“Okay, so you don’t have a campground,” the boy said, singling her out. “But you know something I can do.”
Imogen peaked her eyebrows. She wasn’t used to people noticing as much as she did. “There was a hermit who lived in a burned-out tree for about a thousand years. But she died two months ago, and nobody’s taken her place.”
“Because it’s sacred,” Hawthorn hissed.
“Because it’s filled with spiders,” Lelia added.
“Same thing,” Imogen said, using her midnight-colored nails to flutter away any other arguments before they even formed.
“Sounds perfect,” the boy concluded with a smile.
Imogen took a Sharpie out of June’s flowered backpack and drew a map on his arm. She gave the hermit’s tree a nice, juicy X.
The boy nodded thanks at all of them, spending an extra second on Hawthorn. She frowned at him in a way that made him smile again, his dimples pricking their way into the hearts of the Grays, even if they weren’t interested in that way. He told them, “You should come by. I’m staying for at least three days.” And then he stayed forever.
As far as the Grays were concerned, they had made a hermit.
The Grays walk me back down to Hawthorn’s farm. It looked wild an hour ago. Now it’s a tame bed of flowers and a gently rotting old barn.
Hawthorn is strangely quiet. She disappears into the farmhouse and comes back a minute later with a set of keys dangling from her palm. A substantial chunk of smoky quartz on the end of the key chain catches the dying light.
She presses the stone into my palm. “Hold this. It should ground you.”
I form a fist around the hard lines of unfinished crystal. The angles of the quartz press into my skin as hard as someone shoving their body against mine while we kiss, the pressure like a point on a map, telling me, You are here, you are here, you are here.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“The stone is . . .”
“No,” I say, unwilling to turn this moment into another magic lesson. The Grays are holding something back, and I’m not going to let this stay unspoken. I clutch the smoky quartz harder, almost hoping that Hawthorn’s mother rushes out of the barn, takes this mess right out of our hands.
But no one comes to save us.
“If Neil really did die in that tree, it wasn’t a natural death,” Hawthorn says, tugging at a tiny braid that runs through her curls.
“Do you think someone used magic to kill him?” I ask. There’s no point in dancing around it.
Hawthorn shakes her head. “Witchcraft and murder don’t cross paths,” she said. “If for no other reason than the cost always comes back to the witch who cast the working. It would be easier to kill someone outright.”
“And risk being caught?” I ask. “What if someone was upset enough, and they didn’t care about the price?”
The sky glows, a flashburn that means the day will be over soon. The flare of life that comes right before death. I think about Sebastian in the tree, living at the very edge of his comfort zone. I was the thing that he reached for, right before death. And I barely noticed how important that moment was. I was trying so hard to find the Grays, even though I didn’t know it yet.
Did someone want Sebastian dead? Neil, too? What about Imogen?
Hawthorn is sighing up a storm. “If someone really did want to kill people with magic, they would have to find a way to do it that diverges from every legitimate form of witchcraft. We don’t make spells for this.”
“It’s against every law of nature,” Rush whispers.
“But the laws of nature are breaking,” Lelia says. “Or at least severely cracking.”
“Neil is dead,” June says. “Our Neil.”
“At least his bones are buried now,” Lelia says to Hawthorn. “And not in that creepy store.” The Grays put the bones to rest in the woods near the High Point as I watched, still trembling and coughing up the last of my vision.
“Are you okay?” Rush asks, and I think it’s for me — but she’s talking to Hawthorn this time.
Lelia sets a hand to the back of Hawthorn’s neck as she hangs her head low, working the muscles there, releasing a tightness that must have been building since we first found the water in the hermit’s tree. “Get Danny home. We can’t have her mom stopping us now.”
Hawthorn drives me in her mother’s truck, and this time I leave the silence between us untouched. It starts to rain quietly, unexpected drops cutting across the sky, as sunset glazes the town and the trees.
By the time we turn into the Tempest Gardens parking lot, the rain is already stopping, gone as quickly as it came. Hawthorn walks me toward the cottage, one hand on my back, her long fingers splayed from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.
She stops me a few feet from cottage nine. I assume that she’ll knock on the door, deliver me home, but instead she pulls me around the side, into the mulch of the border garden. There’s only one type of flower here, a Barbie-pink nasturtium. Hawthorn looks down at them as if this is all their fault. I crumple a few under my feet as she tucks me into the space between the corner and the window.
“You’re sure it was him?” Hawthorn asks. “I mean, absolutely sure?” Her voice is different than usual. It reminds me of the redwoods I’ve seen that have been hit by lightning, their tops stripped of bark, pale insides showing.
It takes me a second to find the truth, and then another second to be sure of it. “You and the hermit?”
Hawthorn shrugs.
“Do the rest of the Grays know?”
Is it terrible that I want to know all the things you don’t tell each other?
“They do and they don’t,” she says. “I couldn’t really talk about it with them.” She looks down at her feet in their cloth sneakers. They’re damp from standing in the border garden after the rain.
I see his feet in bare earth.
I feel something, a wisp of what the hermit felt for her. It’s there, as warm as the last droplets of sunlight.
