I had to, she said, and I had no choice, and They would have charged me with neglect.
She’d reported Solomon missing, to the Hudson Department of Child Protective Services. She’d spent weeks trying not to. Reaching out to him, trying to get him to come home. She’d covered for him for as long as she could. But now they’d be looking for him. They might even send cops.
Once I stopped crying, I went online and started staring at photographs. It helped, for a little while. And then it didn’t.
I tried my hardest not to call Connor. I hated myself when I did it: for exploiting him, for resorting to sex with no strings attached as a way of feeling better. Especially since he’d been so upset by seeing Solomon, the last time we were about to hook up. But the darkness was getting stronger. The hole in my chest was getting wider. I needed contact, distraction.
I went over to his house.
“What happened?” he asked, opening the door. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” I said. “Why?”
“You only come by when you’re stressed out about something. Or upset, or sad, or whatever.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
Connor shrugged, and bit his lower lip. His body had definitely become a man’s, even if he still seemed so much like a boy sometimes.
He was right, of course.
“I can go, if you want. I don’t want to make you feel . . .”
“I don’t want you to go.” He summoned up a sweet, sad smile. “Come on in.”
“Evening, Ash,” said Connor’s father, when we walked past the kitchen. He stood at the counter, reading a newspaper.
“Hey, Mr. Barrett.”
Solomon and I had both been crushed out on Connor’s dad, back in the day. He’d had the same broad shoulders and bright brown eyes as Connor, the same fair hair and unblemished skin.
We walked past the room that had been Solomon’s, before he ran away. The door was shut. It was always shut. Like they were trying to lock the memory of him away.
Connor’s room was superclean. The kind of clean that makes you feel bad about yourself, because you look like a slob by comparison. Like the guy had an undiagnosed disorder. He sat down on the bed with a helpless look on his face and I sat down beside him, feeling like I was taking advantage. Which I guess I was, except that Connor enjoyed it as much as I did.
“What’ve you been up to?” I asked, because it felt rude to cut right to the part where we made out.
“Football practice, football practice, and, sometimes, when I have free time, more football practice.” He tugged off the T-shirt he wore, which fit him disturbingly well. “You?”
“Trying to figure out what I’m gonna do for my photography project.”
He sat there, shirtless. Defenseless.
“Is there something going on, with the football team?” I asked. “I talked to Sheffield, and he seemed real weird. Even for him. Especially about the graffiti stuff that’s been going on. Do you—”
“I don’t want to talk about Sheffield or any of them,” he said, and it was only the kiss that made me ignore my curiosity about the look that flashed on his face. A look that wasn’t guilt exactly, but was certainly something like it.
Afterward, we spooned. I’m taller than him, but his arms felt so strong around me. Out the window, I could see the treehouse. Solomon’s favorite place, when he lived here. Connor never had much love for it.
“What can we do for him?” Connor asked. “For Solomon?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did you talk to your dad about him? He’s gotta know some people. Maybe—”
“Solomon’s mom really fucked my dad over. He’s still super–pissed off about it. So, whenever I bring up Solomon, he’s not in too much of a hurry to discuss it.”
“Solomon’s not responsible for what his mom did.” I scowled.
“No, but it goes both ways. Solomon’s just as angry. He’s not rushing over to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with my dad, either.”
“Keep trying, will you?” I said. “He’s a kid, just like us. And he’s in danger. Your dad’s a grown-up. Vice principal. Football coach. Pillar of the community. Everybody loves and respects him. If he can help Solomon, he should.”
“I know,” Connor said, and kissed the back of my neck again. I reached back, and he took my hand. We spent an hour like that, not talking, not moving. Time with Connor was like meditation. It cleared my head, calmed me down.
I didn’t sleep long in Connor’s arms, but I did sleep deep. Plunging from dream to dream to memory to fantasy, until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began, or where the real world was in relation to all that.
A floating restaurant. A mammoth tusk.
A boy who could summon up birds made of fire.
And then—something else, something so sharp and real I knew it had to be a memory.
Deep inside me, a door had been unlocked.
Connor’s house, the same place I was presently sleeping, except back then I thought of it as Solomon’s stepfather’s house, and Connor was just this scrawny short kid who idolized his stepbrother.
The house is bigger, now, because I am smaller. Dark polished wood floors. Framed photographs of faraway cities and strangers in black and white. A basement big enough to hold all the monsters in my imagination.
Solomon and I are exploring. We’re eleven, maybe twelve. His mother and stepfather are at Connor’s Little League game. I wonder why they don’t take Solomon to watch those anymore. He’s big for his age, and strong, but he has absolutely no interest in sports.
He takes us out back. The treehouse his stepfather built for Connor. We climb up.
“This is my favorite place in the whole Palace,” he says. “Sixty stories high. It’s where the war pterodactyls launch from.”
The thing I love most about Solomon is his imagination. How he sees the world. How full of wonder it is.
“Do I have magic?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says solemnly. “But some magic doesn’t manifest until later. Whatever it is, it’ll be incredible.”
