You Must Not Miss

by Katrina Leno

  The town of Near sat as perfect and quiet as she had left it. In a breath she was there at the gate, and in another breath she was walking into her own house on Near–Pine Street, the smell of chocolate in the air, the sound of laughter from the kitchen where her mother and father stood baking an enormous three-tiered cake.

  “There she is,” Ann Marie said, when she saw her daughter. “Are you hungry, sweetheart?”

  “Of course she’s hungry!” Gabriel answered. Magpie set the yellow notebook down on the kitchen table as Gabriel cut a piece of cake, a thick triangle of brown, heavy with icing. He stuck a fork into it—the cake was so dense that it supported the utensil’s weight and propped it up so it looked like a flagpole—and handed it to Magpie. Then he cut another piece and gave it to her, and said, “Give this one to your sister, will you?”

  Balancing the two plates in her hands, Magpie headed downstairs. Her sister’s door was open, and Eryn was on her bed like last time, waiting for Magpie.

  “Cake!” she exclaimed. “Yum, gimme!”

  Magpie sat next to her on the bed, and they ate forkful after forkful of the cake, which was the richest cake Magpie had ever put into her mouth. When they had finished their slices, they dropped the plates and forks onto the carpet, and they disappeared, as if whisked away by some unseen maid. Magpie realized that Hither wasn’t here; had she gone through the doorway too quickly for it to follow? But she didn’t need it now. It would only try to convince her of her own limitations, and she needed the exact opposite. She needed someone to show her she could do more.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Eryn asked, raising her eyebrows, leaning back on the bed. “You look like you’re hatching some evil little plan.”

  “And if I am?” Magpie asked, her voice falling to something like a hiss, like a noise made in the back of some animal’s throat.

  Eryn raised her eyebrows even higher, then smiled slowly, and said, “Great. Things were getting a little boring around here.”

  Magpie stayed in Near until she was tired enough to want to return to Farther. She’d eaten two more slices of cake in Near, but stepping through to her own backyard made her suddenly hungry, as if she hadn’t eaten a thing, so she made herself macaroni and cheese and ate it over the kitchen sink as Hither, a long black snake, slithered around her ankles and over her bare feet. She was relieved her mother wasn’t home so she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

  She slept well that night, and when she woke up in the early afternoon to an empty house and not so much as a note from Ann Marie, she stretched luxuriantly in her bed and stayed there until she got bored.

  She checked the messages on her phone. Only three, from Clare.

  I’m so sorry about what I said.

  I didn’t even think.

  I feel like such an asshole.

  It was just after two.

  Magpie had missed almost the entire day of school.

  Almost.

  She didn’t reply.

  She ran herself a shower so hot that it left her skin tingling and red.

  She took her time getting dressed, then she took her time biking to school, and when she finally arrived, the halls of Farther High were empty after the last bell and Magpie’s footsteps echoed off the walls as she walked to the English department wing and stood outside Mr. James’s classroom.

  I don’t like the look on your face.

  “Get used to it,” she replied, but her voice revealed just the tiniest bit of shakiness. Just the slightest little quiver to it.

  Have you thought this through?

  Had she thought this through?

  No.

  But there had been this spark that ran through her when she had woken up and remembered it was the day of the party.

  This little jolt of an idea.

  And it had grown and grown inside her.

  And it had led her here.

  And she felt just a little bit guilty for what she was about to do.

  For what she was about to try to do.

  But she had to see if she could.

  So she took a deep breath, a breath meant to fill up her lungs with courage and resolve instead of air, then she pushed the door of the classroom open and stepped inside as if she owned the place, as if everyone else were just paying rent.

  Mr. James was at his desk, hunched over a stack of papers, and when he heard the door open, he raised his head, then immediately shook it, disappointed.

  “I don’t accept late work,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Magpie asked.

  “Your assignment was due today. Class is over. School is over. I don’t accept late work.”

  He bent over the papers again.

  Magpie did not like the way he so easily ignored her.

  “I wasn’t coming here to give you the assignment,” she said. Her voice was strong and unquavering. Good.

  Mr. James sighed and looked up again. He seemed tired, the specific kind of tired that affected teachers at the tail end of a long school year. The same tired that affected the students of Farther High. The same glassy-eyed, wild stare.

  “Margaret, there is nothing left to discuss between us,” Mr. James said. “I have given you every conceivable opportunity to improve your grade. I have no choice but to fail you.”

  Magpie shut the door behind her.

  “I have something to show you,” she said.

  “I’ve made it clear that I don’t accept late assignments—”

  “And I’ve made it clear that I’m not here to give you a fucking assignment!” she snapped, and the force of her words took both her and Mr. James by surprise. He half stood, then faltered, sat again, then clasped his hands on his desk.

  “What would you like to show me?” he asked, his voice taking on a new tenor, a careful, controlled tone that made Magpie’s teeth ache.

  “I think you’re really gonna like it,” she replied.

  She swung her backpack around and reached into it, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. James flinch. Did he think she had a gun? How funny.

  But she only pulled out a pen, just an innocent little pen, and he visibly relaxed.

