“That’s because Bly’s a . . . person of color and so’s Rayner and they’re smart! Does Eden get to go to college? Does she have to take a week off at semester break to change into a puma? How can you believe this is anything but a coincidence?”
“How can you not? If Eden marries, there has to be a whole other generation after her before another medicine woman is born. Maybe more. You don’t get to choose, Mallory. You know that yourself.” Cooper’s voice was infinitely gentle. She could smell him as he stood closer to her, a spicy smell like smoke and peppers. “I have to leave and go back in a week. You need to help her. My sister has a rebellious heart. She could run away.”
“You ran away!” Mally cried out.
“I went to school!” Cooper pleaded.
“But you didn’t want to see her suffer?”
“It was school. That was what was expected of me.”
“I never knew you when you lived here.”
“I know people you know. I know your boyfriend, Drew.”
Mally smiled. “Drew’s my buddy, not my boyfriend.” She thought of her house, its warm orange squares of windows alight. Her bed under the eaves, her old bear. It seemed so impossibly far from where she stood.
Suddenly Mallory realized a fact that made her heart stammer. “So this weekend . . . the moon was nearly full a few days ago.”
“Yes. This is her time.”
“It’s not right.”
“Would your sister say that? She’s protected people who were going to be hurt—like the girl you know. Maybe others we don’t know about. The shape-shifter is a trickster too. She can lead evil people astray. Hunters who see her will not have good luck. No one is supposed to see her when she’s in her shape. But if someone sees her when she shifts, then that person has to die or Edensau has to . . .”
“Has to what?”
“She has to do what I said before.”
“Or else?”
“Or else . . . stay in the form of a mountain lion forever. She could still do her medicine. But she couldn’t be a human being again, ever. She’d be in danger every day. Hunters. Hikers. Sometime, she’d be caught, hurt.”
“Not to mention having to spend her whole life eating rabbits and sleeping on the floor of a cave!” Mallory snapped at him.
It all sounded so familiar.
Mallory’s own parents couldn’t know about her and Merry.
No one could know about her and Merry, except Grandma and Drew and now this strange stranger of a boy. This boy with the strong chin and the straight shoulders, the muscled forearms and gentle hands.
Tonight had been enchanted. And it was turning into a sad parallel to her own messed-up existence. One part of her was feeling things she had never felt, wondering if Cooper had summers at home and what he’d do when he graduated. And the same boy was telling her that her best friend might have to eat an innocent jogger who happened to come along at the wrong moment.
Why did anyone have to be “gifted”? Why did people ever complain about ordinary lives? She heard Grandma Gwenny’s voice in her head.
Her grandmother told them,
You do good. You can change lives. You can be like Saint Bridget the Brave, and change lives.
There was a purpose. There was a purpose for people like her and Merry and Eden. At least now she could talk to Eden. For this, she was grateful to Cooper. She was grateful too, for his beauty and the way he danced and sang, for making her feel like a woman for the first time.
She looked up at him. “Cooper, I promise to do my best to protect her and to make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid over James, if I can.”
Cooper put one finger on Mally’s cheek. “I’ll always be thankful that I met you here tonight. I hope it’s not the last time I see you.” He stopped. “You’re so little. Are you really only twelve or something? Are you lying about going to school with my sister?”
Mallory laughed. He was only teasing, flirting. It was like an actual taste on her tongue, an indescribably sweet taste, to play this kind of game with a cute guy. “If I’m lying, so is Eden!”
“Look at the moon, Mallory. The cloud ring broke away for a moment. It’s an optical illusion, but it looks as though there are two moons, a big moon holding a little one. We call it the Lap Baby Moon. It’s lucky to see it.”
“I feel lucky I came. Despite everything.”
He kissed her then. Although it was her first kiss, clearly it wasn’t Cooper’s. When she moved her mouth, he found it again, and drew her closer, putting his arms around her in a way that didn’t feel gross but so that he was nearly lifting her off her feet.
Which was lucky.
Otherwise Mallory would have ended up in a heap on the ground. Her whole body disappeared into a little column of light that flowed from her lips—the only thing she could feel. Despite having spent her life in the company of a brain that never stopped, Mallory passed ninety seconds without a thought in her head.
