by Katrina Leno
“Huh,” Magpie said, and then, realizing that this was not nearly enough of a reaction, she added, “Murdered. Wow. I mean. That’s terrible.”
“Not murdered—dead. She just said dead.” He paused. “But honestly, she was kind of, like, tripping out. Seeing things, swiping at things that weren’t even there. I don’t think Brandon’s actually dead. I think she probably just took some bad acid. There was some at the party, you know? I saw that junior girl, Nicole Lamb, having a full dialogue with a bathroom sink. I had to pee while she was in there because she wouldn’t leave until they’d finished their conversation.”
“Are you serious?”
“I got her some water, and she seemed okay otherwise.”
“Well, I hope Brandon’s all right,” Magpie said, just a little flatly.
“Me too.”
“But I’m not gonna lie. I would have liked to see Allison losing her mind like that.”
“It was kind of entertaining, to be honest,” Ben admitted, smiling.
“Are you telling her about Allison?” Clare asked, suddenly appearing next to the swim platform, pulling herself up with a bag of chips in one hand. “Can I have these?”
“Sure,” Magpie said.
“It was bonkers.” Clare lowered herself into the water, careful not to get the chips wet. “She was losing her mind. I’m so glad I don’t do drugs. What’s that famous commercial? This is your brain on drugs? Well, I’ve seen Allison’s brain on drugs, and it’s a scary, scary place to be.”
Magpie smiled. She really would have liked to have seen it, to watch Allison, confused and shaky and insisting Brandon was dead. If anyone could have emerged from their first visit to Near with any memory of the place, it was going to be Allison. Magpie almost had to give her a little credit.
“You’ve got the right idea, Mags,” Clare said through a mouthful of chips. “This is the life, right here. I can’t remember the last time I was in a pool.”
Magpie laughed. “You were just in my pool the other week! Remember?”
“Oh, right,” Clare said, but she looked a little confused, as if the memory was fuzzy, and instead of saying more, she put another handful of chips into her mouth, chewing slowly as Ben continued talking about the party, about meeting Luke’s boyfriend before Allison had broken everything up.
But Magpie wasn’t listening.
Magpie studied Clare.
It could just have been because she was drunk, but Clare’s eyes were roaming around the backyard, as if she were trying to remember something.
Finally, her gaze landed on the garden shed.
She looked at it for a long time.
Ben kept talking. He thought Luke and his boyfriend made a cute couple.
Clare kept looking at the garden shed.
Magpie kept looking at Clare.
Neither of the girls blinked for at least a full minute, then Clare did, slowly, dreamily, as if she were emerging from a vision. She shook her head and turned back around, and they locked eyes, she and Magpie, and Clare had this expression on her face, as if there was something on the tip of her tongue that she could not quite name but was there all the same.
“We should go,” she said loudly, probably louder than she had meant to, and Ben stopped midsentence to look at her.
“Go? We just got here.”
“I have a curfew. My mom will lose her mind. And I don’t want to walk home alone,” Clare said.
Magpie didn’t doubt that it was all true, that Clare almost certainly did have a curfew, that her mother would worry.
But there was something else, too, some slither of caution that had wormed its way behind her eyes.
Magpie knew Clare didn’t remember.
But she knew, also, that Clare had realized there was something she didn’t remember, and that being here, in this backyard, so close to the shed, to the doorway to Near, had reminded her of it.
Magpie didn’t blame her at all.
It was natural to be afraid of the things we don’t understand.
Even more natural to be afraid of the things we can’t quite remember.
“It’s all right,” Magpie said, mostly to Ben. “We can catch up this weekend. And then we’ll have the whole summer. I won’t even charge you guys admission to the pool.”
Clare had already pulled herself onto the swim platform; she was dancing from foot to foot, trying to get dry enough to put her dress back on. Ben was still leaning against the edge of the pool, looking at Magpie as if the last thing he wanted to do was leave her.
Magpie smiled at him. “Can’t let her walk home alone,” she said, nodding her chin toward Clare, who was even now still so drunk that she was struggling to get her dress over her head.
Ben kept looking at Magpie, and she realized that in another lifetime, in another world, this would have been exactly what Margaret Lewis would have wanted for herself at sixteen years old: nights warm enough for swimming and moonlight so bright it was like midday and stars as far as the eye could see and a kind, lovely boy in front of her who looked as if, had Clare not taken that moment to dry-heave into the bushes next to the pool, he might have even kissed her.
He laughed. Magpie laughed. Clare moaned.
“I’ll be out front,” she said. “I think I drank a little too much. Mags, I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Magpie and Ben watched her go around the side of the house. Ben took a half step back, and Magpie could feel exactly what he felt: that the moment had passed. It was getting just a little too late. The magic hour had turned sour and stale.
“Ben,” Magpie started, keeping her voice a whisper, a secret from Clare and the entire universe. “What if I told you there was a place where you could have everything you wanted? Anything in the entire world, you could just wish it and it would appear in front of you.”
