Authors: Amy Garvey
“ARE YOU SURE THAT’S ENOUGH FOR LUNCH,
sweetie?” Mrs. Lattimer says the next morning. She’s hovering, mostly dressed for work minus her shoes and lipstick, and her briefcase and keys and coffee are piled on one end of the counter. “I can give you some money if you want to get a sandwich, too. You girls eat like birds. I don’t even know how you get through the day.”
“This is fine, thanks.” I smile at her, or try to, and shake my paper bag of yogurt, fruit, and peanut butter crackers. It’s what I take all the time, and the thought of food still doesn’t sit well anyway.
Gabriel was the one to go to my house and pack a bag for me after I called my mom and told her there was no way I was coming home. She didn’t argue, and I was so wiped out, I couldn’t process how surprising that was, even though I told her I was angriest at her for keeping the truth about my father’s magic from me.
Mom wouldn’t let me stay at Gabriel’s, which I mostly expected, but Jess’s parents were glad to have me for a few days. I have no idea what my mother said to Mrs. Lattimer on the phone, but they’ve been treating me the way I guess most people would treat an unidentified explosive.
I don’t mind, really. I don’t feel like talking, to anyone. Even Jess didn’t try, although she curled up behind me in her big bed last night and stroked my hair until I finally went to sleep.
Mrs. Lattimer drives us to school, which is a bonus since it snowed hard enough to leave a few inches, and the day is crystal cold, brittle with ice. Gabriel’s waiting at my locker, and I don’t even care who’s watching—I kiss him hard, pretending just for a minute that I can swallow some of his calm steadiness.
Once I’d cried myself out, I told him about Adam. I wanted everything spread out in one place so I could try to make them neat and orderly facts instead of a throbbing panicked pulse in my head, and that meant telling him what I’d learned about Bay, and what I’d been doing.
Part of me was cringing, waiting for him to say it was too messed up, too much, but he didn’t. I’ll always be grateful for that. Not to mention the chance to do something about a missing kid and take my mind off how furious I am at my mother.
Gabriel and I walk to homeroom together. Dar passes us in the hallway, holding Thierry’s hand, her cheeks pink as an Easter egg, and I give her a subtle thumbs-up. Then I give Gabriel a kiss on the cheek, just because.
Once Gabriel and I are at our desks, I lean over. “Any ideas?”
“About . . . you know?” He shakes his head. Without confronting Bay, which doesn’t seem really likely to end happily, we’ve been trying to figure out some way to learn more about him. I can just picture interrogating Audrey, and drowning in a flood of tears and outrage. Without her, though, I’m stuck.
Unless . . .
“Hey, is Olivia working today?”
He shakes his head again, frowning. “She usually has Monday off. Why?”
I grin at him, possibilities racing through my head. “How do you think she would feel about taking you on a prospective student tour of Saint Francis?”
“There’s no way they’re going to believe I could afford this school,” Olivia says as we chug across town in the VW. “Especially not if they see us drive up in this thing.”
Gabriel laughs. “I doubt they’re going to be watching out the window.”
“Shut up, you,” Olivia grumbles, fingering the stiff, white collar of her shirt. “I’m not an actress, you know. What if they ask questions? What if they want to talk about the application process first? What if—”
“Dude,” Gabriel says, glancing at her from the passenger seat. “Relax. We can always just walk out.”
“Dude?” Olivia says, but she’s trying not to smile. I snicker in the backseat.
My smile fades a minute later when my phone buzzes again. It’s the fifth text in an hour, and I know exactly who it is without even looking. My stomach turns as I reach into my pocket to look anyway.
U CANT KEEP THIS UP 4EVR. U KNOW HOW MUCH FUN WE HAD.
Bay. I delete it and tuck my phone away, nauseated. How he can believe I’m going to forgive him after yesterday is beyond me, but Gabriel thinks he’s worried because he knows I heard Adam’s name.
“That’s probably true,” I said when he proposed his theory, and he shrugged. I haven’t told him how often Bay has texted since the first two, though, because Gabriel may be understanding, but he’s not a saint.
And he’s convinced that something awful happened to Adam at Bay’s hands. “I
felt
blood, Wren,” he explained, “and no one has seen Adam in weeks. Put it together.”
I don’t want to, really. I can’t imagine a kid my age murdered, especially not by other kids. It’s too huge to consider, wrong on levels that I can’t even comprehend.
