The Lost Coast
Page 3
Dad was always traveling for work, and I remember Mom laughing like my night-wandering was a practical joke he’d played on us, leaving his genes to ripen inside of me and grow into dark, restless flower.
To anyone outside of our family, it started in October of sophomore year. I had a feeling about where I was supposed to eat lunch one day, and it pulled me toward the picnic tables in the courtyard, where sunshine tumbled down. I walked out of the cafeteria with my saran-wrapped sandwich and found Mia Livesy sitting on the last inch of a bench like the rest of it was crowded with people, only she was alone.
And crying.
Mia and I weren’t really friends, but she looked at me sometimes like maybe she wanted to be, so I sat down and put my hand on her shoulder. Just perched it there, ready to take flight at the smallest sign that she didn’t want me.
Then it was salt in my mouth, skin under my hands where Mia’s skirt and her shirt didn’t quite meet.
It was done as abruptly as it started, and Mia sank back into crying, deeper this time. Her tears fell into cupped hands, and when I tried to catch them instead, Mia told me in a shipwrecked voice, “Get away from me. Go.”
I ran on numb feet.
I hadn’t been the solution to Mia Livesy’s crying. I had been the reason. Or at least part of it.
That night, I slept for the first time in months, all the way through the night, and woke up with my fingertips perched on my lips. There had been a smile there. The memory of it was as warm as ten blankets.
If I was going to keep doing this, there had to be rules, and the first one wrote itself: no crying girls.
Igive the Grays space after the morning assembly, but I feel every inch of it. I walk by myself, thinking about how today might have gone if the widowmaker had stabbed empty ground. Would Sebastian have played it cool as soon as we were in public? Would he be walking in step with me right now, trying to touch my hand?
My new locker is at the very end of one of these open-air hallways. I dump my books, distracted by the pine-and-dirt taste of the air, the way it comes and goes as it pleases. Who designs these California high schools? Do they actually trust the students not to wander away between classes?
Why?
A girl steps into the frame of the far end of the hall. Her features look like they’re specifically angled to catch the light. She’s wearing a white T-shirt and a black jean miniskirt, and somehow it doesn’t look standard or boring on her, like she’s doing it to blend in, more like she’s turning herself into a canvas to splash paint on later. Her arms are covered with bracelets and her fingers are stacked with a rainbow of rings. I name carnelian and rose quartz, amethyst and clear quartz before I run dry. The thing that I notice first, last, and a few times in between is her hair. It curls in a way that leaves air between each loose, lazy spiral. It’s a red a bottle could never conjure, a red that jealous girls would kill to get.
I walk right up to her, because sometimes I can do bold, even when there’s a pretty girl involved. Especially when there’s a pretty girl involved.
“Hey,” I say, grabbing for the books that seem like they’re about to spill out of her hands. “I’m Danny. Made in Michigan, but I’m really glad to be . . . not there.” I wince at how slick that wasn’t. It feels like getting stuck halfway down a waterslide. “Are you new?”
The girl stares. Except she’s not looking at me, not really, more like the patch of air in my general vicinity. When I try to catch her dark-brown eyes, I can’t. But it’s more than that. Their surface is frosted over. Like fog in the woods.
Or two shards of brown sea glass.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Is this about Sebastian? I can walk you to the counselor’s office.” The vice principal gave me directions during orientation in a pointed way, like she knew about my history.
It occurs to me now that she probably does.
The girl’s misty eyes roam, never settling, and I’m fighting the urge to back away slowly. Something about her feels strange, but that must be in my head, which hasn’t calmed down since I found Sebastian.
“At least let me walk you to your next class,” I say. I’m trying to stay grounded after what happened in the woods, and flirting with this girl is as good a lifeline as anything I can imagine. But it leads me right back to the last person I was flirting with.
The dead one.
The bell rang a while ago. We’re the only ones left in the hall. I grab the girl’s books, because now I’ve promised to help, but I’ve also promised Mom I won’t ditch class under any circumstances.
“What’s your next class?” I ask.
The girl doesn’t say a thing.
I check her notebooks. Western History. Geometry Two. Beneath the class title, I see a name carved into the hard plastic, an imprint that she’s worked in, one point at a time, no lines to connect them.
Imogen Lilly.
I drop her books, and they hit the concrete with a hard slap. When I scrape them up again, the girl doesn’t move to help, doesn’t ask me what’s wrong with me or roll her sea-glass eyes. She’s still looking at the hole where I used to be.
I slide her books back into her empty arms and run.
The birds fly over the knot of people and their possessions called Tempest. They pick at it. They collect, gather, sort.
Known, unknown.
Shiny, dull.
Good, bad.
Help, hurt.
Lelia has eyes green as late-spring grass. Yellow hair with colorful strings in it. Watches the birds, neck back, chin poking the air. Pins a name to each one of them. The birds like being noticed. It gives a shine to the sliced black marbles of their eyes.
They bring presents.