  “What’s this about?” he asked.

  “Just watch. Have some patience.”

  “Margaret, you’re being highly—”

  But he shut up. Because Magpie had uncapped the pen, and she had made the first slice of light in the air.

  She paused.

  Mr. James got up from his desk. The line of light was between them; if Magpie moved just so, she could make it look as if it was cutting his body in two.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “I said you would like it,” she replied, and she made another line. The top of the door.

  “How are you doing that?”

  “It’s the special pen,” she said, wiggling it. “Watch what else it can do.”

  And she made another slash. The outline of a door glowed in the classroom. She stepped around the rectangle of light to stand on the same side as Mr. James, then she drew a little doorknob.

  “That’s a…” Mr. James paused.

  “Open it.”

  “What is it?”

  “You know what it is; just open it.”

  Mr. James’s face was lit up by the light of the impossible door. Magpie saw his hand twitch; she knew English teachers in particular understood how many different forms a door to elsewhere could take. When presented with a doorknob made out of light, not a single one of them would be able to resist.

  Mr. James took a step toward the door. Magpie bounced on her heels; the suspense was killing her.

  Do you know what you’re doing?

  Magpie ignored Hither. All of her attention was focused on Mr. James, who was turning the knob…

  And turning it…

  And pulling the door open.

  For a moment there were two worlds in the ordinary English classroom. There was the world of Farther, where Magpie and Mr. James now stood.
And through a doorway lined in bright white light, there was the world of Near. A rolling expanse of green. A sky as blue as lapis.

  And for just another moment Magpie thought she would have to push him.

  But then he was stepping through the threshold.

  And she followed him inside.

  Mr. James did not puke like Clare had, but he did fall to his knees, and his breathing became ragged and heavy, like a thing that clawed and ripped at his chest.

  Magpie stepped neatly around him.

  The doorway zippered itself up.

  The not-shed was just a few feet away.

  The ocean was even closer.

  Are you paying attention?

  “To what? To the water? Why would I care about that?” Magpie said aloud, and at the sound of her voice, Mr. James pulled himself back onto his shins and looked at her.

  “Where are we?” he asked, and she gave him a few points because his voice did not shake like Clare’s had. “Who were you talking to?”

  “We’re in Near,” Magpie replied. Then she pointed her chin in the direction of the town, at a solitary figure that was making its way up the long and sloping hill. “And I was talking to her.” Well, she had been talking to Hither. But Hither had melted away now, and she supposed it was all the same. Hither, Near, her Near-sister. It wasn’t necessary to differentiate.

  “Is there someone else here?” he asked, and followed Magpie’s gaze down the hill.

  Magpie didn’t think he would recognize her sister. Eryn had graduated before he’d started teaching at Farther High.

  For that’s who it was, of course, solemnly making her way up the hill to greet them. Eryn, wearing jean cut-off shorts and a lavender tank top, her hair in its familiar messy bob and her arms swinging by her sides.

  “That’s my sister,” Magpie said proudly, because in this world having a sister like Eryn was something to be proud of, not something to try your hardest to forget.

  “Where are we?” Mr. James asked again. “This place, it looks like… Did you call it Near?”

  “Clever, right?” Magpie replied happily. “I made this whole thing. While you were living your boring life, I was making a universe.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Mr. James had turned pale. His breathing had quieted but came now in little spurts and catches.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” she replied.

  “Is this because… Is this because I was going to fail you?”

  Magpie rolled her eyes. “No. Do you think I care about school anymore? About grades? Honestly, this isn’t even personal. Maybe it’s like the girl in that story. You never answered my question—why did she go with him? Why did she just let that happen to her? But I was thinking about it… and haven’t I been just like her? Just letting all this shit happen to me? Well, not anymore. I’m not Connie anymore; I’m Arnold Friend.”

  “I don’t… I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I’m not going to be led anymore; I’m the one who’s going to be doing the leading,” Magpie said softly.

  A beat and then—

  You don’t have to do this. You can change your mind.

  Hither’s voice—but where was it?

  “Leave me alone!” Magpie demanded, whirling around, trying to catch sight of it.

  “Who are you… Who’s there?” Mr. James asked, because he had figured out that Magpie’s sister was still too far away for Magpie to be talking to her.

  You can bring him home. He won’t remember anything.

  “He could have just left me alone!” Magpie protested, still turning in circles, still yelling at nothing. “Everyone could just have left me alone, but they didn’t, and that’s not my fault, and it’s not my fault what happens to them now!”

  “Margaret…”

  But Eryn had reached the top of the hill. She smiled sweetly at Mr. James, who was still resting on his knees, then she moved over and squeezed her younger sister around the shoulders.

  “I always miss you so much when you go away,” she whined.

  “Pretty soon I’ll never have to go away,” Magpie promised.

  “Can you do that?” Eryn asked.

  “I guess we’ll see,” Magpie said, and shrugged. “Hey, Mr. James, do you want to know what happens if you die in Near? Because I was thinking about it, and I really have no idea. Do you just, like, wink out of existence? Do they never find your body back home? Is it like you were never even born?”

