Authors: Amy Garvey
The glimmering, dancing lights on my bedroom ceiling. Mom and Gram making a birthday cake, swirling frosting up and down the sides with the flick of a finger. Mom and Dad curled in the swing on the front porch in the dark, each swoop forward trailing soft jet streams of color behind it.
Gabriel sinks down beside me, winding an arm around my shoulders and resting his chin on my head. “But isn’t that a good reason to ask your mom how to control it? Or what it means if you can’t?”
It sounds logical enough, but the whole thing is still more complicated than he understands.
I’m pretty sure I can do things that Mom can’t. Not just things that she
wouldn’t
do, but stuff that her power couldn’t accomplish on its own, not without some serious spell work behind it.
I could be wrong. I am, a lot. But even though I know that my memories of Gram’s power are limited, I’ve never seen Aunt Mari do anything like I can do with just a thought, either.
I close my eyes again, burying my face against Gabriel’s chest. He’s warm, solid, and I burrow in hard, pressing my nose to the worn cotton of his shirt. Behind my closed lids, a frail, white-paper bird flaps to life.
And a boy as pale and still as marble watches me in the musty dark of a garage loft.
I know what it feels like when Gabriel pokes inside my head. Vague pressure that’s not really pain, the sharp light of day visible through a slightly open door. I pull away, even though he grabs my arm to keep me beside him. “Cut it out. You know I hate that.”
He scratches his head roughly and lets go of my arm to stand up. “Yeah, well, sometimes I can’t control that, either.”
For a minute we simply look at each other, and I wish I could read all the emotions I can see in his eyes as easily as he can read me, whether he’s trying to or not.
He means too much to me already. The way he scratches his head when he’s frustrated, the way he slouches just a little when we’re walking together so the height difference between us isn’t so obvious, the low hum in his throat when we’ve been kissing for a while. Tiny, insignificant things that don’t come close to the way he trusts me, or the way he listens to me, but put it all together and just the sight of him makes my heart ache with how much I want to keep this. How much I want to keep
him.
There’s so much I don’t know about Gabriel, but Danny leaked pieces of himself like someone had poked a hole in him. Not a day went by when I didn’t hear how he felt about this movie or that band, and I can still make lists of not only his favorite foods and books and people but the things that made him who he was—the things he felt, in his bones and blood, about everything.
“I should probably go,” I say, pushing to my feet and walking into the living room, where my boots are tossed in a pile on the floor with my coat and bag.
“Wren.” Gabriel sits down on the sofa where I’m putting on my shoes. His cheeks have lost that hectic flush. “I’m sorry. Really. You can stay, we don’t have to—”
“I know.” I force my mouth into a smile. “But I think I want to, and . . . I don’t trust myself right now. I’ll come by the store tomorrow, okay?”
I don’t kiss him good-bye when I leave.
“MY BRAIN’S GOING TO BE COMPLETELY
broken by the time we get to Christmas break,” Darcia says. Her notes and textbooks are spread around her on Jess’s dining room table. It looks like a library heaved up its lunch. A stray pink Post-it Note is stuck to her sleeve, and her hair is twisted up on top of her head with two pencils.
“Breathe,” Jess says absently, and flips a page in her chem book. “Cal called again last night.”
Dar groans and picks up her copy of
The Metamorphosis
, ignoring her.
“And?” I say when Jess doesn’t elaborate. Behind her notebook, Dar scowls at me, and I shrug. Jess doesn’t freak about exams, but she does sort of freak about boys. If you can call overthinking the possibility of one date freaking, that is.
“It was . . . nice.” A satisfied little smile tugs at her mouth. “He’s nice. Nicer than I thought anyway. Which is an excellent example of not judging a boy by his very footbally cover.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Footbally?”
Jess waves this off carelessly. “You know what I mean. So I think I’m going to go for it. Almost definitely.”
“
Meanwhile
,” Dar says with a distinct edge to her voice, “I’ll be grounded because I’ve failed all my exams, but you have fun. Be sure to tell me
all
about it.”
Jess blinks, and even I sit up a little straighter. It’s not that Darcia doesn’t have a temper, but it usually takes something like dynamite and a four-alarm fire to set it off.
“I’m sensing a little sarcasm there, sweetie,” Jess says in the perfectly calm, frightening voice I hate.
“Oh, do you
think
?” Dar answers before I can get a word out.
Jess’s jaw is tight, but I can see it quiver. “What the hell crawled up your ass and died?”
“Hey, come on, this is stupid.” I stand up as if I’m going to have to physically break them up. I can’t remember the last time Jess and Dar fought. Well, with me, sure, but not with each other.
“It’s not stupid.” Jess pushes her books out of the way and grabs her bottle of water. “I want to know what she has to say.”
For a second, I’m sure Darcia is going to open up and explode, spraying angry words all over both of us. The air in the room suddenly feels too thick, oppressive, and Jess’s golden retriever, Lass, whines from beneath the table.
