“Yeah.” Sage’s voice made a flat, deflated volleyball sound. “I need to wrap my head around it first, you know? Prepare myself. Because the team, when they find out…” She didn’t know how to finish.
“You’re afraid they can’t handle it,” Len said. “And then you’ll have to hold their disappointment, too.”
Sage hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but that was it, exactly. It was simultaneously comforting and unsettling, the way Len nailed down her own thoughts.
She couldn’t talk about this anymore. “Have you ever shown anything here?” she asked.
Len looked confused.
“You’re an artist, right? A photographer? Have you ever had your work displayed here?”
Len laughed like that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.
“Your photographs are good, Len. I bet you could make a killing from the tourists.”
But Len didn’t seem to be listening anymore. Her eyes were stuck on the couch, on a spot next to her knee. “What is that?”
“I don’t see anything.” Sage bent close to the cushion. “Oh, this?”
“Don’t!” Len cried, but Sage had already brushed her hand over the streak. “It looks like pen, maybe? What’s wrong?”
“Are you sure?” Len’s eyes were closed, her breathing fast. It reminded Sage of the old cartoons she watched with Ian, when Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk. “One hundred percent sure?” Len asked again. “It’s just pen?”
Sage wasn’t, actually. It could have been from a marker or maybe just a defect in the fabric. She stared hard at Len, who looked like she was in physical pain.
“I’m sure,” Sage said. “One hundred percent.”
Slowly, Len’s breathing returned to normal. A flush filled her cheeks as she opened her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, covering her face. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” Sage said, pretending she wasn’t even a tiny bit weirded out. “It’s fine.”
Len stood up. “I have to go the bathroom,” she said. “And then I want to go home.”
“Oh,” Sage said, taken aback by Len’s abruptness. “Um, okay. Sure. I guess I’ll meet you by the door, then.”
Len nodded and squeezed through the tables at the end of the platform, leaving her mug half full.
It was like something switched inside her, Sage thought. So bizarre. She collected Len’s mug and took it along with hers to the bussing station by the exit. Colorful want ads and notices created a paper mosaic in the window. One flyer—a neon yellow paper right at eye level—had a picture of a volleyball.
REPLACEMENT PLAYER NEEDED ASAP FOR LEVEL A VBALL YMCA TEAM. HITTER PREFERRED.
Sage peeled the paper from the window. She was already a Y member, so her parents wouldn’t have to sign anything. She stared at the handwritten phone number at the bottom. She should hang the paper back up. She wasn’t allowed to play anymore. She couldn’t.
Her hand grasped the edge, crinkling the corner below the number. This team wouldn’t know that.
Behind her, she heard Len say something to the barista who’d served them. She pocketed the paper just before Len came up beside her.
“Anything good up there?” Len asked.
Sage made a show of looking at the remaining ads, like she’d been studying all of them. “Nothing,” she said, pushing open the door. “Nothing at all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LEN
“I THINK IT’S TIME FOR SOME GRATITUDE SHARING.” DAD dished a salmon patty onto Len’s plate.
Len wrinkled her nose, but not at the salmon patty. Even Mom didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the idea.
“Come on,” Dad said. “Gratitude has been proven to increase happiness levels and, well, that’s something we could use a bit more of around here, I’d say.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Mom squeezed the ketchup bottle, which exhaled a red blob onto her plate. “Len, would you like to start?”
“No,” she said. “Thank you.”
Dad pointed his fork at her. “I see what you did there. Clever.”
“It is a hard time to be thankful,” Mom admitted, “but I think that’s Dad’s point, isn’t it? There’s always something to be grateful for. Please?”
Len sliced her patty into tiny pieces. She wasn’t homeless. She had food to eat. She knew how to read. Those felt like copout answers, though, and she’d used them before. Why did Dad make them do these stupid things? She started to refuse, but the way Mom looked at her, so expectantly, so desperate for even the smallest piece of happiness, she had to say something. Especially after her spectacular failure the previous night. She wracked her brain, but she had nothing. Unless—
“Sage,” she blurted.
