Authors: Carrie Jones
So when Issie and I step outside, my cell phone starts beeping that I’ve missed ten text messages.
“Wow. Popular,” Issie teases as we head down the sidewalk toward the parking lot. A man is working in a bucket that a truck has lifted up to the electric wires. He wears a white hard hat, gloves, and a coat; working with all that voltage, all that danger. He looks fragile despite his rugged body.
I check the phone. “They’re all from Astley.”
Issie doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure how she feels about Astley, really. She used to be terrified of him, but I don’t think she is anymore. She widens her eyes and says, “And they say?”
“That he wants to meet me.”
“And?” she prompts.
“And he’s worried about me.”
“And?”
“And that’s pretty much it,” I say, switching the phone and trying not to think about how weak I was last night and how impossibly kind he was during all of it, the way he just held me, rocking me back and forth, letting me cry, telling me about his house on some Scottish island. He was the best kind of friend last night.
I check out the man in the bucket. He works at a bolt, wrenching it. The sound of metal on metal grates against my teeth.
“Does he know about Nick?” Issie asks, pulling my attention back to earth.
“Yes.” I grab the door handle of Grandma Betty’s truck. It stings a bit. I need another anti-iron pill. “He . . . um . . .”
“So you told him?”
As I’m thinking about how I didn’t actually, technically tell him, his voice comes from my left and he walks around the back of the truck. I didn’t even smell him I’m so distracted.
“Tell me what?”
“Astley,” I say, watching his face move from something bland into concerned lines. He reaches past Issie, nodding at her, and moves his hand up to touch my arm as I say, “Hi.”
The touch is at once comfortable and uncomfortable. It’s just a tiny brush of fingers to arm through layers of fabric, but it feels excessive somehow and charged, probably because of the whole pixie thing and possibly because I feel awkward about how much I cried last night.
“Hi,” he says back, and he must realize that he’s blocking my view of Issie or something, because he moves aside a bit, mumbles an apology to her, and then says, “I have been trying to get you all day. I was wondering what happened last night that made you so sad and so scared. Would you like to tell me?”
“Oh boy . . . ,” Issie mutters. She straightens her hat over her ears as I explain to Astley what Nick and I saw last night in the woods. As I do, his expression goes from concern to agitation.
“Zara, why did you fail to tell me this before?”
“I was tired . . .” I search for reasons that don’t involve explaining the truth: that I was moping about Nick and simultaneously distracted by Astley’s niceness. “I’m not sure.”
Conflict-averse Issie interrupts the silence. “Zara sometimes has issues remembering the big picture when human elements are involved—like emotions and stuff. It’s part of what makes her lovable.”
We both stare at Issie. My mouth must drop open, because she gently touches the bottom of her chin as a signal to shut it again. I resist the urge to hug her crazy self.
Apparently so does Astley, who lets out an exasperated sentence. “How angry would you have been if I saw this and did not tell you?”
“Pretty ballistic,” I admit. I rub my hands across my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“I do not need you to apologize—”
“I know.” I interrupt him and pull my gaze away, staring again at the man working on the wires. He plays with currents of electricity, things that will never end, things that make our world work. We even have electricity inside of us. It’s everywhere.
Astley’s voice is calm but strong, a current all in itself. “I just need you to trust me. We are a team, Zara. You have all our people behind you and—”
“And us,” Issie adds. Her arms cross in front of her parka and she rocks forward on her toes. But does “us” include Nick anymore? I don’t know.
“This is a rather large development. It calls for an emergency meeting,” Astley says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll contact Amelie and Becca. Call Devyn and Cassidy. Please have Devyn research as quickly as possible.”
Issie and I give each other a look.
“He’s already been researching,” she says. “And Nick? Should we tell him?”
“Is he stable?” He looks up from his phone.
The word makes no sense, so I repeat it. “Stable?”
“As in mentally sound?” Astley clarifies.
“I think so. He’s back from the dead. He’s not in need of medication or anything.” Pain wells up inside my stomach, but something else does too. It’s a little knot of willpower or strength or something.
Astley nods. I let Issie text Nick because he obviously doesn’t want me to have anything to do with him anymore. We all agree to meet up at the Maine Grind, this little coffee shop on Main Street that’s all orange and purple funkiness. As soon as Astley leaves, Issie climbs into the truck and puts her hand on my arm.
“It’ll be okay, Issie. Whatever those giant things mean, it’ll be okay,” I say as I turn on the ignition.
“That’s not it. I mean, yeah, I’m freaked, but I wanted to tell you something.” She pulls her hat down a little lower over her ears, but her door is still wide open.
“About Nick?”
She shakes her head. “About Astley.”
I wait for it. People straggle to their cars. The parking lot is so empty.
“He’s in love with you.” She watches my face and says all mock angry, “Do not roll your eyes at me, young lady. He is. And it isn’t some weird I-am-a-pixie-king-and-you’re-my-queen love. It’s like Willow and Tara kind of love, like Spock and Kirk, like Jack and Kate on
Lost
, like Princess Leia and Han Solo or Olivia and Peter on
Fringe
.”
I have no clue about half of the characters she is referencing, so I close my eyes and lean my head on the steering wheel. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Because of Nick?”
I shrug. “Not even that. Because everything is insane. Because there are giants in the woods, monsters in closets, the end of the world waiting to happen. Boys do not matter now. Surviving matters.”
She shuts the door, keeping out the cold air. “Zara White, since when has love ever not mattered?”
Personnel responded to a reported fire in the woods near Bedford High School. Evidence of a fire was apparent, but the state fire warden will have to investigate due to no obvious incendiary devices in area. If you have information, please contact the office.
