Rocks Fall Everyone Dies

by Lindsay Ribar

  “I know you know,” she teased. “So get on with it.”

  I reached further into the boy who’d owned Batman. There was a persistent lack of caring about his grades, even though he had a solid B average. A fierce, protective love of his family, even when he hated them. A strong, slow-burning love for a particular girl, who he’d first noticed in fifth grade, when she’d beaten him in a field day race. Tendrils of friendship stretching outward in many directions, immovable and important. A confidence in his ability to play football, basketball, soccer, table tennis, regular tennis, god this was a lot of sports …

  Ah. A competitive streak.

  Maybe that was what I needed. Something bright, as Grandma had said—but still something he wouldn’t necessarily miss when it was gone.

  Got it, I thought—and then realized I’d said the words aloud. I opened my eyes to see Grandma nodding thoughtfully at me.

  “An inclination toward competition,” said Grandma, squinting again as she regarded me. “Toward winning. That’s good work, boy. Subtle, strong, definitely bright. Good. Take it out.”

  That was the cue I’d been waiting for. Closing my eyes again, I hooked my will into the boy’s competitive streak like it was a physical thing. It took a moment to pry loose, which wasn’t surprising since it was so deeply rooted in his personality—but I managed it.

  Ritual reaching wasn’t the same as everyday reaching. When I reached into people and took stuff away, I usually did one of three things with it: absorbed it into myself, gave it to someone else, or released it. The ritual, though, required pushing my talents in a slightly different direction.

  Concentrating hard, I guided the energy of the kid’s competitive streak toward the fireplace … and there it sat, a glowing orb of orange-yellow-purple, actually visible where before it had just been a very solid idea.

  Grandma put her hand on my shoulder, looking so very proud. “Good work, Aspen. Very good. As always. Now, Holly, your turn.”

  “I know, Ma,” she said irritably.

  Grandma raised her eyebrows, but didn’t reply.

  I stepped back from the fireplace, my knees like jelly, my body suspended between drunk and hungover, my mind suspended between my own consciousness and that of the person I’d just stolen from. Not terrible, as far as reaching hangovers went, but still incredibly disorienting. To say the least.

  That was why this ritual needed three people. The thing in the fireplace was already beginning to flicker and fade, and soon it would disappear completely if someone didn’t step in and point it in the right direction. And in my current state, there was no way that someone could be me.

  Aunt Holly moved toward the fire, sleeves rolled up, and took the orange-yellow-purple thing into her hands. She didn’t do anything. Just stared at it. And stared. And stared. And as she kept staring, her hands started moving together, slowly, shrinking the glowing ball into a tinier, more compact version of itself.

  I smiled. This was part of why I loved the triad ritual. Normally, the reaching stuff that my family did was totally invisible. But when we were linked to the fire like this, I could see everything. The results of my reaching were right there in front of me, glowing and pulsing. And I could watch as Aunt Holly sent it, converted by the fire into pure energy, to the Cliff—the giant wall of rock that loomed over the town of Three Peaks—mending the fault in its stones, making it whole again.

  The whole thing was undeniably badass.

  “Did it work?” said Aunt Holly, turning toward Grandma.

  Grandma’s eyelids fluttered closed, and she did that spider-legs thing with her hands again. After a moment, she said, “We’ve made progress. Now, the book. Take something different this time, Aspen. Something a little less bold. A little smaller, perhaps. A little more personal. Whenever you’re ready.”

  By now, my head was clear enough. Setting the Batman figure down in front of the fire, I picked up the battered little paperback instead. Closed my eyes. Ran my hands over it, looking for a place to reach in.

  I found it when I brought the book up to my nose and breathed in its dusty, musty, old-paper smell. A person came into focus in my head. A girl, seventeen, like me. Quiet about some things, loud and opinionated about other things. The book had traveled in her backpack, slept under her pillow, gone away to friends’ houses and come back missing her. Or maybe she’d missed the book, not the other way around. It was hard to separate the two, with the smell of paper in my nose and the feel of rounded page corners against my fingers.

