“Just because we’re in whatever shitstain town is under your jurisdiction, it doesn’t mean you get to act like I’m a baby. How dare you treat me like a fuckin’ housewife!”
For a minute the cop stared at me, a muscle bouncing in his cheek. When he pulled down his shades, the eyes behind them were irritable and brown. Human. “You kiss your mother with that mouth? We’re in the middle of something here, I don’t have time for your shit. Turn on your headlights and go.” He straightened and walked back a few paces, flares hanging at his sides.
I stayed put for a moment, unspent adrenaline sending a dying glitter through my limbs, until Finch leaned over and punched the headlights back on.
“Turn around,” he said. “For fuck’s sake!”
I glared at him. “What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?”
The feeling of knowing you’re being an asshole is as bad as feeling wronged, but without the satisfaction. I turned the car around hard and fast, screeching over the grass on the opposite side of the road. “What are you talking about?” I said through gritted teeth.
“You know what I’m talking about. How privileged can you get?”
“Me, Ellery Djan-Finch-whatever? I’m privileged?”
“This isn’t about money!” he exploded. “You argued with a cop because you know you can. It’s so damned arrogant. Look at me.” He gestured at the obvious; he gestured at his skin. “What do you think would’ve happened if I’d been the one screaming at a cop? And he didn’t even give you a ticket!”
“Did you want him to give me a ticket?” I said, ignoring his point. “Should I go back and ask for one?”
He shook his head, staring out the window.
Nothing made me angrier than someone refusing to answer me. The edges of my vision fizzed into something humming and black, till I felt like I was looking at the road through a tunnel.
“Come on. Tell me what I should do. Tell me what I should’ve done.”
“Just stop,” he said tiredly. “Let’s go to the nearest motel, find a reroute tomorrow.”
I should’ve shut up, but I didn’t. “Hell no. You started a conversation, now let’s finish it.”
“God, let it rest! You shouldn’t have insulted a cop, okay? He could’ve dragged me out of the car because you were being an idiot. You think rich matters in this situation? You think a cop looks at me and sees rich? You’re pretending you don’t get it, but you do.”
I did get it, I did. And the shame of it boiled into something darker. Before my brain could catch up, I jerked the wheel and turned the car off the road, sending us rattling toward the trees.
“Alice!” Finch lunged across and grabbed at the wheel, but I held it fast. The world narrowed to an oak trunk looming in my sight. Till panic clawed its way over the tide of rage, making me yank the wheel hard to the left and swerve back onto the road. We rolled over something that made the body of the car jounce hard. My head smacked the roof, and the anger burned away.
Itchy regret took its place. I’d let myself drift too close to the dark continent at the core of me, a lawless place I tried never to visit. It had been a while, but it was as familiar as the taste of medicine.
Finch sat frozen in the passenger seat. I could feel his eyes on me. I drove faster, like I could leave what I did behind.
“What. The hell. Was that?”
“I’m sorry,” I croaked.
“I don’t care.” He said it again, sounding astonished. “I don’t care. What the hell were you—what am I supposed to think now? How are you gonna convince me you won’t try to kill us again?”
I clenched my fists around the wheel. “I won’t. I wasn’t. I get … I’m bad with people. It’s stupid. I was being stupid, talking to the cop like that. It’s just, disrespect makes me mad.”
“It makes me mad, too. But sometimes you have to swallow it the fuck down.”
“Stop,” I said, lifting a hand. “I’m serious. I know that was horrible. But I can’t tell you I won’t drive us off the road again if you don’t stop talking about it, so maybe you should take the wheel.”
He settled back against the window, arms folded tightly over his chest, and said nothing. So I drove. All the way to the gravel lot of the first motel I saw: the Starlite Inn, pushed right back up against the trees. Finch glanced at them, but said nothing.
We were checked in by a man who looked exactly how the guy checking you in at a cheap motel in the middle of the woods is supposed to. I’d assumed there’d be a guest book, where I could sign funny names and maybe get Finch to look at me again, but they must only have those in old movies.
He paid for just one room, and I was grateful. At this point I didn’t trust he wouldn’t disappear. Go back to New York, or try to, and take a wrong turn and end up in the Hinterland.
Clingy didn’t become me. I prided myself on not needing friends—I thought it meant I didn’t need anybody. Turned out it just meant I needed Ella terribly, too much. She was literally all I had.
Our room was the in-between color of despair, with a landscape painting behind each bed that was a Rorschach test for depression: if you saw a faded-out cornfield in a dusty blue frame, you were fine. But if all you could envision was whatever god-awful sweatshop must’ve produced it, the prognosis was not good.
“Stop staring at the ugly painting,” Finch said. “You’re weirding me out.” He flopped down face-first on one of the beds, then immediately rolled over. “This pillow smells like the time my bunkmate peed his bed at camp. And I’m too tired to care.”
I sat on the edge of the other bed. “I really am sorry.”
He winced. “Don’t say that.”
“What? Why not?”
He threw an arm over his eyes. “Just forget it. Look, what did you see on the road, behind the cop? Not an accident, right?”
