Amber Jewett glided by, then glided back when she realized Nick had beer. “Can I buy one off you?”
Already digging in her pocket, she was oblivious to me. A silver vine climbed her ear, seed pearls hanging from loops and catching the firelight. She was in my jewelry class too.
“They’re Willa’s,” Nick said.
“Just have it,” I told her, and kept walking.
Faint embers bobbed beneath the cliff on this shore, the other half of the party. If the cops or the Coast Guard rolled up on us, they’d probably figure out that the stoners by the caves were with the boozehounds by the fire. We always kept separate, though, just in case.
The rocky coast rolled beneath my boots. I shoved my hands into my coat, hunching my shoulders as I walked. Leaving the fire reminded me that it was almost winter. My breath added to the haze, and wind snuck down my collar. My back broke out in gooseflesh, the rest of my skin following.
Everything felt slightly sideways. Like the ground had shifted, but it didn’t roll like water. If it did, I would have found my balance easy. Instead, it was increments. A tilt beneath my feet; the wind coming from the wrong direction.
No matter what Bailey said, I felt that island. It was looking at me; it felt alive. And that was crazier than seeing things.
Tugging the red-yarn braid on Ashley Jewett’s hat, I melted into the huddle. I knew all these people, and they made room for me out of habit. But since I was the angel of death around these parts, it was up to me to keep the conversation rolling.
I held out my hand for the next pass and asked, “Anybody else starving?”
The night drifted on. Our buzzes faded, and there was nothing left in the bake. Slowly, we knotted back up by the fire. It was too cold to stay at the cliffs, even if you did have somebody to hang on. I didn’t; Seth never showed up.
Our parties on Garland Beach usually ended with music. Instead of pulling out his guitar, Nick plugged his laptop into an external battery and let GarageBand do the honors. Songs he’d written with Levi—Nick never stopped smiling, but it was a tell. Without my brother there to sing, it wouldn’t have been right to play.
“You’re quiet,” I said.
“Tired,” Nick said. He tossed his paper bowl into the fire and slid to sit on the rocks. That had to be all kinds of cold, I thought. He arched his back, stretching his arms, then slumping. “You drive?”
Picking out a piece of sausage, I shook my head. “Walked.”
The fire popped, full of mussel shells and sweetened with burning corncobs. Nick turned, resting his elbow next to my hip. His hair fell back when he looked up at me, a rare glimpse of his entire face. “I can take you home.”
“You finished my six-pack,” I replied. “I’ll walk you.”
“You should stop being a bitch to Seth.”
At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. My fingers stilled, no longer searching the bottom of my bowl for more scraps. Since everything was uneven, and I was buzzed, I blinked down at him. “What?”
With a sigh, Nick slumped against the driftwood. “He’s trying to help you, Willa.”
“Who asked you?”
“Nobody did,” he said. “I’m the only one who’s going to tell you. ’Cause I’m not your friend. You’re my friend’s sister. My best friend’s girlfriend. I like you, but they’re . . . Get past it.”
On my feet, I threw my trash into the fire and turned on him. “It’s not done, you dickwad. How am I supposed to get over it?”
Nick leaned back on his elbows. “Over it, that’s something else. I said get past it. It’s not July twenty-third anymore. I don’t think you noticed.”
Replies surged in my throat, hot like bile. Terry Coyne hadn’t even been indicted yet. There was a house payment my father wouldn’t let me make. A boat I wasn’t supposed to fish from, a whole life that wasn’t going to happen.
Whether I needed to get past it or not, he wasn’t the one who got to tell me to do it. He wasn’t from Broken Tooth. He didn’t get to judge me.
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” he said.
Zipping my jacket, I backed away from him. Maybe my voice broke. My throat was tight, my face hot, but I wasn’t going to cry for him. None of the things in my head came out.
Instead, I said, “You can’t make me feel anything.”
