A Spindle Splintered

by Alix E. Harrow

  I picture the rules of this world reasserting themselves over my cells, harsh reality swallowing fantasy. I glance sideways at Primrose and understand that it’s not just the leather jacket that confused me when I first saw her: her hair is an ordinary blond rather than a shimmering, impossible gold; her eyes are blue rather than cerulean; I think she might even have pores. She isn’t a fairy tale princess any longer.

  Charm clears her throat and slides the X-rays back into their stack. “But like, this is pretty good. Very good. It’s like the clock is reset.”

  I swallow, tasting the plasticky cold of the artificial oxygen in my throat. “So—so how long—?” It’s not a question I’m accustomed to asking. I’ve always known exactly how long I had left.

  “They don’t know,” Charm answers. “It could be a month. It could be another twenty-one years. Welcome to regular-old mortality, friend.” Her voice is shaking again and her eyes are shimmering with tears she’s too stubborn to shed. Normally this is the point when I would look away from her, when the two of us would retreat to sarcasm and bravado. But God, I’m tired of being too cowardly to let myself love anyone. I catch her wrist and haul her toward me. She falls against my chest and I wrap my arms around her and it turns out I haven’t used up my tears after all.

  The princess steps around the bed and looks politely out the window while we cry at one another. I rub Charm’s back and watch Primrose through the rainbowed distortion of tears. A princess who slept with a poison knife beneath her pillow, who rode into the night to face her own villain, who stands now in the strange light of a new world, unflinching. I don’t think the next person Charm falls for will be a coward.

  I scrub a hand across my cheeks and tousle Charm’s hair. “You’re snotting all over my hospital gown, hon.”

  She slides her gross face across my collarbone and burrows in a little closer. “Fuck off.”

  “So, Prim,” I say loudly, “What do you think?”

  The princess looks away from the window, a tendril of yellow hair drifting fetchingly in the air conditioning. “Of what?”

  “Of our world.” I gesture grandly at the cramped room, with its bland furniture and wipe-able surfaces. “It gets better than the Columbus ICU, I swear to god. There’s … ice cream? Bet your world didn’t have that. And dresses with pockets. Gay rights, at least some places.” Charm goes very still against my chest, barely breathing. “You wouldn’t be a princess anymore, but you’re hot and white and young, so you could be pretty much anything else you wanted. A librarian or a physical therapist or a lion tamer, if those are still a thing.” I can see the idea taking hold of Primrose, rising like stars in her eyes. A whole galaxy of possibilities laid out where before there had been a single, narrow story with a single, bitter end. I know precisely how she feels. “Would you like to stay?”

  Charm sits up. She looks at Primrose and then away, as if she doesn’t care what the answer is. Charm’s worst crushes are generally the ones she pretends she doesn’t have.

  Primrose is looking down at her borrowed clothes, running her thumb along the leather sleeve of her jacket. Her hand is shaking. “Could I?”

  I kick Charm again and she clears her throat. “Yeah. I mean, you could stay at my place. I mostly sleep on the couch anyway.” This is a stone-cold lie, but I don’t call her on it. Some lies are important.

  Primrose looks at Charm through her lashes. I see her eyes trace the stubborn line of her chin, the defiant square of her shoulders. “I—yes. I would like that.” Charm gives her a watery, puffy-eyed smile, and Primrose smiles back, and I’m torn between rolling my eyes at them and crying some more.

  Primrose unglues herself from Charm with an almost audible snapping sound and turns to me, that silly smile still in place. “And what about you? What will you do?”

  I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. I just stare back at her, jaw loose, feeling all those galaxies of possibilities spinning around me. I’ve never thought about the future. I never had one.

  Charm’s hand finds mine and squeezes. I squeeze back. “I don’t know,” I answer, and it’s the simple, glorious truth.

  11

  IT TAKES ME about three weeks to figure it out.

