Rocks Fall Everyone Dies

by Lindsay Ribar

  “Do you like that girl?” said Willow, making me jump. “Leah Ramsey-Wolfe?”

  “I mean … sure? Kind of? But she’s, um. Well, you heard. She’s totally not into me.”

  Willow nodded, touching my elbow in a way that I guessed was supposed to be understanding. Or something. “Brandy left when you told her the truth about yourself. Didn’t she.”

  “How’d you know that?” I asked.

  She smiled sadly. “I’ve seen it happen far too many times over the years. I know the signs. The averted eyes. The refusal of breakfast before she left. My Holly reached into her and confirmed it. Then took the memory away, of course—”

  “She did what?” I said, my whole body snapping to attention. That was the whole reason I hadn’t stopped her from breaking up with me—because I knew how much it sucked to have memories stolen, and I hadn’t wanted that to happen to Brandy.

  Willow looked alarmed. “She removed Brandy’s memory. We can’t very well have people wandering about, knowing our secrets, can we?”

  “But …”

  “Holly was very careful, if that’s what you’re worried about. She made sure not to take anything else by mistake.”

  I nodded. That was something, I guess. “Then she’s not going to remember why she broke up with me,” I said.

  Willow shrugged. “I expect she’ll fill in the blanks with her own version of events. The human mind is remarkably elastic in that respect.”

  Right. Like how Dad had stolen my memory of my real grandmother, and I’d filled in the blank by assuming Willow was my grandmother instead.

  I sighed.

  “But,” she said, “you should know how sorry I am. She was a charming girl.”

  “Charming,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “Aspen? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just … I stole so much from her. I took away all the negative things she thought about me, and all the new feelings that kept popping up for Theo, and I … I didn’t even think it was a bad thing to do, you know?”

  She laughed. “You have a talent that few people have. It’s only natural that you should want to use it.”

  Only natural.

  Like it was only natural that a boy my age should be pissed off, but not at all sad, about his mom leaving.

  “I guess,” I said uncertainly … and that was when my entire brain skidded to a halt.

  Willow’s hand. Still touching the bare skin of my elbow. Yesterday she’d been shaking—and now, she felt totally normal.

  Oh.

  Oh, shit.

  “Grandm—uh, Willow?”

  She gave me a smile. “You can continue calling me Grandma if you like. It’s up to you.”

  “Um,” I said. “The other night. You said you had … you know. A tremor in your hands. But now …”

  I nodded down at her hand on my elbow, and she pulled it away. “It comes and goes,” she said.

  The suspicion in my gut bloomed, slowly, into something larger and uglier.

  “How?” I made myself ask. “How, exactly, does it come and go?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea. It isn’t as though I can compare notes with other women my age.” She looked at me with clear eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because of Brandy,” I said. “We stole from her to fix the Cliff yesterday.”

  She thought for a moment. “Yes, that odd bracelet. What about her?”

  “She’s … she was shaking,” I said. “She said it started when they were at the lake. And I can’t fix her.”

  Willow raised an eyebrow.

  I went on: “Was yesterday when your tremor stopped?”

  A moment passed, and Willow nodded. Slowly, her gaze never leaving my face, she nodded.

  “It’s for you,” I said, clutching at the back of my neck, which had suddenly gone tense as hell. “All the extra stuff. It’s not for the Cliff. It’s for you.”

  “Extra stuff,” she echoed, sounding weirdly impassive. “Such as?”

  “Yesterday, all I took away from Brandy was a couple of freckles. That was seriously all I took. But the Cliff stole something else. And—and your eyes!” I said, pointing.

  “My eyes?”

  “When I got here, right up until the first time we did the ritual, your eyes were all—I mean, I saw you read with a magnifying glass once, for heaven’s sake.”

  She nodded. “I remember that.”

