Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  As for what’s going to happen once I’m in front of number 32—I have a rough idea. It doesn’t matter. I still need the snap of empirical proof, or I’m always going to wonder.

  So the drowsy streets roll back, and kids scamper through sprinklers, and adults lug groceries. No matter how long I live in this complacent normalcy, I’m always going to carry the buzz of the impossible. Because I’ve been there, I’ve seen it for myself, and that kind of madness gets in your flesh. It’s like one of those viruses that scorches its way into your DNA, stays part of you years after the fever has broken.

  Fine.

  The Delbos’ house slides up on me. The irony is that I almost miss it and walk right past, because I’ve half forgotten that it’s only a single story high. A bland, butter-yellow split-level ranch. A home where I was always a stranger, except when Josh was smiling at me.

  I stand and look at it, searching the windows for any stir that might be him, even though I know that will never happen. No matter if I go right up to the glass, or how I stalk in circles around the house, the magic will always arrange for Josh to wander into some room where I can’t see him. He’s in there, I could almost swear it, but at the same time he’s unreachable.

  I had unsettled plans to storm up and ring the bell, but now that feels preposterous. What will happen if I try it? I take the first step onto the Delbos’ front walk and feel weakness bursting in my knees, ready to topple me. A warning shot. Whatever. I’m here and I’ll take the worst it can throw at me.

  A window in the living room jerks up. Against all reason, my heart leaps and my hand flies out, as if Josh’s hand will be close enough that I can grasp it.

  But of course it’s not him. Emma Delbo is there, looking a bit less decrepit than she did last time I saw her. Still, even now that Josh is back and everything that happened has been wiped from her mind, I can tell her forgotten experiences aren’t really gone. She’s weighed down by something blue-gray and terribly heavy, until it’s visibly distending her skin. Maybe her mind doesn’t remember, but I can see what happened in the sag of her lips.

  “Go away. You’re not welcome here,” she calls to me. I notice, of course, that she doesn’t say my name. That’s another thing since we’ve been back—no one calls me Kezzer now, like it’s a facet of everything they can’t say. I don’t think Emma’s a fan of Ksenia.

  But maybe that’s not the only reason. Maybe there’s someone who can overhear the faintest edge of Emma’s voice, and so saying my name is impossible for her.

  “I never thought I was welcome,” I snap back. But the truth is, a flush like fire races through my skin. It made more sense, her hating me, when she thought I’d murdered Josh. But now? I try to tell myself it’s just the enchantment shoving her emotions around, but that’s not as convincing as I’d like it to be. She probably thinks I duped him into running away with me.

  “Why did you even come back to this town? You should have stayed in Buffalo!” She slams the window, but I stay where I am. Did I hear—or maybe I’m only imagining—a few rapid footsteps coming behind her, with a cadence that I know like my own pulse?

  No one else comes to the window. No one else will.

  The air is so blue, so vibrant, that it cradles me and stops me from falling. Windows wink golden, and I can see everyone else—anyone else, actually, in all the world—going through their everyday motions. And I know I have to stop staring into the void of the one person I can’t see, even if that void pretends to be a magnolia tree and an expanse of vinyl siding. I turn to go.

  Half a block later, I halt. Light footsteps are echoing just behind me, each one deliberately timed to coincide with mine. And this time—how?—I already know, I accept in my gut, that those steps aren’t his.

  I swing around and meet her grubby gray eyes. Awkward as hell that she’s here, of course—does she think she can take my place? Lexi and I are both horribly certain that the Xand who still lives in town is as fake as tinsel. But at least she’s had the sense to button up that hideous dress, though the crude red rag of her autopsy incision still pokes above the neckline. She gawps at me, maybe embarrassed, with her jagged blond hair twitching and her mouth hanging open.

  “Sennie,” she whispers. Ugh. Then, with a shade more confidence: “Did you find it? Give it back to me, and I’ll go away!”

  Of course. She’s still after one thing. “Our missing heart?” I say. “Neither of us can get it back. You’re going to have to forget it.”

  “Ours?” Her eyes narrow. “It was mine, it was all mine! Prince made it and put it inside me, and then they stole it right out of me! It’s mine.”

  “It belonged to both of us,” I tell her. “And no matter how much it hurt sometimes, I know we both would have given almost anything to keep it. But we couldn’t. It’s lost forever.” I nod toward the Delbos’ house. “You know where it is as well as I do.”

  Her head twists to look, with a suddenness like a convulsion. When she stares at me again she’s gone bone white, her lips are trembling, and I pity her as much as I can. Which turns out to be a lot, actually.

  In a dried-up riverbed, at the bottom of a gorge, I buried a heart full of water.

  Now it lives in a yellow house. But that house is deeper than any gorge in the world. There’s no getting to the bottom of it.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “But I have to go home. And so do you. Or—look. You can go to another town, if you want. Invent a new name for yourself. I won’t rat you out. Why don’t you try that? Just be as alive as you can, with everything you have left.”

  She stares at me a while longer, both of us suffused in blue. I have a lingering sense—of what? responsibility?—that keeps me from turning my back on her and leaving. For a fake person, a poppet, a mannequin cobbled out of magic and mind scraps and maybe a rotten log, she’s done pretty well, in fact. When she pointed me toward the way out of nowhere, she showed a kind of spirit and independence that has to be worth something.

  “You think I can do that,” she says at last. It’s not a question. “With no heart.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I think you stand a decent chance.”

  She nods, twitchily, like there’s nothing else that either of us could possibly add to that. No smile—it occurs to me that she might not have learned how to smile yet. She just pivots sharply on one heel and marches off, leaving me with the sick dread that I was spewing lies at her. It would be cruel to feed her false hope.

