—Scrap, being a dick
(Fuck off, Beckan!)
But one night he gives up, spreads his book out on the kitchen table, and begs them to help him. They sit on each other’s laps and roll on the floor and tell stories of what actually happened when Scrap wasn’t there, embellishing in all the right places, laughing at him while he tears out page after page of stuff that is too far from the truth to make it into his book. (“I never hated you, Scrap, take out the parts where we hated you.” Sometimes he listens. Sometimes he believes it.)
Beckan gives the court transcripts more pizzazz, and Josha and Tier add illustrations when Scrap indicated them and sometimes when he didn’t. Rig refuses to make herself sound more like Rig.
Scrap combs over Beckan’s scenes with Piccolo. “I’m keeping this part,” he says.
Beckan says, “I never slept with Piccolo. That’s kind of an enormous part of your book.”
“Poetic license. It works. Everyone loves a good love triangle.”
Piccolo says, “Yeah, but it’s disgusting.”
She hits him.
“It makes sense!” Scrap whines. “What else were you in it for?”
“Um, freedom?” Piccolo says, and very carefully does not look at anyone.
Josha twists the locket around his neck and is mostly quiet, nowadays.
And so all should be mostly well. Tier and Rig are happy, hunting together, holding hands at dinner, having a much more discreet and mature relationship than Scrap and Beckan. Piccolo is so happy to have a family that he’ll impulsively stop what he’s doing and beam at them. Scrap and Beckan, clothes half on, hands all over each other, lips on each other’s lips, should be perfect.
They are content, they are sated, they are so horribly in love, and Beckan is happy, but Scrap is not, and she doesn’t know if there is anything she can do.
He sits at the top of the stairs and watches Josha pace, watches Josha’s hand on the locket.
“Stop chasing,” she tells him, when he is still staying up to all hours, tearing through his book and finding more reasons why Cricket should not have died. “Stop chasing and come to bed.”
But he can’t. She wakes up in the middle of the night and he is sitting up in bed, his head in his hands, his mouth moving to a million conversations. He relives everything again and again and pretends that there could be a reality where he didn’t kill Crate, or where he killed Crate before he killed Cricket. Or he fixed Josha. Or he never hurt anyone. Or he never started writing this book.
“Stop chasing,” Beckan says. “Stop writing.”
But he can’t.
Then one day he starts downstairs early after a night of barely sleeping, and he sees Josha and Piccolo making breakfast. Something causes him to stop and sit on the top step instead of going down.
Josha and Piccolo are next to each other at the stove, not speaking. And Piccolo moves his hand, just to grab a fork, Scrap thinks, but instead his hand stops at Josha’s wrist, slowly turns it, and presses itself against Josha’s palm.
Josha doesn’t look at him, just opens his fingers and slips them between Piccolo’s.
And Josha’s shoulders relax—Josha relaxes—and Scrap feels something inside him give and a hundred things pour out of him with his next exhale, and the next thing he knows he is back in bed with Beckan, forcing her awake, whispering in her ear that there are some things that he has not ruined, that Josha is not a lost cause, that there is still hope, there is still hope, there is still hope. It’s all things she already knew, but it feels amazing to be able to tell her them, to be, for once, the one to reassure her. He believes. He truly believes that his pack will survive.
He realizes, for the first time, that it already has.
But it isn’t his nature not to fret, and some evenings he sits on the roof with Piccolo and faces the city and watches the flashes he is sure are bombs.
“Idiots,” Piccolo mumbles. “Fucking idiots.”
“I hope your guys got out.”
Piccolo raises an eyebrow and says, “My guys did get out.”
“I meant the tightropers.”
“Eh.” Piccolo lies back. “Fuck ’em. How’s that book coming along?”
“Almost done.”
“About time.”
“Scrap!” It’s Beckan. Happy. He climbs down from the roof and meets her behind the house. “Look,” she says, and tugs him over to the flat rock Josha hauled up for her a few weeks ago. A makeshift workbench. “Look what I made.”
It’s a mess of twigs and leaves; there isn’t much metal to work with now. They are learning to enjoy it, but the truth is that they are still children of iron and stone and it will take many, many more years of soft greens and browns to change that.
Beckan holds it up. It’s a long piece of bark with sinew straps splayed in all directions and slit after slit cut into the wood. It has joints that bend and wooden fingers that fan out along the edges.
He looks at her.
“It’s a wing,” she says.
“For flying?”
“Mmhm. For you. You said maybe fairies did have wings.”
“A long time ago.”
“And maybe again.”
“Becks.”
“But I only have one.”
“Beckan,” he says. So softly.
“I figure you get the first one, since you don’t have an arm. Then the next one’s for me. Then Josha, Piccolo, Rig, and Tier, whatever the order, it doesn’t matter, and then I’ll make second ones for all of us and then we’ll see what happens.”
“Will they work?”
“I hope so. Hard to tell with just one.” She touches it. “Can you imagine, though? If I made them for all of us? We could chase each other, play. And then we could fly back to the city and watch it from so high up. No one could stop us. We’d never have to come down.”
“Someday.”
“Yeah. We have a very long time.”
He leans his head against hers. They are so perfectly the right size, his lips right against her cheek, and she looks up at him with a smile that could burn down the whole fucking forest.
He kisses her, softly.
They have plenty of time.
THE END
Beckan closes the book. “What a sappy fucking ending.”
“Amazing, thank you. We can put that on the front of the book, like a quote. My boyfriend wrote this book and I don’t even like the ending. And you realize I’m going to have to write this part down now. Now my shitty book has an epilogue. Do you know how much I hate epilogues?”
She laughs and sits down on my lap. “I liked it. I still don’t think you should have ripped all those pages out of Tier’s books. That’s kind of destructive. You should also put it in order. And take out all the parts where you go a little crazy and start talking to me and stuff. And all the times you made fun of my nose.”
“Can you blame me? Look at that thing.”
“I like your book,” she says. “I like the parts that I’m in.” And she laughs because she thinks she is very funny, and I laugh because fuck am I in love with this girl.
But then I look at the book and stop.
“What?” she says.
“I don’t know what to write next.”
“Scrap,” she says.
It takes me too long to look up.
She holds out her hand. “Come to bed.”
I do. We curl up and look out the window. We face the city, and I see the lights exploding upward and into the sky.
Our city.
Another bomb goes off. “Like fireworks,” Beckan says.
“Yeah.”
We stay still for a very long time. She brings my fingers to her lips and kisses them.
It will never be okay that we left.
But it just has to be okay that we’re alive.
Hannah Moskowitz wrote her first story, about a kitten named Lilly on the run from cat hunters, for a contest when she was seven years old. It was disqualified for viole
nce. First published at sixteen, she is the author of two middle grade and six young adult novels. Her books have received starred reviews, landed a spot on the ALA’s Rainbow Book List, and received a Stonewall Honor.
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