The music from the ride, old-timey and tinny, was blaring from the old wooden structure. It was one of Ava’s favorite places in the world. Even with all the disgusting bug talk, she couldn’t imagine anything better than this moment, right now. Summer was here, and she was drinking a lemonade by the carousel with the cutest boy in school.
That is when she noticed a weird kind of itching on her arms. She tried to scratch them nonchalantly as they walked over to the multicolored carousel animals bobbing up and down.
“My favorite is the deer with the antlers and jewel eyes,” she said, to distract him.
“Where?”
She turned, shifting her back to him and furiously scratching her arm, and pointed. “That one.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I like that one. But my favorite is the lion.” And then he gave her a funny look. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Like what?” she asked, dropping her arms and turning back to him with wide eyes. It was a look she’d practiced in the mirror. Wide eyes, like Marilyn Monroe.
“Um, I think you’re like bleeding or something. In back.”
The carousel spun around and around, flashing its lights. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Jennifer and her friends approaching.
Bleeding? She felt the oddest sensation then, a prickling across her arms and shoulders, down her back. As if she’d gotten tangled up in brambles in the forest. And then she started to itch all over.
“Are you okay?”
She tried to stammer an answer, but just made a strange strangled sound instead. She wanted to scratch herself everywhere. What was happening to her? She thought about Lucy Spiegel, how she’d spent a whole day last year walking around school with her skirt tucked into her underwear. And now here Ava was, standing in front of everyone in her new bathing suit, with some hideous thing happening to her body that she couldn’t even see. Her mind spun in horror.
Before it got any worse, she turned and ran. Past the lemonade stand, past Jennifer and her friends, past the beginning of the beach line and over to the bathrooms. Her skin prickling and itching. She touched her arms as she ran, and felt little bumps that hadn’t been there before. Thankfully, the girl’s room was empty and she rushed inside and slammed the door shut.
Scratching furiously, she peered into the mirror at her own horrified face and then at her arms and shoulders, the strange bumps she’d felt under her fingers. As if . . . something was growing from her skin.
Just then, another feather drifted into the air. Bright white, like the one in her father’s workroom.
Was it coming from... her? It seemed her body was always playing tricks on her nowadays. Everything growing, changing, becoming monstrous and gross and strange...
Outside, someone started banging on the door. “Are you okay, Ava?” It was Morgan. “Ava, what’s going on? Why’d you run away like that? He’s gonna think you’re crazy.”
She moved right next to the door and pressed her lips to the crack.
“Morgan,” she said, whispering as loudly as she could. “Can you bring me my cell and my clothes?”
“What’s going on? Ava, you’re being crazy!”
“Just bring them! Please!”
“Okay, okay. You know, other people need to get in here.”
“Then hurry! Run!!”
All she wanted now was to get out of there. Get back to her pale pink room and shut the door. Then she could cry as much as she wanted to. All she had to do was hold herself together till then.
A few minutes later, Morgan was back, yelling for Ava to open the door.
Ava opened it a crack, grabbed her clothes and phone, and then pushed it shut again. “Just give me a minute,” she yelled, slipping back into her clothes and trying to dial her father at the same time.
He answered on the first ring. “What is it?”
“Dad,” she said. “Please come get me. Right away.”
To her surprise, he didn’t ask any questions. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Will you be okay until then?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then wait for me in the parking lot.” They hung up, and she looked once more into the mirror, ignoring Morgan and other voices now, just outside the door.
Other than her watery, terrified eyes, she looked normal.
A normal almost-thirteen-year-old who couldn’t stop scratching her weird, pale, not-even-slightly-tan skin.
She slipped on her T-shirt and shorts, then opened the door and left the bathroom. An angry woman pushed past her inside.
“What’s wrong?” Morgan asked, her face pained. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Ava said. She felt bad for her friend, who was so worried, but what could she say to her? She had no idea what was wrong. All she wanted to do was curl up and die. “I just want to go home.”
“Okay.” Morgan reached out and hugged her, and Ava hugged her back. “I’ll tell Jeff you only freak out like a looneytunes on Sundays.”
Ava smiled. Morgan was a good best friend even if she was a huge dork. “I’ll text you later.”
Her father raced into the parking lot like an ambulance driver, looking visibly relieved to find Ava all in one piece.
“What’s going on?” he asked, as she slipped into the car. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine!” she said, folding her arms and turning to the window.
“You’re fine?”
She held back tears. “Dad, please! I just need to go home!”
He looked at her and sighed. “Ava, don’t you find this behavior a little odd? Are you trying to give your old dad a heart attack?”
“You’re not that old,” she lied, leaning her forehead against the glass. In the distance, she could see Jeff and his friends. They were probably all talking about what a complete spazz she was. “Dad, can we just go, please?”
“We’re going, we’re going,” he said, pulling back onto the country road that led to the lake.
After an excruciating ride with her nosy father, Ava ran into her room and closed the door, then pulled off her T-shirt and shorts and bathing suit. A cluster of feathers—tiny ones, little baby feathers—fell to the floor, bloody at the tips.
