by Phoebe North
She laughed a little, and the sound reminded me of the inside of a sweatshirt. “James told me. He sounds like a hard guy to live with.”
I looked at her, my gaze sharpening to a laser intensity. “You mean Dad, or Jamie?”
Vidya opened her mouth, showing the inside where the lipstick had worn off. Then she closed it again and smiled. “There’s my mom,” she said, waving to an SUV in the distance. “It was nice talking to you, Annie. You should think about Madrigals next year.”
“Two years,” I corrected her quickly. “I’m only an eighth grader.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I always forget you aren’t twins. You seem a lot like him, you know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. But I didn’t have to. Vidya’s mom leaned on her horn.
“See you,” Vidya said, and ran off, just like that, her hair a trailing storm system behind her.
I found my brother in the bathroom, picking his acne in the fluorescent light of Mom’s makeup mirror.
“You told,” I said. Jamie’s zit popped with a dramatic explosion of pus and blood. He didn’t even cringe, just wiped everything up with a piece of toilet paper, then used rubbing alcohol to clean the wound.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “Get out of here. You’re supposed to give me my privacy.”
It was true. We were supposed to let him have as much time as he wanted in the bathroom, no matter how badly anyone needed to pee. “That’s why we have two toilets,” Mom had said, even though Dad had coughed awkwardly at the idea, saying, “Why can’t he just do it in his room?”
I had asked what it was, but they pretended not to hear me. Apparently, it was popping zits. He was just digging into another when I repeated myself.
“You told. You told Vidya. You told Vidya about Gumlea.”
Jamie glanced at me, annoyance sparking in his eyes. “Did not,” he said, like it was even possible for us to lie to each other.
“Did too. She told me, James. I guess you’re a good match for each other. Neither one of you can keep a secret.”
My brother turned to face me now. His skin was red and splotchy and angry, but his brow was even, like he didn’t feel a single thing. “I didn’t tell her about Gumlea. I only told her we write stories together.”
I squinted at him, not quite believing. It felt unlikely—or pointless. Gumlea had never been about me and Jamie. It had been about magic. About making a space where we could be ourselves, and not whatever everyone else thought we should be. What was there to say about our “writing stories together” that would be of any interest to someone like Vidya? She was just an ordinary girl, wasn’t she? She was never going to understand. Still, it was a small comfort. A smaller betrayal, then. Not like the drugs I’d caught him smoking with Neal.
But Jamie was rolling his eyes, adding, “Or used to write them, I guess. Before you changed your mind about that.”
My fists clenched. “What?”
“Anyway,” Jamie went on, ignoring me. “Who cares if I tell her? She’s my girlfriend.”
My nostrils flared. G-d, I was angry. Perhaps mostly because, sure, part of me understood why it was happening. I thought of Vidya’s long, velvety veil of hair, remembered the sweet smell of her, like incense and dryer sheets and piano dust. I’d wanted to give it all away for a girl before, for Miranda. I understood. But I hadn’t done it. When it had counted, I’d been faithful.
“You can’t do this,” I said. “There are Laws. There will be a price to pay.”
“Come off it,” Jamie said. He closed the medicine cabinet, not hard, but quietly. Just a year ago, he’d been the kind of boy who had thrown things, broken things. Now he kept his temper in check. Now he felt nothing, or claimed to. These changes had taken place elsewhere, away from me. But I knew better than anyone how anger burned through his veins, all the G-d damned time. “I’m not playing that stupid game anymore.”
He brushed by me on the way to his room, not even bothering to make eye contact. But he muttered something as he left.
“Let it go,” he said.
He might as well have punched me. That’s how much it hurt.
15
BENEATH THEM WAS ONLY SEA, endless and churning. The boy gripped the harpy’s wing more tightly. That was his mistake. She let out a cry of displeasure, casting her head back, lifting her voice to the empty sky. Her wings hesitated. Her back arched. That’s when she threw him, when, weightlessly, his body arced through the air.
I’m finally free, he thought. With eyes open, he waited for death to take him as his body barreled toward the sea.