  Reaching further into the book’s memory of her, I dug around for something I could take. Her lingering guilt over a friendship she’d lost? Her loyalty to her boss at—where was it—ah, a local bookstore? The crush she had on one of her friends? Maybe that would do the trick.

  “Not enough,” said Aunt Holly in a harsh voice that jolted my eyes right open. She was staring at me. Glaring. Yeah, that was the other thing about the ritual. Normally, when I reached, I didn’t have an audience. Even the person I was reaching into couldn’t tell I was doing it. But during the ritual, everything and everyone was connected. Which meant Aunt Holly and Grandma could watch me as I worked.

  “Ma said something personal,” Aunt Holly went on. “Weren’t you listening?”

  I thought a crush was plenty personal, but Grandma didn’t contradict her, so I just nodded and closed my eyes again. Reached.

  “Is that who I think it is?” I heard Aunt Holly whisper. “That girl, again? Didn’t we just deal with her?”

  Grandma huffed. “A few months ago. Yes.”

  This girl loved books. She liked most animals, but didn’t trust birds. Her favorite foods were Buffalo wings and vegetable dumplings. She liked thrift-shopping, and had made a point of cultivating a strange sense of fashion. She liked being alone.

  “That,” Grandma breathed. “You’re on the right track. Just go deeper.”

  I didn’t know what she was getting at, but I focused on the aloneness thing and went deeper. This girl spent entire afternoons in the woods, reading in the shade of trees. In warmer weather, she often pitched a tent and spent the night the same way. Or she would rent a canoe from … Was that the same lake Theo and Brandy and I had been going to? Yes. It was.

  She’d rent a canoe, paddle out to the middle of the lake, create a cocoon for herself with a beach towel—and read. For hours. Alone, separate from the entire rest of the world.

  Grandma’s hand landed on my arm, gripping it so hard, I could feel her nails in my skin. “Good,” she said. “Perfect. Thinks she can just run away from real life, does she? Thinks there won’t be consequences? Well.”

  I didn’t know what that was about, but I wasn’t gonna ask. Not in the middle of the freaking ritual. For now, all I asked was, “The boat thing?”

  “The boat thing,” she confirmed.

  So I latched on to the girl’s affection for boats, and for the peaceful solitude they provided. I dug my will into the places where it melted into the rest of her personality.

  “Good,” said Grandma again. “Good work. Keep going.”

  I did keep going, even though the girl was proving weirdly difficult to latch on to. Clutching the book harder, I increased my focus and tried to tune out the rapt attention of my grandmother and my aunt as they watched me. I pulled.

  I pulled.

  I pulled.

  Something came loose—but it didn’t feel the same as last time. With Batman’s former owner, it had been easy. Smooth, like sliding a block out from the side of a Jenga tower. This time, though, I had to pull so hard that I felt something sliding out of place within myself. I could feel the echo of the girl’s loss within my own body. Weird, especially since the thing I’d just taken wasn’t very big.

  But I still managed to hold on to it. I still managed to nudge it toward the fire, where it hung suspended, a bigger orb than the first one, orange-yellow-purple with flickers of red around the edges.

  As Aunt Holly began to work her magic, I braced myself
for a reaching hangover even worse than the first one. It made sense, given how much effort the stealing had taken.

  But the usual hangover feeling didn’t come.

  Weird.

  I looked down at the book, sitting harmlessly in my hands. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Nothing unusual about it at all.

  Aunt Holly finished her magic. The orb disappeared. She turned toward Grandma and asked, “How’s the Cliff?”

  “Good,” said Grandma, after taking a sip of her tea. “Solid. The fault is gone.”

  As she spoke, the fire’s flames turned normal again. Shades of orange instead of shades of blue. I lifted the cover of the book, just to see; there was a My Name Is stamp inside, under which a name had been written in textbook-perfect cursive.

  Leah Ramsey-Wolfe.

  “Good,” said Aunt Holly curtly. “Then I’m going to bed.”

  Without so much as a good night, she unlocked the door again and left. Grandma and I both watched her go.