  I spend the time bouncing between home and the hospital and Charm’s place. I don’t actually need to be in the hospital. The doctors tell me the first few globules of protein have appeared in my organs, but I still feel better than I have in years, and there’s still nothing they can do but hand me some steroids and suppressants to slow it down. Mostly I think they just want to continue poking and prodding at me. They keep scheduling me for more samples and tests and biopsies, followed by interviews with panels of doctors whose attitudes have moved from baffled to ambitious, as if they’re seeing themselves presenting their findings to packed lecture halls, using laser pointers to circle my miraculously empty lungs. I should be worried about transitioning from dying girl to lab rat, but I can’t seem to be worried about anything. And I already know—in a wordless, formless way—that I’m not sticking around.

  Between appointments I’m mostly at Charm’s place, which is conspicuously less disastrous than it used to be. There are even curtains on the windows now, instead of towels held up with binder clips; I would worry about what this means in terms of how hard she’s falling for Prim, except that Prim seems to be falling just as fast. The first time I show up she tells me about the Swiss Army knife Charm gave her with a degree of sappiness generally reserved for bouquets or diamond rings. “It’s mine! Charm says I don’t even need to hide it!” I can’t believe how much I missed those exclamation points. “It’s a tool and a weapon!”

  “Yes, but remember there is no dueling in Ohio, for any reason.” Charm says this with the peculiar emphasis that indicates there was another Incident. There’s already been problems with a bank teller who didn’t use her proper title and the HVAC guy who tried to give Prim his number and wound up with a nosebleed. “What should you do if you get in trouble?”

  Prim sobers and recites, “Text you on the phone, like a normal person.”

  Her education in modernity is going pretty well, all things considered. Charm and me take her on lots of long walks through town, pointing out crosswalks and traffic patterns. We wasted an entire day in Pam’s Corner Closet & More, explaining everything from fake fruit to microwaves. There have been some stumbling blocks (toilet paper, the internet, the whole concept of wage labor), but Prim is pretty sharp, it turns out, and I already knew she was brave.

  In the evenings we tend to her cultural literacy by getting high and binging classic Disney movies and Austen adaptations (she agrees that the 2005 Pride and Prejudice is the superior version, because it is). Charm and Prim let me sit between them on the couch, my head on Charm’s shoulder, my feet slung over Prim’s legs, all our hands jostling in the popcorn bowl. It feels like all the slumber parties I never had growing up. It feels like a happy ending.

  At Mom and Dad’s it mostly feels like an endless party. Dad keeps baking cakes for no reason, humming off-key in the kitchen; Mom uses up all her vacation days at work, rather than hoarding them for some looming medical emergency; we reinstitute family game night and I discover, to my deep dismay, that Mom has been going easy on me in Settlers of Catan for twenty-one years. She straight-up stole my longest road without even a flicker of remorse.

  I have the nagging sense that there are things I should be doing—applying for jobs or joining the Peace Corps or meditating on the profound gift of time—but all I seem to want to do is lounge around Roseville with everyone I love most.

  It takes me a while to realize I’m saying goodbye.

  I’m putting away groceries with Dad one evening when I pull a fresh set of twin sheets out of the bag, still wrapped in plastic. “Are these for me?”

  Dad is halfway inside the fridge, rearranging Tupperware to make room for the milk. “They were half off! I figured you wouldn’t want to take your old set with you. You’ve had them since w
hat, middle school?”

  I stare at the fridge door. “Am I … going somewhere?”

  Dad reemerges with a pot of leftover lentils in one hand and limp celery in the other. He gives me a shrug and a smile that hangs a little crooked on his face, bittersweet. “You certainly don’t have to. I guess it just felt like you might, now that you have…” He shrugs again. I consider all the ways he might have ended that sentence: a future, a life, a story still untold.

  “Huh. Yeah. I guess.” I feel it again, that sense of galaxies spinning around me, hanging like fruit ripe for the picking, and I know he’s right. I stack diced tomatoes on the counter in silence before clearing my throat. “Would you and Mom be … okay, with that?”

  He goes very still, a box of Cheerios in one hand.

  “I mean, if I left for a while, maybe like a long while, you wouldn’t freak out?”

  Dad sets the Cheerios down and spreads his hands flat on the counter, his back to me. “When you disappeared, I thought that was it. Charmaine kept saying everything was fine, but I didn’t really believe her. I thought maybe you’d run off, and that she was covering for you.” His voice is low and thin, like he’s forcing it through a tight throat. “It hurt like hell. Of course it did. I kept thinking about all the hours I spent trying to keep you here, trying to save you—or maybe myself—”

  “Dad, I’m sorry—”

  He slaps his palm on the counter. “And what a damn waste it was. Of my time, of our time together. I should have let you do whatever the hell you wanted. I should have spent more time thinking about your life than worrying about your death.”