I wonder what video game or fantasy novel he got all this out of.
“Take my picture,” he says.
I raise the camera. It’s cheap and digital. This is long before the Leica.
Through the lens, he looks like a normal boy. Wearing a shirt that is maybe a tiny bit too small for him.
Solomon smiles. I push the button. The camera clicks.
Twelve
Solomon
A camera clicked.
I opened my eyes to total darkness. My arms and legs were still tingling.
I had been plunging from dream to dream to memory to fantasy, until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began, or where the real world was in relation to all that.
A house, high in a tree.
Ash, carrying a camera.
“You’re awake,” Connor said. Just a voice in the dark; small and fragile.
“Are you playing with my camera?” I asked, struggling to sit up. The camera clicked again. “You can’t take pictures in the dark, silly. Light striking the film is what makes a photograph. No light, no picture.”
He sat down on the bed beside me. Put his hand on my forehead. “Are you still sick?”
“I’m okay,” I said, feeling so tired that every word was an effort. “What happened?”
“You had a fit,” he said. “At the restaurant. Quang snapped you straight into bed, though. You’re lucky, because me and Mama would never have been able to carry you.”
“I’m superlucky,” I said.
He kissed my forehead, which is what Radha always did. The best medicine, as far as he knew.
“Thanks, brother,” I said. “I need to sleep, now.”
“Mama told me not to bother you,” he said.
“I’m glad you disobeyed her.”
And I was out, quick as that. Swallowed up by a dream. A memory. Something I blocked out.
> Me and Ash, down at the train tracks. The nine women soldiers in her personal guard following at a careful distance. Armored stegosauruses on either side of us; mammoth-sized jaguars ahead of and behind us.
Storm clouds are piled up like black cliffs in the distance. They’ve been there for days. They’ll be there for days, like the storm is stalking us. Watching. Waiting.
“I’ve been feeling it more and more lately,” she says. “A tingle up my spine. I focus on it; I can feel it getting bigger and bigger—I just don’t know how to release it.”
“Your nine guards can’t help you?”
“They’re trying. It’s just a block I have, I guess.”
We are twelve. At breakfast, as I was spooning diced dragon fruit over a really very modest serving of yogurt, the queen had announced to the whole crowded room full of courtiers and servants: “The way that boy eats, you’d think he just came in off the street this morning.” And all of them giggled. And I’d spent most of the rest of the day crying. I was better now, but not by much.
“In two days, my guards are going to try something new,” Ash says, and I can hear the fear in her voice. Those nine soldiers love Ash to death and would gladly die for her, but they push her hard.
But I can’t feel pity for the princess’s problems. Not today. My own hurt feelings are echoing too loudly in my ears. Hurt feelings, and fear. Memories of hunger. Of how horrible the city could be.
Also, I’m superhungry, because I wasn’t about to eat that food after the queen made fun of me. So I’m not thinking straight. So please forgive me.
“What’s with you?” Ash asks.
“You really don’t know?”
She makes a psssh noise. “You’re still thinking about what my mom said? Don’t pay any attention to her.”
I stop walking. Try to make myself calm down.
I know Ash can’t help it. She is what she is. All her needs were met; she never had to worry about anything except for when her magic would start to work.
“You’d never understand,” I say. My voice is hard, mean, and I know that’s not me, not us, but I can’t stop myself. “How could you? You’ve never been hungry. Never been assaulted on the street, while a police officer looks the other way.”
“But you’re not out there anymore, are you? Because I saved you. Because I know how ugly this city is, even if I never had to live with that ugliness.”
This is Ash. The princess. My friend. Who picked me up out of the gutter. Who I love so fiercely and owe so much to that sometimes I resent her.
But it sucks, loving someone. It means you’re not in control of what you do anymore. It means you’re helpless. That’s what I’m angry about, when I open my mouth and say:
“While you’re sitting up in the Palace, safe and sound, or out here surrounded by war jaguars as big as houses, people are living lives and dying deaths you could never imagine. So don’t ever pssssh at me.”
The look she gives me in response is hard, and full of things she chooses not to share.
We don’t say another word, but we spend a long time walking. Sometimes the silence feels almost comfortable, like it normally does, and sometimes it prickles like a thick, thorny hedge between us.
What we don’t realize is that we only have two more days together.
In less than a week, I’ll get kicked out on the street and Ash won’t be the same.
I don’t know why I remember that now, in the safe warm dark of Radha’s home. I blocked out the memory because I was ashamed of what I’d said. And now that I could remember it, I could connect the dots. Ash’s words. In two days, my guards are going to try something new. And the fact that two days after that conversation, everything went wrong.
Thirteen
Ash
The high school parking lot had become a minefield. Students and teachers alike stood around, gawking.
In the middle of the night, someone had spread a bucket of tar on the pavement of the student parking lot, then sprinkled a sackful of broken bottles on it, and nails and screws and other random, sharp metal things, so that in the morning when people started pulling in, their tires all got shredded. By the time I pulled up for school, the parking lot was closed and there was a line of tow trucks trying to figure out how to get everyone’s car to safety so the tires could be changed.
