Ava smiled and took a deep breath, her heart pounding with excitement. She pulled the robe around her shoulders. Before she could even put her arms through the sleeves, she felt the robe fusing to her back.
“Oww!”
“Oh my god!” Morgan leapt up. “What’s happening?”
But Ava couldn’t have answered even if she’d known what to say.
The feathers were like flames running down her back, her arms, and then her body bent and dropped down, her neck stretched up, and suddenly she was close to the ground, warm and strange, peering up at Morgan, who stood over her screaming and flailing about. But Ava could no longer hear her, not the way she could before.
Everything was different. Everything looked different, felt different, smelled different.
The air was different, even.
Ava was sure she could hear the sounds of the creek, the flopping of fish, the hush of the trout moving through the water. How was that possible?
She stretched out her wings. The breeze sifted through them. They lifted on their own accord. Her neck stretched out after them. Above her, Morgan didn’t look at all like herself. She was misshapen, stretched out too long and too tall like taffy. Over her, the trees were a dark, glowing green. The sky was like an ocean she could dive into.
Ava laughed. Morgan looked so funny! But what came out was a long, strange honking sound. She laughed again and the air was filled with it.
With each passing second she felt more and more comfortable in her new body. It was so . . . light! And lovely. She stepped forward, flapping her wings, and let out another loud honk when Morgan jumped back, screaming.
“Now turn back!” she heard suddenly, cutting through the haze of other sounds, and she focused again on the strange creature in front of her. “Ava! Turn back into a human!”
And Ava tried to remember . . . But instead all she could think about was how beautiful the sky was. How inviting. And it was so strange, the feeling that she was in the air and the sky was below her.
She realized then that she felt exactly right. Perfect. This is how she’d always wanted to feel! Her body, sleek and small and perfect. Weightless. She had imagined that sometimes, how nice it would be to float through the air and have no body at all. And now this, here, was almost like that. She lifted her wings again and flapped them, and the next thing she knew she was in the air, her face was level with Morgan’s face, and it was easier than being on the ground.
HONKKK!
Right in Morgan’s face.
HONK HONK!
She couldn’t stop laughing at Morgan’s horrified expression, and that only made things worse.
HONK HONK HONKKKKKKKKK!
She was so busy laughing she forgot to move her wings, and then she was flat on the ground with her feet—her fins? what were they?—at her sides, and Morgan was standing over her, swatting at her neck. “Hey, stop that!” Ava called, filling the air with more honking.
“Ava, you change back right now! It’s my turn!!!”
Ava focused again on Morgan’s words. Change back? Why would she do that, when all she wanted was to launch herself into the air? Why would she change back ever? This was so awesome!
And then she remembered that she was a human girl, and that even though she felt awkward and embarrassed all the time—though not today, not now, today she hadn’t felt awkward hardly at all, had she, even with Jeff Jackson calling her pretty and all the zombies giving her their mean-girl looks?—she did want to see her father and Grandma Kay and her friends, okay, friend, and she wanted to kiss Jeff Jackson and possibly she even wanted to see Monique. Though that was a stretch. Plus, she had an amazing birthday party to plan.
But she couldn’t remember what to do to change back.
She flapped her wings a few times.
She stomped her weird flat feet.
And then she thought about the feathered robe, how she’d slipped it on, and she moved as if she were lifting her hand and reaching for it, not even thinking about what she was doing . . . and suddenly everything happened in reverse and she was standing next to Morgan, the feathered robe in her hand.
She blinked and looked at her friend.
“Oh my god, you almost killed me!” Morgan cried. Ava wasn’t listening. A euphoria moved through her. It was as if she’d just arrived at the top of Mount Everest, or ridden a roller coaster so fantastic it hadn’t been designed yet. “That was amazing!”
“Well, you are the stupidest-looking swan I have ever seen.”
Ava jumped up in the air, and then started bouncing up and down like a pogo stick.
“AND the stupidest-looking human.”
Ava stopped bouncing. “Morgan, I cannot possibly explain to you how awesome that was.”
“Well, luckily you don’t have to,” Morgan said, reaching for the feathered robe. She stopped just before her hands touched it. “Can I?”
“Yes, fine,” Ava said, though now she regretted having told Morgan she could try it. What if her friend really did ruin it? What if it wasn’t allowed?
Morgan’s face was shining as she took the robe, and Ava felt suddenly guilty. “Here, I’ll help you,” she said.
Morgan smiled. Ava stood behind her friend, helping her maneuver into the robe. It was awkward; when Ava had done it, she hadn’t even had time to slip her arms through the sleeves before she transformed. With Morgan, the two girls together had to struggle to get her arms through the slightly too-narrow sleeves.
Nothing happened. Morgan stood wearing the robe, but she was definitely still a human girl. “Did I do it right?” she asked, after a minute had passed.
“I think so. Let’s try it again.”
They slipped the robe off and then on again. Still nothing happened.
“It looks kind of glamorous on you, at least,” Ava said. And it did. With her red hair and green eyes, Morgan looked like some kind of exotic Russian queen or something.
Morgan was not soothed. “Maybe we did break it,” she said, her voice quivering with disappointment. “Here, you put it on again.”