  He turns to face me finally, tears not merely gathering in his eyes but already sliding down his cheeks, pooling in the laugh lines around his mouth. He holds his arms out to me. “I’m sorry. Go wherever you want, with our blessing.” I fall into him, stumbling over half-empty Save-A-Lot bags. “Just text sometimes, okay?”

  The next morning I wake up with a slight headache from crying, a curious lightness in my chest, and a calm certainty that it’s time to go. This time I pack the essentials: a few weeks’ worth of meds, an alternate pair of jeans, my phone charger, my brand-new sheets, still in their plastic. A single splinter stolen from another world.

  Mom’s in the garden shaking junebugs into a pie pan of soapy water and Dad’s sleeping in, so I leave a note beside the coffee maker. Be back when I can. Expect me when you see me. Love, Zin.

  I’m in my car before I text Charm. Not on the groupchat we’ve been using for the last three weeks—on which we’ve finally convinced Prim to stop beginning every message with “To my Esteemed Companions Zinnia and Charmaine,”—but just her.

  meet me at the tower, princess.

  * * *

  IT TAKES CHARM eleven minutes to get there, which is exactly the time it would take to read a text, pull on a pair of jeans, and drive from her place to the old state penitentiary. She must still be sleeping with her ringer on.

  I raise a hand in greeting, leaning against the warm stone of the tower. She narrows her eyes at me, hair standing at wild angles, and stalks through the rutted dirt and overgrown grass to lean beside me.

  She’s close enough that I can feel the heat of her skin, see the rumpled pink lines the bedsheets left across her face. “Morning,” I offer.

  “Morning,” she replies, coolly. “What the fuck?”

  “Charm, please don’t get upset—”

  “If you ever speak to me in that tone of voice again, I will do crimes to you.”

  I should’ve known this would be way harder than leaving a note for my folks. I shut my mouth and fiddle with the wooden splinter in my hands. It’s spent the last three weeks in my pocket, and the edges are already beginning to smooth with use. The end is still plenty sharp.

  I feel Charm’s eyes on my hands, hear the soft rush of her breath. “You’re running, aren’t you.”

  It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer it. I nod once to the ground.

  “May I ask why?” Her voice is so carefully, ferociously calm, but I hear the bite beneath the calm, and the pain beneath the bite. “Why, now that you are magically healed, would you—”

  I interrupt her in a soft, level voice. “I’m not healed. Not really.” She already knows that. I showed her the little grayish blooms on the X-rays, my curse as-yet un-lifted. “All I have is more time.”

  She makes a surly, stubborn noise. “Which you could spend with us.” I wonder if she realizes how quickly and tellingly her me has transformed into an us.

  I don’t look at her, speaking instead to the hazy green of the horizon. “I’ve spent every day since second grade with you, Charm, and I’m grateful for every second of it.” I scuff my shoe against a dandelion, staining the earth yellow. “But even at the very best of times, there was a part of me that was just … playing out the clock. Waiting. Wishing I could save myself somehow, but never thinking I could aim higher.”

  “Higher?”

  I clear my throat, wishing the truth was just a little less cheesy. “Saving others. I should have gone to all those stupid protests with Roseville’s Children, I should have at least tried, and now it’s too late.” Last week a reporter from CNN asked to do a profile of me as “the oldest surviving victim of GRM.” I never wrote back, but the word victim burrowed under my skin and itched at me, a brand-new allergy.

  Charm doesn’t say anything, so I keep talking to that green horizon. “I can’t stop thinking about the others. Not just the other kids with Roseville’s Malady, but the other sleeping beauties. The girls in other worlds who are dying or trapped or cursed, who deserve better stories than the ones they were given. Who are all alone.” I run my fingertips across the point of the splinter and I know by the sharp sound of Charm’s breath that she understands. That she sees the infinite pages of the universe turning before me, a vast book filled with a thousand wrongs that need righting, a thousand princesses that need rescuing, or at least a hand reached toward theirs in the darkness. “I don’t know how much time I have, but I know what I want to do with it.

