Danny: Two Weeks Ago
Part One: Dawn
Danny: Now
The Grays: Now
Haven and Imogen: Six Weeks Ago
The Grays: Six Weeks Ago
Danny: Now
The Students of Tempest High School: Now
Danny: Two Years Ago
Danny: Now
The Ravens: The Past Ten Years
Danny: Now
The Grays: Now
Danny: The Past Two Years
Danny: Now
The Students of Tempest High School: Now
Danny: Now
Imogen and Rush: Eight Months Ago
Danny: Now
The Trees: Now
Danny: Now
The Grays: One Year Ago
Danny: Now
The Trees: Now
Danny: Now
The Ravens: Six Weeks Ago
Danny: Now
Part Two: Daylight
Imogen and June: Eighteen Months Ago
Danny: Now
Rush and Imogen: Now
Danny: Now
Danny: One Year Ago
Danny: Now
Rush and Imogen: Five Months Ago
Danny: Now
The Bones: Now
Danny: Now
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
The Grays: One Year Ago
Danny: Now
The Students of Tempest High School: The Past Seven Years
Danny: Now
Danny: The Last Five Months
The Grays: Now
Danny: The Night Before
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
Haven and Imogen: Four Years Ago
Danny: Now
Imogen and Rush: Four Months Ago
Danny: Now
Haven: Now
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
The Grays: Four Years Ago
The Grays: Now
Part Three: Nightfall
The Students of Tempest High School: Now
Danny: Now
Imogen and Rush: Five Years Ago
Danny: Now
Haven and Imogen: Four Years Ago
Danny: Now
Emma and Imogen: Five Months Ago
Danny: Now
Emma and Imogen: Two Months Ago
Danny: Now
Danny and Rush: Now
Danny: Now
Emma and Imogen: The Past Ninety Years
Danny: Now
Part Four: Before Midnight
Emma and Ada: One Hundred Years Ago
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
The Ravens: Now
Danny: Now
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
Haven and Imogen: Six Weeks Ago
Danny: Now
The Grays: Now
Haven and Imogen: Two Weeks Ago
Danny: Now
Part Five: Midnight
Danny: Now
Part Six: After Midnight
Danny: Now
Emma and Imogen: Now
Danny: Now
Haven and Imogen: Two Weeks Ago
The Grays: Now
Danny: Now
Acknowledgments
The first time I saw a redwood, I had a brand-new feeling — like discovering a color you’ve never seen before, or smelling snow for the first time if you were raised in a world without cold. Mom and I were driving up Highway 101 in a mostly good mood. We’d called Dad from the airport, and he hadn’t sounded tragic, even though I knew he missed me. And I’d seen a dozen rainbow flags between San Francisco and this stretch of wildness. Every single one felt like a welcome sign.
I checked the GPS and saw that we had less than an hour to Tempest. And then I saw the trees and my breath was gone, my thoughts were gone, my heart tapped out a tight new rhythm.
Mom pulled over at the first opportunity without either of us talking about whether or not we should. I grabbed my phone but dropped it before I could take a picture. I already knew it would be disappointing compared to the real thing. My neck tilted and I drank in the trees. Green splashing against reddish brown. Trunks stretching and stretching until they made homes in the sky. I was staring at a thousand years, maybe two, pressed into a shape I’d always thought I understood. Back in Michigan, tree meant something I could run around in a single breath. Something I could take in with one glance. On the drive up to Tempest, these redwoods broke the rules.
A tree could be so alive it felt like a challenge. It could turn sunlight into long knives and stab them right through you.
“What do you think?” Mom asked, turning to me. The light brought out every drop of red in her brown hair. My hair was that color, too. But the smile Mom gave me was only hers, and I knew it too well — a thin wire of worry. She was wondering if she’d done the right thing. Even though I was the one who had looked at a map and picked Tempest. I was the one who had begged for a new life, my tears salted with guilt.
I turned from her smile, which knew all about those tears, back to the trees, which didn’t know me at all. I studied cracked patterns running up the trunks like arteries. Bark the rusted red of old hearts.
“I love them,” I said.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. This love begged, too. It wanted me to step closer, to learn how solid the trees felt under my fingertips, but I got the sense that if I did, they would pull me deeper into the woods, and I would never be heard from again.
I’m halfway up a redwood tree, wearing a dress as thin and dark as a shadow, a boy breathing hard to keep up.
“I think I liked the idea of climbing better when we were on the ground,” he says.
His name is Sebastian. He’s another transplant to Tempest. Besides that, what I know about him is as flimsy as the name tags they made us wear at new-student orientation. He has sprigs of dark hair. He’s a nervous dancer.
“Don’t you want to see the sun rise?” I call down.
It’s the same question I asked a bunch of people I barely knew, when the house party thrown by some popular senior burned out, melted wax and crisped wick. Sebastian was the only one who actually listened to what I was asking. Who said sure. Which, I realize as I haul my stomach over a branch and pull myself to my feet, is not really the same thing as yes.
“Sure,” he says again. “Remind me why we’re doing this?”