Mom sat back, puzzled.
“I mean, coffee,” Len amended. “Coffee, with sage. You know, the herb?” She speared a salmon piece and shoved it into her mouth.
“What an odd combination,” said Mom, eyebrows raised. “I’ll have to try it sometime.”
Dad cleared his throat. “Okay. It’s good to appreciate the little things, after all. Debra?”
Mom added another scoop of mashed potatoes to her plate. “Momma told me that her daughter visited her a few days ago.”
Len’s knife slipped, cutting an ear-splitting scrape into the plate. Dad grimaced.
“I’m grateful that she knows I’m there,” Mom said. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Even if she doesn’t know it’s me.”
Dad put his hand over hers. “You’re a good daughter, Debra.” Their fingers interlocked and Dad squeezed her hand tightly. “She knows you love her.”
Mom nodded, unable to speak. Guilt lit up Len’s body.
“What about you, Dad?” she asked, desperate to change the conversation.
“Me?” Dad sat up straighter. “I’m thankful for knowledge in unexpected places.”
Mom blotted her eyes. “Oh?”
“After painting today, I went to Reiki, and I met the most amazing person, a new student. We got to talking and he’s a recovering alcoholic—clean four years—but his body has taken a beating. Apparently, he had liver cancer, and the doctors gave him only a few months to live.”
“How awful,” Mom said.
“But get this. Instead of giving up, he started meditation.” Dad’s eyes practically glowed with excitement. “He took up a daily practice of imagining healing energy going into his liver, combined with positivity mantras about how good he felt. And how he was healing.” Dad leaned over his plate. “That was two years ago!”
Mom’s eyes widened. “Incredible.”
“Isn’t it?” Dad tapped his head. “That is the power of the mind.”
“Wait,” said Len. “You’re saying that this guy healed himself? With his mind?”
“With positive energy,” Dad said. “By tapping into the Life Force.”
“He probably also had some medicine,” Mom added.
Dad shrugged. “He didn’t mention it. Even so, you’re not convincing me it’s a coincidence that he started recovering at the exact same time he began energy work.”
Len sat back in her chair. Her brain felt like one of Nonni’s yarn spools that had come undone and been rewound haphazardly. An idea tugged on the end, trying to unravel it again.
“Len, honey.” Mom touched Len’s back, making her flinch. “Are you all right?”
Len realized she was cradling her head and forced her hands down to the table. “Yeah.” She started to grab her fork, but there was no way she could eat any more. “Ms. Saffron gave me these prompts,” she said, standing. “For the Melford. I don’t wanna miss the light.”
Len walked to her room, eyes fixated only on her camera until she got back into the hall. She wasn’t actually itching to go outside by any means, but she couldn’t stay in any longer, not after what Mom had said about Nonni.
She was outside before she realized she didn’t have her prompt list. Whatever. She held the camera to her
eye and started snapping, everything and anything. She loved how the world looked this way, manageable and confined through a lens that she controlled. Like nothing outside the edges existed. She walked slowly, keeping to the mushroom-free section of the yard, her finger glued to the shutter release.
Dad’s story poked into her mind. The power of the brain. Of thoughts. If positive thoughts could heal, that meant—
Don’t think it.
She swung the camera up, then increased its aperture to blur the background. Tiny pieces of dust drifted slowly through the last traces of sun, perhaps debris from the trees overhead. The chut-chut-chut-chut-chut of the camera steadied her, gave her something else to focus on—something to keep other thoughts out.
Motion appeared on the lens’s edges, and she turned, adjusting the zoom. Fireflies. Their dark bodies traced patterns through the deepening shadows until they blinked—beautiful—like magic.
Len followed them. Fireflies were lovely when illuminated, but Len liked them best the moment before the spark, when they were dark and small and nearly invisible—tiny gems of overlooked potential.