Later, as she and Eden lay side by side in their sleeping bags watching the dawn come up, Mallory told Eden what she and Cooper had talked about.
“I thought you would,” Eden said. “I’m glad you know. I even knew he was the guy for you. But I won’t do it, Mally. I’ve done it long enough.”
“You have no choice, Edie. Like us,” Mallory whispered. “I can’t imagine how it must hurt. I really can’t. I don’t know what it’s like to be in love. But for you, Eden, it’s not just letting people down. It’s dangerous for you, you personally, to break the tradition.”
“I don’t care. There’s nothing that is so wonderful as being in love. Or so terrible.”
And Mallory couldn’t begin to disagree.
THE INTRUDER
T
o audition people she might want for friends—at least according to Erika—Neely invited the whole freshman class to a Halloween party. For good measure, she added twenty sophomores and juniors.
It didn’t matter that Halloween was over.
“Anyone could have a Halloween party on Halloween,” Neely said. “I want this to be more than a Halloween party. I think I want it to be a pagan festival.”
Meredith couldn’t imagine what that meant, but she knew she didn’t want to miss it.
“Come with,” she told Mallory. “What, do you have a blood disease or something? I’ve never seen you so lazy and you’re always lazy.”
“I have stuff on my mind,” Mallory said. “And I wouldn’t go to a party at Neely Chaplin’s for money.”
“Then you don’t really want to find out,” Merry said.
“Find out . . .”
“Who’s planning to hurt someone next at the tryout. You know, they’re on Monday. I never really got an answer that night.”
Mallory sighed. She was restless. Life seemed to be both boring and a constant source of distress, like a broken heater that made more noise than warmth. Even soccer wasn’t much fun. Since Cooper, even moonlight or the smell of burning leaves was a sort of sweet torment.
He had sent her a letter, which she received before he even left Ridgeline.
Dear Mallory,
I’m so happy I met you. And I’m so grateful you’re there for Eden. I wish you weren’t really twelve! Just kidding. Remember the Lap Baby Moon. I’ll be thinking about you.
Your friend,
Cooper Cardinal
Mally kept the letter in a slit she’d cut in the lining of her backpack and thought she should probably have it laminated so it didn’t fall apart from her taking it out and reading it four times a day. “Your friend.” It didn’t exactly say,
I’m so grateful I met you. Please wait ten years and marry me
. But how could it? They’d spent all of thirty minutes together. The fact that she could think of nothing else . . . “It’s just biology!” her mother would say. The other thing about Cooper that made Mallory happy was that her mother and Merry didn’t know anything about him.
Campbell admired the black dress and black moccasins, stroking them and marveling at the intricacy. Aunt Kate even wondered aloud if Eden’s grandmother might give a lesson in beading at the community center while Mallory prayed,
Oh no, oh please no,
until Campbell finally said it was a craft that was probably too time-consuming for most people. Campbell packed the dress between layers of tissue carefully, so that Mallory could wear it again and keep it always. Mallory wore the moccasins all the time. Eden had told her they were made never to wear out, that her people had walked all the way from Canada in shoes just like these.
Neely’s party would at least distract her from reliving every second of her first kiss—ten times a day.
She said, “Fine. I’ll go as an idiot. I am anyway.”
“What’s wrong with you, Mally? Same old?”
“Something new.” Meredith’s eyes lit up. “And private,” Mally added firmly. Merry purred. She was no fool. But she didn’t press Mallory for details.
Because it might be fun, and lead to more opportunities for overhearing other people’s plots, the twins decided to dress identically, so that they could change personalities at will—like shape-shifters, Mallory thought. Two years earlier, their parents had gone to a party dressed up as a pair of Aces. The cards were so nicely made by the twins’ aunt Kate, the Craft Queen, that all they needed was to be dusted off. The hoods (which looked to Mallory, who had recently become interested in Lady Jane Gray, like executioners’ hoods) were in perfect shape and clean, in a plastic bag. All the girls had to do was pull on wool tights and turtlenecks and the black suede boots their parents had given them the previous Christmas.