The easy answer comes out. “We’re Californians now! We can’t just eat more avocados and talk . . . really . . . really . . . slowly . . . and act like we fit in.” I know that I sound like I’m joking, but the truth is I feel every difference between this place and the one where I grew up. The food is better. The Mexican food is infinitely better. People smile at strangers. But there’s a difference that I don’t know how to talk about, something in the air that must have a chemical interaction with my blood. It makes me feel strange, so I want to do a strange thing to match. Like climbing a tree that touches the bottom edge of the sky. “This is a time-honored rite of passage that I just made up.”
That answer peels back, and I can see the one underneath it. I don’t want to go home yet. Mom won’t stop asking if I hate the rental cottage, hate how temporary it feels, how it smells like burned dust and the brass beds scream when you turn over at night. I actually think the rental cottage is kind of cozy. I just didn’t want to loosen my grip on the night.
I just needed to breathe in the woods.
I look between my bare feet and find Sebastian’s face below me, all misery, like I’ve put him in a redwood prison and the only good part is looking up my skirt but he’s pretty sure he has to feel guilty about that.
“I don’t care, you know,” I say.
“That we’re both about to die falling from a tree?”
“That you know what color my underwear is.”
I think it’s red. I didn’t pay that much attention when I put it on, but it suddenly feels relevant.
I grab the branch above me, my face pressing into the shaggy bark. It’s softer than I’d imagined, and the limbs of the tree are strong, fanning out in spokes. When I reach a gap, my heart goes glossy with fear. I press off with my feet, and I am touching nothing but air until my hand cuffs the next branch and a scream drops back into my lungs, unused.
I’m not braver than Sebastian; I just want to get to the top more than he does. There is something waiting for me up there, and I won’t be able to name it until I see it.
Now that I’ve gotten past the rough, patchy middle, the tight spin of branches near the top makes the rest easy. It’s like climbing a spiral staircase into the dawn.
“Quick,” I say. “We’re missing it.”
The treetops give way, leaving a jagged view. The gray sky is just black rubbed thin. A pale, secret shade of pink glows where the sky and the world touch.
I stop where I am and sit, my back settling against the trunk. Sebastian pulls himself up and stands right in front of me, his thighs barring the sunrise. “Sit down please,” I say, and he does. Now his face is in my way, but before I can complain, the sunrise turns his hair into glory, softening each dark strand with coral and rose.
“You know what’s weird?” I ask, my eyes catching on a break in the treetops, a pothole between us and the sunrise, right over the town we came from. “Being new feels a little bit like we don’t exist. Like somebody in Tempest has to notice that we’re here before we can really be here.”
He looks down at his fingernails, which are nervously picking apart a small piece of the tree. “Maybe we can notice each other,” he mumbles.
That wasn’t really my point. But he looks so hopeful that I can’t tell him the other half of my thought. It’s too unwelcome. Too Danny, and I’m going to be different here. Somebody who eats avocados and talks slowly enough that people listen.
But not saying it doesn’t stop me from thinking it.
We could die tonight, and it would be as easy as crumpling a name tag.
I pull my phone from the pocket in my dress. The screen’s glare cuts against the soft burn of the sunrise.
“You’re texting?” Sebastian asks, a whine trickling into his voice. It’s not as cute as his nervous dancing, or even his halfhearted tree climbing.
“My mom likes to know I’m alive,” I say. I don’t owe him the rest of the story, even though it itches on my tongue.
Sebastian nods and keeps nodding until it’s clear that he’s working himself up to something. “Do you want to hang out? Sometime?”
I take a quick breath. He’s right — what we’re doing at the moment isn’t hanging out. Nobody climbs to the top of a tree on a date. There are rituals. Rules. Tonight doesn’t have ropes around it, so it’s outside of everything real, a fact that leaves a sour memory-taste in my mouth.
Lip gloss, cigarettes.
“Danny?” Sebastian asks, his confidence draining as quickly as the dark. “What do you think?”
I don’t know how to answer. It has nothing to do with how lovely and kissable Sebastian is. Even after all the girls I’ve been with, I sometimes find myself wanting to kiss a boy, and that makes it harder for a lot of people — I won’t declare myself and stick to one side of a fence. I don’t know how to explain that I don’t even see the fence.
Sebastian does this nervous look-away, and his long, exposed throat begs for my attention. This is when I should let my fingers drift toward his skin. When I would normally lean into the moment, touch my lips to his. Wind nudges me forward, urging me to do it. Yellow deepens to gold and pours in thick and heavy, and he’s goddamn glowing. The moment is here.
This is where a kiss would fit.
But I can’t. There is a weight making me too heavy to move. A hand pinning me in place. I’m not supposed to kiss this boy, and I don’t know why. But I trust the pressure that is telling me no.
“Hanging out is a good plan, Sebastian,” I say, voice deeper than usual, long patches of silence seeping between the words. Almost Californian. “Let’s talk about it when we get back on solid ground. Of course, this tree is my natural habitat now.”
Sebastian smiles, and I think I’ve saved us from death by awkwardness, but a new sound nudges me off balance. At first I assume it’s the trees. Sometimes they are monumentally silent, but when the wind picks up, they creak like doors learning to open.