Ben thought about it for a moment, and Magpie realized that this was just one of Ben’s many refreshing qualities: When you asked him a question, he took the time to really consider it, to really hear you. He didn’t just wait for his turn to talk.
“It sounds nice in theory,” he said finally. “I mean… Of course there are things I want. There are things everybody wants.”
“And you could have them. All of them,” Magpie said, trying not to sound too eager, trying to keep her voice light.
“Hypothetically?” he asked.
“Hypothetically, yeah.”
“Hypothetically, yes. Of course.” He paused, looking upward, his eyes unfocused and faraway.
Magpie’s head still ached. A steady thrum in the exact center of her skull.
He looked back down at her and smiled. “But I don’t know. I’m pretty happy here. It sounds like that might get a little boring. Nothing to work for, you know? No challenges, nothing to accomplish. I don’t know. It sounds like it would get old pretty quickly.”
Magpie smiled.
And Ben cocked his head slightly, perhaps because he couldn’t figure out why his answer made Magpie’s smile look so sad.
“Better get going,” she said. “Clare’s waiting.”
“I’ll talk to you soon, Mags, okay?”
“Yeah. Good night.”
Ben gave her a little wave, then followed Clare around the side of the house.
I like him.
I like him, too, Magpie thought.
You could change your mind. You could stay. You could be with him.
“Let’s say I did,” Magpie said. She was talking to Hither, but at the same time, she was talking to herself. Or—those things were one and the same. “Let’s say I stayed. And let’s say we get together, Ben and I, and let’s say—for the sake of argument—that the disappearances of my father, my English teacher, and my sexual abuser are never linked back to me. Let’s pretend everything works out perfectly. It’s a possibility, right? Ben and I start dating, Clare and I become best friends, Allison never fully remembers what happened in Near…” Magpie looked up at the stars. So many of them, each a million miles aw
ay. Each unreachable and impossible.
“Let’s say all of that worked out. I don’t fail sophomore year. My mother finally gets clean. My sister never reports me to the police for trashing her dorm room…
“But even if all of that happened, even if everything fell together, just so… Who’s to say any of it would last? Ben and I, we’re sixteen. Would it last for a year, two years? Would we make it through college?”
Magpie took a breath. “So, no. I can’t change my mind.”
Not everything is about forever.
“But I can have whatever I want. Forever. And that’s where Ben and I disagree; I don’t think perfect gets boring.”
And Magpie got out of the pool. She wrapped herself in her sister’s towel: ERL. And—with Hither close behind her—she stepped through the garden shed into a world of her own making.
The little perfect town of Near was gone.
Underwater.
The crashing, expansive ocean had finally swallowed it up.
The hill was the only thing still green and untouched in this world, and Magpie stood on top of it in a long flowing white dress. (Had she wished this dress? Or had this place just given it to her?) Hither was beside her, a lion now, with teeth that glinted in the morning sun.
“I understand why there’s water now,” Magpie said.
What will you do?
“Just float,” she replied.
She took the Near-pen from the pocket of her Near-dress and started to draw.
She had never been much for drawing back in Farther, but here, in Near, the lines flowed from her pen as if she had studied art all her life. She concentrated with a singular purpose, and when she was finished, there was a perfect wooden sailboat in front of her, just big enough for her and Hither. There was a little cabin with a neatly made bed and a desk filled with maps and instruments that would allow her to navigate by the light of the stars. It looked almost exactly like the little sailboat in the painting hanging in Mrs. Henderson’s office.
So I’m coming with you?
“You’re always with me,” Magpie said. “You’ve always been with me. The voice inside of my head trying to convince me that everything will be okay. And look—I’m stronger now. You’ve helped to make me stronger. My head isn’t even hurting anymore. When I came back to Near—it just went away. I can stay here now. I can make whatever I want. Everything really will be okay. So maybe you’ll finally take a little break.”
She stepped into the boat, and Hither, a large seabird now, followed after her, alighting on the tall mast, cawing as Magpie unfurled the sail.
And together they turned toward the sea.
And the waters rose obligingly to meet them.
And they were on their way.
AFTER
It took another almost seven months.
Allison Lefferts, by the time the police arrived at the Phipp residence, could not remember for the life of her what she had meant on the phone with 911, what she had meant when she told the dispatcher that her boyfriend, Brandon Phipp, was dead.
The police assumed it was a prank.
The party was broken up.
Allison Lefferts neither slept that night, nor the night after, and she had only just managed to doze off on the third evening when the doorbell rang.
The police.
Brandon’s parents had returned from vacation to find their youngest son missing.
Suddenly, people were interested again in what exactly Allison had meant when she’d told them he was dead.
There was an investigation.
For a little while, Allison was considered a person of interest.
But she stuck to her story that she didn’t know anything, that she’d had too much to drink that night, that she couldn’t explain why she’d called the police in the first place. And there couldn’t be a murder without a body, without a single shred of evidence to suggest it, and eventually, the police stopped questioning her.