“Sorry I called you a bitch.” Knitting his brows, Nick draped his arms over his knees. He looked small, but not young. Not even a little; the dark eyes he kept hidden behind his hair were wells, endless and empty and deep. “It’s true, though.”
I left him there, staring into the fire, because he was right.
He wasn’t my friend.
SEVEN
Grey
I watch her move through the village. She’s distinct from the rest. Her light has shape now. It outlines the fall of her hair and the sway in her step. The others simply gleam, so many fireflies in the dark.
She’s seen me. Recognized me. But she doesn’t come.
Why doesn’t she come? Is there some trick I’ve never learned? Some secret that Susannah kept when she trapped me here? Standing on the cliff, I try to be a beacon. It’s foolish; wishful thinking. Even if she could make me out at this distance, I’d be a firefly, too.
If I were a siren, I could sing to her.
If this were a fairy tale, I could send a tainted apple.
But this is a curse, and curses come with torment. I’m supposed to suffer, and this is a brand-new agony. I spent so many years holding back the fog because no good man, no man with scruples, would buy his freedom with someone else’s blood.
Now I realize, I’m not a man anymore. And she’s a trick of the light, no more real than a daydream. In fact, she’s worse than a daydream. She’s a glimmering ring of promises, just out of reach. I can go round and round, forever reaching for it, forever missing it.
Hope is the thing that torments me.
So it doesn’t matter that she’s thinking of me. That she’s seen. That she knows. There will be no rescue. No salvation. And I will spend two thousand years in this lighthouse, twenty thousand, eternity.
Unless I do that thing. I wonder now, why shouldn’t I?
EIGHT
Willa
At night, Broken Tooth could be quiet. It was on this side, most of the houses dark, most of the people sleeping. Streetlights hummed and spilled out sickly orange light. It hung in the fog, strange haloes at every corner.
My house was dark too. Daddy’s truck was gone, but Seth’s was in the driveway. Trudging toward it, I realized he was still inside. I saw his arms, curved over the top of the steering wheel, and his head, hanging.
All at once, I was exhausted. Rounding the back of the bed, I came up to the driver’s side and knocked on the window.
Startled, Seth jerked upright. At first, I thought he’d been sleeping. Then I realized there was nothing soft about his face. Every line was drawn tight, his lips, his eyes. He started to roll the window down, then something changed his mind. Waving me back, he opened the door.
But he didn’t get out. He pushed the door open as far as it would go. Then he turned to me, still perched on the bench seat. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“I had my phone.”
Seth nodded. He rubbed his palms on the knees of his jeans, then scrubbed them over his face. I wasn’t the only one sideways. I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn’t right. That he was wrong—we were too.
Then he turned, coming like he was going to get out of the truck. When he moved, I smelled perfume. Clinging to his coat, light and sugary.
A sharpness slid through my belly. All my insides fell, and I thought they might fall out. I knew that scent. The last time I smelled it, the girl wearing it spat at my feet. Probably would have gone for the face except she knew I would have punched her then.
Holding a hand up, I took a few steps back. My voice wasn’t my own. It was brittle, full of sharp edges.
“You spen
t the night with Denny Ouelette?”
Seth looked caught. Not ashamed, just surprised to be found out. Grimacing, he stopped his slide out of the truck. Leaning off the side of the bench seat, he pulled his own hair, then took a deep breath. Instead of sighing or finding some shame, he popped.
“I get tired of doing everything right, Willa. It’s not enough for you. I can’t make you happy, and fine. That’s fine—you shouldn’t be. But I can’t even make it better. I do everything you want me to, everything you need me to. And you couldn’t care less.”
Cold with disbelief, I stared. “So you cheated on me?”
“We just went driving around.”
“I know what that means!”
Seth bristled. “Nothing happened.”
I walked away, short, tight steps. My head screamed, anger that roared in my ears and cut my brain off from my mouth. Everything I said rolled out, like it was made on the tip of my tongue.