  “And after the ritual,” I said, “Leah’s friend Jesse went blind. That night. The first ritual I did. That was when your eyesight got better. And then there’s—”

  Heather. Then there was Heather. And I almost said so, except that was when I realized what was really happening here. I was telling Willow all this stuff, and she was listening, and she was nodding … and she was smiling. Just like she’d smiled after I’d completed my very first triad ritual when I was ten years old.

  She looked like she was proud of me.

  “Oh,” I said. “You knew.”

  Willow smiled kindly, her eyes twinkling as she pressed one warm palm against my cheek. “Aspen, dearest. Of course I knew. And look at you, clever thing, figuring it out so fast. Even Holly, bless her, still hasn’t figured it out.”

  “Well, obviously,” I said. “If she’d figured it out, she would know that you’re the real reason Heather died.”

  “I’m … sorry?” said Willow, the kindness draining from her eyes. “Maybe I misheard, but it sounded very much like you just accused me of murder.”

  “No, god, not—not murder exactly, but—but her lungs—she—”

  “Deep breath,” said Willow. I took a deep breath, because she was wearing the kind of look where disobedience wasn’t an option. “Now explain yourself.”

  So I did. I explained about Heather creating the bounceback to protect Leah, and how it had backfired when the Cliff stole from Heather, presumably to patch up Willow’s broken-down lungs. “Am I right?” I said, when I was done. “You couldn’t breathe right, and then you could? Right around the time Heather died?”

  Willow nodded slowly, looking so stricken that I honestly believed she hadn’t known. “Poor girl,” she whispered. “Poor foolish girl.”

  “Foolish?” I said, indignant. “She’s dead.”

  Willow smiled tightly. “Death, unfortunately, doesn’t make fools any less foolish.”

  My whole body went tense, and my hand clutched at my neck. That was probably the most callous thing I’d ever heard anyone say.

  “I guess,” I said slowly. “It’s just … I mean, don’t you feel, I dunno, guilty?”

  “Her death wasn’t my doing. It was the Cliff.”

  “Sure, but it was still for you,” I countered.

  “Indeed it was,” she said. “And believe me, if I could have chosen anyone but Heather, I would have. I value my family above everything, Aspen. You know that.”

  I nodded. I did know that. But she seemed awfully composed for a woman who’d just learned that her several-zillion-times-great-granddaughter would still be alive if not for her.

  “You seem troubled,” said Willow.

  I snorted. Troubled. Yeah.

  Then she said, “What’s that you’re doing?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re massaging your neck,” she said, mimicking the gesture. “Do you know how many times I’ve seen you do that since you arrived here?”

  I paused, thinking. “I dunno. A lot, probably?”

  “Why do you do it?”

  Well, by now it was as much habit as anything else. But the reason the habit had started …

  “Old injury,” I said. “I was in a car crash when I was … ten? Eleven? Just a little one. But I got really bad whiplash.”

  “You poor thing,” she said quietly.

  I shrugged. “It’s not horrible. Acts up once in a while, but whatever.”

  “Ten or eleven,” she mused, tapping her bottom lip with one finger. “Why didn’t your father heal you?”

  “Oh, he did,”
I said. “It hurt like a b—um—it hurt a lot, at first. But he reached in and took all the pain away until it healed.”

  She narrowed her eyes, considering. “But it never fully healed, did it. He took away the symptoms of your injury, but not the injury itself. You were left with a neck, which, and I quote, acts up once in a while.”

  I shifted my weight a little. I’d never given much thought to that. “Well, right. But …”

  “But nothing. Come with me.” She turned and headed away from the driveway, toward the woods.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, jogging a little to keep up with her brisk pace.

  “To the May Day tree.”

  Through the woods we went, Willow nimbly dodging rocks and roots, me following doggedly in her footsteps, until we got to the field. Immediately I was struck by a sense of … not déjà-vu. Nothing as heady as that. Just a sense of circling. Of always ending up back at the same place.

  It didn’t feel good.

  “Well? Are you coming?”