Summer came and went.
And then one ordinary Tuesday night, Mr. Franklin James—a missing person along with Brandon, Magpie, and Magpie’s father—turned up at his own front door.
He patted his pocket for his keys but didn’t find them.
He rang the doorbell.
He waited patiently.
Only a faint chill in the air suggested to him that something might be off.
Because he remembered that morning being warm. And now it felt almost like fall.
When his wife opened the door, she screamed and cried and seemed so very happy to see him. He couldn’t understand it.
She called the police.
They showed him a newspaper; he told them he could remember nothing of the entire summer. He remembered the inside of the classroom where he taught at Farther High, a very bright light, and then his own front porch.
He was wearing the same clothes he’d gone missing in. He was perfectly unharmed.
Brandon Phipp’s parents never believed Allison had anything to do with their son’s disappearance. They weren’t naïve to their son’s many shortcomings. They figured that probably Brandon had finally pissed off the wrong person.
They cleaned out his bedroom.
They invited Allison to the house one night for dinner.
There’s a box of his things we thought you’d like to have. In his bedroom.
So she went to get it.
And for just a second—
But she was tired. Her eyes were playing tricks on her.
Another month passed. And another.
And one afternoon Ann Marie Lewis opened the door to find her former husband dirty and tattered and bruised on her front lawn.
Like Mr. James, Gabriel Lewis had no memory of the months that had passed between now and then.
Unlike Mr. James, he was slightly worse for the wear; he spent one week in the hospital, recovering (according to what Ben relayed to Clare in the cafeteria) from a strange case of exposure.
A few days after he turned up, Allison’s cell phone rang.
It was Magpie’s house number.
She stared at it for a long time. Wondering—was it her?
But the call went to voice mail, and when Allison listened to it, it was not Magpie’s voice but Ann Marie’s on the other end, her words sloppy and slurred as she begged Allison to call her back.
It was very late on a Wednesday night.
Allison did call back, because why not, and when Ann Marie answered the phone, she started crying.
Do you know where my daughter is?
Do you know where either of my daughters are?
I’m sorry. But I really have no idea.
Junior year had started.
Things at school were different.
Allison herself was quieter. She stuck to herself. She did her schoolwork. She avoided people in the hallway. She existed.
She sometimes ran into them in the cafeteria line or passing by their lockers—Clare and Ben. They seemed to always be together, the two of them, a little quieter, too, than they had previously been.
Ben talked to Allison only once. Outside calculus. A quick touch to her wrist to get her attention. And he’d leaned in and said:
Do you know anything?
She had, for a moment, been tempted to pull away. Call him a name. Tell him to fuck off.
But those things felt like too much effort now.
So she just shook her head.
And said no.
And he didn’t bother her again.
And once, in English class—
But no. That was silly.
And then winter came to Farther, and with winter came hot apple cider and wreaths made of dark evergreens and holly berries and Christmas. And with Christmas came Christmas trees.
Allison went to the Christmas tree farm with her parents, trailing behind them in a white knitted hat that covered her ears and made the world sound muffled, distant. She liked that.
It had been a hard almost-seven months for Allison.
A weird almost-seven months.
For a little while, after Mr. James and Gabriel Lewis had returned, she had started to hope that Brandon might show up soon, too, confused and hurt but ultimately alive. But then she’d decided that wherever Brandon had gone he was almost certainly never coming back.
She pinched an evergreen needle between her fingers and smelled it.
Her father called from somewhere. She spun around but didn’t see her parents; she must have wandered away from them.
Coming!
And she started to follow the sound of his voice, but—
Well, that was odd.
It almost looked like…
If she turned just the right way…
She saw something impossible.
It had taken almost seven months, but finally Allison saw what she had seen two times before and hadn’t let herself believe.
You cannot open up a doorway to another world and expect the cracks to go away when you close it again.
Allison reached out into the darkness.
And her hand found purchase.
She gripped the doorknob of an impossible door, and she stepped through into an impossible world.
A world made almost entirely of water, just the tip of a green hill left rising above the waves.
A world that was bright and shining and new.
Well, almost new.
And she remembered now.
She had been here before.
Do you like it? Magpie had said. I made it myself. It’s called Near.
And Brandon really was dead.
Magpie had killed him.
Allison closed her eyes.
The sun was hot above her, glinting off the water and the waves of this place. Of this world.
She held her hands in front of her stomach, squeezing her fingers one by one.
She smelled chlorine.
The smell of chlorine had always reminded Allison Lefferts of summer.
And summer in turn reminded her of Magpie’s pool.
Was this ocean made of pool water?
She had loved Magpie’s pool. They had played Marco Polo, the two of them. They had pretended to be mermaids. They had seen who could hold their breath the longest. They had been friends once. They had met in a pool and they’d grown up in a pool and they’d grown older in a pool and at some point—Allison couldn’t quite pinpoint when—they’d grown apart in a pool.
