Page 66 of Our Crooked Hearts
The girl looked down. I had the sense that she was gathering herself, like the thing she needed to communicate was bigger than she could hold.
“There are fairy tales,” she began, “in which girls trade pieces of themselves away for the things they want. Love, riches.” She looked at me. “Information.”
I pressed both hands to my jittering knees. “Just tell me what you want from me.”
“You’ve paid enough,” she said fervently. “If I had it my way, this wouldn’t cost you one single thing.”
A wave of self-pity washed over me, warm as bathwater. “What wouldn’t?”
One of her eyes was in shadow. The other was a cup of liquid light. “Answers. To all the questions you’ve asked, and all the ones you never thought to.”
“Whoareyou?” I said.
“I’m your friend, Ivy. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid. You’ll understand soon.”
The way she said my name—why was that the part that scared me most? Maybe it was how she looked when she said it: like she knew me. Like we shared a whole complicated history. My brain was sodden with fear but busy, too, ticking like a game-show wheel.
“If I want this,” I said. “If I want answers—what happens next?”
“We walk up the path.” Her voice was on the edge of trembling. “We turn, just there. And I take you to a place where you can know everything.”
The car keys were imprinting into my palm. “Why not here? Just tell me here.”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
I looked to the place where the road bent right. It was high summer, the trees too thick to see what lay behind them. I looked back at the girl who knew my mother, and had walked an unfathomable road to sit beside me. “What’s your name?”
She paused, and something shifted behind her eyes. “My name is Marion.”
I had the oddest feeling the name hadn’t been at her fingertips. That she’d had to dredge it up, like she was a ghost who’d already divested itself of the trappings of the living. ButIknew that name. I could summon it in my mother’s voice, and AuntFee’s. A taint of secrecy hung about it. They’d only ever spoken it at that register reserved for hidden things.
“Marion,” I repeated, and put my hand on the door. “Let’s go.”
The night was still, just the faintest breeze hushing like an endless exhale. This was the way I’d first seen Marion: as a pale shape moving through a nighttime wood. She was clothed now, jeans and a blue peasant shirt that didn’t fit her. I kept her in my sight and one fist tight around my dad’s keys. The gravel was murder on my bare feet. The third time I sucked in a pained breath she glanced down and spoke a few careless words.
They hung in the air like a sparkler’s trail. I smelled dark sugar and burnt hair and felt a silky tautening beneath my soles, as if the rocks I walked over were smoothing themselves into a hot glass road. I yelped, jumping back, before I realized it wasn’t the path. It was my feet.
I lifted one, then the other. When I tapped a nail against my callused right heel I heard an audible glassy click.
“Holy… how did you do that? What did you do?”
Marion looked at me blankly, like I was interrogating her for breathing. “You’re welcome,” she said.
I high-stepped down the road, lifting and resettling my feet like a dog in snow boots. Such a small change but it made my whole body feel foreign to me.Separatefrom me, my form and my consciousness never more sharply defined. My brain rebelled from what she’d done, from being near her at all. But my skin wasawake,attuned to her every motion, and the shimmering possibility that she might do something impossible again.
We hit the turning. The gravel broadened, giving way to clean pavement. A long driveway that ended at a house, big and white and silent. All the windows were dark, but the front door hung wide open.
