Page 72 of Our Crooked Hearts
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The city
Back then
The last of summer burned itself away. The leaves turned and fell in what seemed like a single weekend, trampled into sludge and then gone. Fee and I were still together all the time, but it was different, the space between us filled for the first time with things we didn’t dare say out loud. Maybe if my dad hadn’t been sick we would’ve had the fight we needed to have. Gotten it over with, figured out who and what we were on the other side. But he was, and we didn’t.
We stopped doing magic cold turkey. Though our abilities were our own again, Astrid’s power-up stripped away, we didn’t dare use them after Marion.
The world on the other side of magic was so flat, so gray.
When we were sophomores nobody noticed us. But we went back junior year reeking of elsewhere. By then Fee topped five feet ten, with a brick shithouse build that affected the general population like a stupefying gas. Burgundy mouth, black clothes, this waving mass of hair that gave you the impression of an angel’s fallen sister.
Within a week she had a secret girlfriend, a Polly Pocket–size blonde who cornered me in an empty girls’ room to thank me for covering for them. It took me a second to realize she was thanking me for being Fee’spublicgirlfriend, the fake one who’d take the heat.
“No problem,” I muttered. All the garbage I’d thought would happen—the slurs written in lipstick, the hallway shoulder checks—never materialized. I moved through school the same as I always had, in a bubble of my own making. And nobody was about to mess with Fee.
I paid a tithe for what I’d done to Marion, of course. I paid it out in sleep. My dreams were an endless round of salt and blood and broken mirror, soundtracked by a rabbit’s death cry.
But I had other things to worry about. My dad was dying. First he was functional sick, shuffling to the corner for Pringles and tallboys and Nicorette. Then he was housebound sick. Then Uncle Nestor was holding my hands, talking about a future I refused to look at straight.
My dad hung on through a miserly spring that softened grudgingly into June. I opened my eyes one pale blue Tuesday and knew, just by the plasticine quality of the quiet. I called Uncle Nestor before I’d even opened my dad’s door.
My uncle held me tightly as the EMTs carried him out. My dad. My dad’s body, that he’d used too hard and loved too little.
Uncle Nestor was talking to me.
“You’ll always have a home with us,” he said. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll have a father.”
I tried to focus on his face. “Thank you,” I said.
I felt like a girl in a storybook, packing my bag. That’s thefantasy, right? Your parents need to be eliminated for your life to change, so you can go live in a boxcar or a cottage in the woods or a magical school for the broken. When I unzipped my suitcase on Fee’s bed, later, I knew by her expression I’d done it all wrong. I’d grabbed odd and senseless things and it made her worry about me.
My father died on a Tuesday and I moved in with Fee and Uncle Nestor that Thursday. I turned seventeen a few weeks later. It didn’t take long for my entire childhood to feel like a dream.
The fight Fee and I were putting off happened one year after the second summoning. The day before Marion would’ve turned nineteen. Fee woke me when the sky was still silver, whispering into my ear.Let’s go to the lake.
We snuck out together like we used to, like we hadn’t in months, walking east through the dawn. Fee dropped to her knees and looked over the water, toward the place where the world bent out of sight. Finally she sighed, running both hands through her tangled hair.
“Tonight. We have to at least try.”
“Try.” My head was still toffee-sticky with sleep. “Try what?”
Fee looked at me with a face so naked in its grief I finally saw how much she’d been hiding from me. “To find Marion.”
My heart started to pound. “What are you talking about?”
“I think about her all the time. When I look in a mirror. When I can’t sleep. When I, I don’t know, when I feelgoodfor one minute, I think about how she doesn’t.” Her eyes were pleading. “I don’t think I can live with myself if we don’t try.”
“She’s dead,” I said shrilly. “My god, Fee—all this time you’ve been thinking she’salive?”
“She can’t be dead. If she were dead, that would mean that you… that you…”
“That I what? Say it.”
She looked back at the water.
“Do you need me to be the bad guy?” I asked her. “I’ll do it. I’ll be that for you, if that’s what you need. But first you have to accept this: Marion’s gone.Dead.And it was either her, or all of us.”