  Willow’s voice made me jump, and I realized that I’d stopped at the edge of the field, while she’d almost reached the tree already. I ran to catch up.

  We stood right at the spot where Leah and I had sat together, just a short time ago. Willow’s sharp eyes scanned the pile of stuff that surrounded the trunk. Finally, after a long moment, she said, “Pick something.”

  “Me?” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me what to look for?”

  She smiled. “This isn’t part of a ritual, Aspen. This is just for you. Pick something. Anything.”

  My stomach curdled. I knew, somewhere deep inside, what was about to happen—what she was going to tell me to do—but I couldn’t acknowledge it. Not yet. It was too huge. So, for now, I did what I was told. I went for the first thing that caught my eye: a bright blue hardcover book. It said The Hardy Boys on it.

  “Is this okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Bring it here.”

  I did, and she took a moment to examine it. “Hm.”

  “Hm?”

  She looked up at me. “Reach inside. See if the owner of this book has a neck that’s free of injury.”

  Finally, I let understanding seep in. I was supposed to fix myself.

  I was supposed to fix myself by, essentially, passing my injury along to someone else.

  I swallowed. “I don’t think I should do this.”

  Willow gave a little laugh—the kind of laugh that made me realize just how weak my protest had sounded. “Oh, Aspen,” she said.

  “Oh Aspen what?” I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest. “I just found out that my cousin died because you keep healing yourself, and now you want me to do the exact same thing?”

  “Hardly the same thing,” said Willow, her voice so calm that it made me want to break something. “I have to rely on the Cliff to heal the parts of myself that are broken—but I can’t control whom it chooses to steal from. You, though. You have control over what you take, and whom you take it from.”

  That was true.

  “Besides,” she continued, “your injury is such a small thing. You’ve lived with it for years. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn to carry your burden.”

  I found myself nodding. “Plus it’s not like it’s a real disability or anything, right?” I said. “It’s just annoying.”

  “Even if it were a real disability,” she said, “people learn to live with those all the time. Take your eyes, for example. I know you wear those contractual lenses—”

  “Contact lenses,” I corrected her with a grin.

  “Ah, yes. Those. Don’t you think that if you’re going to shoulder a responsibility like keeping the Cliff standing, you ought to be able to see properly to do it?”

  I frowned. I could see just fine, as long as I had my contacts or my glasses. Still, my eyes would probably get worse as I got older… .

  She moved closer to me, touching the edge of the book that I held. “You can replace yourself over time, Aspen, just as I do. But you can do it on your own terms. You can choose whom to steal from, and whom to protect.”

  Replace myself. I could heal all the injuries I had now, and the ones I might have in the future. I could keep my body from breaking down when I got old. I could …

  But the idea still took a few more moments to compute, and when I spoke again, my voice came out quiet. Almost scared.

  “Are you saying I could live forever?”

  Willow tilted her head, just a little. Just so. Her eyes glinted. “What I’m saying,” she said, “is that you ought to start by reaching into that book and replacing your neck injury with something better.”

  My entire body was close to trembling now. My skin itched, like it was suddenly too big, or maybe too small. I felt drunk and high and totally sober, all at the same time.

  I reached.

  This time, I only lingered on the surface long enough to make sure that the owner of this book wasn’t someone I knew. Once I was sure, I bypassed everything else—all the surface emotions and superficial personality traits that I usually noticed when I reached into people for the first time. I didn’t want to see those. I just thought Neck, and there it was, instantly. A perfectly healthy neck.

  Moving cautiously, I wrapped my will around the health and strength of that particular curve of his spine. I took a small piece away, leaving enough behind that he’d still be able to, you know, hold his head up … and I pulled.

  I pulled it out, and I absorbed it into myself.

  And then, for the first time in who even knew how long, my neck

  Felt

  Fine.