She looked down at it, then turned her back to the mirror and looked over her shoulder.
Her skin looked strange and jagged and bumpy, but soft, too. Kind of magical. She looked more closely and gasped. There were tiny little feathers all across her back, as if she were some kind of winged animal. They were sprouting all over her back now, across her shoulders and down her upper arms. Some were fully formed feathers, some just the tips, pressing out. And all over, she tingled and itched.
And Jeff had seen!
She started rubbing her palms down her arms, trying to find some relief.
It was too much. Ava moved away from the mirror, lay on her side on the bed.
Monique was curled up by the pillow and Ava pulled her to her chest, but the cat wriggled out of her arms just as another feather wafted into the air. Monique leapt up and swatted at it, watching with fascination as it drifted to the floor.
For a few minutes Ava just lay there. Then she reached out and picked up the photo of her mother that she kept on the nightstand. A black-and-white photo of her staring into the camera. Impossibly beautiful, with inky black eyes and long pale hair.
“Mama,” Ava whispered, letting go, letting tears roll down her face. “Please. Come back.”
CHAPTER TWO
Ava had not even been three years old when her mother died, and yet she swore she could remember her, even if those memories were like fragments from dreams.
But she kept those bits of memory close to her heart: the smell of her mother’s hair, the feel of her mother’s skin as she held Ava in her arms, the image of her laughing in the sunlight. In her closet, she kept a box filled with her mother’s things: a scarf, a few pieces of jewelry, a bottle of the perfume her mother wore, which Ava occasionally took out and held to her f
ace, breathing in, imagining she could conjure her mother to her right then. And then she had photos. Like the one next to her bed, which her father had taken one day out in the backyard, under the weeping willow. This was how Ava always thought of her. The sunlight streaming down on her light hair so that it seemed almost white, her beautiful laughing face.
Her mother.
Her father never wanted to talk about her. Though it had been more than ten years since her death, he had never even looked at another woman since. You’d think she was still alive, the way he wore his wedding ring and spoke of her, on the rare occasion that he did at all, as if she were right around the corner. Even Ava knew this was not exactly the most healthy behavior. The only person Ava could really talk to about her mother—the only other person who had known her mother, that is, who was still around—was her grandmother, and Grandma Kay was old and losing her memory. Ava’s mother didn’t even have any family of her own, so when she died there was no one left. No one to remember her, or tell stories about her when she was young.
And so Ava’s mother was a secret thing, something only for her.
Sometimes, Ava liked it that way—or maybe she didn’t like it, but she was at least okay with it—having this secret mother who lived in dreams and photographs. Other times, like now, she would have given anything to have her mother back. A real mother who would hold her and comfort her and explain what was happening and tell her that everything was going to be okay.
Sitting in front of the mirror in her bedroom, with the door locked, Ava stared at herself in disbelief. She couldn’t look away, the sight was so horrible.
In the few hours since she’d returned home from the lake, the itching had stopped but the feathers seemed to be multiplying . . . growing up and down her arms, over her shoulders. And they were becoming larger, some as long as her pinky finger. She put her hand over her arm, felt them pushing against her palm. They prickled across her back, her shoulders, her arms. Coating her until it was impossible to see the skin underneath.
She picked a feather up off the floor and brought it to her face. It seemed normal enough, for a feather, though it was bright white and seemed to glitter when the light hit it.
She ignored the plinks coming from her computer and the buzzing coming from her cell—no doubt Morgan IMing and texting her to see what had happened. She couldn’t deal with Morgan right now, couldn’t deal at all with the awfulness of what was happening, and the one big truth that it all pointed to . . .
That she was a freak. A total, complete freak.
To think of all the times she’d been embarrassed by her pale skin, her too-tall body, her pooching belly. She’d give anything now, to just go back to normal. Suddenly nothing about her normal life seemed so bad at all. So what if she wasn’t one of the popular girls? So what if she could barely speak and in fact had a tendency to dive underwater like a huge dork when Jeff Jackson was around?
Now everything was ruined. She would never be able to show her face in public again. All her dreams of growing up and moving to a big city like New York and maybe getting a job writing for a magazine or owning a flower shop or becoming a psychiatrist were shattered. She would obviously never be able to leave her house again, let alone Pennsylvania or the seventh grade. Not only would Jeff Jackson never like her, but no boy ever. Unless he was blind. And lived in a bubble.
Ava refused to leave her room all that afternoon and evening, even when her father knocked on the door and told her that Pretty in Pink was on (she loved old John Hughes movies!) and that he was thinking of ordering a pizza for dinner and would even let her pick the toppings.
“I’m not hungry! And I’m so over that movie,” she lied, immediately realizing she was starving. “I’m already in bed.”
“Can I bring you anything?”
A new life, she thought. “No!”
“Okay. Well, there will be leftovers in the fridge if you feel better later. Get some rest.”
“I’m trying,” she said, making her voice sound raspy and weak. There was no way she could go back to school tomorrow. Or anywhere again, ever, for that matter. But how was she going to explain that to her dad?