She snapped an image of two of them, unlit, circling each other, just before they glowed at the same moment, their light echoed by others behind them. Then, as suddenly as the sparks flickered, came a rush of memory:
Len was six. Laughing. Fauna, sixteen, held her up, and Len reached for the moon. As she cupped her hands together, fireflies flashed above them: two simultaneously, followed by three more.
The memory burnt out, but it left Len doubled over.
It’s your fault, her mind said, and she cursed herself, because she’d stopped focusing. And now the thought was in, burrowing into her brain. Your fault.
Len’s foot snagged on something, and she almost fell face first. “No,” she whispered, even though she knew it was true. She lowered the camera and suddenly the world was huge. Disorienting. She couldn’t move or step anywhere. There were tons of diseases in dirt—some life-threatening. She’d made the mistake of Googling it once. What if she stepped in one and carried it back into the house? And what if Mom touched it when she was picking a book off the floor, or Dad did when he was sweeping, and they got sick, and one of them died?
She bit her wrist, hard, because she couldn’t scream, not without people hearing. The last thing she needed was someone calling the cops. Her mind yarn was loosening by the second, everything coming more and more undone.
The dementia, she thought, and remembered another Google search—how fast it could consume young victims. Cicadas called loudly, swallowing every other sound. She looked toward the house. Were Mom and Dad still at the table? Had Fauna called? Had they even thought about following her?
It’s okay, she thought. This was the whole idea behind karma, wasn’t it? It wasn’t anything more than she deserved.
The left tail light of Nonni’s pickup reflected the street lamp, and Len forced herself toward it. Mosquitoes had come out, and she couldn’t just stand there. She convinced herself she could Lysol her boots, and the idea gave her enough calm to will herself to the truck.
Locking herself inside the cab, she watched the last drips of sun leak into shadows. She’d always hated dusk. Nonni had told her once that she found it the most peaceful time of day, but Len couldn’t imagine feeling that way. She didn’t mind darkness, which Nonni thought was somehow a paradox, but it wasn’t the night that bothered Len. It was the shifting and how it happened. Dad said it was a magical time—the in-between—but Len thought there was something profoundly sad about the way sunlight lost its grip, overcome, and was swallowed up by the dark.
Alone, as the final light died outside, she couldn’t suppress the truth any longer. If positive thoughts can heal, then the inverse also had to be true: negative thoughts could damage. Could destroy.
Your fault.
She closed her eyes, squeezing the steering wheel so tightly she thought the skin across her knuckles might split open. “Nonni,” she whispered.
“Len!”
For a brief, miraculous moment, Len thought her grandmother had answered her. Then light spilled into the yard, and Len heard her name again. Mom looked out of the house.
Len squeezed the wheel harder. She didn’t want to get out, but she couldn’t let them find her here. They might notice the truck had been moved.
“Len! Where are you?”
Softly, she opened the door and jumped out, timing her response—“Coming!”—with the click of the door to mask the sound. It was simple, slipping from the truck unseen. Len had always fit in with the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SAGE
THE NEXT DAY COULDN’T MOVE FAST ENOUGH. AS SOON AS Len had dropped her off the day before, Sage had called the phone number on the flier. A college student answered, and while he was pleasant enough, Sage could tell he was skeptical when she explained that her grades had kept her off the high school team this year—no doubt he thought she just wasn’t good enough to make the cut. Still, he’d invited her to meet the team the next evening at the Hendersonville Y.
“You’re jumpy,” Lyz told her at lunch. “What’s going on?”
Sage did her best to look surprised and forced her knee to stop its twitch beneath the table. “Nothing.”
“Probably just pent-up energy,” Ella said, taking a huge bite of green beans. “When are you gonna be able to practice again, anyway?”
Kayla’s wide eyes shot Sage a look.
“Those tests, you know?” Sage plastered a fractured smile on her face and shrugged. “The results take a while.” She ignored Kayla’s frown.
“I can’t wait till you’re back,” Hannah said. Nina nodded.