Buttons first: a round red cranberry, a beveled jade, a wart of gold plastic. They drop the buttons where they know Lelia will walk. They follow with slick wingbeats. They cut the sky above Tempest with their bodies and scream when it heals over.
Lelia loves the buttons. Sews them onto a favorite jacket, wears it everywhere. They bring more. Scraps of people’s lives. Paper and ribbons. Metal and porcelain.
Lelia gives back what she can. Not the pretties in the glass house. Nothing in that house ever comes outside, except for Lelia. So Lelia feeds them stories, and they stuff themselves full on the misery of what it means to be so human, so young. They might not be able to pick apart the words, but they know the song of sorrow. It is sharp in the throat.
They fly in and out of years.
Lelia. The birds.
And then, after years of walking alone, Lelia collects friends. Brings them to the birds like presents.
Shiny, shiny, shiny.
There is one in particular. Copper from above. Dark flash in her eyes. Water glitters when she walks near, turns to diamond. She talks to the birds as if they speak the same language. She keeps watch over her flock.
They fly in and out of years together.
The birds. The witches.
The Grays are waiting for me around the corner. Lelia and June stand back to back so they’re holding each other’s weight. Hawthorn looks down at her knuckles, working a bit of sharply scented balm into her skin, and Rush is staring at me like she never stopped. There’s hope and fear in it. There’s something bigger, older, deeper than whatever she thinks about me.
I spin around. Imogen must have gone back the way she came, because she’s already gone.
I’m officially cutting class now, six periods into what should be a brand-new school year. A shiny new Danny.
“You told me she was missing,” I say.
“She is missing,” June says. “We haven’t seen Imogen in six weeks. She’s been like . . . that.”
Whatever that is, it’s big and not easy to break through. Still, I want to yell at June, at all of the Grays. They brought me here because their friend won’t talk or look them in the eye? She could be depressed. In some kind of medically recognized fugue state. She could be so pissed at the world that she doesn’t want to conne
ct to it anymore. There are options. Things that could explain this.
Words that can be used to put a box around whatever is wrong.
But I know from experience that boxes aren’t always big enough. And I don’t want to treat the Grays the way people treated me for so long. I want to believe them, the way nobody bothered to believe me.
“I’ll help you,” I say. “If I can.” It sounds really nice, but in a way it’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever said, because I want to be close to the Grays. Something about them pulls me in, holds me in place.
Their responses come in a tangled heap.
“Thank you,” June breathes.
“It took you long enough,” Lelia says.
Rush stares and stares, underlining the importance of what everyone else is saying with her hard gaze.
Hawthorn asks, “What can you do?”
They pull Danny into the woods. There are no old-growth trees right near the high school, but there are still redwoods, scruffy upstart ones, punching their way up, fighting to own a patch of sky.
Lelia gives Hawthorn a highly refined This won’t work glare.
“It’s good enough for now,” Hawthorn says.
But the real problem isn’t the lack of proper trees. It’s the lack of time. The Grays have never had to find someone’s magic in a hurry. It’s always been a careful process, searching out a path to a place no one’s ever been. But here’s something they know: the longer Imogen’s gone, the less likely it is that they’ll get her back. And then there’s Sebastian, killed by a wind that Lelia insists was unnatural. Killed on the day that Danny showed up.
One girl unreachable, one girl finally here, one boy dead.
The gossip at school wasn’t completely stupid this time. The Grays see the same pattern as everybody else. They just read it differently.
“How are you doing?” June asks, patting Danny’s shoulder. Danny pulls away like June’s fingertips are live flames. “Sebastian dying can’t be easy, especially since you knew him.”
“A tiny bit,” Danny says, working her backpack straps off her shoulders and dropping the bag to the ground.
“Time isn’t the only way to know someone,” Rush says, the wind tugging at her hair, the words trickling into her heart.
Imogen had been in their lives since middle school, but if you measured it that way, it sounded like any other friendship. Like it was just a matter of having someone to sit with at lunch or go to the movies with on the weekend. Loving Imogen made everything brighter and deeper, like staring down into the sea and finding a world layered with strangeness and beauty. Losing her turned the world shallow.
The girls sit down in a circle. “So . . . how do we do this?” Danny asks.
Hawthorn takes the lead, and the Grays take it for granted that she will. “Normally I would say that you should start with whatever sort of working calls to you, try a bunch of different types until you build your own. I guess I should get this out of the way. There’s a reason we’re called the Grays and not the Wicca Club of Tempest High School.” Hawthorn rushes through her explanation, pausing only to summon more breath. “It’s not like we make everything up ourselves. But the craft is a braid of traditions, and a lot of those are tied to the places they came from. The way I see it, you can’t swap out one for the other and expect it not to matter. Every place has its own rules, and Tempest is highly specific.” Hawthorn lays her palms against the dirt, like she wants the ground to give her strength, like she might even ask it to speak.
“All right,” Danny says. “So what happens next?”
But the Grays don’t know, because Imogen would be the one to answer that question if she were here. She was good at schemes. Always leaping to meet new challenges and take the universe’s dares.
“We thought you would come knowing your abilities,” Lelia says.