  When the silence between us started to grow uncomfortable, it was me who finally said the obvious: “She’s still depressed.”

  Grandma’s eyebrows lifted. “Can you blame her? It’s only been a few months.”

  I nodded. I knew that. Hell, I’d even been to the funeral. But it wasn’t like Heather and I had been close or anything. We’d seen each other like once a year. Maybe twice, tops. And yeah, we used to have fun hanging out, and obviously I was sad when she’d died—but was grief really supposed to last this long?

  “Heather was her only daughter,” Grandma went on, her voice all soft. “I know you don’t have any idea what it’s like to lose a child—and I hope you never do—but try to give her the space she needs, all right?”

  I nodded again, even though I’d barely seen Aunt Holly since my friends and I had arrived. When she wasn’t at her office, she only came out of her room for meals. Sometimes not even then.

  I rubbed my neck, which had gone tense at the thought of Heather and the funeral and Aunt Holly. Talking about awkward stuff always did that to me.

  “Anyway,” I muttered, basically dying for a change of subject.

  “Anyway,” Grandma echoed, her voice a gentle mockery of mine. It made me loosen up a little. “You did good work tonight, Aspen. You always do, of course. But your talents are even stronger than the last time I saw you. Even more precise—and that’s saying something. I’m proud of you.”

  This was a much easier thing to talk about. Especially since I knew she was right. I had gotten better at reaching since last summer. I was glad she’d noticed.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Oh, hey, so, what’s your deal with Leah Ramsey-Wolfe?”

  “Leah?” said Grandma, looking suddenly suspicious. I pointed at the handwritten name in The Hound of the Baskervilles, so she could see where I’d learned it, and her expression turned into one of understanding. “Ah. Yes. Well.”

  “I mean, you clearly can’t stand her. Either of you. So … ?”

  Grandma sighed, shaking her head. “It’s nothing. Old scores. Bad blood. Nothing you need to worry about.”

  That sounded interesting. “Come on. Tell me.”

  “Aspen,” said Grandma, sounding almost as sharp as Aunt Holly. “Leave it alone.”

  “Whatever,” I said. If she didn’t want to tell me, I could just as easily find Leah Ramsey-Wolfe myself, and get my own damn answers.

  “Whatever indeed,” said Grandma. “Shouldn’t you see if your friends have returned yet?”

  Brandy and Theo. I’d almost forgotten.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I should.”

  I darted around her, out the door that Aunt Holly had left open, and into the foyer. I recognized Brandy’s sparkly sandals among the shoes arranged neatly by the door. But Theo’s shoes weren’t there. A quick glance up the stairs told me that none of the lights were on. Huh.

  Next, I checked my phone—and there they were. Five texts. One from Brandy, four from Theo. I read Brandy’s text first:

  Going 2 bed. CU 2mrw. Ughhh worst day evr.

  Worst day ever? I smothered a grin and clicked over to Theo’s texts.

  Ummm Brandy just broke up with me?????

  I’m gonna go for a drive.

  Don’t wait up.

  And don’t ever get broken up with, man. It blows.

  I turned my phone off, slid it back into my pocket, and let out a long sigh of relief. Back at the diner, when I’d decided to reach into Brandy and take away her love of Theo and put an end to their stupidly cutesy let’s-make-out-in-public-all-the-goddamn-time relationship, I hadn’t really been thinking ahead, and—

  Well, okay, that was kind of a lie. I’d thought about breaking them up for months now. Planned out various ways that I could do it, planned out what I’d do afterward. But there’d always been something in the way. The thought of people asking questions, the thought of repercussions at school. Stupid shit like that, keeping me firmly on the fence about whether or not I should actually do something.

  But then, earlier this evening, Theo had stolen one of my fries—my fries—and handfed it to his girlfriend, complete with ridiculous airplane noises. Brandy had looked totally embarrassed, but also totally charmed, and she’d eaten the fry. She’d eaten the damn thing, and just like that, I was off the fence.

  Without even giving it a second thought, I’d reached into Brandy and removed her love for Theo. And apparently, it had worked out in the best possible way. Which was to say, with a breakup.