“The Grays didn’t understand about Neil?” I ask. “Why?” I think about all of the restrictions we put on each other, all the ways we don’t understand. I didn’t want to believe that could happen here.
Hawthorn squirms, looking up at the sky. “Except for living in a tree, Neil was really . . . ordinary.”
“Ohhh.” Ordinary is the one of the few things the Grays wouldn’t be able to get their otherwise open minds around. But I can’t imagine Hawthorn ran into that particular quality a lot, growing up on Ora’s farm. “Maybe that made him special to you. Maybe that’s something about him you actually liked.”
Hawthorn winces, as if I found a truth she was planning on keeping hidden from herself for a little while longer.
I give her one of my secrets in trade. “That boy we found? Sebastian? He was out in the woods because of me. We climbed a tree together. We almost kissed.”
Hawthorn nods, like she hears all the parts I’m not saying.
She grabs me by the wrists, gently, and pulls me toward her, her lips softened by a lifetime of beeswax. I meet her with a matching sadness, slowness. The funeral kissing falls away quickly, and here is the heart of it. Her skin. My breath. She pulls me closer, sets her fingers lightly against my collarbone, delicate, because something’s about to break. I’m kissing her like she’s a boy I barely know. She’s kissing me like I’m a boy she’ll never get to love.
The door of cottage nine creaks wide.
I figure we’ll rip apart from each other. I’ve had enough scares, enough interrupted moments and close calls to know how this works. But Hawthorn keeps her hold on my wrist, she keeps her body close to mine, and I don’t let go.
“Danny,” Mom says, peeking around the edge of the cottage. “Are you out here?” She has a pencil shot through her dark-brown hair, but it’s falling everywhere. She gives us a very serious look, which summons the normal, confident Hawthorn up from the depths. Her scowl makes Mom smile. “I guess I should be happy t
hat you’re bringing them home now.”
Them.
All the people I kiss.
Does she think I’m experimenting?
Starved for someone to be with?
A queer girl who has to kiss everyone she stumbles across, because that’s part of the deal?
I don’t want to ask, because the answer will probably break my heart. I don’t want to tell her the truth about the Grays, because she’ll never get her mind around it. She’s willing to accept that she’s got a messed-up teenage daughter. But would she believe that she has a magical one? There are parts of me — maybe the best parts — that she will never see, because they’re too strange.
If the word queer would make her cringe, witch would send her running.
I flare with a blush. She probably thinks I’m embarrassed at being caught, but the truth is that this redness goes deeper, thrusting angry roots. Mom is willing to see only part of my story. She wants this to be easier to understand — wants me to be easier to understand. She turns around and waits for me in the doorway, fingers tapping on the frame, eyebrows up.
If you pressed someone to talk about Imogen Lilly in middle school, they would probably say she was the girl with curly red hair and a strange absence of freckles, the girl who strayed to the edge of the woods during lunch and ate her sandwich in the shadows, the girl who looked up at the treetops instead of keeping her eyes on the ball during gym, no matter what sport they were supposed to be playing. She didn’t belong to any clubs or cliques. She didn’t talk to anyone.
Mostly, she whispered to herself.
And then high school came like a whirlwind, and she was right at the center of it, unruffled by the storms that slapped everyone else out of their personalities and left them naked and shivering.
Imogen arrived at Tempest High with her own style, solid opinions on every possible topic, and a smile that could burn through fog. Everyone noticed her long black skirts, tiny black shorts, shirts with no bra underneath, messy red braids, and wide-brimmed black hats that would have looked stupid on anybody else but on her, somehow, looked right.
One day Erin Wong was crying in the bathroom stall that was pretty much reserved for girls who were upset or getting sick. Imogen kicked in the door, put an arm right around Erin’s shoulders, and said, “What did he do?” not in a sweet, caring whisper-tone — more like her voice was a knife and could reach all the way across the school, cutting whoever had hurt this girl.
Erin cried harder. When she finally calmed down, Imogen was sitting on the tiles with her, pulling things out of her scaly black bag.
The next day, Erin was wearing a tiny bottle of water around her neck and smiling. By the end of the school year, half the girls in the sophomore class had bottles that didn’t quite match but all carried a few precious drops of water in them.
When the boys asked, the girls shrugged mysteriously and said it was a new style. Nobody gave Imogen away. The boys still smiled as she walked toward them, their faces — and sometimes other parts of their anatomy — perking as they passed her in the hall.
They all wanted her, in different ways, even if they didn’t know why, even if they couldn’t name the lack that she was supposed to be filling. The students treated her like a drug dealer or a minor goddess or both. And everyone put up with the Grays, a gang of shadows that followed her around wherever she went.
Mom can’t be too pissed about catching me with Hawthorn, because she lets me eat the leftover lo mein from the Chinese restaurant in Arcata, the one that she stops at on her way home from work when she doesn’t want to cook.
I haven’t actually broken a rule, so she doesn’t puncture the silence with anything except small talk.
What do you want for lunch tomorrow?
Should we schedule a call with your father this weekend?
Are all the girls at your school that pretty?
I answer.
Anything.
Sure.
No.