Ava took the robe and slipped it on. Immediately the feathers spread like a fire over her skin and she was back on the ground, stretching out her wings.
“Wooooo!” she yelled. This time, she leapt into the air and fluttered her wings up and up, until she was above the trees looking across the sky. And then she swooped down to the ground, reached back as if she had arms . . . and was standing holding the robe again, shining with joy.
Morgan, on the other hand, was dejected. “I guess it only works on you, huh?”
“I guess so. Last night, one of them said I couldn’t use hers, so I figured . . . I’m sorry. But it was worth a try.”
“It’s so not fair. I’m the one who should be a swan maiden.”
“Well, you have a mom, at least.”
“I have a pretty good mom, don’t I?”
“Yeah. So quit being so jealous.”
“Well, hopefully soon you’ll have a mom, too.”
Ava nodded. “Yeah.” She smiled. “And if I get a mom? Then you can be totally, completely jealous.”
“Deal.”
The sun was beginning to fall in the sky, and the light grew more dim in the woods. Ava stuffed the robe into her backpack and the two friends made their way out of the forest and to Ava’s house.
The house looked so cozy and sweet, in front of them, as they left the woods. Its little chimney jutted into the sky. Ava’s dad was already home; the lights were on in the kitchen and living room, and Ava could see him moving around the kitchen.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
The girls burst into the house, which smelled like meat and wine. Monique yowled a greeting and Morgan scooped her up, pressing her own cheek into the cat’s.
“Can you take her home with you, please?” Ava asked.
“You are the most glamorous cat in the whole world,” Morgan said in her annoying c
at voice, ignoring Ava. Monique purred loudly, looking at Ava accusingly.
“Girls!” her father yelled then, coming out of the kitchen. He was wearing a big goofy apron and a chef’s hat, and holding a wooden spoon. “I’m making my special veal marsala,” he said. “Hungry? You staying for dinner, Morgan?”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Lewis,” Morgan said, suddenly going all bashful, a blush creeping up her pale, freckled cheeks, “I promised my mom I would be home. We’re having company tonight.”
“Ah, well then, you’ll have to have a taste now of my famous red sauce.”
“It smells amazing!” Morgan said. Knowing what was coming, Monique jumped out of her arms and scuttled away.
Ava rolled her eyes as they followed her dad into the kitchen, which was now a complete disaster, with pots and pans everywhere and bread crumbs and flour and grated cheese covering the counters.
“Dad!”
“Ava, this is how a real cook works,” he said as he dipped his spoon into one of the bubbling pots. “Now behold my famous pasta sauce.”
As Morgan leaned in and tasted a spoonful, doing a good job of pretending she hadn’t tasted it a thousand times before, Ava suddenly had a memory. Just a flash of one, a sliver: her father and mother standing over the stove laughing together while she played on the floor. Her father feeding her mother a spoonful of something from the stove. Their two heads together, her mother’s long moon hair next to her father’s dark curls.
“Dad, you cooked this for Mom, too, didn’t you?”
He looked at Ava, surprised. “Of course,” he said, after a second. “It’s my specialty. She loved it.”
“It’s delicious!” Morgan gushed.
“I remember,” Ava said. “I remember you guys cooking together.”
He smiled. Handsome despite his ridiculous getup. “Yes,” he said. “She liked to cook. She never really had before. We had a lot of fun in this kitchen.”
The two girls gave each other a look. Ava felt a strange sort of shiver going down her back.
Her mother, here, over this stove, tasting her father’s sauce. But she’d been a swan, she wasn’t supposed to have been here at all, Helen had said. A swan maiden, cooking Italian food in this little wooden house. Her mother!
“How come she had never cooked before?” Ava asked. “Isn’t that weird?”
Her father shrugged. “She’d always loved being outside so much, your mother, she was a bit of a wild child. I tamed her, in a way. She loved this house, loved cooking in this kitchen, loved you and being your mother.”
“Really?”
“Of course. She was madly in love with you. Who wouldn’t be?”
Morgan snorted.
“I thought you had to get home,” Ava said.
“I’m going! I was just trying some sauce. It’s so good, Mr. Lewis, thank you!”
“You’re welcome,” he said, ruffling Morgan’s hair.
Ava knew she wouldn’t let anyone else in the world do that to her, but Morgan loved Ava’s dad and was always giddy and silly in his presence. He seemed to have that effect on most women, though he never seemed to notice.
“Dad,” Ava said, her mind whirling, after her friend had left. Her dad was frying eggplant and veal now, and the kitchen was even more of a mess than it had been before. “How come you don’t date anyone ever?”
“Date anyone?” He turned and looked at her, a slice of eggplant in his hand. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Well you’re not that old, right? And you’re sort of good looking.”
“Thanks, honey.”
“And Mom has been dead for ten years.”
“Mmmmhmmm,” he said, pulling fried eggplant out of the pan and laying it on some paper towels.
“She is dead, right?”
He stopped what he was doing, turned down the burner, and leaned back against the counter. “Ava,” he said, looking at her intently, “why are you asking me that? You’re not experimenting with drugs are you? Let me see your pupils.”