With his eyes covered, he was easier to talk to. I lay back on my own pillow. “Not an accident. I don’t know why, but it felt kinda, you know. Hinterland-y. You saw the car with all its doors open?”
“I didn’t see anything. There was a cop in my face, I was too busy trying to look innocent.”
“You? Could you look anything but innocent?”
“Oh, yeah. I can be a real asshole.” His voice was drifting.
“I don’t buy it,” I said softly. “You seem like one of the good ones.”
“Shows what you know.”
There was something in his voice that made me wary, and I took too long to think of a response. His breathing turned steady and slow, a contagious sound that climbed into my limbs and made them heavy as sand. I could barely lift my arm to turn off the light.
After I did, I blinked up at the ceiling and smiled: it was covered in phosphorescent stars. I let my eyes close. The sound of Ellery Finch sleeping was almost as good as having someone to reach out for in the dark.
18
Finch was having a nightmare.
I heard him in the next bed, making small, sorry sounds. The light that came in around the curtains was the dusty yellow of streetlamps. I couldn’t tell what time it was, and my phone was plugged into Finch’s charger across the room.
“Finch. Ellery.”
He didn’t answer. When I switched on the bedside light he flinched but didn’t wake. Silently I sat up and swung my feet to the floor. I stopped there, waiting for his eyes to open.
They didn’t. My body felt gritty from the motel bed, like I was swimming in the dirt of other people’s bodies and just couldn’t see it. I rolled my neck and watched him.
His head was thrown back and his eyes were moving beneath their lids. Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?
But Finch stayed staunchly, solidly unified. He was a boy i
n a bed with his neck stretched long. His mouth shaped itself around words I couldn’t hear, then he moaned with such aching regret I was next to him with my hand on his shoulder before I could think.
“Hey. You’re having a bad dream.”
He sucked in hard through his nose. His eyes shuttered open and hooked on the ceiling, then my face. I watched the dream leave them and sense roll back in.
“Oh!” he said. In his voice were unshed tears, and I thought he might want me to look away. But he grabbed my hand and brought it to his chest and held it.
I let him. The steady pump of his heart through his shirt made me remember the heart was a muscle. Our most important one. “You were having a nightmare.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Alice.” He said my name like a person putting something precious down on a bed of moss.
“For what? It’s just a dream.”
“No, I…” He looked at me so intently I dropped my eyes, watched our hands rising and falling with his breath. “Alice, let’s go back.”
My head jerked up. His lashes were wet and his cheek was creased. My mind shot an arrow from the first time I saw him in his uniform at Whitechapel to right now, wearing a T-shirt and boxers in this bed.
“Back to what?” I asked.
He let his head dip forward till his forehead touched mine. “There are better fairy tales,” he whispered. “If the Hinterland’s real, maybe all of it’s real. We could look for Neverland. Or Narnia.”
I hadn’t cried since the night Ella announced her engagement, but I felt like crying now. “Ella’s not in Neverland,” I whispered back. “Or in Narnia.”
“Maybe she’s not in the Hazel Wood, either.”
I pulled back, my skin feeling cold where it had touched his. “Maybe not. But this is what we came here to do.”
“We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. There’s still—we can still turn around.”
“Where is this coming from?” I yanked my hand back and slammed it down on the mattress, feeling like an impotent ass when it made barely a sound. “What did you dream about?”
He shook his head. “I dreamed all of it was real.”
“It is real. We both saw Twice-Killed Katherine.”
“Not that. All of it.”
“All of what?”
He kept shaking his head, looking past me. “Don’t you ever feel like your life is a movie? And you’re playing a part? And you waste all your time watching yourself in that movie, thinking what a good job you’re doing at playing you, until you wake up and remember it’s all actually real? Every person around you is fucking real?” His voice went fast and faster, then cracked.
“Must be nice being rich,” I said, giving it an ugly edge, but I knew that wasn’t it. I felt that way, too. Except I never thought I was doing a very good job in my movie.
“Everything we do has consequences,” he said.
He’d caught me off guard, looking all soft and disturbed in the middle of the night. But now I was getting pissed. “This isn’t an assembly on drugs, Finch. You don’t need to tell me that. The consequence of you agreeing to drive my ass all the way to the Hazel Wood is that you will now follow through on that agreement. I have no money to give you for gas and no way to convince you to help me other than the fact that I will actually kill you if you try to drive me back to the city while we’re this close to maybe finding my mother. Got it?”
We stared at each other.
“I dreamed about the Hinterland,” he said.
“Yeah, I got that. But your dream has nothing to do with what we’re doing.” It tasted like a lie. I tried again. “It was a dream, not a prophecy.”
“How far would you go to find her?”
“Ends of the earth.”
“No farther?” He looked like he wanted me to convince him of—something.
I pressed my hands to my eyes, hard. “You feel like you’re playing a part in a movie? Well, so do I. I feel like I’m playing a part in a movie where all the sets have burned down. And the script got erased. And the cameras have no film, and we’re in a haunted movie lot in the bad part of town. Finch, she’s not just my only family, she’s my only person.”
When I saw acceptance break on his face, I realized what he’d wanted me to convince him of. He wanted to know I had nothing to lose. He wanted to know, maybe, that I would die in pursuit of Ella.