This sound is different, though. Fainter and farther down. Shushshushshush — a rain of steps.
I look past branches that took an hour to climb and would probably take about three seconds to fall past. Sebastian gives me a seasick grimace. I can finally feel the danger of what we’ve done together. I reach for the nearest thing that I can brace myself against, and it turns out to be Sebastian’s thigh.
Below us, I see a sweatshirt hood but can’t tell anything about the person beneath it, not that I’d be able to recognize someone from Tempest by the top of their head. I twist around to follow their path through the woods, but I’ve already lost them.
“Were you expecting someone else?” Sebastian asks with a laugh that skitters away from him.
The climb down feels longer than the one that took us up. The ground is much harder than the spongy redwood bark. I wiggle my feet back into my shoes. They’re damp. My feet are damp. Everything is covered in a grainy coating of bark, like the trees have been shedding their skin.
Sebastian offers to walk me home, but I say that I’m headed in the other direction, which is true, and that my mom needs me back right away, which is also true and probably has been for hours. Sebastian gives me a last wobble of a stare and starts to walk away. Immediately, relief settles over me like the first of the tree-filtered sunlight.
I walk softly. Trees creak. Doors open.
The mother tree is covered in mosses and ferns and saplings so bright green that it feels like defiance. The downed redwood would be beautiful on its own, but the four figures gathered around it turn it into the center of a scene painted in lace and jeans and silver jewelry, nervous breath and soft skin.
June ragdolls with her back against the trunk, legs stretched out, toes pointing. Flexing. Lelia nuzzles June’s shoulder, drawing swirls that might be shells or galaxies on June’s thigh with a wisp of a paintbrush, adding silver highlights to her warm brown skin, switching without a missed brushstroke to her own peachy-white ankle.
Their softness matches the morning, while Hawthorn stands at a spiky angle to it, pacing through the clearing, worrying a smoky quartz crystal in one hand. She touches the frames of her silver full-moon glasses as she stares into the stone’s heart. Then she crouches and slides one finger through a swirl of pine needles. It looks like she’s switching between books, unable to find the story she wants to read.
Rush stands on one end of the mother tree, bare feet nesting in moss. She turns the tree into a ship, her body a figurehead, as carved as any sea-girl who parts the waves, with swirls of dark hair reaching to the backs of her thighs. She keeps her body still and lets her voice do the roving, chasing down a song. Notes slip away from her, and she lets them go. The right ones will stick. The right ones will stay.
She sings toward the sea, because of Imogen.
This is more or less a normal dawn for the Grays, the splitting open of a new day. But without Imogen, it feels hollow and rotted inside.
Until they see another girl wafting through the forest.
Hawthorn stops moving. June and Lelia stop whispering paint over each other’s skin and secrets in each other’s ears. Rush stops singing.
They trade looks.
The Grays have mastered the art of looking at each other. Everything they do is heavy with meaning, like they’re slipping stones in e
ach other’s pockets to keep their bodies from floating away in a riptide.
Hawthorn steps toward the new girl, but Rush surprises them all by being the first to speak. “You’re here.”
Rush is careful with her words, winces when the rest of the Grays talk too much. She has good reasons, but they love when her voice scratches against their ears, like it’s found an itch they forgot about.
The new girl stares at Rush like maybe she feels that way, too. She has brown hair blessed with red, cut to different lengths, one side short enough to tuck behind her ear, the other hugging her jawline. She wears a short dress, dark blue as the glint on a raven’s feathers. Her skin is pale in a way that says elsewhere, a white girl from a place where they don’t value sun. The Grays notice everything about this girl that can be noticed by staring.
They drink her in.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Her voice is jumpy, like it’s used to leaping away from trouble. “I’m Danny. I don’t know if we know each other. I’ve met a lot of people in the last two weeks. Were you at Mackenzie’s party? I don’t think I saw you. That’s where I came from. I heard someone over here and I . . .”
“Found us,” Hawthorn says. She steps forward again. When there’s a single sunbeam between them, she reaches out and snares Danny’s wrist, turns her hand up to the fresh stream of light. Hawthorn is trying to read this girl, to find where the truth bit into her palm and left marks. “Don’t worry,” she says with a victory smirk. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
Danny laughs, and it should be a nervous sound, but it’s not. Rush can hear the music inside it. Hawthorn wants to put it in one of her mother’s glass jars, the ones that line the barn in every size and shape and color, waiting for needing fingers to pry them open. The Grays want everything about this girl. They’ve been waiting for her.
Haven knew that her sister was planning something big.
She always got pouncy right before a spell, like she might give you an enormous hug for no reason, or she might jump down your throat for doing something wrong. Her definition of wrong was always different from Mom and Dad’s. So no matter what Haven did, she was always wrong.
Haven had the house to herself on the night Imogen took her backpack and went for the woods. Mom and Dad were on a trip to the Bay Area to get “real sushi” and spend the night with the friends they actually liked, the ones who thought living in Tempest was a bad joke.
The Lost Coast Page 1