  But maybe she’ll pull it off and forge a life somewhere. She’s what you’d call socially awkward, but so are a lot of people. And anyway, does it have to be with no heart?

  With whatever heart you can make for yourself. Make it out of the surging trees. Out of this twilight that doesn’t try to erase you anymore—that lets you burn on, Ksenia Adderley, at the core of its simultaneous peace and wildness. Out of a dark girl working on her term papers, but with a touch of her awareness still tuned to you. She’ll expect you to stop by, even if it’s just for a few minutes, because you always do.

  acknowledgments

  It’s often impossible to pinpoint where inspiration starts, but in the case of Never-Contented Things I know precisely the night that set the book in motion. My beloved husband, Todd Polenberg, and our brilliant friend Ben Bartelle were sitting up late by a fireplace in Maine, talking crazy talk with me, when Todd volunteered that he would take a cocktail from a bartender with snake-head hands. “You will do no such thing!” I cried, distraught. “You do not accept food or drink from nonhuman visitants. That’s rule number one!” The conversation unraveled through wild digressions, and by morning I knew what I would write next. (Thanks to this book, Todd is now convinced. No serpentine cocktails!)

  The epigraphs that begin each section of this book point to its older roots in faerie literature, but they also trace personal influences to which I owe a lasting debt. My mother, Betsy Hart Porter, read me Goblin Market when I was a small child; it scared the bejesus out of me in that indelible
way that can return, decades later, in the form of a new book. My wonderful editor, Susan Chang, casually introduced me to the medieval poem Sir Orfeo, which had a deeper impact on me than she could have anticipated. (An Orpheus and Eurydice retelling where Eurydice is stolen by faeries!? How cool is that?) The wise and charming Morgan Fahey suggested the Poe poem that gave this book its title and pointed out the eerie beauty of the titular line. Another friend, Laura Henze, sent me a volume of Yeats’s faerie lore after that same Maine trip, which not only led me to “The Stolen Child” but informed subtler atmospherics as well.

  I also want to thank my incredible agent, Kent D. Wolf, who believed in me when no one else did and hasn’t stopped yet; everyone at Tor Teen, but especially Susan Chang and Kathleen Doherty, for believing in me now, and Zohra Ashpari, for being so consistently awesome. Todd always, Kevin Messman for his insightful readings of basically everything I write, and Tera Freedman, also always.

  And to a particular dream I had about a bowler hat: thanks for being there when I needed you. You were creepy as hell.

  also by sarah porter

  Vassa in the Night

  When I Cast Your Shadow

  Tentacle & Wing

  The Lost Voices Trilogy

  Lost Voices

  Waking Storms

  The Twice Lost

  about the author

  SARAH PORTER is a writer, artist, and freelance teacher who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and two cats. She is the author of several books for young adults, including Vassa in the Night and When I Cast Your Shadow. She has an MFA in creative writing from City College. Look for her online at www.sarahporterbooks.com, www.facebook.com/sarahporterauthor, and on Twitter as @sarahporterbook. Sign up for email updates here.

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  contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part One

  ksenia adderley

  How Could I Leave Josh Behind?

  We’d Never Seen Them Before

  What Was I Supposed to Do?

  We Need to Be Happy While We Can

  I’m a Stranger Here Myself

  They Might Not Find Their Way Home Again

  You Could Put It Like That

  What a Little Savage You Once Were!

  Because We Weren’t Really Home Before

  Tiny, Sparkly Hands

  It Was What We Had to Give

  Do Tell

  Part Two

  lexi holden

  Every Skein of Light

  An Orchestra of Breaths and Bells

  A Velvety, Minuscule Death

  Not a Single One of Them Reaches My Voice

  Just Enough of the Truth

  My Voice Becomes Vapor

  Once You’ve Been to Nowhere

  Now We’re All Living Under a Spell

  Part Three

  joshua korensky

  The Only Way to Break Them Open

  The Land of Not Too Late

  So What’s to Trust?

  Why Did You Send Me to Die?

  What Is a Grave, If Not a Doorway?

  Please Don’t Think This Is Me

  As Any Artist Does

  Part Four

  lexi holden

  The Particular Shapes of Her Silence

  Nothing Essential Is Safe

  Minds Slap Shut Like Books

  Even Dreams Consume

  There Are Lies That Have Some Truth in Them

  Nothing of Great Matter to Her

  A Vast and Hollow Darkness

  Part Five

  unselle

  But Still Enduring

  Part Six

  ksenia adderley

  That Makes Two of Us

  They Stole Me from Myself

  They Didn’t Make Everything

  This Ground I’m Lying On

  My Version of Love

  I’ll Set My Own Criteria

  I’m Not Going to Let You Take It Back

  How Can Everything Become Nothing?

  I Paid Our Rent

  What Else Would I Do?

  The Whole Bright and Whirling World

  Whatever Heart You Can Make for Yourself

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sarah Porter

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  NEVER-CONTENTED THINGS

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Porter

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph by Darla Teagarden

  Title lettering by Jim Tierney

  A Tor Teen Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Porter, Sarah, 1969– author.

  Title: Never-contented things / Sarah Porter.

  Description: First edition.|New York: Tor Teen, 2019.|“A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046897|ISBN 9780765396730 (hardcover)|ISBN 9780765396754 (ebook)

  Subjects:|CYAC: Fairies—Fiction.|Foster children—Fiction.|Brother and sister—Fiction.|Sexual orientation—Fiction.|Love—Fiction.|Magic—Fiction.|Supernatural—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.P8303 Ne 2019|DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046897

  eISBN 9780765396754

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  First Edition: March 2019