“When the moon’s risen, meet us at the mother tree,” Hawthorn says. “The fallen one, where we met last time.”
I grab my bag and shoulder the ridiculous weight of five textbooks. “And moonrise would be . . . around . . . ?”
Hawthorn sighs as she digs her toes back into her sandals. “Nine thirty.”
It does not go unnoticed when the Grays tramp back to eighth period straight from the woods, June Ocampo twirling a great big knife.
It started ironically at first, the way everybody calls them the weird girls, because everyone is a little bit weird in Northern California. To most of the students at Tempest High, normal is about as great as syphilis.
But there’s the way they named themselves the Grays, like they can claim an entire color. The way they never show at parties, but sometimes people catch them running naked through the woods after midnight, shrieking. How June wears lacy baby-doll dresses but also necklaces that look like tiny bird skulls. And Hawthorn keeps that smelly leather notebook tucked into the pockets of her homemade dresses. Plus, every time Lelia Boyle catches someone calling them the weird girls, she corrects them with a shout loud enough to rattle the lockers in junior hall. “It’s WEIRDOS.” Then she smiles a switchblade smile and brushes her shoulders, like she’s proud of herself for some reason.
And there’s Imogen. She’s the only one most of them like, or maybe not like, but feel drawn to. But something’s wrong with Imogen, and nobody can figure out what. Wrong enough that they don’t even want to make up stories about it.
The senior girls gossip about Sebastian instead, and watch the weirdos roll their eyes and close ranks. Lelia is the only one who responds, hooking her thumbs under the floral suspenders she wears with a black muscle T before she hisses. It becomes a game. Get Lelia Boyle to hiss at you. Ten points.
And then the cloud of Grays shifts, and they notice someone standing at the back of the group, one hand bolted to the other elbow, hiding her left eye behind the sweep of an uneven bob. The new girl has gotten swallowed up by the Grays.
Her look is equal parts girly and grunge, green tights with runs in them layered under a short black skirt. The obligatory flannel, though she’s wearing it shrugged off her pale white shoulders to catch the sun. Anyone who’s noticed her would say that she doesn’t quite stand out and she doesn’t quite fit in. Only a few of them even know her name.
Danny Something.
On any normal day, her arrival would have been important, but on this day, they lost track of her. Now she’s standing in the middle of the Grays, looking like she took a wrong turn and ended up on a dark road she doesn’t know the name of.
Itake my time getting home, which is a challenge, since the town part of Tempest is so small. A single strip of Highway 101, so short that you can watch it taper into the trees in either direction. There’s a huddle of storefronts, old-fashioned bells making a big deal every time a door opens.
I stop into the diner and study the menu. They’re not beholden to one category of food — they serve everything from chorizo omelets to sandwiches that are mostly sprouts to garlic-drenched pasta. I order the pasta to go. I’m begging forgiveness for the class I skipped, something I hope Mom will never hear about. Balancing a Styrofoam tower in one hand, I cross 101 and walk the last quarter mile.
An old-school neon sign, faded by daylight, marks Tempest Gardens. The cottages are quiet at midafternoon. Most people staying here are tourists, packing up cars filled with kids and coolers, coming back around dusk with hiking gear and bodily odors to match.
Mom’s car is, of course, missing. She hasn’t said much about her new job at a medical facility an hour away, which means she probably hates it. That fact settles on me like summer dust. Thick, hot, uncomfortable.
I fling open the screen door to cottage nine, put down the food, and peel off my shirt to take a shower.
Then I realize that Rush is there. For one stupid second, I think it’s for me. She wants to talk to me in that rough voice, or sing to me in the smooth one I heard in the woods.
I crash hard into the rocks of reality. She’s wearing an apron over jeans, and intense blue rubber gloves. Rush is cleaning the room where I semi-live.
I grab my top off the floor and put it back on over the black bralette I’ve been wearing under everything, the one that promises lacy fun. I cross my arms. Defending my boobs from — what? The fact that Rush isn’t looking at them? “How did you get here so fast?”