But going to Saint Francis is one possible way to figure out something helpful. As we pull into the parking lot, I cross my fingers.
A woman is waiting for us in the office. I’m not sure if I was expecting a nun, but this chick looks like any other corporate worker bee in her navy suit and red scarf. She eyes me with curiosity, and I try to make myself as small and unobtrusive as possible. Gabriel holds my hand anyway.
“I have some information to gather for you,” she says after shaking hands with Olivia and introducing herself as Valerie Flynn. “Why don’t you take a look around while I do, get a sense of the school?”
It’s hard not to beam. Letting us wander around on our own is the best-case scenario, and I’m betting that Adam’s locker is going to have the equivalent of a neon sign above it. When Danny died, there were stickers and notes all over his locker within days, and flowers stuck through the vent in the door.
Students are still milling around, coming out of the band room and the hallway that leads to the auditorium, where someone is practicing a song that sounds like something from a musical. A couple of kids break out of a lip-lock against the lockers at the end of the upstairs hall when they hear us coming, and another girl walks past us into the bathroom, door squealing shut behind her.
“I don’t see anything,” Olivia whispers as we walk along, poking our heads into classrooms just to keep up the act. “Maybe they wouldn’t let the kids decorate his locker?”
“No, they did,” Gabriel says, and points as we round a corner. Halfway down the hall, one locker is covered in Post-it Notes and stickers. Dying flowers are stuck in the vents, and three teddy bears and a floppy-eared stuffed dog sit on the floor in front of it.
Olivia and I stand back, watching the hall for anyone coming, while Gabriel goes straight for the dial on the locker. It’s the one thing Adam would have touched every day, I guess, and I realize I’m holding my breath as Gabriel curls his fingers around it and closes his eyes.
“I’m not sold on this as worth the money,” Olivia whispers to me. She’s looking at a bulletin board announcing events. “Of course, who knows? Maybe they have some kind of Skull and Bones club that gets graduates into Congress or something.”
“I think they’d have to drape themselves in ivy first,” I say absently, watching Gabriel. He’s concentrating so hard, brows drawn together and mouth pinched shut, and then all of a sudden he’s not.
Because his knees are buckling, and he’s crumpled on the floor before I can even blink.
“Shit,” I hiss, and smack Olivia on the arm.
He’s gasping for breath, and I know it’s another headache. Olivia is horrified, hovering beside me in her gray pencil skirt and clutching his hand.
“Wren, what the hell? Is he okay?”
“He will be.”
I hope
. But I don’t know how we’re going to get him downstairs and into the car like this, not without someone freaking out and calling 911. He’s shaking violently this time.
Unless I hide him. I frown, thinking hard. “Go back downstairs and tell that woman we had to leave—tell her I was sick or something. I’ll get him down to the car.”
She lets go of her brother’s hand reluctantly. “How?”
“I’m working on it,” I tell her. “Just go.”
The hallway is empty except for me and Gabriel, and I lean close. His breathing has evened out, and I stroke his cheek. “Hey. Can you hear me? Gabriel?”
He manages to crack one eye open. “Adam.” He sounds like he has a throat full of glass.
“Tell me later,” I say, and wedge an arm under his shoulders. “You need to help a little. Gabriel, come on, you can do it.”
His head lolls on his shoulders like one of those stupid bobblehead dolls, and I give up and
push
at him with my power. For a moment he’s weightless, and then finally he balances, blinking.
“Now hold still,” I tell him. My heart’s pounding, because I have no idea if this will work, and I can hear Gabriel’s voice in the back of my head:
Poisoned himself with power.
But if Bay could do this with Fiona, I can, too. I tug him as close as possible while he winces, and wave my hand in front of both of us as I whisper, “Invisible.”
Something like static crackles under my skin for a second, but when I look down, I can still see us both. Crap. Then a short boy in a loosened tie and his blazer hanging over one shoulder skids around the corner, laughing. I have to shove Gabriel closer to the lockers so he won’t run over us.
It worked. I can’t quite believe it, but it worked.
Steering Gabriel all the way downstairs and out to the car isn’t easy, though. More than once I have to shush him when he mutters something random: “the stupid French Revolution” and “tell her no way” and “Tater Tots.” We’re invisible, but I’m pretty sure anyone could hear us talking.