  Charm exhales very slowly beside me. “And they said a folklore degree was impractical.”

  “Not if you’re a cursed fairy tale princess, it turns out.”

  It’s a weak joke, but Charm smiles for the first time since she stumbled out of her Corolla. “Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe you weren’t the princess, after all. Maybe you’re the prince.” She rubs her Superman tattoo as she says it.

  I shrug at her. “Or maybe we got the wrong story altogether. Maybe GRM is more like a poison apple than a curse, and there’s seven dudes waiting to put me in a glass coffin when I die. Maybe my true love’s kiss will revive me.” I kick at the dandelion again. “Maybe there’s a cure out there in one of those other worlds.”

  Charm gives me a sharp, sideways glance before squinting at the rising sun. “Nice to know you’re trying to save yourself. Finally.”

  “Yeah, so maybe you can stop trying to save me. Finally.”

  I don’t even have to look at her to feel the mulish set of her jaw. God, she’s stubborn. I feel like I should warn Prim before I go. Then I remember the exclamation points and wonder if I should warn Charm instead. “Look, just—don’t work for fucking Pfizer. Don’t stick around Roseville. Go do something, anything else. Whatever you want. And take Prim with you.”

  “You are not the boss of me,” Charm answers reflexively, but I can see the dangerous softening of her jaw at the mention of Prim’s name. She swallows and adds, casually, “Hey, by the way: I love you.” Her hands are jammed in her jeans pockets now, her eyes are still on the sky. “You don’t have to say anything back—I know about your rules—I just thought you should know before you—”

  I tip my head against her shoulder, right where Superman’s hair curls against his forehead. “I love you, too.” It’s surprisingly easy to say, like the final tug that unties a knot. “It was a stupid rule.”

  “Hot, but stupid, like I’ve always said.” C
harm’s voice is rough and gluey, full of tears again. “Will you come home? When you’re ready?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Okay.” Charm turns and kisses me once, hard, on the top of my head. “I hope you find your happily ever after, or whatever.”

  “Already did,” I say, and it’s possible that my voice is a little gluey, too. “I’m just looking for a better once upon a time.”

  We don’t say goodbye. We just stand for a while, my cheek still on her shoulder, watching the sun rise over Muskingum County. Eventually Charm sighs and walks back to her car. She turns and blows me a final, brassy kiss before she gets inside.

  The tower still smells faintly of roses. I find them curling and drying in their buckets, their petals gathering in drifts against the walls. I watch Charm’s car through the scummed windows, feeling the gathering heat of summer, thinking about stories that are told too often and the ink that bleeds from one cosmic page to the next and the stubborn arc of the universe. Charm’s car vanishes around a bend in the road, sunlight flashing gold against the windshield, and then I’m a girl in a tower again.

  But this time it’s not midnight. This time I’m not drunk on despair and cheap beer, hoping desperately for a way out of my own story. This time, when I press my finger to the end of a splintered spindle, I’m smiling.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IF WRITERS RECEIVED fairy blessings on their christening days, they couldn’t hope for any better gifts than these:

  An agent like Kate McKean, who has never met a tree she can’t talk me out of.

  An editor like Jonathan Strahan, who didn’t laugh when I said I wanted to Spider-Verse a fairy tale, and an editor like Carl Engle-Laird, who is weak for the memes of the mid-2010s.

  A publishing team like this one, including the patience, time, and talents of Irene Gallo, Ruoxi Chen, Oliver Dougherty, Troix Jackson, Jim Kapp, Lauren Hougen, Michelle Li, Christine Foltzer, Jess Kiley, Greg Collins, Nathan Weaver, Katherine Minerva, Rebecca Naimon, Mordicai Knode, Lauren Anesta, Sarah Reidy, Amanda Melfi, and everyone from Tor Ad/Promo. Expert consultants like Ace Tilton Ratcliff, who made this story smarter, kinder, and more true, and early readers like Ziv Wities, H. G. Parry, Sam Hawke, Rowenna Miller, Leife Shellcross, Anna Stephens, Tasha Suri, and the other denizens of the bunker, who all had better things to do with their time but spent it correcting my Tolkien references instead.