Through the first week of September, Jamie was always off with his friends, and I was always alone. After my activities got out and I came home on the late bus, I’d go out into the woods by myself. The days were getting shorter, rapidly tumbling toward the dark of winter, and it seemed like the neighborhood kids had abandoned this place in favor of warmer, brighter spaces. Calvin Harriman’s apartment, I guess, or behind the bleachers at the high school, or the mall up in Kingston if they could bum a ride from one of their older friends, or a parent if they had to.
I hiked through the forest, my boots sticking in the mud. I climbed trees, letting the bark bite at my hands. In my head, I tried to conjure Gumlea, but it was getting hard to see it now. Sometimes I’d spot a Winter Watcher’s hideout or the shape of the King’s dragon, skulking through the underbrush, but mostly everything around me was normal. Spray-painted pot leaves. Crushed beer cans. Poison ivy trailing over the path.
There was a massive old oak tree up ahead, half rotted away and hollow, carved with the graffiti of a thousand boys and me, too. Its guts were always crawling with carpenter ants and termites. It had been one of my favorite places in Gumlea, the site of the King’s tower if you were through the Veil, full of danger and packed with wild, unchecked magic.
“I’ll save you, Princess,” I said, with a flourish to hide how half-hearted my words felt when they rattled inside me. I pulled myself into the tree and hauled my body up. If I closed my eyes, I could smell the fungus and the moss and the mold, a dank, warm, familiar scent, and I could almost pretend it was just a few years ago—before the whole damned world went wrong.
I imagined voices. Shrill, girly screams. The King. The King was torturing her. I opened my eyes and pulled myself even higher into the hollow, my feet sinking into the rotting wood, my back braced against the oak’s worm-eaten heart.
I fixed my hands on the bark, yanked myself up to where I knew there was a crack in the trunk. I peered over, expecting to see nothing. But instead, I saw a light up ahead. A flashlight’s beam, bobbing with every step my brother took over the tangled ground.
He wasn’t alone, of course. He never was lately. He was with Neal, walking forward, talking in low tones.
At least they’re not smoking, I told myself as I watched them, invisible inside the oak tree. If he had been paying one iota of attention, he would have known I was there, waiting for him. But he was busy.
“I don’t feel guilty about it,” he said. There was more emotion in his voice in that single cryptic sentence than I’d heard from Jamie in the last year. “Any of it. I just don’t understand why it has to change.”
“You’ve got a girlfriend now.”
“She doesn’t have to know.”
“Yeah, well, I know.”
“Is this about church?”
My brother stopped walking in the middle of the path and turned his flashlight directly onto Neal. The other boy grinned for a moment in the white circle of light, but then that moment passed and he batted the flashlight’s beam away. Toward me. I pressed my spine down, hoping to be invisible. Of course, I didn’t need to worry. Jamie wasn’t even thinking about me.
“No,” Neal said humorlessly. But Jamie kept pressing.
“Because you know that’s all a lie. Things people tell themselves to make themselves feel better. No one wants to admit there’s nothing else out there. Just the real wo
rld, with nothing surprising in it.” My brother kicked at a beer can as though to punctuate his thought. “And then death.”
“You’ve been talking too much to Vidya,” Neal said.
Jamie shrugged. Smiled. Blushed. “Talking. Yeah. Among other things,” he said with a grin. I saw a flash of white as Neal rolled his eyes. I rolled my eyes, too.
Among other things.
I thought of my brother, his hands clutching at Vidya’s back as they danced. I thought of them together, long afternoons in Calvin’s apartment, and everyone else suddenly gone. I thought about him telling her about the stories we’d written together. About the two of us, building fantasy worlds in our bedrooms or the backyard or the woods. I imagined how they would press their skin together after talking about everything, their bodies intersecting at all the right points. Or all the wrong points. It made me feel sick to think about it, Jamie and Vidya. Talking about me. But it made me feel other things, too.
Inside that sacred tree, emotions burst open inside me. I couldn’t tell what was lust and what was jealousy and what was pure white-hot rage.
