Page 85 of Our Crooked Hearts
“Ofcourseshe wants to curse her enemies,” Fee told me later. “What ten-year-old wouldn’t?”
“And she wants to scry,” I said sourly. “Or as she puts it, ‘spy on people to see what they really think of me.’”
I knew what Fee was gonna say before she said it. “You have to tell her about Marion. Give her a chance to understandwhy.Right now she thinks you’re holding her back for the hell of it. Don’t let her set you up as an adversary, not with this.”
She’d said it a dozen times before. And I replied like I always did.
“Of course I’ll tell her. When she’s a little older, we’ll tell her everything.”
It was my shame that was really stopping me. Fee and I both knew it.
She’s a good kid.
I repeated it to myself like it was gospel. And it was true, but that didn’t alter the fact that Ivy was drawn to morally questionable magic like a bee to the lip of a Coke can. She was curious, heedless, troublingly fearless. And she was stronger than me. Corralling her abilities into small workings felt increasingly like trying to direct divine fire through the claustrophobic tunnels of an ant farm.
Working magic had set her apart from other kids her age. She was too self-possessed, too immune to other people’s influence. She had soccer friends, camp friends, school friends, but she didn’t really havefriendfriends.
Until a family moved in across the street the year she turned eight. A single dad, a toddler, and a freckle-faced seven-year-old cannonball named Billy.
I hadn’t actually realized Ivy was lonesome until he showed up, and they merged like two raindrops meeting on a window. She nodded with great seriousness when I reminded her thatmagic was a secret even Billy couldn’t know. Months became years and there were no explosions but I wasn’t an idiot: the little boy from across the street knew something.
I looked out the window once and saw them in the grass at the end of the yard. Both were keeping an eye on the ground between them, with an absorbed stillness few grade schoolers possessed. I couldn’t see what they were looking at.
Then Billy’s face opened up into startled delight. Ivy grinned at him and he grinned back. I knew how pride looked on her and Iknewshe wasn’t showing him something ordinary.
I upgraded my assumptions. The boy from across the street knew everything.
My appendix burst at the worst possible time. Rob was on a work trip, Fee and Uncle Nestor were visiting family in San Antonio. Hank was going through some kind of emotional upheaval he refused to talk about, and Ivy was being an adolescent nightmare. I didn’t have loads of mom friends, so I turned to Google.Twelve-year-old daughter incredibly defiant normal?
The next day Ivy came into the kitchen, brandishing my laptop. The search was pulled up. “First of all,” she said, “learn how to erase your search history. Second, I’m not defiant, I’massertive.”
I stood too fast, lunging to yank the laptop from her hands. Just as quickly, I was bent over my knees, gut neon with pain.
Ivy crouched beside me, grabbing my hand. “What is it? What hurts?”
I showed her with my fingers, gasping.
“Uh-oh.” She looked scared and a little thrilled. “I bet it’s your appendix.”
She wanted to try a healing charm and I said absolutely not and she was still sulking when a neighbor showed up to drive us to the hospital. Ivy stayed until late showing me videos on her phone, then got a ride home from another neighbor. I had to stay overnight, my appendix so thoroughly ruptured my whole gut was shot through with poison.
“People die from this,” a nurse told me, with too much relish. She was pissed because I fought everything they wanted to do. I needed Fee here, running interference. I needed Rob to come take me home. I was furious at them for being so far away.
Rob couldn’t get a flight home until the next morning, but the kids were old enough to keep each other alive for a night. It was fine. It should’ve beenfine.
When I got home, I knew right away that it wasn’t.