I took pictures. People’s faces. More than one person was crying. Everyone was somber. They looked at each other with suspicion; with fear. This wasn’t some little prank. This was destructive, aggressive—scary.
The student parking lot. Whoever did this knew that the people who came first would get it the worst. So it had been set up to target the nerds, the good students.
I thought of the ultramarine swastikas. Marcy Brockelmeyer’s house, vandalized. And now this. They couldn’t be unrelated. Something was up. Someone was responsible.
Solomon was picking up pennies from the train tracks, when I got there at four o’clock. He must have laid them down on the rails the night before, to be run over by a freight train, because they were huge and flat and thin—lopsided metal ovals.
“I call them trained pennies,” he said, holding one out to me. “Get it? Trained? Like they got run over by a train?”
“Awesome,” I said, taking it. It was still hot from the autumn sun on the rails. He’d called me up, the night before. From a bar. One a.m., and my seventeen-year-old best friend was hanging out in a bar. But at least he’d called.
I wanted to see him, because I had something to say to him. Something he wasn’t going to like. I had to convince him to get help. Because at this point, with his aunt having reported him missing, it was just a matter of time before someone put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Come with me, son”—or someone from Child Protective Services recognized him, which was pretty likely in a town as small as ours. And I didn’t think Solomon would respond well to “Come with me, son.”
But I had to work up my courage to get to all that. “What do you do with your trained pennies?” I asked.
“It’s a kind of currency,” he said. “Certain transactions, you can’t use regular money for.”
“So you use these.”
He nodded.
You see my dilemma, with shit like this. I had a lot of questions, but ask too many of them and he might pick up on my skepticism, or think that I was trying to diagnose him. Which, yeah, I kind of was. “What kind of transactions?”
“Lots of groups don’t trust the queen or her government, or they don’t want to pay taxes that support the police. They have their own economies.”
The queen. Her government. Secret economies.
Paranoid. Tinfoil hat kind of stuff.
When he was done picking up pennies, he walked along the train tracks and I followed him.
Solomon did not smell good. His clothes were sour with cigarettes and scotch—someone else’s; Solomon didn’t drink or smoke. There was also definitely body odor—his own.
“Do you want to come over to my house?” I asked, after a while. “Hang out, eat some food, take a shower?”
He laughed. “I stink, don’t I?”
“How long has it been since the last time you bathed?” And did you know that lapses in physical hygiene are a common symptom of mental illness?
He shrugged. “Couple days. There’s a brakeman’s hut up ahead, where I sleep sometimes. Doesn’t exactly have the amenities of a four-star hotel.”
We walked. I tried out about a hundred questions, in my head, before saying, “Tell me about the queen.”
“She’s an asshole,” he said, then laughed. “But she’s in a difficult position. Half the city is afraid of the other half, and vice versa, and she has to make both sides as happy as possible, even though most of the time they’re at each other’s throats. She still wears all black, even though her wife died six years ago. She rides a white tyrannosaur—the only tyrannosaur allowed in the city. It’s a nod to the othersiders—the people with powers—that she cares for the
m, too.”
He stopped.
“Sometimes I can see it so clearly—what’s real and what’s not. Like right now, this all sounds crazy, and I know it’s not real. But then something will happen, I’ll hear a bell, or see the color blue, or I’ll doze off, and it’s all of this that seems crazy—these train tracks, this town, these people. You . . . talking to me like nothing’s wrong. That’s what’s not real.”
His make-believe world was getting stronger. He was sick. But maybe he was also . . . special? Able to see things other people couldn’t? What if something real was happening—to me, to the world around us—and he had insight into it?
“You said something was coming,” I said. “What kind of something?”
“Seeds that were planted long ago are beginning to bloom. People are afraid; people are angry. Fear and anger don’t stay silent. They become action.”
I thought of Sheffield. The wave of vandalism.
“Do you remember?” I asked, and this time the question came out without my thinking about it. “Do you know what happened to us? When we were twelve?”
“Some of it,” he said. “But I can’t tell which memories to trust. Which ones are real. That’s why I need you. To figure this out for both of us.”
“It happened at Connor’s house,” I said. “Tell me what you remember. All of it. Real or not. We can figure it out together.”
He didn’t say anything. His face was tight, and reddening fast. I knew I was hurting him, but I had to press forward.
“Your mother,” I said. “She got locked up— It was right around the same time. Right?”
He didn’t move. Didn’t nod, didn’t say anything. But I knew that much was true.
“Did something happen with her?” I whispered. “Did we see something? Something she did?”
“I can’t,” he said, and held up both hands so I could see how they shook. “When I try, I get—I don’t know, sick. Nauseous. And then I space out. And then bad things happen.”
His arm twitched. His leg jerked. Solomon was struggling with the fight-or-flight response, and I knew that in a minute, maybe two, he’d turn and run. I might not see him again for a while. And I might not get the chance to warn him.
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