“But I’m not me,” I tell him.
“You ARE you.” We pause. “Also, Aza, I’m scared too.”
“You are?” This makes me feel weirdly better.
“Yeah,” he says. “But at least we’re not scared of each other.”
I look at him.
“Are you sure?”
He hesitates for a little too long. “Nope. I mean, I’m not unscary. Maybe you’re scared of me.”
I smile at him. “I am deeply, deeply scared of you.”
We go up the walk to my house.
I think about the day I don’t remember, the day I came here fifteen years ago, newborn and no one, tucked into a bed not mine, in a body not mine, meant to die, and living because of these people who kept me safe without even knowing what I was. Who worked so hard to keep something broken going. Who loved me.
I think about my mom, apparently coming into my bedroom with a needle full of her serum, or so Jason tells me, and what was she then? Scared, and clueless. She thought I was human. She thought I was dying of something no one would understand. So she taught herself to understand it. She made me medicine. She put it into my bloodstream and hoped. When no one else could help me, she gave me everything she had.
Because of her, I’m here.
I can feel my chest rattling.
Being home is better than breathing, I tell myself.
I ring the doorbell. And they’re coming down the hall. I can hear them, my dad, footsteps, shoes on even though they shouldn’t be, my mom murmuring to him.
Jason’s kind of bouncing in place, like he might take off running, like we’re some other kind of couple on the way to the prom.
I suddenly think nothing bad can ever happen again, which is not smart, Aza, not smart, but I don’t care.
The door opens.
It’s my parents. Them. Really.
I have to fight really hard not to freak them out by crying, this stranger bursting into tears. But I sure as hell make some kind of noise. And they’re {???} and I’m {&,&,&} and they look at me like they don’t know me, which makes sense but feels like everything wrong ever and so I say “Mom?”
She doesn’t know me. I look completely different. I knew this would happen, but I’m not ready. It hurts.
“What?” she says. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
I discover I’m ready to reverse course and run from this, some kind of total coward. No one will know me down here. Not my parents. No one.
I start to stutter, start to stammer, and Jason steps forward.
“Hey, guys,” he says. “This is going to be weird, but hear me out.”
“Hi, Jason,” my mom says. “Are you okay? You seem not so hot. Should I call Carol? I heard about what happened.”
“Lightning,” Jason says. “I don’t recommend it. I’m mostly fine.”
I feel a pounding in my chest. Caru, above me, in a tree opening his wings. I hear a song inside me, Caru singing comfort.
“Jason,” says my dad, and I can see he’s trying to smile, but he’s startled to see Jason with someone who isn’t me. “Who’s this?”
“This is—”
I put my hand up to touch my hair. I don’t look the way I looked. They can’t possibly know.
“Hi,” I manage, whispering. “It’s good to see you.”
Eli runs down the stairs behind my parents, and stops in her tracks.
“Whoa,” she says. “I heard your voice, and for a second, I—” She looks closer. Her brow furrows. Confusion. “Jason?”
My parents are looking hard at me now. It’s the voice. I forgot. It’s the same. My voice belongs to me.
“Who are you?” my dad says. “I don’t think I—”
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know—” says my mom, her voice getting higher and higher.
“This isn’t funny,” says my dad.
“No,” says Jason. “I’m not trying to be funny. She has to show you something, okay?”
My mom stares hard at me. My dad is crying. I can almost not stand it.
Jason hands me a piece of paper and a pen. “Right?” he says. “This is what you do. You know what to do.”
“This is an apology list,” I say, louder than is strictly necessary. I put the paper against the wall and start writing. I know whose handwriting I’m writing in. It hasn’t changed. There are all these things that don’t change, ever, no matter what.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For not knowing what you were. All the times we did normal things. All the times you came into my room when I was scared and you told me you loved me.”
“Wait,” my mom says. “What is this? Jason. This isn’t okay—”
“I’m sorry,” I say to my dad. “For making you come to my school over and over to get me loose from the principal’s office. I’m sorry for not appreciating it when you held my toes as I went into the MRI machine, and saying I wasn’t scared. I was scared. You made me less scared. You told me you’d fight Big Bird for me.”
My dad’s expression is crumbling. He lets out a strangled sob.
“I’m sorry you suck at backflips and strained your back showing me who was boss.”
He snorts suddenly and looks up at me, his face shifting.
“I’m sorry I died when you were with me, and you couldn’t keep me from dying. It wasn’t your fault. I can explain it.”
I look at Eli.
“I’m sorry for—”
“Stop,” she says. She looks at me hard. “You don’t need to. I can see you in there, Aza.”
“I never even gave you a real I Love You list,” I manage to say, because I’m not far from crying right now, “let alone a real apology list. I put everything stupid in your list, and none of the real things.”
Eli looks at me. “Also, you underestimated me,” she says, and grins, a very Eli grin. “I notice everything.”
“What is this? What are you saying?” My mom. I take her in. Her blond-gray ponytail. Her face. Her eyes are shining, wild.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “For not seeing you. I didn’t know how lucky I was. You worked late and I slept late. We never saw each other. I made fun of your war-mice. I told you that nothing you did ever helped. I complained. I crashed the car into the garage, twice, and then pretended you did it with your bike. The last thing you said to me was on the phone, when I was in the ambulance, and you told me it was okay to go.”
The corners of my mom’s mouth wobble.
How do you prove you’re not gone? How do you prove you’re alive, when your whole family saw you dead? How do you prove you’re even human, after all that, after everything that’s happened, and everything that’s probably still going to happen? I don’t know how you prove it. I only know you have to have faith in people.
My family is around me. There is a moment of not knowing, of not loving, of not caring.
Then my sister reaches out her arms. My dad does too. Then my mom. I hear Caru whirring from the tree outside the front door. I reach out my hands to them and throw myself in. Jason’s on the outside for a moment, and then I grab him and pull him into us, and we are like
( )
like [[[[[[[[[[[ ]]]]]]]]]]]
like
H O M E
O M
M O
E M O H
For as long as it lasts.
They’ll come for me. Zal isn’t dead. Magonia isn’t gone. And Dai—there’s Dai. There’s Heyward and the Breath. There’s a whole world of trouble out there.
But right now, Jason and me and my family are holding onto one another, and all of us in this kitchen?
However much time there is? I’ll take it. I feel my strange, beautiful bird in my heart, and the unflooded world all around me.
Aza Ray, human and not, Magonian and not, Aza Ray, whose history is hospitals, and whose future is more interesting than her past. Aza Ray, who was born in the sky. Aza Ray, who is in love with a boy from earth.
If I have to
fly, he’s flying with me. If I have to sail, he’s on my ship. I lace my fingers into Jason’s. I hold on tight.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
tk
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HarperCollins Publishers
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is a memoirist, novelist, and editor, most recently of the novel Queen of Kings and the New York Times bestselling anthology Unnatural Creatures (coeditor with Neil Gaiman). As the author of the work of short fiction “The Traditional,” she has been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Brooklyn with a seven-foot stuffed crocodile and a collection of star charts from the 1700s. You can visit her online at www.mariadahvanaheadley.com.
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COPYRIGHT
MAGONIA. Copyright © 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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ISBN 978-0-06-232052-0
EPub Edition October 2014 ISBN 9780062384911
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