There are plenty of technically pretty girls at school, even openly not-straight ones. But the Grays are special. After them, anyone else would pale in comparison. I realize, with a cold stone in my stomach, that I haven’t even considered kissing any other person at Tempest High.
If I told Mom that, she would probably give me a hug and extra lo mein and call it progress.
But what if it means that I need the Grays too much? What if it means that they have all the power and I have nothing?
I do my homework, and when it’s filled in enough that I won’t get in trouble tomorrow, I change into drawstring shorts and a T-shirt, climb into bed early.
I turn from one side of the bed to the other, mash my face into the feather-soft mattress like that will somehow cut off the oxygen to my fear. But the way it felt to take Neil’s final breaths sinks roots. It sends tendrils outward. Starts to grow.
Two boys killed in the redwoods.
One girl gone.
I look out the window, and the trees are waiting like a collection of needles, piercing the evening blue. It won’t be fully dark out for a while. Twilight has separation anxiety; it sticks to the trees.
I close my eyes, but I don’t fall asleep.
Iwould get out of bed in the middle of the night, and they’d find me three neighborhoods away. I dragged myself toward the fistful of lights at the center of town, down sidewalks and street margins so skinny my body barely fit. When I walked through the liquor store parking lot, I sliced my heel open on a broken bottle.
I called Dad that time.
He called Mom.
In the emergency room, she asked in a ragged voice, “Were you sleepwalking?”
I had done that. Torn up her hope that things were going to get better. And even worse: I couldn’t name what I was doing, or where I was going, or answer the most important question, the one that started gushing out of people like blood from an unexpected wound.
Why?
The school counselor asked it when she handed me a calendar of the month of May, with the days that I’d missed school blacked out. It looked like a building with half the lights off.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“Nowhere. Anywhere.” I had mostly been in the fields outside of town, the abandoned barns with sunlight pushing through slits between the boards.
“Why did you feel that it was acceptable to leave?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
The counselor wrote a report that said I was obstructing the process. My teachers were asked to report it to the office immediately when I didn’t show up for class or if I took more than two minutes to use the bathroom.
Which meant no more kissing Hallie Carpenter when I was supposed to be taking history quizzes. That turned out to be a stupid worry, because Hallie didn’t want to kiss me anymore. She told me one day that we’d made out twenty times and she felt like if we did it again, it would actually mean something.
Apparently twenty-one was the magic number.
After that, I had to work at the edges of Mom’s schedule, find time when I could disappear into the woods or the back seat of a car. The people I went with didn’t care if we made out once or twenty-one times.
They barely cared if they knew my name.
I ran my hands over hips and under shirts and waited for excitement to take its rightful place. But all I felt was skin. I was trying to chase a feeling backward. I strained through each moment, hoping that if I worked hard enough, I could end up in that place where finding someone to kiss was enough.
A girl in the class above mine with a blunt black bob and a history of staring at me drove me out to the lake and threw me into the back of her Jeep with a pile of blankets. A half an hour in and a few items of clothing down, she flicked my hair with her breath as she laughed. “You’re so lucky you’re a girl slut. If you did this with guys, you’d be pregnant by now. Or worse.”
I sat up so fast I almost threw up. I got out of her car and walked the rim of the entire lake before I called M
om to pick me up.
I didn’t feel lucky.
“You’re depressed because you’re having random, meaningless . . . hookups,” Mom said an hour later as she paced around my tiny room. She looked mad, but I knew the anger was just something she’d slapped on over her guilt so she felt fully dressed.
Guilt was a naked feeling.
“I’m not depressed,” I said. I clicked open the metal tab on a can of Vernors. The ginger ale sizzled down my throat, coated my nervous stomach without shaving off the sharp edge. “And please, please don’t say hookups.”
I wanted to be better for her. But I kept getting out of the car at red lights. Walking through private property at dawn. Knocking on strangers’ doors in neighborhoods where people owned multiple guns and would have been happy for an excuse to take one out.
And then: suspension, grounding, screaming, apologies.
And then: California.
A four-hour flight where, for once, I didn’t want to run. Which was good, because there was no escape. Nowhere to go except into the howling sky. Pinned to my seat, I watched the landscape change beneath me. Rising, falling, endless curves and shadow-rich valleys. I put one finger on the window and traced everything beautiful.
In the morning, long fingers of cold rake across Tempest, forcing the Grays into jackets and sweaters. They stamp their feet in the corner of the senior parking lot, four pairs of hands wrapped around steaming, sweet-smelling cups from Coffee Gods.
“Coffee is magic,” Lelia mutters, sticking her face into the steam. “I will fight anyone who doesn’t believe it.”
June bumps Lelia’s hip with hers. “That’s what caffeine does. It triggers your fight-or-flight impulses.”
“Good,” Lelia says. “I’m a fighter, not a lover.”
Rush tugs at the bottom hem of her long maroon sweater. It goes almost to her knees, worn over black velvet leggings with her silver-laced boots. She looks fancy, by Rush standards. She’s clutching an extra cup, sipping from the one in her right hand and leaving the left outstretched. “I hope Danny shows up soon. Her latte will get cold.”
The Lost Coast Page 10
