by Phoebe North
As to love a man who’ll break my heart
When cockle shells turn silver bells
Then will my love come back to me
When roses bloom in winter’s gloom
Then will my love return to me
We’re at the edge of the cemetery, where a bunch of scrubby brush rises into tangled wildness, as I finish the last verse. Annie doesn’t say anything at first. That doesn’t surprise me. She’s always seemed so quiet at school. Shy, I guess. Even when I used to see her with her one weird friend at lunch, the two of them hardly spoke. Now she just sits down on a nearby footstone, her feet crossed beneath her, those familiar eyes of hers hard as marbles. And then she speaks, and I can’t even be sure that she was listening to me sing at all.
“He’s not dead. I’m not saying that because I’m delusional or in denial. I’m saying that because I know.”
I blink. “But, when you invited me to the funeral, you said—”
“I know what I said, but I’m telling you now. He’s not dead.”
I don’t know what to say to this. I have no idea whether it’s the truth or not, whether it’s some stage of grief I don’t know about. How could I have any clue what she’s going through? And honestly? I don’t want to have this conversation. We buried James today, finally. I need to move on, too.
But even so, something makes me lean forward. “How do you know?” I ask her. “Are you in touch with him?”
Her eyebrows wrinkle. She picks up her hands and rubs her palms over her face, against the sockets of her eyes and then through her hair like the question is incredibly painful for her.
“It’s hard to explain.”
I lean forward even more and let my mouth smile, the smallest smile I can manage, like my mom would. “I’m here for you.”
Annie looks at me. Her lips, which are wide and full and just a little bit chapped, pucker for a second. Then she draws in a breath, nostrils flaring.
“Fine. But you can’t laugh.”
“I won’t,” I tell her. “I’m listening.”
“Okay,” she says, and then she says it again. “Okay, fine. You know about the—the stories we used to tell?”
She’s kind of shaky when she asks it, and her cheeks are pink, like she’s embarrassed. Or maybe scared. And I remember James’s face when he first spoke to me of them. Hey, he’d said, his voice a little husky with excitement. You like fantasy books? Me too.
It hadn’t come out all at once. If it had, he probably would have scared me off, the same way other people got weird when I told them that I could recite poems in Elvish or that I know everything there is to know about Brian Wilson. But bit by bit, I’d learned tiny scraps of information about James’s kingdom in the woods. The one he’d spent his childhood building. The one with the Island of Feral Children, all dressed in furs and speaking in animal tongues. The one with the mermaids’ cove. The one with the king they talked about killing—a story I always figured was secretly about their dad.
“Gumlea,” I say. And Annie winces when I say it.
“What?” I ask. She’s still cringing, her eyes half closed, as she shakes her head.
“It’s just . . . weird to hear you talk about it. He wasn’t supposed to tell you about it. I’m not supposed to tell you about it, even now.”
“Sorry,” I tell her softly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. If it helps any, I’ve never told anyone about it. Not even Harper Walton, and we’ve been best friends forever.”
Slowly, she opens her eyes and lets out a long, low sigh. “That—that does help. A little. Yeah.”
We’re quiet for a moment, the two of us. I’m not sure what to say next, so impulsively, I reach out my hand and put it over hers. Her skin is warm and dry. “Go ahead,” I tell her. “Tell me about Gumlea.”
She’s looking down at my hands. Really staring at them. When she speaks again, she doesn’t move her eyes at all. Just keeps them down there, still, on both of our hands.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she says in a low voice. “It was real to us, in a way. Not just make-believe.”
That’s not what James told me. Stories, he said. He always called them stories. I always figured it had been kind of like having an imaginary friend, only it had been an imaginary place instead. But I don’t want to scare her off. I keep my hand where it is and give her fingers a little squeeze. “Okay,” I tell her.
She exhales, hard. “He’s—he’s there. He’s in Gumlea, right now. There’s a sort of wall, or more like a curtain, between this world and that one. It’s called the Veil, and he’s stuck on the other side of it. There’s a ritual I can do. To pierce—pierce the Veil. Pull him out of Gumlea. But I can’t . . . I couldn’t figure it out. So he’s stuck. He’s not coming home. And it’s my fault.”
