everyone broke out in effusive hollers.

That was enough. Hart trudged back under the deck, through the house, and up the stairs to the second floor, until he was outside again, his heavy steps clapping down on the deck’s floorboards. “Come on, H, time to go.”

Heather glanced over her shoulder, pitching him a sly smile. “Uh-uh,” she said.

“Heather!” Hart snapped.

She closed her eyes now and took off running to the other end of the railing. From below, a wave of gasps broke out, with splashes of “ Oh, shit! ” and “ Damn! ” But on the deck, Hart wasn’t going to let her get much farther. He ran alongside her, and in a moment where it looked like she was leaning over the edge, he caught her around the legs, drawing her toward him.

Boos from the orchestra below clamored in the night air but grew fainter as Hart carried Heather back through the house, cradling her to his chest.

“Donkeyass!” Heather whined. “Let me go!”

But Hart only tightened his grip and gritted his teeth, lugging his twin all the way to the front door. She pounded the sides of her fists against his arms and chest, but he held on. He didn’t let go until Heather sank her teeth into his shoulder.

“OW!” he howled, flinging his sister off him onto the quiet front lawn. “What the hell is your problem!?”

“ Me? ” Heather shrieked in the way she only reserved for fights with her brother. “What’s your problem?”

“I was saving your life!” Hart spat.

“I wished for balance!”

Hart rolled his eyes so far it made his head dip back.

“Whatever,” Heather said. “You’re such a control freak.”

It took everything for Hart not to tear his hair out. “The fact that you can say that to me with a straight face,” he said, on the verge of spiteful laughter. “After all the shit you pull with your little party stunts.”

Heather caught her breath, chastised. She trudged to his pickup truck and looked at her sullen reflection in the window, combing her fingers through her hair in an obvious attempt to avoid Hart’s accusing glare. But he hadn’t said anything out of turn. Every garden party, without fail, Heather just had to wish for control. Good old teenage shenanigans weren’t good enough for her; she needed to pull all the strings, take everything to the brink of shocking, barbaric, dangerous, for her own amusement. And the garden parties were the perfect cover, because by the next morning, the only thing the guests would remember was how good it felt to be there and how much they wanted to go back.

As the minutes stretched on, Heather’s silence sucked all the angry wind from Hart’s sails. “Why do you do it?” he asked, deflated now.

Her back was turned to him, but in the passenger window Hart could see her face, and their gazes locked. He couldn’t be sure if what he saw was light glinting off the glass or if the sheen in Heather’s eyes came from within. “Remember when we were kids?” she asked. “And your wishes worked but none of mine ever did?”

Hart nodded, and suddenly longed for those days. Now it was his wishes that didn’t work, while Heather’s wishes—useless, stupid wishes—ran amok.

“Once you know how to work it,” Heather said, “once you know how to put together just the right combination of words to get whatever you want… there’s nothing that could ever get you to stop. No matter how awful your wishes might be. How much they might hurt everyone around you. But you already know that, don’t you?”

Heather didn’t have to pinch or bite him. Her words left a mark just the same, and Hart recoiled, taking a step back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

In the car window, Heather’s reflection rolled her eyes. “Sure you don’t.”

“You showed Lowell how the garden works, didn’t you?”

Heather leaned into the window and her hair fell like a curtain around her face so that Hart couldn’t see her reflection anymore. But he could gauge how she felt from the remorseful tone of her voice.

“I felt bad for him,” she said. “I know what it’s like to want to change a part of yourself. And I just wanted to do something for him. Let him feel a little bit of magic.”

“What you did was reckless.”

“I warned him,” Heather said. “I told him every wish has its consequence. He said—”

“Warnings don’t mean anything, not in the moment,” Hart said. “You know what happens when people get addicted to making wishes. You saw what it did to Mom.”

Heather spun on him. “What do you want me to tell you, H? I’m an idiot. I make stupid decisions because I’m bored and I’m tired, and it’s all your fucking fault.”

Hart listened, but he’d stopped understanding Heather a long time ago. His mind snagged on what she’d said earlier, about when they were kids. He thought about that time—when they’d hide in the folly for hours, when they had only each other to play with, when their language was secrets that they told only each other, and he wondered how they’d grown so far apart since those days. “You’re drunk,” he said finally.

“Take me home, then.”

He unlocked the truck, and once they were both inside, he took up a more amenable conversation topic. “We’re throwing a party.”

Heather turned to him. “A little early for the winter solstice.”

Hart didn’t care. He was trying to make his wish work, and it wouldn’t hurt to appease the garden with a mass of human energy. If Lowell hadn’t come to his own party, he had to come to one at the garden.