“Gotta follow doctor’s orders,” said Sage. Her knee resumed its twitch, because that was precisely what she wasn’t going to do. Tonight would be her first time on a court since her diagnosis. A normal person might be terrified—there was, technically, a chance her heart might give out. But Sage had never been normal when it came to volleyball. Besides, Dr. Friedman had said it was theoretically possible she could go into sudden cardiac arrest at any moment, even when not working out. Of course that was unlikely—so unlikely, in fact, that he’d determined Sage didn’t need a defibrillator. But it was nonetheless theoretically possible.
It was also theoretically possible that she could continue playing and never have a heart attack. A lot less likely. But again, theoretically possible.
Kayla’s frown seared into her, but Sage was suddenly very busy with her mashed potatoes.
“Do you guys know that chick?” Hannah bumped Sage’s elbow. “She keeps staring at us.”
“That’s the girl from the other day,” Ella whispered. “Isn’t it?”
Sage looked up just as Len dropped her eyes back to her sandwich. She sat on the far end of a long table, four seats between her and a cluster of theater students. Sage’s chest twinged. Did Len seriously not have any friends at school?
Kayla made a face. “That’s just Len Madder.”
“Don’t do that,” Sage said.
“Do what?”
“Why’d you say just Len Madder?”
“I don’t know. Hannah asked why she was staring, plus she’s weird. I was only saying—”
“Yeah, well,” said Sage, “I think maybe she’s dealing with some stuff, so edge off.”
Kayla’s face turned hard, but before she could answer, Nina asked, “What kind of stuff?”
Sage shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. But… something.”
Kayla snorted. Len lifted her eyes again, and Sage gave a small wave. Len glanced over her shoulders, apparently to check that Sage was, in fact, waving at her and not someone else. It hurt Sage’s soul, and before she knew it, she was calling Len to their table.
“What are you doing?” Kayla whispered.
“Give her a chance,” Sage said between her teeth as Len hesitatingly gathered her things and approached them. Ella slid over to make a space between her and
Hannah, but Len didn’t take it. Her eyes skidded between their faces, and Sage saw her register that, should she join, she’d be the only non-volleyball starter at the table.
“Come on,” Sage encouraged. “Sit.” Ella patted the open space beside her.
Len stared at the seat. “Actually,” she said, glancing at Hannah, “would you mind…” She swallowed, and Sage had the distinct impression Len was struggling with herself. “Could I maybe sit on the end instead?”
“Oh.” Hannah shot a quick look to Kayla. “Um, okay.” She slid down toward Ella, allowing Len to have the end seat.
“Here we go,” Kayla said, just loud enough for Sage to hear.
“Thanks.” Len perched on the very edge of the bench, her gloved hands still gripped on her tray, like it might fly away at any moment.
“So,” Sage said, thinking maybe this had not been her best idea after all. “Everyone, this is Len.”
Ella, bless her, didn’t let the awkward start bother her. “Hi,” she said at once, and introduced herself.
“Hi.” Len’s voice squeaked in a rusty chair kind of way. “I think we have Biology together?”
Ella’s smile slipped. “Really? Third block? I thought I knew everyone…”
Len nodded. “It’s okay. It’s a big class. I sit in the back.”
“Oh,” Ella said, confidence faltering. “Well, great. Um, this is Hannah and Nina.”
“I’m Lyz,” Lyz added. Everyone looked at Kayla.
“We’ve met.” Kayla crossed her arms.
“Len’s a photographer,” Sage said quickly.
“Oh!” Nina perked up. “My brother studies photography at UNC.”
“Really?” Len finally loosened the grip on her tray. “I’d love to go there.”
“Their facilities are amazing,” Nina added. “It’s pretty competitive, though. And expensive.”
Len picked up her straw, pushing it against the table to break the paper.
“Ugh,” said Ella, pulling her roll in half. “Everywhere is expensive, even in-state prices. My parents started a fund when I was little, and I’ll still have to work full-time if I don’t get a scholarship.”
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