“Broom,” she says.
She doesn’t signal, in any way, that this is a joke.
“Oh.”
Rush points out the window at the parking lot, edged by cabins with lace curtains, trees crowding in like bodyguards.
“I have a car,” she says, and there it is, in its rust-nibbled glory. A piece of the bumper missing. A crack in the windshield spidering up from a corner. Duct tape on door handles. I can’t see the spells that she uses to hold it together, but I can’t imagine anything else would.
Rush crouches to clean one of the brass beds with some kind of solution. It smells like chemical death and stings my eyes even from a distance.
I don’t know what to say, but I know it’s my job to come up with something. Rush is the quiet one.
“Saving money for college?” I ask.
“One dirty bed at a time,” she says quickly, a melody strung through the words. It almost distracts me from the awkward truth that she’s cleaning the bed I sleep in. The bed I dream in. The bed I sweat and toss and do other things in, when I’m alone and I need to feel something good.
Words bully their way out of me. “It’s funny to see you here after . . . you know . . .”
“The woods? The wind? The boy with a hole where his heart used to be?”
“The way you talk is different,” I say. Rush looks up at me sharply, as if I’ve poked her in the side. I don’t know how to tell her that different is the best compliment I can give. I definitely don’t want her to think that I’m making fun of her, so I stumble even deeper into the pit of my own feelings. “I was going to say that I love it, but that sounded like way too much in my head, and people are always telling me I’m too much . . .”
“I have synesthesia,” she says, attacking the long, skinny bones of the brass headboard. “Lexical-gustatory, which means I taste words. Not all of them. And when people talk fast enough, it doesn’t really give my brain time to do it.” She slows down on the last bar, scrubbing at a spot of dull black, but it looks like she’s somewhere else entirely. A place where dirty beds don’t exist. “Synesthesia,” she says again, slowly. “I’m lucky that word tastes good. It’s like cold, cold chocolate ice cream.”
She starts cleaning really hard, and I’m feeling weird about the fact that I’m standing here doing nothing. “Do you need any help?”
She looks up at me. Dark hair. Shining blue eyes. Almost amused. “You want to help me clean your room.”
“I want to help you find your lost friend, but I’m not sure I can do that. Please accept scrubbing instead.”
“Imogen would call that a false equivalency,” Rush says, and goes back to her little cart for more death spray.
“So . . . no.”
Rush crouches again, but this time she doesn’t clean. She sits back on her heels. “I need you to find her.”
Not we. Rush has peeled herself apart from the rest of the Grays, if only for a moment.
I follow an instinct to the point of no return. “You and Imogen were a couple?”
Rush nods slowly. I remember Imogen all at once, the girl we’re actually talking about. The one with the red hair and the winter skin and the hollow stare. She probably used to look at Rush as intensely as Rush is looking at me right now.
She probably used to do more than that.
“I need to finish in here,” Rush says, like she’s all up in my thoughts.
Is she?
This girl is a witch. Maybe that’s what her magic is. Does she feel me wanting to step closer, to set my hand wh
ere her glove and her shirt don’t quite meet? Soft fingers on soft skin. Standing close and quiet, a river of unspoken questions.
Part of me is frantic, afraid that she knows.
Part of me is buzzing with hope that she does.
I go outside the cabin and wait around the back on a decorative little bench that it’s possible nobody has sat on for ten years. Every time I try to walk away, I loop right back, like I’m tying knots.
When I open the door an hour later, Rush is gone, and the furniture gleams.
They were in love.
It was possible but not true for a long time. And then they were in Imogen’s room one charcoal afternoon in the middle of winter. In Tempest, winter was a season of dark, endless water, the world outside lashed with rain.
It felt like summer had forgotten about them.