  “Aspen, honey?” said Grandma, making me jump. And making me realize that I’d been standing stock-still in the foyer, grinning at my phone like a total creep. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, totally,” I said. “Everything’s awesome.”

  Because a breakup didn’t just mean I’d never have to hear those stupid-ass airplane noises ever again.

  It also meant Brandy was single.

  BEFORE

  February always sucks. This is a scientific fact. But at the time, I remember thinking that this was objectively the worst February that had ever happened to anyone, ever, in the history of the entire world. There were three reasons for that.

  First there was Heather. Aunt Holly called Dad, and then Dad told Mom and me. It was something with her lungs. Some fast-acting disease that I never found out the name of. There was a lot of hugging, in which I participated, and a lot of crying, in which I did not.

  We went upstate for the funeral, and it was just me and Mom and Dad and Grandma and Aunt Holly and a couple of distant relatives who’d flown in to help scatter her ashes. None of Heather’s friends came, which kind of surprised me. But then, Heather had been kind of a giant nerd. Maybe she just hadn’t had any friends.

  The second reason February sucked was Brandy. I’d had a raging crush on her for almost two years, but never worked up the nerve to ask her out—and then, on February tenth, I caught her making out with Theo on his front stoop during a party. Brandy admitted that they’d been going out for a week or so. They just hadn’t told anyone yet.

  Then there was the third reason. The one I couldn’t have seen coming even if I’d been a goddamn clairvoyant.

  My mom left us on Valentine’s Day, of all days. She’d always told me it was a greeting-card holiday that didn’t mean anything, so it shouldn’t have mattered, but there was something extra wrenching about sitting in my room that night, knowing Mom was on a train to Long Island at the same time that Brandy and Theo were probably out at some romantic dinner-and-movie thing, being all coupley.

  The sitting-in-my-room part happened after my fight with Dad, which was after Mom had taken me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye, and given me a speech that she’d clearly practiced: “Aspen, if you ever want to leave, too, you just call me, okay? I’ll come get you, no matter when it is. Even if it’s ten years from now, if you want to change—if you want to get out of all this—you just call. Okay?”

  I’d asked her, of course, what the hell she was even talking abou
t.

  “You’ll figure it out,” she’d said, her eyes going all wet. “God, I hope you will. Just remember this: You’re a good person. If you want to get out, just call. I can help you.”

  Then she’d taken a single suitcase, and she’d left.

  As soon as I’d recovered from the shock of her absence, I’d gone into their bedroom, where my suspicions were immediately confirmed: Mom had left so abruptly, she hadn’t packed much of anything at all into that suitcase of hers. Her side of the closet was still mostly full. Her slippers were on the floor. Her night table was still cluttered with stuff.

  I picked something at random—the tiny book of Chinese poetry that her father had sent her from Hong Kong—and brought it out to Dad, who was slumped at the kitchen table. He looked like he was trying not to cry.

  “Okay, I don’t know what the hell’s going on with you two, but you need to make her come back,” I said, slamming the book down in front of him. He looked up at me, uncomprehending, so I said it again, in much simpler terms: “Make. Her. Come. Back.”

  He blinked a few times. Looked at the book, then at me. “Aspen, I can’t do that.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Obviously you can.”

  He sighed.

  A newer, uglier thought occurred to me: “You don’t want her back?”

  Dad rubbed his hands over his face. “Of course I do,” he said in this tiny, delicate voice that made my skin crawl.

  “So what’s the problem?” I said. “Do it.”

  “No,” he said.

  I slammed my palm down on the book’s cover. “Do it. Reach. Or I’ll do it myself.”

  He sprang to his feet. It was like I’d flipped a switch that turned Dad from a rag doll into the goddamn Terminator. Looming over me, he said, “You absolutely will not.”

  But I stood my ground. This was Mom we were talking about. “Yes. I will.”

  “All right. You listen to me, and you listen carefully. You will not alter your mother in any way. You know the rule.”

  “Oh, come on, just this once—”