“Get out of my driveway. Go home. Go pick up Nick, he’s drunk at the beach. You can talk about how screwed up I am, and what a bitch I am, and when you drop him off, maybe Denny will let you stay the night and be all sweet to you. I bet nothing bad’s ever gonna happen to her. She’ll be sweet forever.”
“Willa, I’m—”
“I said get out!”
I may as well have slapped Seth, because he couldn’t have looked more wounded. But he didn’t have a right to be sad and sorry in my direction. He wasn’t gonna cry. The only time he misted up was at the end of war movies, when it was clear that everybody was going to make it home or nobody was.
His spine straightened. Seth slid back into the truck and dropped both hands on the wheel. He could see me glaring at him, waiting for him to go. Finally, he reached for the key. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
“Well, this is what you bought.”
Hiding under my hurt was sympathy. Or compassion. Whatever it is you feel when someone you love is in pain. Didn’t matter that I was part of it, or that he’d brought it on himself.
Because I could trace it all back: I was being a pain in the ass. And I was a pain in the ass because I’d done a terrible thing. So that explained why I was a bitch, and why Seth needed somebody sweet. None of that excused it. Nobody made him open the passenger-side door for Denny Ouelette. That was all on him.
So I watched Seth drive away. I stood in the middle of the street doing it too. Under my breath, I swore I’d be fine.
A fragile, just-been-shattered layer moved under my skin. It’s exhaustion, I told myself. I was tired and cold, and I wasn’t going to break down in the middle of Thaxter Street.
I was breaking down in the middle of Thaxter Street. I was the one making those awful, animal sounds. My belly wrenched, and my throat clamped shut. It wasn’t a pretty cry, a crystal tear slipping down my cheek. It was crying like vomiting. There was no fighting it; it came up on its own.
Seth and Bailey were my constants. My anchors, twin points that came together to be my north. I didn’t know how to be without them. When I looked up, all I saw was the nothing coming. The future where Seth drove around with other girls and Bailey went off to college and never came home.
That same future with an empty place at the dinner table, and half as many Christmas presents under the tree. The one where I stood on land and watched the tide go out without me.
Nick was wrong. July twenty-third wasn’t over.
And it wasn’t ever going to be.
Defeated, I walked inside. I heard a TV upstairs, and I followed the sound. Down the hall to my parents’ bedroom, I peeked around the door. My mother sat propped against the headboard.
A crossword puzzle book lay in her lap, her place kept with a ballpoint pen. She didn’t look at me, but she knew I was there. She patted the place beside her.
I didn’t ask where Daddy was. I didn’t want to know, and since she was sitting up late, she probably didn’t have an answer.
Sliding in beside her, I fit my head in the crook of her shoulder. Somebody else’s cigarette smoke clung to her skin, half met by the scent of her soap.
“How was the party?”
“It sucked.”
She hummed a reply. Trailing her hand over my hair, she started untangling it. It was an idle touch. One that moved because her body knew how to do it. Maybe we were all stuck.
Those thoughts didn’t get far. They crashed into the numb that spread through me. It started at the top of my head and drifted ’til I knew I had toes but couldn’t feel them.
Even my voice sounded detached. Mumbling against Mom’s shoulder, I said, “I thought you hated this show.”
“I do.”
It was on for the sound. Or the company. It was on because the house was too quiet. It was always too quiet now.
Squeezing my eyes closed, I burrowed closer to her. I wanted to be ten again. When I could lay my head in her lap and every bad thing slipped away. She combed her fingers through my hair then, too. She used to cure a bad day with idle touches while she read a magazine or watched shows she did like. I wanted it to work again.
“Seth could have come in,” she said.
I froze. Did she know he’d been sitting in the driveway? An ugly, tangled knot filled my throat. It choked me, and I wished for ten years old again. Tikki-tikki-tembo, Seth Ar-sham-bow: that was the worst of my problems then.