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I have to drop off Issie at her house so her mom can verify she’s in one piece and force her to do her homework for an hour. Then we all meet at the Maine Grind on Main Street. Main Street in Bedford is two blocks of mostly two-storied brick buildings, half of which are closed down with giant FOR LEASE signs on them. Insurance companies dominate one end. The other end has retail shops, nonfactory stores, a health food store, the Grand Theater, a diner, and the Maine Grind. The coffee shop used to be the Masonic temple and the new owner has tried to liven up the steady squareness of it by painting the pillars by the door purple and orange and funkifying the bricks with gold-foil stuff.
Cassidy and I drive over together and the whole way she keeps her hand on my forearm. I know this is her way of “reading” me, which is basically her psychic energy trying to see things through my energy. This sounds hokey, but it’s actually pretty cool. Cassidy’s whisper-small voice makes me turn the music way down because I don’t want to miss anything she says. Right now it seems like she wants to say something important but can’t gather up enough courage to do so. The cue to knowing this is how she keeps opening and closing her mouth.
It’s not till I’ve made my fifth attempt at parallel parking Betty’s truck that Cass inhales so loudly it makes me look at her. Tears are peeking out the corners of her eyes.
“What is it?” I ask, putting the truck in park and double-checking that there’s enough space behind the hybrid in front of me. “Cassidy?”
She doesn’t answer, just slowly moves her hand off my forearm and clasps it in her other hand, almost like it hurts her or something. “I don’t want to tell you.”
“Cass,” I try again as her braids swing down, obscuring her face. I move them to the side and kind of hold them there so I can see her eyes. “What is it?”
Every motion she makes is tired, slow, like an elderly arthritic woman’s or someone who has the flu. Her eyes meet my gaze and I swallow hard because her eyes are so terribly, terribly sad. “Death.”
“Mine?”
She nods.
I want to drop her braids. I want to scream in frustration or run or hide or something, but I just sit there and wait despite the fact that it feels like my stomach has transformed itself into a giant glob of mud.
Instead of doing any of that drama-queen stuff, I say, “Do you have any details?”
“They are horrible.”
Snow trucks down out of the sky. Sometimes I forget to notice it—all the coldness, the way it’s like a shroud. I notice it now.
“Tell me anyway, Cass,” I say as the car engine makes a funny clicking noise, which is weird since I turned it off already. I don’t understand cars. “I can take it, Cass. If you saw it, you saw it for a reason, so just tell me, okay? It’ll be okay.”
My reassurance sort of works, I think, because she nods fiercely like she’s summoning up her will for real this time.
“There’s blood. You’re in Astley’s arms and he’s burning too, but just wounded, and you aren’t you anymore. Curtains fall down.” She closes her eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No,” I offer. “No. You should. We need to know anything we can about what’s happening. Any hints are good, even if it’s a bad hint, you know?”
She nods quickly and I let go of her braids, unlock the doors to the truck. The mechanism makes a popping noise. I search for another one of Astley’s iron-resistance pills and pop it in my mouth. Iron is poisonous to pixies. Just being near it—like in a car—gives us headaches. Luckily, Astley’s people have developed a pill that lets us tolerate it. Still, my head hurts a bit and it’s hard to focus for a second while the pill kicks in. Maybe it’s the fact that people are predicting my death. It’s only four o’clock, but the light is fading as a mom hurries down the street, clutching her toddler’s hand. As we get out of the truck, the mom looks from one side to another like she’s expecting to be killed right there. A white police car trolls down the road, snow flipping out from beneath its moving tires. It’s Detective Small. She waves. We wave back. I can feel the pill reach my stomach and settle there, and I turn back to Cassidy as I press the fob to lock the truck.
“Is it soon?” I ask her as I step over some snow slush on the sidewalk. “Do I die soon?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I think it’s soon.”
“Do you know where?”
She shakes her head. “It’s dark. There’s a curtain that hangs to the floor. Other than that, nothing.”
“Well,” I say trying to be lighthearted for her sake. “I’ll avoid all places with curtains.”
“Zara, this is serious.”
I clear my throat. I know it’s serious. “We aren’t telling anyone else about this.”
“But—”
I interrupt her. “Seriously, Cass, they’ll freak. It will get us all unfocused. You know how we go off on tangents. The other day Issie talked for twenty minutes about what we should call ourselves. She wanted a group name, remember? And then there was that time that Devyn started explaining chaos theory.”
She stops on the first step to the coffee shop. Her hands go to her waist and she glares at me, her voice hard to match her no-nonsense eyes. “You dying isn’t a tangent.”
“Well,” I say, stepping around her to pull open the door, trying to ignore the horrible feeling of doom that seems to be crushing my kidneys into my spine, “yeah. Am I the only one?”
“What?”
“The only one who dies?”
“No.” She sighs. “I don’t think so.”
Nick, Devyn, and Issie are already waiting inside the Grind, sitting on two leather couches, sipping drinks. Nick gives a little wave like he never told me I was soulless. I give a little wave back because it’s more mature than giving him the finger. I’m a pixie queen now.
Is holds up two Super Juices, which she’s already bought because she knows that Cassidy and I don’t do coffee. It makes both of us wacky-hyper. While we wait for Astley and our pixies, we settle in and start talking about the giants, what Cass just saw, what steps we need to take to stop the apocalypse and deal with the crazy pixies who are tormenting our town.
It isn’t nice coffee-house chatter. Throughout our entire conversation Jay Dahlberg keeps making eyes at us. He’s sitting with Callie and Paul, Cierra, and some other people from school like Austin and Danielle, who I don’t know that well. Callie’s got her Mohawk bejeweled with some crystals and Paul’s rocking a new surfer-boy haircut. Cierra’s touched up her roots. For a second I’m almost jealous that they have time to deal with their hair, but that’s just wrong of me. I’m happy for them.