He’s a lot heavier than he looks, and I nearly crack his head on the car door trying to wrestle him inside. I sit with him in the back, focusing very hard on not remembering Danny beside me in this same backseat, blank and trusting and doomed. Gabriel finally lays his head on my shoulder, and I murmur comforting nonsense things I won’t remember a moment later into his hair.
Olivia startles me when she opens the door, and once inside she draws a shuddering breath and says, “Shit, where are they?”
Oh. Crap. I whisper, “We’re back here, hold on,” so I don’t scare the shit out of her, and pull my power into a neat knot as I say, “Um, visible.”
I wriggle against the same tingling crackle under my skin, and smile at Olivia in the rearview mirror.
“Wow,” she says, blinking. “Is he okay?”
“Let’s just get out of here,” I tell her, and she starts the engine without another word.
“I saw him,” Gabriel says when we’re two blocks away, and lifts his head to face me. At least he sounds lucid, even though he looks deflated, pale and fragile, circles smudged under his eyes in purple. “He was just a kid. But it was so much . . .”
“I know.” I grab his hand and squeeze it, holding on, and jerk when my phone buzzes in my jacket pocket.
I know who it is without even looking. I reach into my pocket to shut it off, and let Olivia take us home.
IT’S A LONG, STRANGE WEEK. PARTS OF ME ARE
scattered all over town—at Jess’s in the evening, with Gabriel at school, at Bliss for two shifts. The part of me that wonders what’s happening at home is a raw wound, too sore to touch, and the part of me waiting for my father to get into town is cringing in a corner, too frightened to even peek out.
Gabriel is a rock, even though his last headache won’t completely fade. He’s dreaming, too, he tells me on Thursday morning.
“I don’t know what might be real and what’s just the images I saw at Adam’s locker, trying to shape themselves into some kind of sense.” He pokes at his sandwich at lunch, as if he expects it to move or poke him back. “Then there are the dreams where I’m running Bay out of town at the end of a flamethrower, but I think that’s just wishful thinking.”
“Aw.” I pat his hand and lean up to kiss him lightly. Gabriel may have vengeance in his heart, but he’s the gentlest person I’ve ever met. He’d probably wind up saying please as he brandished his flamethrower.
I can take care of Bay on my own anyway, which I’m sure he knows. It’s Adam that’s a big empty space, and I have no idea what to do about it. When I close my eyes, I picture the kid I remember, not too tall, dark brown hair always cut a little too short, lying somewhere in a sticky puddle of drying blood.
His eyes are open and unseeing.
I shudder and unwrap the granola bar Mrs. Lattimer tucked in my hand this morning. I’m not really hungry, but there’s nothing else to do while Gabriel faces down his sandwich, and Jess is across the room with Cal. Sitting in his lap, actually, which is something I never thought I would witness in my lifetime. Unless I’m wrong, she’s batting her eyelashes at him.
At least someone’s happy. Dar will be, too, on Saturday morning, but until she gets through the showcase on Friday night, she’s going to be the walking bundle of raw nerves she’s been for days. I keep finding her practicing her fingering under her desk during World Lit. If you don’t know what she’s doing, it looks sort of disturbing.
Kirk Burdett was staring at her yesterday, snickering and pointing her out to another one of his knuckle-dragging buddies. I was so tempted to send an electric shock across the desks, possibly to his crotch. But at the last moment I just glared. I haven’t used my power at all since Monday at Saint Francis.
Maybe it’s dumb. It’s not like magic would be out of character for me, even at school. And when Mom and I had it out a few months ago, she didn’t say it was dangerous. But what does she know? She’s not the one who apparently abused it, and she clearly didn’t think enough about it to even tell us our dad had magic in his blood, too.
It’s another empty place inside me, made purely out of confusion, but if I get close enough I can feel my power underneath it, a vague, humming vibration. For now, I can’t bring myself to touch it.
“You’re not eating.”
I glance up at Gabriel and roll my eyes. “Neither are you.”
“We can starve together,” he says with a dry smile. “It will be beautiful and tragic, and people will write songs about us.”
“With my luck, Katy Perry will write the song, and we’ll die in glow-in-the-dark tracksuits,” I grumble, and he snorts a laugh.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I groan. Bay has stopped texting so often, but not entirely.
Gabriel frowns and pokes me. “See who it is, Wren. It can’t always be him.”