Out of nowhere, I’m flooded with the memory of shouting, “Stop!” at Danny, and watching him crumple to the ground, strings cut and nothing more than a lifeless collection of bones in the grass. I shudder and turn around, digging into my bag.
I can’t do that here, now, but I can do this. When I turn around again, my phone in my hands, Darcia’s eyes are blazing darker than I’ve ever seen them. Jess is waiting for whatever Dar is about to say, fingers too tight around her water bottle, but I knew neither of them could ignore me.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I snap a picture, catching the angry set of Jess’s jaw and the stray blond hair that she’ll tuck behind her ear any minute now. “Taking pictures of my best friends acting like assholes.”
“Hey,” Dar starts, and I turn to her. The shutter clicks before she can close her mouth, and she blinks.
“Oh, that’s a keeper,” I say, looking at the screen. “Totally a Facebook moment.”
“Don’t you dare,” Dar warns me, but she’s trying not to smile now, and Jess actually snickers.
“Are we done now?” I set the phone down on the table. “Seriously, guys, it’s exam week, not war. Get a grip.”
“I wish I could,” Darcia sighs. Her shoulders sag and she crosses her arms on the pile of books before laying her head on them. “All I keep thinking about is college applications and grades and scholarships and my sister coming home next week, and I just want to scream.”
“As long as you don’t scream at me, I’m cool with it,” Jess says. She reaches across the table and pulls one of Dar’s curls. “Come on. I think it’s time to re-caffeinate.”
I have to pull Dar to her feet, but we follow Jess into the kitchen, where she pulls three cans of diet soda out of a carton in the fridge. “I think I want a smoke, too,” she says once she’s cracked her can with a fizzy pop.
We troop outside through the kitchen door, and the dry brown grass is brittle underfoot. “Coats would have been smart,” Dar says as we huddle together on the splintered wood bench behind the garage.
“Don’t be a wuss.” Jess reaches under the bench, where her pack of Marlboro Lights is stashed. When she lights up, she exhales a stream directly at Dar, who sticks out her tongue.
“I still need to get Gabriel something for Christmas,” I say, scuffing the toe of my boot in the dirt. “I’m drawing a total blank.”
It’s really the least of my problems, when I factor in my trigonometry exam, which I
am
in danger of failing, Robin’s continuing sulk, and whatever the hell happened between Gabriel and me last night, but it doesn’t seem like it. I want to give him something awesome, something special, and I don’t have any idea what that could be.
“A book?” Dar suggests, sticking her hands between her thighs, and huddling closer to me. It can’t be more than thirty out here, and the air smells like snow, thick and damp.
I roll my eyes. “He works in a bookstore.”
“How about a watch?” Jess asks, blowing a bluish stream of smoke in the opposite direction.
Dar and I exchange a look. Sometimes Jess forgets that the rest of us don’t live on Planet Bling with her, not that she ever makes a big deal of how much money her family has. “I can afford roughly whatever comes in a box of Cracker Jack,” I tell her. “I don’t think anybody wants the kind of watch I can buy.”
Dar bites back a laugh and reaches over to tangle our fingers together. Her hand is dry and cool. “What about burning him a CD?”
“Ugh. The mix solution.” I sigh, and blow a plume of steam into the frigid air. “So completely lame.”
“God, are you done?” Dar asks Jess. She’s shivering beside me, and the pencils in her hair wobble. “My brain is now frozen, and I really want that soda, but I’m afraid my tongue’s going to stick to it.”
“You two would never make it as POWs,” Jess says. She stubs out her cigarette, and we troop back inside. The kitchen is gloriously warm, but I’d still rather have a huge mug of hot coffee or tea than the cold soda.
“At least now I’m too cold to realize everything I don’t understand about Kafka,” Dar says with a groan.
“Come on.” I grab her hand and lead her back to the cluttered dining room table. “I’ll explain it again.”
An hour later, Jess is reciting chemical elements under her breath, and Dar has moved on to irregular Spanish verbs. I’m still stuck on trig, even though most of my brain is elsewhere.
It’s quiet aside from the bare branch that sometimes scrapes at the window, and Lass occasionally snoring under the table. Dar has her iPod on and a new pencil anchoring the crazy knot of her hair, and I’m getting sleepy. Trigonometry wouldn’t be the most exciting subject in the world even if I understood it.
As I slouch in my chair, staring at my open notebook, I’m trying not to think about Gabriel. At least not about what happened last night.
I close my eyes, picturing it so perfectly, I can almost feel it again. The flush of heat, and beneath it that distant thrum of power, beating steady as a heart in my blood, in Gabriel’s blood . . .
Nothing that feels that good is usually good for you.
“Hey, no sleeping on the job,” Jess barks, and I jolt back to the present to find her watching me, one eyebrow cocked. “I find that study by osmosis doesn’t work very well,” she adds, and picks up her soda to drain the last few sips.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” My voice is as wobbly as I feel just remembering last night.