“Anyway, I hope we can still start that band together . . . ,” my brother was saying, but his voice sounded suddenly distant as I scrambled up over the top of the old oak tree, my ears instead filled with the roaring rush of blood.
“Yeah, if you can get that drum kit.”
“I’m working on it. I’ve got a connection—”
In that moment, I thrust my body over the jagged top of the tree, letting myself fall toward the forest floor. And Jamie. I was aiming myself at Jamie. An ambush, like something out of a movie. I flew toward him, my broken nails bared.
“Aaaaauuuuuuugh!”
I screamed, and my brother yelped out “What the hell?” as his body broke the fall of my body and we went tumbling toward the hard ground.
I could hear the wind go out of him. We hit the ground next to one another, but soon, I scrambled back toward him. On top of him. Holding down his wrists.
“You betrayed me!” I yelled, finally letting my anger get the better of me. “You broke the Laws!”
“Annie, what the hell?” Neal was coming toward me, reaching his arms around my shoulders to pull me off. I wasn’t stronger than he was, but I was angrier, and no matter how hard he pulled at me, he wouldn’t distract me from my task. I wanted to punish my brother. To make him feel sorry for everything he’d done.
Jamie’s eyes got wide. I didn’t have a plan for what I would do—only rage, unchecked, at the growing space between us, the differences that hadn’t been there before, the loss. I grabbed at his clothes and raised my open hands and watched as my brother flinched away from me, waiting. Neal was still trying to pull me away, but he was just a distraction. My brother and I were the only ones who mattered.
“Sorry!” he yelped. “I’m sorry!”
He squinted one eye open at me and I felt in that minuscule slip of time something shift. A vision, the way we used to see Gumlea. I was a harpy, claws outstretched, screaming, beating her wings. I was a harpy, dropping him into the open ocean. I was a harpy, flying away.
I scrambled back, and Neal fell back with me. We were all breathing hard, the three of us, as I looked at my brother and saw him in two places at once.
Here, in the forest behind the drainage creek. There, tumbled inside an ocean of swirling, endless blue.
“Sorry,” Jamie said to me again, and I could hear how he meant it. I began to nod, to tell him it was all right. The King would soon forgive him. Everything would be okay.
That’s when I felt something hard hit me at the edge of my cheekbone, thwack. I winced, saw an explosion of light, watched a rock tumble into the roots of that old, broken oak tree. When I looked up, my brother was glowering at his friend.
“What the hell, Neal?” he said. Neal’s hand was still up, raised from where he’d thrown the rock.
“I was only trying to help,” he said.
16
WHEN HIS BODY WAS HAULED from the water, he protested at first. It was too much light, too much sound, the seagulls and the ocean waves roaring beneath him and the raucous cries of men among themselves. His tongue tasted salt—water? blood?—when it wanted to taste nothing. He should have been gone already. Instead his flesh was assaulted by what felt like a thousand dull-edged knives. Rope, cutting into his shoulders and back and legs, wet and swollen and splintery. This was like waking up on the first day of school after a long, languorous summer. This was wrong, all wrong, the Nameless Boy thought as the net opened and his body slammed into wooden boards and two lungs full of water came rushing out of him.
Jamie chased me through the woods again, but by the time I reached the creek, he’d given up. Alone, I launched myself over and out of Gumlea and stormed through the screen door, leaving a trail of mud and soggy leaves behind.
It was nearly dinnertime. I could hear my father in the kitchen, cooking pasta while listening to a bombastic podcaster shout about investing. He didn’t seem to notice me, and I was glad for it. I breezed by him and rushed toward the bathroom, hoping to examine my wound in private.
Though the cut was small, my cheek was split right on top of the bone, a small vein of brown blood crusted over it. My eyes looked bruisey already, though it was mostly from crying. My hair was a tangled, dirty mess. I looked like a wild animal. I riffled through the drawers of the vanity, searching for a Band-Aid that didn’t have one of Elijah’s cartoon characters on it.