And he’s right. It’s my mom, with an entirely too grammatically correct text telling me my dad is finally here.
I show it to Gabriel without a word. Tonight, I’m going home.
There’s an unfamiliar car parked outside the house, a faded gray sedan that nearly disappears in the dusk. I run my hand over the hood, but I’m not Gabriel—it simply feels like cold metal. I don’t know how much of my father would linger in the hood of his car anyway.
I can’t stall anymore. I have my packed bag in one hand and my backpack over one shoulder, and I’m going numb as I stand staring at the house. In the thick gray shadows, the windows glow softly, and I can see someone moving behind the sheer curtains. This is it.
The door opens before I’m even halfway up the walk, and Robin slouches there, toes wriggling in her striped socks and her hair loose around her face. So she can hide behind it, I think, and raise my free hand in a sort of half-mast wave.
“I missed you,” she says once I’m close enough to hear her.
“You too. Are you okay?” I glance at the windows one last time before she moves aside to let me in.
“Yeah.” She shrugs, but she’s strung pretty taut, and the hands she has jammed in her jeans pockets are curled into fists.
I bump her shoulder and work my mouth into a smile. “Let’s do this then.”
She closes the door while I drop my bags at the foot of the stairs and take off my coat. I’m a little amazed at how scared I am. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t spoken to my mom for this long, but right now I’m tempted to run into the living room and hide myself in her arms.
And my dad . . .
I turn around with Robin plastered against my right side, and there he is. I wonder if I’m still breathing—I feel too light, unreal, made of nothing but memory. He’s the man I knew, beneath a new layer of years that licked gray through his hair and his beard. And yet, I don’t know him at all.
“Hello, Wren.”
His voice is familiar, even if the smile hiding in his whiskers is a little dim. The one I loved was huge, mouth open and teeth white, always full of laughter.
All of my words are tangled in my throat, wrapped in fear and rage and grief and a strange, hopeful joy. I can’t remember the last time we were all in one room, and I don’t know if my mom realizes it, but suddenly she’s striding toward me.
“I missed you, baby,” she whispers, and then she’s all around me, scent and warmth and softness. “Let’s do this, huh?”
I have to laugh, because it’s so close to what I said to Robin, but a tear escapes anyway. As Mom wipes it away, I whisper, “I’m still mad at you, you know.”
She kisses the top of my head. “I figured. Now come on.”
The dining room table feels weirdly like a council of war. My parents take one side, and Robin and I take the other, and the two ends float uselessly, empty.
Robin can’t shut up. She’s a little machine gun of questions, punching holes in the mystery of our dad. It’s not that I don’t want to know that he used to be an art teacher and now he illustrates children’s books and fantasy novels, or that he lives up in the Adirondacks, where he spends a lot of time reading and hiking. But it’s hard to listen when all I can see is my mom, watching him answer as if every word is a gift, and my dad, glancing sidelong at my mom every few minutes, like he needs to know she’s still there, real, in the same room.
They look like the kind of long-lost lovers you see in movies, and the ache of it is palpable in the way they don’t touch.
And Robin doesn’t have any idea how much more she doesn’t know, and doesn’t even know to ask.
I’m studying my dad’s face—the spiderweb of lines I don’t remember beside his eyes, the eyes themselves that are so much browner than in my memories, the hands that look smaller now that I’m bigger. Sometimes he catches me watching, and I’m surprised that he never looks away.
Well, if I’m allowed to see him now, I want to see everything.
Robin’s asking what his house is like, if he has extra bedrooms, and I get it, she wants an invitation, she wants to see it all herself, too, but as he smiles at her, I can’t wait anymore. “Robin, just . . . shut up for a minute.”
She huffs and reaches out to smack my arm, but I grab her hand, stopping it in midair, and stare right at my father. Dad. Sam Darby. I don’t even know what to call him anymore.
“Tell me why you left, really. And why Mom never told us you have power, too.”
Robin gasps, and I let go of her hand as she swivels around to face him. Mom isn’t shocked, of course. She is pale, though, facing Robin across the table like she’s waiting for a blow.
“It’s not a short story,” Dad says. He’s worrying the wedding band, which he still wears, with his thumb, twisting it. “And it’s not a very happy one.”
“I want to know,” I say, and I’m proud that my voice is steady.
Beside me, Robin straightens up. “Yeah. Me too.”