It was a relief when she added, “I know it’s a small town, but I feel better knowing he’s driving you back and forth from these parties.”
Shock and tears and all kinds of God-awful feelings threatened to spill out of me. It was on my tongue to tell her we broke up, but I bit down instead.
She’d want to know why. I’d have to dissect it. Sugar-sweet Denny Ouelette being mixed up in it would piss her off. But she wouldn’t understand just how deep that cut went. Maybe she’d think it was my fault. Nick did. Daddy did.
Strangling myself on all that, I shrugged. Made myself sound normal. “He had to get home.”
Swirling her fingers, she started at the crown of my head again. “All right.”
“He said hey.”
“Next time you see him, tell him I say hey back.”
With a nod, I agreed to carry that message. For a second, my life was normal again. Cuddled up with my mom, the TV playing on. Her fingers in my hair; a distracted message to carry like always. Normal. I had to lie to get there, to myself and my mother, and the whole world.
But it was better than falling apart, piece by piece.
EIGHT
Grey
I melt into mist so it will heed my call. I gather it, from the sky, from the sea. I wind it tight and pull it close.
This is my purpose, after all. I am the lord of nothing but the mist. It’s mine to bend as I will—to bring salvation or destruction. All these years, I’ve held it at a distance. Felt its liquid ache instead of my own blood.
Now I need it. It spills across the water, then rises. It undulates, a living thing. Shadows swirl within it, it makes new shadows. Strange lights reflect in it, exploded to a silvery glow. One by one, the streetlights in town blink out.
The houses huddle before they’re swallowed. The cliffs fade—though they’re greater than mist and refuse to disappear completely. There’s always something greater, something larger—I wonder if there’s some earthcaller out there, wondering what’s happened to herself. If she’s cursed to raise the dust—but somehow, I can’t picture it.
Though my wishes never revealed every detail of the curse, it grants me folklore. Myths. I have books upon books upon books. There’s a Grey Man on Pawleys Island in South Carolina, but he’s only a harbinger. He warns of hurricanes, nothing more. The Irish have far liath, but they abound and care nothing for souls. They seek no release.
I’m alone. Again, more than I was before. I’m taunted; that makes me lonely. I run mad.
So I retreat to the only power I have. I call it all, I bid it come. I beg it stretch the whole length of my light. The air is nearly s
olid now, a shroud that falls over my island and her village at the same time.
She’s blotted out now, and I can rest.
NINE
Willa
I didn’t have to ditch school again. It was canceled because of the fog.
Thick and cold, it clung to the streets. Sunrise didn’t cut it; neither did headlights. Every thirty seconds, the foghorn blared in the distance. It echoed through the haze, alien and removed. I lingered by the front door, listening to the radio going in the kitchen.
“. . . confluence creating a dew point higher than usual,” a mechanical voice droned.
The Weather Service had a bot, and they could program it to say anything. It was the voice of the fleet—Mom used to call it Dad’s Girlfriend. Dad’s Girlfriend is calling for rough seas today. Dad’s Girlfriend says we’re waiting for a nor’easter, better buy milk and bread.
Calm and certain, Dad’s Girlfriend told me that I had a couple of hours before the fog lifted yet. That I should exercise extreme caution. That if I had no official business, I should stay home. That’s when I closed the door and headed into the haze.
I faltered on the step and hesitated. I really couldn’t see anything. People talked about fog so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It was true; I touched my nose, then reached for the stair rail. My hand disappeared.
Nothing had shadows or depth, and I tripped again on a front walk I’d been running down my whole life. Instead of going back, I closed my eyes. There wasn’t much to Broken Tooth. I pictured it in my head—the steps in front of me, the broken piece of sidewalk two steps from the mailbox.
With a deep breath, I took a surer step. Then another, and then I opened my eyes and kept going. My phone trilled in my pocket, and I pulled it out. Another text from Bailey, wanting to know what was going on. I had a couple more, one in all caps. DID YOU DUMP SETH!?
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