“Damn, I should have gotten a picture of that,” Jess says. “I could have Photoshopped in some drool.”
“That’s it!” I sit up so suddenly, I almost knock over my soda can.
“That’s what?”
“Sorry.” My face is hot, and my pulse kicks hard. “I know what I can give Gabriel for Christmas.”
Jess scrunches up her face. “Your drool?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s criminal that you’re not on Comedy Central already, you know.”
She rolls her eyes right back. “Fine, don’t tell me.”
Darcia takes out her earbuds. “What are you talking about? And so loudly.”
“I figured out Gabriel’s Christmas gift.” I stuff my notebooks into my bag as quickly as I can.
“Oh! Cool. Wait, what is it?” she says. One cheek is a warm pink where she’d propped it on her hand, and she sounds half awake.
“Pictures,” I say, and Jess looks up from her notes. “Places we’ve been, stuff like that.”
For a second, in the dog-panting silence, I want to take it back. It’s probably dumb, a cheesy do-it-yourself nightmare that he’ll laugh at, and any minute Jess is going to say . . .
“That’s perfect.” She sits up straighter, tucking her hair behind her ears, all business now. “You take awesome pictures. Or . . . you know, you did there for a while.”
I did all the time, before Danny died. A camera is a great way to put some distance between yourself and the world, and I liked being behind the lens. No one pays attention to you back there, at least after they forget you’re clicking the shutter. I have a whole file on the laptop of pictures I took of Danny and his friends, of Jess and Dar and my family.
I pick up my jacket and shrug it on, not looking at Jess when I say, “It’s not . . . lame?”
Her disgusted sigh is all the answer I need, although Dar chimes in with, “I think it’s awesome.”
“I’m going to go take some now.” I shoulder my bag, biting my lip nervously. “This could be really good. I hope.”
“It will be,” Jess promises. She’s smiling, feet tucked up on her chair and her arms wrapped around her legs. “Of course, I’m pretty sure he’d love it if you gave him, like, a ball of hair, you know.”
“Oh my God, you’re gross,” Dar says to that. She looks forlorn, moored in her sea of paper. “Call me later? Dad’s freaking about Adam’s disappearance, so I’m pretty sure I’m stuck at home tonight.”
“I will.” I stick my phone in my bag and wave to Jess after I put my coat on. “I’ll be around if you want to talk about Cal.”
“We’ll see,” she says, and runs her hands through her hair absently as she stretches in her chair. “He’s supposed to call again tonight, so he’s got another chance to impress me.”
“Lucky him.” I pet Lass’s head when she gets up to follow me. “You stay, girl.”
Jess and Dar are already focused on their books again when I open the front door, and it’s hard not to run, now that I’ve got the idea in my head. I can think of a dozen places that mean something to both of us, but I need to get to them before the light dies.
And if my camera isn’t where I think it is, buried in the bottom of my desk drawer at home, I’m going to have to hope Gabriel really likes Cracker Jack.
In the papery winter light, I take pictures of the cornerstone of the high school in shadow, the splintered wood steps to the porch of Gabriel’s house, and the bare branches of the huge maple on Forest Avenue where Gabriel dragged me all those months ago, to tell him about Danny. None of the shots are really what I would call romantic, but I work on each one, examining angles and shadows to make them interesting.
I hope they are anyway. I won’t be able to frame them all, but I can mount them on heavy paper. I make my way downtown as the light is truly dying, pale white sky smudged gray at the edges, because I want to get shots of Bliss and the bookstore, too.
I shrug down into my coat as I walk, and wind my scarf tighter around my neck. It’s even colder now, and it’s really beginning to smell like snow. The air is heavy, as if it’s full of secrets, and I’m glad I grabbed a hat before I left my house. Olivia was home when I stopped there to take my first pictures, and she made me a mug of instant hot chocolate while I rooted around in Gabriel’s closet for a pair of his shoes.
“What exactly are you going to do with those?” she’d asked idly, leaning in the doorway to his room, her own mug cradled in her hands.
“Um, take a picture of them.” I gave her a hopeful “that’s not weird, right?” smile. When I explained that I was going to take off my Docs and line the two pairs up side by side on the porch steps, she got it.
“That’s pretty cool.” She licked chocolate off her top lip. She looked half awake; when she was bartending on Friday nights, she got home long after midnight. “Are you doing color or black and white?”
“Black and white,” I said, straightening up after I finally found Gabriel’s faded blue Converse low-tops under his bed.
“I can’t wait to see them.” She smiled before wandering away, and I ran downstairs to set up my shot.
I didn’t have the nerve to tell her she might see the pictures sooner than she thought, since I doubted Gabriel had had a chance yet to tell her about my mom’s invitation to Christmas dinner.
I’m not too worried about her coming for Christmas, since she’s pretty much the coolest older sister I’ve ever met, but the idea still makes my stomach roll over unhappily. Olivia is the only family Gabriel has, and if she isn’t happy with me—and my weird little family of magical women—I know it will hurt him.