“Be nice,” June says.
“Not in my repertoire,” Lelia shoots back. “And that’s why you love me.”
June rolls her eyes, although the Grays know that she really does love Lelia for her bristle, her bravado, her absolute lack of fucks.
Danny nods back and forth between Lelia and June. “Are you two . . . together?”
“Grays don’t date each other,” Hawthorn says, and Rush stops breathing.
“I don’t date anyone,” Lelia adds.
“I have an idea.” June scrambles out of the circle and goes to her flowery backpack, which she dropped at the base of a tree. She tugs the zipper, shoves aside a few schoolbooks, pulls out a knife as long as her forearm, grips it by the redwood handle, and rushes back to the circle. The weight and darkness of the knife draw everyone’s eyes. The sharpness forces Danny’s breath into a new shape.
“Whoa,” she says. “I don’t go in for blood rituals.”
Lelia smirks. “If we want to bond with you, there are better ways.”
Danny’s eyes flick wide.
“It’s official,” Lelia says. “I like messing with her.”
“Okay, so this knife is special,” June says, tugging Danny back to the point, literally and figuratively. “It’s not meant to cut anything except air. I have a smaller knife for spell bits. String, candlewicks, that kind of stuff. This is for rituals.”
“And there’s a ritual to find what my magic is?” Danny looks like she wants to believe them.
She looks like she doesn’t believe them at all.
“It’s not really like that,” Hawthorn says, slipping off her beaded sandals, connecting the soles of her feet to the sun-freckled ground. The other Grays follow, until everyone is shoeless but Danny. She stubs toe to heel, pushes off her dark-blue Keds. Hawthorn pushes her glasses up into her hair, lodging them in her curls, because the kind of sight they help her with is not the kind she needs right now. “You can probably do a lot of things — cast spells, read the world differently from other people. But you’re here for a reason. There’s something you can do that . . .”
“We can’t,” Rush finishes.
June nods, because Rush said the thing that they were all thinking. The unbearable thing. It means they can’t bring Imogen back without trusting someone who doesn’t know her the way they do.
June inches closer to Danny, who doesn’t back away but clenches along invisible lines all down her body. “I’m going to make a few signs over you, to see if I can open up your intuition,” June says. “I don’t want to tell you what your magic is. I want to show it to you and then have you tell us.”
“So . . . you’re going to slice into my psyche?” Danny asks with what the Grays are starting to think of as her trademark smile. It’s a nervous, flimsy thing, bright and fluttering, a kite somebody lost their hold on.
June swings the knife back and forth slowly, inches from Danny’s face.
Danny’s smile dulls.
And then it’s gone.
In the supposedly haunted bathroom stall during the winter dance, hooking up with Hallie Carpenter, whispers of a ghost keeping everyone away while we gasped each other’s breath, worked our hands into the impossible spaces between tight dresses and skin.
Jenna DeWalt running her pen up and down my leg for an excruciating, perfect forty minutes while we watched a movie about the French Revolution in World History. I waited for her after school, wordless. We went back to Jenna’s house and put on another movie, a romantic comedy, no beheadings. The lights on, then off. Jenna hovering over me, then pressed under me. The sound of bored straight people falling in love breaking around us like waves.
A friend of a friend from another school who heard I would kiss any girl who needed kissing. Ginger-mint breath and brown hair pinned up, with a few wisps at her neck. We sealed ourselves together in her car, pretending that no one could find us in the overlook near the state park, like the windows weren’t just glass.
My mom looked at me when I came home, that narrow-eyed tweezer look, like she could lift this truth out of my soul as easily as she used to take splinters out of my palms.
This was different, so I kept it quiet. Which led to rule number two: no one who likes to talk more than they like to kiss.
Icome back to June’s face, smiling, expectant. She drops the knife to the ground between our knees.
Her eyes are a soft, mossy brown-green. Her smile does things to me. Not the ones I usually experience when being smiled at by a cute girl. These are softer, like the clouds stretched out beneath an airplane.
“What did you see?” she asks.
“Not magic,” I say. “But I’m used to being a disappointment.”
“Disappointment,” Rush whispers. “Bitter and pulpy. It’s like chewing on a Popsicle stick after the Popsicle’s gone.”
I have no idea what Rush is talking about, but I’m starting to gather, one soft-spoken comment at a time, that maybe her brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s. Which makes me want to pull her aside and ask her more. I’m not sure about my brain, but my body definitely seems to follow its own rules.
I don’t think the rest of the Grays would appreciate being splintered, though. They seem like a package deal. So I give Rush a nod that I can feel all the way down my spine and say, “Yeah. I don’t want to turn into anybody’s sour old Popsicle stick.”
Hawthorn presses her lips together. “I think we should take her to the hermit.”
“Yes!” June claps, a quick little burst. “Hermit time!”
I have visions of an old man with an extra helping of beard, possibly to make up for a distinct lack of teeth. A man who lives in the woods, communing with trees and animals because he’s reached the limits of human bullshit.
I like him already.