God. Jesus. She’s got to be kidding. And at the same time, I know she isn’t.
She pulls her hand away from mine and cradles her face in both hands again. “Augh,” she says, a little too loudly. Then she pulls her hands down, sniffling. And laughs at herself. “It sounds insane. I know that.” And she looks right at me then, and there’s an accusation in her eyes.
“I mean,” I begin slowly, and pause. I don’t want to make her any more upset, but I also don’t want to lie. “It’s kind of hard to swallow.”
She doesn’t fight me on that. James said she was always spoiling for a fight with him, but right now, it seems like all the energy has drained out of her. In fact, she laughs again, a little wildly. I find myself laughing a tiny bit, too.
“Yeah,” she agrees, and quickly looks down at her feet. She’s so tense, she’s pulled up a bunch of grass in her fists. She’s scattering the blades down on her bare legs, green against pale white. “It sounds crazy. That’s why I don’t tell anyone. Not even my shrink.” Then she lets a smile curl her mouth and adds, “Especially not my shrink.”
I don’t know what to say to that. We’re quiet for a long minute. In the distance, I see the black limousines pulling away, Annie’s friends and family tucked inside them. I guess she’s walking home today. It’s probably time for me to leave, too. Dad’s waiting for my call. And I should get away from here—from this bizarre story and this even more bizarre girl. But before I can do anything, Annie wrinkles her nose, looks up.
“I could show you Gumlea,” she says. “It would be a lot easier than just talking about it. You’d believe me, if you could see it.”
“I . . . What?”
“I’ve never showed anyone else,” she tells me quickly. “I wanted to show Miranda, but Jamie wouldn’t let me. But—I think he’d be okay with you seeing it. You said you haven’t told anyone, right?”
I already told her I didn’t, but she seems desperate to hear it again. Slowly, I nod.
This conversation is bananas. I know it is, and Annie’s got to know it is, too. It’s so weird that my brain can’t even quite catch up to what’s happening. I think if it did, it would tell me to stay away from Annie [Redacted] and her crazy family and her even crazier ideas.
But.
I study her face. Pug nose. Freckles. Brown eyes, veined gold. Eyelashes thick and dark even in the golden sunlight. I want to believe her. Hell, I want to go with her, and not just because she reminds me of James. There’s something about her that’s magnetic, like a queen or a rock star. Wild and otherworldly. Vulnerable, and, yeah, pretty, too.
“Okay,” I tell her, holding my chin high and sure. “Gumlea. Sure. This week?”
“After school,” she says. “Not Monday. I have therapy. It’ll have to be Tuesday or Wednesday or Friday. Mom’s in class late those days. You could come over—”
“Tuesday is Madrigals,” I remind her. I can’t quite believe that I’m saying it. But I am. “We could take the late bus to your place. I mean, if that works for you.”
Annie stands up. She brushes the grass off her legs. In that moment, she looks happy. Her grin is crooked, like a little kid’s, and I see that dimple again on her left cheek. Something inside me
tugs and twists. A part of me that has been fast asleep since Keira. Or maybe since James.
“Sure,” she says. “Okay.”
“It’s a date,” I agree. And I don’t mean it like that, except maybe I do.
Six
ANNIE RAISES QUESTIONS I DON’T know how to answer. Questions about her sanity—and mine. Wardrobe questions, too, apparently. On Tuesday, summer’s finally left us, and the weather’s gone cool again, even though the leaves are still mostly green with only the slightest brown tinge. In the morning, I stand in my closet, stumped. What do you wear, anyway, before you go to a magical kingdom? With your dead ex-boyfriend’s sister? Who swears he isn’t dead at all, but trapped in said magical kingdom?
In the closet, my hand lingers on my ren fest dress, which I haven’t worn in a couple of years. It’s not like I could ever wear it at school, anyway. Our Madrigal robes are bad enough. So I pull on some dark skinny jeans and a boxy T-shirt and the hiking boots Mom got me last year before rock camp that I never really wore, because no one hikes at rock camp, but she didn’t know that.