“We need to make our own heat,” Imogen said. She pulled her body on top of Rush’s and braced herself. A joke. Until it wasn’t. Rush was as hot as coals from sitting so close for so long. They kissed with the quick burn of paper, and once it started, they couldn’t stop. Rush and Imogen ate through hours like that, mouths and bodies pushing against each other in a constantly changing balance, the kind of kissing that Rush had always believed in with the same fervor that she believed in magic.
Their past shifted as they told it to each other, revealing itself in layers, a slow undressing. The times that they’d met each other’s eyes and laughed when no one else knew what was funny. That afternoon when Imogen had heard Rush play the cello, once upon a time. All those nights they’d stayed up later than the rest of the Grays, Imogen getting Rush to split a cigarette with her, but only because she’d brought a jar of honey to cure Rush’s throat after the smoke ripped it up.
Imogen kissed Rush’s throat.
Rush said she was ready.
“For what?” Imogen asked.
“For . . . you.”
“You can’t be,” Imogen said. “We just started.”
“I think we started a long time ago,” Rush said. “We just figured it out now.”
But Imogen wanted to be careful, because Rush meant so much. Because she didn’t want to rip at Rush’s heart. Because there was no amount of honey you could pour on a wound like that.
“Okay,” Rush said. “We’ll wait.”
Walking through the woods that night, I text Mom every five minutes.
I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.
I told her that I was meeting up with people who could potentially become my friends. I didn’t use the word Grays. She doesn’t know, specifically, about Hawthorn and June and Lelia and Rush. What would I tell her? They think they’re witches? I think they’re witches, but I’m not sure? I might be a witch, too, but don’t worry?
Nope. Nope. Nope.
I text the same words, like a heartbeat.
I’m alive.
Mom asks about my day even though we went over all this at dinner.
Did your teachers spring any tests on you?
I used to tell her the grades I got on every quiz. The feelings I had about every friend. People said we were so close.
Loved that garlic pasta! Yum!
Mom abuses exclamation points, trying to convince me that everything is good. But I can’t seem to move my thumbs.
You are so thoughtful today!
She doesn’t know how much it stings to be reminded that I’m not a thoughtful daughter most days. Besides, it isn’t even true. Today I skipped a class. Today I stripped in front of someone, even if it was by accident.
I shove the phone into my pocket.
Walking deeper into the woods is surprisingly easy. The moon blasts hard enough to create its own sort of noon. I want to spread a picnic blanket and stretch my body out, basking in the silver that’s been swapped for gold.
The mother tree sprawls at the center of a clearing. The mother tree is dead, technically, fallen and tipped sideways, but there’s so much life taking root on its soft bark: silvered ferns and even tiny trees.
June and Lelia sit in the moon-shade, using tarot cards to play a game like it’s a regular deck. I think Lelia’s winning, but maybe she just likes to crow. Hawthorn is sitting cross-legged on the tree’s long body. She has her face turned toward the sky. She’s counting stars. Or renaming them. Trying to move them with her mind, maybe? Moonlight drips down her long throat, studs her natural hair like fairy lights.
Rush is standing at the end of the tree. I walk around to join her and find myself staring at a claw of roots, the place where the tree used to become part of the earth. It’s taller than Rush, ringed by spikes of tortured, twisted wood, and rotting toward total darkness at the center.
Rush is singing into that darkness. A whisper song in a minor key. A mourning. For Sebastian? Or Imogen? For whatever they had together? Is that gone, or does Rush want to get it back?
Is that why I’m here? To save their love story?
To save all of them from having to live without this girl?
I can feel Imogen like she’s nearby, watching. Now that I’ve seen her at school, I can draw her face up when I close my eyes. I open them fast because I don’t know how to save her.
My breath thickens in my throat. That must be how the rest of the Grays feel every second.
Rush and I are caught together, staring at the end of a ripped-up tree that has more presence, more pull, than Imogen did standing in the hallway. Even death has more life in it than her body does.
Rush sings, and I wait for her to stop.
She sings and I don’t ever want her to stop.