  Mr. James scrabbled, crab-style, sideways, away from Magpie and her sister.

  Eryn removed her arm from around Magpie’s shoulders.

  Magpie took a careful step back.

  For a single blink of an eye, Eryn was just a girl.

  Just a girl in cut-off shorts and a tank top and messy hair and a sloppy grin.

  Just a girl who looked like how Magpie might look in six years. The same color hair. The same color eyes. The same color skin.

  Just a girl with a funny grin on her face. A grin that didn’t seem nice at all.

  And then, in the next moment, in the next blink, she was slightly bigger than just a girl.

  And then bigger.

  And then bigger.

  And as Magpie and Mr. James watched, Eryn’s teeth grew more and more fanglike.

  And her limbs grew longer and longer.

  And when she opened her mouth, her jaw unhinged.

  And her open throat was like a cave.

  And she snarled.

  And then you really couldn’t say she was much like a girl at all.

  NINE FOR A KISS

  The thing that had swallowed Mr. James shrank down to the size and shape of a girl again, and that girl hugged Magpie tightly and pecked her on the cheek and then turned and walked back down the grassy hill to the town of Near.

  Magpie watched her go for a minute or two, then she turned to see if Hither had shown up again, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found. Or—yes, it was, just over there, but it had shrunk to the size of a mouse, and it was dark and heavy, like a mouse’s shadow.

  Near was quiet and still, an overwhelming kind of silence that felt like a blanket. Magpie’s ears rang. She tried to decide if she regretted it, feeding Mr. James to her sister, to Hither, to the world.

  But she didn’t regret it, not really. Because she had proved something.

  She became aware of a sharp pain in the back of her neck. A blossoming headache. She was tired and hungry, and the night was not over. The night was far from over.

  Magpie stepped through the not-shed and emerged in her own backyard again.

  As far as she could see, the one fatal flaw in her plan was that her bike was still at the school. But she wouldn’t need it. She could walk to Brandon Phipp’s party. Or, hell, she could go back into Near and make a car for herself.

  But the pain in her head was now shooting bluntly upward. She needed to rest and eat and bide her time.

  It was almost four.

  Magpie made a box of macaroni and cheese, and she sat eating it on the couch in the living room. Her mother had made some attempts to clean the house since her hospital stay, but they were surface tricks only: a rag run over a shelf, a passing attempt at vacuuming. At its core, the house was dirty enough now that it was easy to imagine it might never be fully clean again. The coffee table was ruined with rings from sweating glasses of vodka; the carpet was stained with the daily trek of mud from front door to kitchen to bedrooms to bathroom; the couch Magpie sat on smelled faintly of mildew, as if someone had once spilled a glass of something and it had never properly dried.

  Magpie had spent every day of the past six months in this house, moving through these rooms, but it was only now that she saw it properly, that she saw what it had become. It was a shame, maybe—to some people it might have felt like a shame—although Magpie couldn’t seem to bring herself to care.

  The noise of a car door slamming broke her reverie. She looked down at her bowl of macaroni and cheese and found it empty. Sh
e was still hungry, as if the effort it had taken to change her Near-sister into something capable of swallowing a person whole had depleted everything inside her. She looked up from the bowl and stared at the front door, waiting for it to open.

  Someone fumbled with the doorknob, then Ann Marie burst sloppily into the house, midlaugh, her hair unwashed and greasy, and her shirt unbuttoned just one button too many to be decent.

  She saw her daughter, and her grin erupted into something so wide and big that Magpie knew, as if she hadn’t known the moment she’d seen her, that Ann Marie was drunk.

  Drunk and driving at four in the afternoon.

  Magpie had hoped the near-death-inspired sobriety would have lasted longer than two weeks, but what could one do?

  One took what one could get.

  “Sweetheart! It feels like I haven’t seen you in weeks,” Ann Marie said, throwing her coat at the peg rack on the wall, missing, ignoring it.

  “I’ve been around,” Magpie said.

  “Is school done yet? It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s done,” Magpie said, because as far as she was concerned, school was over—at least, she didn’t plan on ever setting foot in those hallways again.

  “Oh, it’s such a beautiful day outside,” Ann Marie declared, throwing herself into the armchair that sat across from the couch. This version of Ann Marie was the one not drunk enough to be sad or mean, just drunk enough to fail a sobriety test if pulled over, just drunk enough to smell lightly of alcohol, just drunk enough to forget that her own life was inarguably just as ruined as Magpie’s was.

  No—as Magpie’s used to be.

  That all ended today. It ended with the party tonight.

  “Where were you?” Magpie asked, if only because it was her turn to speak, and Ann Marie was staring at her, waiting, her grin lessening ever so slightly with every second that passed.

  “I was at work,” Ann Marie replied, and the lie was so big that Magpie had to force herself not to laugh, had to shove the empty spoon into her mouth and bite down on it for something to do with her tongue.

  Ann Marie frowned, as if trying to decide whether Magpie was being rude or not.

  Magpie withdrew the spoon and stood up.