Die like Ness’s friend had died.
I looked at Finch, the solid boyness of him, and I knew I couldn’t let him go all the way with me. Not into the black hole of the Hazel Wood. At some point in the past thirty-six hours, he’d joined the tiniest, saddest clique of people, of which Ella had previously been the only member: people I, Alice Crewe, couldn’t bear to see die.
Hell is caring about other people.
* * *
I woke hours later with a feeling of fleet panic, breathing like I’d just come up from underwater. There was something in my ears, a sense of dying sound. What had woken me?
“Morning.” Finch was awake and watching from the next bed, sitting up with his hands braced behind him.
I fisted the hand he’d held to his chest, remembered how he’d looked with wet lashes in the dark. But his anguish of the night before was ironed away, his veneer of chipper Finchness back in place.
“Morning. I thought I— Did you hear something?”
“Well, yeah. We’ve been having a conversation for the last five minutes.”
“What?”
“You were talking in your sleep. I answered.”
“What did I say?”
He smiled. There was something sly in it. “Nothing. Just nonsense. You know, sleep stuff.”
“Finch. Tell me exactly what I said.”
His amusement faltered at the ice in my voice. I wondered if he was remembering that time I nearly drove a car with him in it into a tree. “Seriously, it was silly stuff. Like you were talking about fishing and toast and crap like that. Please don’t freak out.”
“I hate it when people tell me not to freak out.”
He swung his feet to the floor and looked at me seriously. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I should’ve woken you up. But it was cute. You looked so mellowed out, your voice just sounded so … different from usual. But—”
“But you should’ve woken me up,” I finished.
“Yeah.” He stood and stretched, his T-shirt riding high over his boxers. I switched my gaze to the ceiling, eyes on the mealy yellow circles of plastic stars till he was in the shower. Why hadn’t I believed him just now? What was it in his voice that told me he was lying?
Finch came out fully dressed, and I took his place in the bathroom. After showering I pulled my clothes back on over damp skin, leaving me with a clammy, half-finished feeling. I’d waited too long since my last haircut, and my wet hair brushed down past the tops of my ears. I frowned and mussed it upward. It was thick and corn-colored and wavy, and until I was fourteen it was so long I could sit on it. It was total Disney hair, catnip for every little girl with an itchy braiding finger. Ella had kept it short till I was old enough to put my foot down. And then I’d kept it long till that asshole teacher reminded me it was an invitation. Aren’t you a pretty little house cat.
After that I hated my long hair as much as Ella did. Cutting it off helped make me invisible—no more boys reaching through all that silk to snap the strap of my training bra. No more girls asking if they could touch it, and grabbing a handful before I had time to reply.
“You ready to go?” I asked, walking back into the bedroom.
Finch had ripped open the green foil packet of ground coffee tucked beside the tiny coffeemaker on the dresser. “Yea or nay?” he asked, tipping it toward me.
I dipped my nose toward the anemic smell of packaged Folger’s, and recoiled. “My bosses would go into a coma if they saw me drinking that stuff,” I began, before remembering, for the first time since Ella disappeared, that I’d completely blown off Salty Dog—or was about to.
I’d be missing a shift later that day. I thought of Lana, forced to deal with the worst of the regulars on her own. Would she, at least, wonder enough to call me? And how pathetic was it that the only people in New York who might miss me had to pay me to come around?
“You have bosses?” Finch replied, wrinkling his forehead in a fussy rich boy way that made me want to kill him. I tried Christian’s cell phone while shoving my stuff in my bag and my feet in my sneakers. No answer. I called Lana as we walked out to the parking lot.
I could hear the music of her voice picking up as my hand dropped from my ear to my waist. Without looking, I ended the call.
“So, where do you—” Finch began, then stopped.
The rental car, parked on the pavement in front of our room, was filled with water. Filled, like a fish tank. The water was a silty swirl you couldn’t see through.
A tight, sickly laugh bubbled out of me. It was a reminder, clear as day: the Hinterland was with us every step of the way. We thought we were so damned clever, but wherever we went, it was because they were letting us.
Finch walked past me, hands on his head, and looked straight up at the sky.
“I hope you’re not looking for rain,” I said.
I thought he’d be freaked out, or aggressively calm in that Finch way I was growing accustomed to, or even pissed. But when he turned toward me he looked reverent. “The Hinterland did this.”
“Yes.”
“We can’t go back to New York now.”
“We were never going back to New York.”
“No, I mean, even if we wanted to. It’s like … we have no choice but to keep going.”
“What? Yes, we do. We have a choice, and we’re choosing it. This isn’t fate, Finch, this is getting bullied by supernatural assholes.”
Feet planted as far from the car as I could get them, leaning way forward at the waist, I opened the passenger door. A tide of water sluiced out. It lapped around my shoes, brackish and full of specks of green and gray.
“It’s seawater,” Finch said wonderingly, right as a fat silver fish flopped out onto the asphalt. It was wide and whiskered like a catfish, and landed on its belly. Its sides moved gently in and out. The sight of it filled me with pity—another victim of the Hinterland.
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