My arm brushes against hers. She shiver-jumps. When she looks at me and smiles, the beckoning darkness of the tree roots is overpowered. Some people have smiles like explosions. Rush has one like a flower, soft and uncurling. “You came.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m all yours.”
There is a moment where it’s just the two of us before Hawthorn slides her bare legs down the mother tree and the rest of her follows, thudding to the ground. “Come on,” she says. “The hermit isn’t far.”
“But I was winning!” Lelia cries, throwing down the Queen of Cups.
“Imogen’s gone,” Hawthorn says in a Do I really have to remind you tone. “Nobody’s winning.”
There is magic in the woods tonight.
The trees feel it.
The trees feel everything.
This is how redwoods survive. Yes, their bark is unrotting. True, they block the sunlight so other trees can’t choke their view. But that’s not enough to weather centuries. The trees know every whisper, every footfall, every prick of wind. They keep a catalog of beauties: the lemony tang of bark, the glossy red of heartwood, the long glide of forever, and the dart of a season. They know what happens in sunlight and darkness, and what slides through the spaces between.
Magic is moving fast tonight.
Some of it is trapped in human bodies.
The trees do not bother with human names, so much learning and forgetting. Humans might as well be fireflies. They live a breath longer. They love a spark brighter. Blink, and they’ll be gone. But there are other things in the woods.
Things that linger, that settle, that stay.
The trees know those names.
Death is one.
We tramp through the woods, following some path I can’t see. The tops of the trees are half a mile above us, but for some reason I feel claustrophobic. “So how is seeing some old guy in the woods supposed to help?”
“What makes you think the hermit is old?” Lelia asks.
“What makes you think he’s a guy?” Hawthorn says, hot on her heels.
“Well, he is a guy. But it’s best not to make assumptions,” June says. “For instance, Lelia is nonbinary.”
I stare for a second, my brain frozen.
“Don’t worry — she gave me blanket permission to tell people,” June adds.
Lelia presses her cheek against June’s shoulder as they walk, which is pretty imp
ressive friendship choreography. “I kind of hate having to tell people,” Lelia admits, “but I do want them to know, so June is helping me out.”
“Right,” I say. I know a little bit about nonbinary genders, but where I grew up, people have barely wrapped their minds around gay. I’ve been waiting to meet anyone who can handle more, and here they are, and I’m the one who can’t keep up. “Uh, what are your pronouns?”
“She is fine, at least for now,” Lelia says with a shrug. “And while we’re here, I’m not allo either.”
I silently thank the internet for teaching me that allosexual is one end of yet another spectrum, with asexual at the other.
“You’re ace?” I ask.
“Gray ace,” she says with another shrug.
“She’s a double gray.” June beams.
The whole thing seems so ordinary and everyday to them. These new maybe-friends of mine can’t feel that they’re an earthquake, rattling everything into new places, breaking the ground open.
“I’m a girl,” June says. “Of the girly variety. And I like girl-types.”
“She’s pretty proud of that triple crown,” Lelia says, the kind of teasing that’s pure sweetness.
“I prefer the term femme as fuck,” June says, practically shouting it. “And I’m proud of anyone who isn’t afraid of who they are,” she says at a slightly more normal volume. “It’s not an easy thing.”
Of course, as soon as I think California is an earthly paradise made of rainbows, the Grays tell me it’s not that simple. Still, I can’t help but say, “It might not be easy anywhere, but it’s different here. I can feel it.” Like seismic activity. “What about you?” I ask Hawthorn.
She turns back to me, hair bobbing as she steps. “Ora gave me endless speeches about how you shouldn’t be too eager to label and box people.”
“Ora?” I ask.
“Hawthorn’s mom,” June pitches in.
“Really?” I figured from the way Hawthorn was talking that Ora was her older sister. And I’ve never met anyone who uses their parents’ first names. Is that a California thing, too? Or just a Hawthorn thing?
The Lost Coast Page 4