  It was like there’d been an anvil sitting on top of my head for years that I hadn’t even noticed until, suddenly, it wasn’t there. My head was balloon-light. Almost dizzy. I felt like I was about to cry.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered.

  “Feel better?” asked Willow.

  I feathered my fingers over the base of my skull, then downward. “I … I didn’t even know I could feel this much better. Like, I can’t even describe this. I …”

  “No need, my dear boy,” she said, smiling kindly. “If anyone understands, it’s me. Now let’s get back to the house before we lose the light completely, shall we?”

  When we got back, Willow led me up to the second floor and pulled down the attic stairs. “Holly usually disposes of the objects we’ve used in the ritual, but as she’s not here, would you mind? Just leave that book in whatever box still has room.”

  I’d been up to the attic before. Heather had brought me up when we were both much smaller, to show me how many things she’d used in her rituals. How many people she’d stolen from. At the time, I’d thought that it looked like a serial killer’s stash of trophies or something, but she’d assured me that it was a family legacy thing, which made it all right. Now, though, as I stared at the piles upon piles of cardboard boxes full of other people’s trinkets, my first impression was rapidly returning, and all I wanted to do was get out of there as fast as I could.

  So I opened the box closest to the stairs, intending to drop the Hardy Boys book inside—but there, at the top of the pile, was The Hound of the Baskervilles—the book that had once been Leah’s.

  I didn’t throw away the Hardy Boys book. Instead, I plucked The Hound of the Baskervilles from its box and brought both books with me into Heather’s room.

  And as I tried to fall asleep later that night, I ran my fingers back and forth over the spine of the Hardy Boys book, wondering about the guy I’d just stolen from. Trying to put my curiosity aside so I could go to sleep.

  But after a little while, I found myself thinking about what Leah Ramsey-Wolfe had said earlier, under the May Day tree:

  Seems to me you could be as empathetic as anyone else, if you bothered trying.

  This was what she meant. This, right here, was the difference between trying to be empathetic and not. Between being a robot and being a person. I could reach into the Hardy Boys book a
nd meet the person I’d stolen from—or I could set it aside and tell myself that it wasn’t my problem, just like I’d always done before.

  I reached into the book. This time I went slowly enough to see all the things I’d missed the first time around.

  It wasn’t a guy I’d stolen from, first of all. It was a woman. Young—actually, only a few years older than me. She was studying math at a state school not far away, and she came back to Three Peaks every few weeks to visit her family. She loved dogs, hated cats, and had a secret fondness for peanut butter ice cream. Secret, because she was a health nut. Health nut, because she was a gymnast.

  Oh.

  I lingered on that for a moment. Then a moment more.

  She was a gymnast, this girl. And I’d given her a neck injury.

  BEFORE

  I don’t remember exactly what my mother’s face looked like, that night. All I remember is that she didn’t look proud of tiny little fourth-grade me. That fact stood out because everyone else looked so proud that they could’ve floated away. My dad. Aunt Holly. Grandma. Even Heather, more or less. Not my mom, though.

  “First try!” said Grandma, clapping my dad on the shoulder as Aunt Holly put out the fire in the fireplace. “You certainly couldn’t do that, could you, Andy?”

  “I think it took about ten tries for me,” said Dad, shaking his head. “But that’s the hope, isn’t it? For your kids to be better than you.”

  I remember Mom’s face darkening. I remember how she didn’t say anything, even though she looked like she wanted to.

  “Isn’t that great, Heather?” said Aunt Holly. “Aspen can help us with the triad ritual now.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Heather, who’d already schooled her face into an expression of practiced apathy. “I’m still better at it. Can I ride my bike now?”

  “It’s dark out, sweetie,” said Aunt Holly. “We can ride bikes tomorrow before we leave, okay?”

  Heather hmphed, crossing her arms and scowling at me, like it was my fault that the sun had already set. I knew she was really mad at me for taking her spot in that night’s ritual, so I gave her the toothiest grin I could muster. She just scowled harder.