Later, when the television was silent and the house dark and she knew her dad was in bed, she slipped on her favorite hoodie and tiptoed into the kitchen, grabbed a slice of pizza and a yogurt and went back to her room.
She ate the pizza and yogurt, and then she went back to the kitchen and ate the rest of the pizza, until it was gone. What did it matter? At least she could console herself with yummy food since obviously she could never go out in public again. She imagined her days from now on. Locked in the house, empty pizza boxes strewn around her. She’d end up being like that guy she saw on TV who had to be carried out of his house with a crane. Except of course that guy didn’t have feathers.
She moaned out loud. Never in her life had she felt this sorry for herself, or this envious of everyone else. Even the most uncool girl in school was cooler than she was right now. Becky Rainer with her unwashed hair and funny walk and braces with bits of food in them, even Becky was cooler than she was. She thought of Becky, with her smooth greasy unfeathered skin, and wanted to cry.
Plus, her stomach hurt now.
She took off the hoodie and lay on the bed, careful to lie with the feathers flat—it hurt, she realized, to bend them, and it was a relief to expose them to the air. She stared out the window. There was a bright, big moon, nearly full, shining through the tree branches, surrounded by thousands of stars. Ava shifted her head, moving her pillow down, until she could stare right into the moon, unobstructed. As soon as she did, she felt her body relax and sleep start to come over her.
Her grandmother had told her to look for her mother in the moon and the stars. “On the night of the full moon,” her grandmother had said, “you can see her, sometimes sitting on the moon, sometimes spread out over the stars, flying across the night sky.”
The moon glowed behind the trees, and the stars all seemed to be spinning.
“Are you there?” Ava whispered.
The leaves rustled in a slight breeze.
She tried to stay awake, but her eyes were so heavy now. Outside, the breeze picked up, and the tree itself started to sway. The stars made shapes in the sky. The Big Dipper and Little Dipper, which her father had pointed out to her, the day he showed her how to find the North Star. She imagined her mother there, among the constellations, imagined she could make out her mother’s long hair, her large eyes, in the stars. And just as she drifted off to sleep, she was sure she saw her mother’s face looking down at her, smiling.
When Ava woke, the sun was streaming in through the window. She blinked, disoriented, as her room came to life around her. The pale pink walls and the Ava Gardner poster her grandmother had given her the year before, the little rocking chair covered with discarded clothing. She sat up, yawning. What strange dreams she’d had: She’d been flying, she remembered, great big wings stretched out on either side of her body, the stars surrounding her, the sky like black water, thick and warm.
She reached down to scratch her arm, expecting to find bare skin.
Instead, her hand pushed into a pile of feathers, which ruffled at the contact. Ava gasped and snatched her hand away. Gross!
She leapt up and ran to the mirror.
There she was: her flowing dark hair, her pale skin, her long neck . . . and then her long arms, covered, from the shoulder to the elbow nearly, with white sparkling feathers. There were so many now! She turned; they were covering her back, too, from her neck and down. Tight and close to her body, like a thin layer of vanilla icing.
There was no way Ava was going to school the next morning, but of course her father might have something to say about that. He did seem to think that school was awfully important, being a professor and a parent and all. She wrapped herself in her comforter until it was covering her arms and back and shoulders, and opened the door of her room. Her father was in the kitchen pouring coffee. She shuf
fled toward him, coughing and trying to look as miserable as possible.
“It lives!” he said, turning and smiling.
“Barely,” she said.
“You look like you need this coffee more than I do, sweetheart.”
“Gross. What I need is my bed.”
“Well, I’m not sure they let you bring beds to school, do they?”
“Dad,” she moaned. “I can’t go to school when I’m this sick!”
He cocked his head and looked at her, squinting. “Are you sure this doesn’t have anything to do with what happened yesterday, at the lake? You seemed awfully upset. Morgan seemed to think it might have had something to do with one Jeffrey Jackson?”
Ava could have killed Morgan then. “No! Dad, I’m really really sick. I was sick yesterday, too, that’s why I was upset.”
“Not sick enough to finish off that pizza, though?”
“I have a cold,” she said, coughing for effect. “You can still be hungry with a cold. Hungrier, even!”
He reached over and put his hand against her forehead, frowning. “Well, no fever. No body parts falling off. Maybe we should make an appointment with Dr. Rose.”
“I don’t need a doctor, Dad, I can just stay in bed all day and drink lots of OJ.”
“Who is this Jeffrey fellow anyway?”
Ava felt herself blush from her forehead to her toes. Yet another weird way her body was betraying her. “He’s just a boy at school, Dad.”
“Hmm. How very interesting.” He smiled and raised his eyebrows, his handsome face crinkling, and then pulled her in for a hug. “You stay in bed and you rest. I’ll be home by dinnertime. Call me if you need anything at all, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, careful to keep her comforter wrapped tight around her.
She watched her father’s old truck pulling out of the driveway and into the street. Outside, the sun was bright and shining. It would be an amazing day. When she was sure her father was a safe distance away, Ava threw off the comforter and ran into the backyard.
The Next Full Moon Page 2