“Can I help?” I heard Dad’s voice in the door behind me and winced. When I turned, he was watching me expectantly. Maybe another father would have been shocked or upset at the way I looked, but my normal, boring father took my feral appearance in stride.
“I guess,” I said thickly. My father gestured to the toilet; I sat down on the closed lid. The last time I was in here at the same time as him, my legs would have dangled, but that was a long time ago now. I sat with them splayed, like a man. Mom would have told me to sit differently, but Dad never did. I could never decide if that kind of thing was a relief or a curse. He didn’t police me. But maybe he never really noticed me, either. Even now, as he dabbed the wound with rubbing alcohol on a cotton pad, I had the weird feeling like he was looking through me. His eyes were green like money, and even this close, I couldn’t hook them. They avoided mine.
“I’m not going to ask you what happened,” he said. “But you can tell me, if you want.”
He turned his back to me again and went to get a plain Band-Aid out of a box on the top shelf, hidden behind some of Jamie’s brand-new stinky aftershave. I looked at the staid, boring frame of his shoulders and considered saying nothing. My father wasn’t a liar. He would have let me sit in silence. But my anger and confusion were still all boiling up inside me, tearing up my guts like some kind of sour soup.
“Me and Jamie got into a fight,” I said. It didn’t matter to me that Neal had been the one to throw the stone, or that it was somehow Neal and Vidya’s fault, together. What mattered was me and my brother.
“James, you mean,” my father said, gently correcting me. He was always careful to call Jamie that now, no matter how often they butted heads.
“Yes,” I said tersely. “James.”
“Well,” my father said. He peeled the bandage off the backing and stuck it carefully to my cheek. “I’m sure the two of you will work it out.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. As I reached up to touch my fingertips to the thin strip of plastic, my stomach felt squeezed. Uneasy. Sick. “He doesn’t want to . . . to tell the stories we used to tell each other anymore. And he told some friends about it. He said he wouldn’t, but he did.”
“Gumlea?” Dad asked, like he’d always known.
I nodded. “Yeah.” My stomach churned. I wondered if it was true. “They were our stories, Dad. They were private.”
“It’s his life, too, Annie. His story.”
I studied my father’s face, all the little wrinkles, the receding hairline. “You
always take his side,” I said, and it was immature and not at all true. If anything, Dad was harder on Jamie than he was on me. But I felt petty. Jealous.
Still, it didn’t bother my father. He shrugged. “I honestly think it’s better that he’s found other friends. Better for you, too. I used to worry about both of you. You were always such interior creatures.”
I felt my lips pucker out in a scowl. “What do you mean?”
“I worried that the two of you would have trouble when you got to school. Half the time it was like you were speaking a language no one else could understand. And that can’t last forever. Someday, your brother will go away to college. You’ll have to find something else.”
“There’s nothing else,” I protested. “I love Gumlea. We need it. Me and Jamie—”
My dad gave me a withering look. “If you spend all your time immersed in fantasy, you’ll miss out on real life. You won’t even notice how much you’ve lost until it’s already gone.”
“It’s not a fantasy,” I said. It wasn’t. Gumlea was real, by whatever definition mattered; Jamie and I had built it together out of our magic. How could something be an escape from reality if it was your reality? I held my hands over my eyes as though I could shield myself from what my dad was saying. I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to even consider it.
“It’s good to get out there,” my dad was saying. “Experience the real world. Make friends. Feel things.”
“I have friends,” I said, my hands still over my eyes. “I feel things.”
“Annie.” My father put his hands on my hands and guided my fingers down. I couldn’t remember the last time our fingers had touched. I’d probably been a little kid, rushing across the street with him, my small hand tucked in his. Now I was grown in my father’s eyes. And in my father’s eyes, it was time to put away childish things. His touch didn’t linger. His hands were back in his pockets before I knew it, the expression on his face stern. “I know you had fun with the games you played with your brother, but they weren’t real. They were never going to last forever. He’s growing up now, and you are, too. Don’t let yourself get distracted from the things that matter.”