“How did you meet, anyway? You never told me how you guys met.”
“I haven’t?”
“No, Dad! You never talk about her!”
He looked so sad for a moment that Ava almost wished she hadn’t asked. His shoulders sagged, and his face, so handsome, seemed to break open.
“Dad–” she started.
“No, I should talk more about her to you,” he said. He looked far away then, his face softening as he remembered. Ava watched him, barely breathing, afraid to break the spell.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “It was summertime, and I was down by the creek with my rod. The fish back then practically jumped into your hands. It was twilight. There was a great big full moon, I remember, just peeking out. And then I saw a woman swimming in the creek with her friends and I’d never seen anyone more beautiful, not even in the movies, or in the magazines, or in my dreams.”
“Then what?” she asked.
He shrugged. “We started talking. I don’t remember all the details. I knew right away I would marry her. And that was that. There’s someone for each of us, Ava, and your mother was the one for me.”
“Do you ever think about her now?” Ava asked.
He sighed. “Of course I do. I think of her every day. And I see her every day, in you.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You’re so much like her. It scares me sometimes, seeing you become so like her. You look more and more like her every year, too, even with that black hair. You even walk like she did. The same voice, everything. And now you’re about to be a teenager. I can’t believe it.”
Ava felt tears prickling at her eyes. “How come you’ve never told me that?”
He shrugged. “I thought I had.”
And then he turned around and fired up the burner again, absorbing himself in the veal and the eggplant. But before he did, Ava was sure she saw tears prickling in his eyes, too.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Over the next few days, Ava focused more on her birthday party than anything else. She and Morgan made up a list of kids to invite that started out small and ended up including practically the whole seventh grade, even Becky Rainer with her greasy hair and Jennifer Halverson and her crew. It didn’t feel right to exclude anyone, and she figured no zombie would set a pedicured, kitten-heel-wearing foot in her house anyway. The girls planned out a menu, which Ava’s father approved instantly as it featured his famous meatballs and spaghetti as well as Ava’s (and his) favorite dessert, a pistachio ice-cream cake with Heath bars crumbled across the top.
Ava had never had a party before, and certainly not one on such a momentous occasion as her thirteenth birthday and in her very own house to boot. Before, even just a week ago, she would have been mortified at the idea of letting her classmates into the quaint little house with the wraparound porch and the basement full of handmade fishing rods, and she would have cringed at the idea of being the center of attention. She would have been terrified that no one would come or, if they did, that they would discover some new dorky thing about her that she’d forgotten to hide. But something big had changed since she started growing feathers, she realized, and she didn’t have the same twisty feeling in the pit of her stomach when imagining a room full of her classmates in her own house. It would be fun. If anyone didn’t like her house or her stuff or her cool professor dad with his salt-and-pepper hair and love of the Rolling Stones and fly fishing, it was, really, their loss.
She tacked up a ballerina calendar on the wall and started marking down the days. And that Friday night she counted down: just twenty-nine days until her birthday, her party, and the next full moon.
She woke up the next morning feeling wild with excitement. On top of everything else, there were only two more weeks of school left before the long summer, which stretched out in a perfect, blissful haze with no school, no getting up before eight in the morning, just whole days at the lake and in the mountains. She wanted
to jump up and down with excitement, thinking about the future. Becoming a teenager, going to the high school in another year, going to college, moving to a big city like New York and maybe working for a magazine, or being a famous artist, or opening a little store filled with candy cigarettes and jewelry made from orange slices.
And, of course, finding her mother, and learning about the swan maidens. That future stretched out in front of her, too, a sequence of full moons, waning and waxing and waning again. That’s how it worked, right? No matter how tiny the moon became, it always became full again.
She stretched happily, twisting under the covers. Monique flew off the bed and landed on the floor.
“Oh, sorry,” Ava said, as Monique turned to her with an outraged expression.
But she couldn’t stop smiling. She picked up the photo of her mother by the side of her bed, traced the lines of her mother’s face. The new memory, of her mother and father cooking over the stove, stayed with her like a gift, and she clung to it, rolled it over again and again in her mind.
She must have been a baby, playing on the floor, with her parents laughing above her, the kitchen smelling like garlic and onion and frying things. Her mother had liked cooking, her father had said. How strange and wonderful it must have been for her, living in this house, being a human woman, having a child.
Had it been hard for her to leave? Had she missed her other life? Did she miss this life, now?
And if she was really alive, where was she?
She closed her eyes and imagined: riding over the treetops with her mother the way she had with Helen, leaning down and holding her mother’s swan body, her fingers burrowing into soft feathers, her mother’s wings stretched out and flapping on either side. Feeling her mother’s heart beating under her fingertips.
Or: the two of them, flying next to each other, her mother leading her to another, better world. Or up into the stars and to the moon, where Ava had watched for her so many nights. The two of them, flying past stars whirring in the sky beside them, passing through black holes, sliding down the Milky Way . . .
Her phone buzzed loudly.
“Yesss??!!” she answered, knowing it was Morgan, making her voice as goofy as possible.
The Next Full Moon Page 8