During lunch, and then later at Madrigals, I mostly act like everything is normal. I catch Annie staring at me a few times, but don’t stare back.
When Mrs. Kepler lets us go and I head down the risers to meet Annie, Harper gives me a pointed look. “Do you want a ride?” she asks me, and there’s another question there. She wants to ask me what I’m doing hanging around James [Redacted]’s little sister. Again. But I don’t know what to tell her. Hell, I don’t really know what I’m doing hanging around Annie [Redacted].
“No, I have plans,” I say to Harper, full of breeze and springtime and sparkles, so happy and definitive that Harper closes her gabby mouth fast, but there’s still a question in her eyes and I know that my phone will be full of texts before I even get to the bus:
Harper: Vee, what’s up????
Harper: You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone! Is this about James? You went to his funeral this weekend, right? Did something happen??
Harper: Veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sure enough, in my backpack, my phone buzzes and buzzes. I ignore it. If Annie hears it, she ignores it, too. She walks like an old-school cartoon of a schoolgirl, her books over her chest, shyly pushing her hair behind her ear. We walk up the stairs of the bus together. She’s silent as we take a seat. For a minute, I kind of regret doing this. I have no idea what to say to her. We have nothing in common except James, and he’s gone, even if she says he isn’t.
I glance over. She’s staring out the window as the bus pulls out of the empty parking lot. And then, without looking back at me, she starts talking.
“Do you ever get bored, and look at things, and imagine them some other, more interesting way?”
“Like daydreaming? I guess. Doesn’t everyone?”
“I don’t know. I’m not everyone. It feels like, if it’s something that everyone else does, it’s different than the way I do it. Like they’re thinking about, I don’t know, school dances and homework and who said what to who and who is fucking everyone else and I never think about any of that.”
I’m smiling at her. She’s just said more than I’ve heard her say ever. I remember James once texted me to complain about his sister.
She just won’t stop talking about all this Gumlea stuff. It’s mortifying.
Wait, I’d said, are we talking about the same Annie? I’ve met her. She barely talks.
That’s because you don’t KNOW her, he said. Believe me. Once she’s got something in her head, she’ll never shut up about it.
I’m looking at her now, and almost grinning because I can see it. The blabbermouth little kid who always got on James’s nerves.
And you know what? She’s not wrong about how it works for most people. Most of the time I do think about school dances and homework and who is fucking everyone else.
“What do you think about?” I ask her.
“Ways my life could be more interesting. Like, look. Do you see those woods on the highway?”
I see them streaming by the window, green and brown and overgrown and a little soggy, clinging to the guard rail and in some places overtaking it. There’s garbage and there’s mud and muck and maybe a bird or two.
“Yeah,” I say.
Annie lets out a short, joyless laugh. “I used to always wonder, why do we have these spaces in between shopping malls and behind schools and in between subdivisions that no one even notices? They’re like null spaces. But they’re real places. Woods and meadows. Once, the whole world would have looked like that. When we were cave people or something. But now we pretend that we’re not animals anymore. That woods and nature are just spaces between our houses and roads and stuff, not the other way around.”
“Well, we’re not animals,” I say. “We wear clothes, have jobs . . .”
“It just seems wrong to me,” she says quickly, like what I said doesn’t matter. “So Jamie and I came up with a better way. We decided that there would be people, called the Winter Watchers, who live in the woods. They have animals—familiars. They ride the backs of silver-furred ten-point deer and stuff. His was a hare. You know, a rabbit? And the Winter Watchers, they record what it’s like to live, I don’t know, in the margins of our world. They’re observers. Mostly you see them in the forest, but sometimes, if you’re at the library and there’s a pretty girl with a pencil behind her ear who keeps doodling in her notebook, she’s probably one of them.”