Mally was curious about the shoe-tape issue.
But she figured that, given what had happened to Crystal, all of the girls trying out would be checking their shoes in any case. She went along for a reason that she didn’t share with her twin. Hanging out with Dad and watching the game or practicing with Adam just didn’t cut it anymore. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was tired of lying around brooding or being a freshman who acted like she was still in sixth grade.
Just one taste of a new life was enough to make her old life boring. Sometimes, Mallory wished she’d never had it.
Neely’s party was held on her front lawn in a heated tent, so it didn’t matter that it was November. Campbell dropped all of the girls off at the end of the driveway, where the reliable Stuart was waiting to ferry them to the top. Surprisingly, Kim Jellico had called, at the last minute, and asked to come along—for one night deserting the friends from Deptford Consolidated she usually hung with now. Crystal, still on crutches, sent melodramatic texts every fifteen minutes, requesting cell-phone photos. Alli was dressed as a harem girl. Erika wore an old suit and a slouchy hat to look like a mobster. Kim was wearing a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader’s sort of outfit—basically a bikini with a cowboy hat and silver boots.
Though she had lost weight and gained height since David’s death, Kim was still a big and broad-shouldered girl, and the two-piece, with its little bolero, looked to Campbell like a few pieces of tinsel on a Christmas tree. She wondered why Dave or Bonnie hadn’t made Kim wear a body stocking underneath. But Bonnie had gone into what seemed to Campbell to be a permanent middle distance since David died. She did her work competently, but no longer went to yoga or the book club. Not for the first time, Campbell thought that she and her daughter Merry had both lost their best friends when David died. The tragedy was far from over. Kim wouldn’t even be fifteen until December. She was still a kid, but so closed. Maybe being with Merry would do her good.
“Have a good time, Kimmie!” Campbell called impulsively. Kim turned and waved, and the smile that crossed her face was brief as a passing cloud.
The girls couldn’t begin to count the windows, each with a different backlit Halloween silhouette. A projector scrolled flying bats across the facade and blue lights seemed to erupt periodically from the roof. Costumed adults, dressed as ghouls and pale alluring vampires, stepped from behind trees to beckon them. There was a life-size guillotine. But when they saw that it dispensed Toblerone bars when the “blade” dropped, everyone felt better. Will Brent started filling his pockets.
Neely greeted them in a see-through chiffon cape over a bodysuit threaded with twinkle lights. Her hair was swept up in curls, similarly arrayed and electrified. A few of the guys arrived at the same time as the twins and their friends.
“What are you supposed to be?” Will Brent asked Neely. “An electric eel?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” Neely said. “I’m actually dressed as Night. Just Night.”
“She could be an ad for outlet covers,” Mallory said.
“Shut up and be nice,” Merry whispered.
“At least they have cheese and tomato sandwiches,” Kyle Karzniak put in. “Jalapeno poppers too. Ginger ale and orange juice?”
“Fake mimosas,” said Caitlin, taking one off a tray. She winked at Merry. “Wonder where the real ones are.” Merry put her finger to her lips.
A deejay was setting up. The whole tent had a temporary planked floor, sprinkled with bushels of glittery little moons and stars.
The cheerleaders and Mallory huddled and surveyed the crowd.
Neely, after greeting a fleet of guests, floated over to them. Suddenly, she asked, “Are you guys twins?”
“Just good friends,” Mallory answered.
“Did I know that and just forget? How could I have gone through two months of school without noticing?” Neely asked herself.
“Do you notice much?” Mallory asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Neely said. “I see everything that counts.” She whirled away for a moment and waved to a group of older boys. “Like that.” She pretended to touch her finger to a hot stove and then to her tongue.
“That’s Drew!” Merry said. “Who invited Drew?”
“He’s cute,” Neely said. “He’s looking at Kim. Hey, Kim, he’s noticing you! He must like girls with a little meat on their bones.”
Kim whirled and stalked away from the group to join a knot of kids at the other end, mostly boys that included Dane Greenberg. All of them looked approvingly at her boy-kini.