“Okay then.” He stands up and walks toward the window, looking out at the darkness, and the whole room seems to go still, even the air unmoving as we wait for him to speak. When he turns around again, he looks hollowed out, and every secret he has to tell is there in his eyes.
An hour later, Robin is curled beside Mom on the sofa, and I’m cross-legged in front of the fire, the heat licking at my back. My father is in the chair in the corner, elbows on his knees, head bent, and I can’t decide whether I want to hit him or hug him.
It’s like Gabriel said, more or less. His family had power, both boys and girls, but it wasn’t as persistent as I guess my mom’s family’s has been. Not everyone had power, and not everyone could use it well. According to Dad, it was treated more like an inherited disease than a gift.
But he loved it. And he was good at it, almost from the beginning. Developing and practicing his magic was his one rebellion, and the only time he was any kind of happy, except when he was drawing.
He was a freshman in college when it got weird. Using his power was such a habit—getting a sandwich, turning on the TV, typing a paper—that the magic, as he said, started using him.
“I didn’t even think about it half the time.” His voice is tired, rueful. “It was a little like, um, impulse shopping, I guess you call it. Before I even knew I wanted something, or was angry about something, or needed something, the power was working. I got so used to that constant buzz, I realized I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to use my power. And that scared the shit out of me.”
Robin had blinked at that and blushed a little, but Dad had kept talking as if he didn’t even realize what he’d said.
And I thought about the picture my power had taken, all on its own, of my friends at the café.
Dad had stopped himself then, even though he didn’t explain exactly how. It had involved borrowing a friend’s apartment for a couple days, and I think possibly something to make him sleep, even though he didn’t offer the details. At the end of a week, he hadn’t used magic at all, and he decided that he wasn’t going to use it ever again. It wasn’t heroin, and it wasn’t gambling, but he was an addict either way.
And then he met my mom.
I couldn’t look at either of them when he said that.
“I never expected to meet someone who had power, too,” he’d said, and the look he gave her was still full of wonder and shared secrets. They fell in love, the way people do, especially people attached by a thread the rest of the world doesn’t even know exists. And he still didn’t use his power, although he was happy to watch Mom and Aunt Mari, even my grandmother.
“But why . . . why did you leave then?” Robin says now, and Mom curls an arm around her shoulders.
I’m waiting to hear it in his own words, the whole story, not just the scrap of impression Gabriel had given me. No, that’s not true. I’m waiting for something else, a different story, one with a better ending. I bite the inside of my lip, hard. This is anything but a fairy tale.
“It’s my fault,” Dad says carefully, looking at Robin and then at me. I can see now it’s sadness that carved the lines beside his eyes. “My choices. I want you to understand that.”
They were young, he says, without a lot of money. He was teaching, Mom was working at a salon, and all the things that you never expect to happen happened anyway. The car broke down, the salon closed, whatever it was that week. And he wanted to fix it.
So he was using magic again, just once in a while. And then I came along.
It’s hard not to feel like it’s my fault then, even though he keeps saying it’s not.
We were babies, he says, babies who sometimes fell and hit their heads and swallowed too much mashed corn, and it happened all over again. Every instinct to keep us safe and happy bled out of him in magic, and he couldn’t stop it. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to try.
“You girls—all three of you”—he looks at Mom, and my heart squeezes painfully—“were everything to me. It didn’t seem so dangerous then, if I could make sure no one had a concussion or there was always food on the table or even if I could make one of you laugh with dancing stuffed animals.”
I’m not sure I understand. “Why was it so bad then?”
He takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. Behind me, the fire crackles and spits. “It was like I felt a shadow behind me.”
“Um, everyone has a shadow, Dad.” The relief in Robin’s voice is sweet-tart, as if she’s just solved the stupidest problem ever, and wow, can’t parents be dumb.
“Not that kind of a shadow,” I tell her, and when Dad nods, my skin crawls, electric with dread.
“Not a real shadow, baby.” He stands up and runs his hand softly over Robin’s head before pacing the length of the room and back, his hands clenched as if he wants to grab something and choke the life out of it. He turns back to face us, and I flinch at the heartsick regret on his face. “I didn’t know myself anymore. I couldn’t trust myself. Things happened . . . bad things. When I was angry at someone at work, or stressed. I didn’t have any control of it anymore. And I had no idea what I might do to you girls or your mother.”