I stare at her. Pretty girl. And it’s absurd, but my stomach feels good and warm at the thought that Annie might find a girl pretty. Might find me pretty. That we might have something in common—that we see the prettiness of girls. That we might be able to bridge a gap, and not just a gap between worlds, like she claims. But a smaller one. More human, but more important, too.
James’s. Sister, I remind myself. And I stuff those thoughts down.
“So Gumlea,” I begin, very carefully. Annie still winces when I say the name of her magical kingdom. “It’s a story you guys dreamed up when you were bored, kind of.”
“It’s a story we dream all the time,” she says. “I look out the window, and I can see the Winter Watchers there, looking back at me. I go for a walk and I hear Feral Children playing on the playground. It’s not like I think it’s real. Rationally, I know it’s not. I know that ordinary people don’t see airplanes fly over them and look up and tell themselves, well, that’s just about the same length as a dragon. But I do. And honestly? I can’t even imagine what it’s like not to have that. It seems so boring.”
I study her face again. What I don’t tell Annie is that I know what she means. I don’t tell myself stories, but when I stare out the window during Advanced Chemistry, I hear music. Surf music, sometimes, mostly. My own and other people’s. I doodle notes in my notebook margins. When I walk down the road to get the mail for my dad, it’s usually in 3/4 time. Once, when I was a kid, my daydreams were Lothlórien all the time, but since eighth grade, it’s mostly been the Beach Boys. Now, I listen to Annie talk about Gumlea, and I imagine a life without song, and she’s right. I almost can’t imagine it at all.
But I don’t tell Annie that. Instead, I give her a wry smile and say: “Am I boring to you?”
She laughs a little. “No, you’re fine,” she says. “You like Tolkien and play the ukulele and aren’t named, like, Olivia. You’re different. Interesting. Even if you don’t know the Laws of Gumlea.”
Different. Interesting. I know that she really means geeky, but for some reason, in that moment, I don’t mind. I stretch out my legs in front of me and smile down toward the toes of my purple Chucks. I’ll take it. Compliment’s a compliment. Even from Annie.
Maybe especially from Annie.
Beside me, she sighs. “I know I should have given this all up a long time ago. Jamie thought so, starting when he was, like, eleven. He thought it was embarrassing.”
“If it makes you happy, who cares?” It’s somethi
ng my mother would say. A small kindness.
Annie laughs again. “You sound like my shrink,” she says, but she isn’t mad about it.
Soon, the bus lets us off in front of her house.
The [Redacted] home is a two-story white colonial with green shutters. There are bushes, neatly trimmed, all the way up the walk. I’m not sure what I was expecting. In the back of my mind, I think I always assumed James lived in a rotting old Victorian covered with vines. But their house looks pretty ordinary. Annie turns over a fake rock under one of the front windows and fishes out a key.
“You said your mom has classes?” I ask as she lets us inside.
“Yeah, she’s studying to be a school psychologist,” she says, throwing her bag down in a front entryway that’s littered with mail and shoes and winter coats that probably haven’t been worn in a long time. “She says it’s because my therapist has made such a difference with me, but I really think it’s because of Jamie.”
“How do you mean?” I ask carefully. I want to hear about James but I also don’t want to hear about James. There’s a part of me that would love to forget that he’s the thread that’s tying us together, Annie and me. But I can’t forget, and she can’t, either. We have that in common, too.
“She thinks she can stop it from happening to other kids. Because he was, you know, ‘troubled.’” She moves her fingers in air quotes.
I peer at the photos on the wall by the front entryway. James is in them, younger than when I knew him, grinning and sunburned on vacations, sitting next to his sister’s car seat, wearing an ugly blazer in a school photo, his dark hair slicked down.
“Does your family talk about him often?” I ask.
Annie snorts. “No, never. Well, that’s not true. Dad talks to people at church about him, and Mom talks about him with her internet friends, but we never talk about him together. I mean, they don’t talk much together at all since Dad moved out. But we don’t even mention anything that might remind them of him. Running, or synagogue, or whatever.”
“The funeral must have been weird. I mean, it was weird for me. But it must have been super weird for you.”