“To catch the rain,” I said.
She leveled a look at me. “You could try closing the window instead.”
“In a storm like this?” Between the sound of rain and the still-frantic pace of my heart, my voice came out almost giddy. “No way.”
“Weirdo,” she muttered, and wrapped her arms around herself. Her sky-blue pajamas were sopping wet. Wet enough that I could see, very plainly, that she wasn’t wearing a bra. I would have averted my eyes, if I hadn’t noticed something else at the same time.
“Hey, you’re shivering,” I said. “Here, come in.”
Which was a stupid thing to say since, technically speaking, she was already in. But she took a few more steps away from the window, rubbing her hands vigorously up and down her arms, like a Boy Scout trying to start a fire.
I grabbed the first warm-looking thing I could find: a fluffy purple blanket from Heather’s closet.
“Here.” I held it out to Leah, but she didn’t take it. She didn’t even seem to see it. Whatever. It was probably too small to keep warm with, anyway.
“I should go,” she said, looking uncertainly back at the window. “This was a bad idea.”
“Wait,” I said. “What did you mean, I was supposed to be Heather?”
Leah glanced back at me. “Um, hello. This is her room?”
“Um, hello,” I said. “She’s been dead since February?”
“Very funny,” said Leah. “Hilarious, even. Just tell me where she is, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Where she is?” I repeated, feeling totally off balance.
“Or, wait, don’t tell me. She’s off on another crazy European vacation, right? Figures. People with money. Honestly.”
“Leah—”
“When’s she back, so I can—”
“Leah.”
Her mouth snapped shut, even as I cringed at the sound of my own voice. I don’t think either of us expected that to come out so loud. I took a few seconds to listen for movement outside the bedroom door, just in case.
Only when I was satisfied that the house was just as still as before did I register the look on Leah’s face. Total confusion. She really thought I’d been kidding.
“You didn’t know?” I asked.
She stared at me. “Know what?”
“Heather died,” I said again. “First week of February. Some kind of lung disease.”
Leah stared some more. After a few seconds, she began shaking her head slowly, back and forth, almost like she didn’t even know she was doing it.
“February,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, studying Leah. Something was missing here. For someone who felt comfortable climbing through Heather’s bedroom window at—I glanced at the clock on the dresser—almost two in the morning, she’d missed an awfully huge piece of news.
“Right before Valentine’s Day. Yeah, that’s when …”
I stayed quiet this time, watching her brow furrow, waiting for her sentence to end.
“That’s when she stopped coming to school.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Because she was dead.”
“But I asked,” continued Leah, like she hadn’t heard me. “They said she’d transferred to another school. I figured it was one of those fancy art schools down in the city. She used to talk about applying for scholarships, and I thought she finally …” But then her eyes went sharp again, focusing intently on me. “Why’d they lie? Who lies about something like that?”
I put my hands up, palms out, like I could keep her at bay. “Dude, you’re asking the wrong guy.”
I remembered, then, how few people had been at Heather’s funeral. I remembered noting that none of her friends had shown up. Only family. But why?
“And she …” But Leah trailed off again, her hand creeping upward and pressing flat against her chest, just below her collarbone. She looked like she was about to have a panic attack. I closed the window, then went over to Heather’s closet and rummaged inside until I found a bathrobe. It was very pink.
“Not quite your style, probably,” I said, holding it out to Leah, “but it looks warm.”
She hesitated a moment, saying, “That’s Heather’s.” But then she took it and wrapped it around herself. “Thanks,” she muttered, more to the floor than to me. Now, instead of shivering, she’d gone entirely still. “I just can’t believe …”
“Yeah,” I said. “Um, listen. Not to be rude, but, uh, if you and Heather were climbing-through-each-other’s-windows-type friends, how did you not figure out … I mean … didn’t you notice she wasn’t, like, calling you anymore? Or whatever?”
Leah’s mouth fell open, and for a second she looked ready to murder me. Or to cry. But all she said was a curt, “I should go.”
“Like hell you should,” I said, pointing at the window behind her. “It’s insane out there.”
She turned to look. On the other side of the glass, the storm was getting worse. The rain was practically horizontal. There was no way I was letting her go back outside. “Leah,” I said. She didn’t answer. Brow furrowed, she stared almost blankly at the sheets of rain whipping past. “Leah. Hey. Sorry for being insensitive or whatever.”
Still nothing.
“Leah!”
She started violently, brushed her hair almost angrily away from her face, and squinted at me. “What?”
“Why’d you come over here, anyway?” I asked.
Leah opened her mouth, just a little bit. Then closed it again. Her eyes looked sort of past me, and sort of through me, and suddenly I couldn’t tell if she was about to keel over or start crying or just pull out a gun and splatter my brains across Heather’s wall. Anything could happen tonight, with Heather’s death so fresh in Leah’s mind, and with the wind howling like it was. Anything at all.
If it’d been anyone else, I’d just reach into her and take away her sadness, or her shock, or whatever. But last time I’d stolen something from Leah, I’d ended up passed out in a stranger’s backyard. So instead I just said, softly as I could, “Leah? Come on, what is it?”
“It’s Jesse,” she said, voice choked with some emotion I couldn’t quite make out. “He’s … god, no, it seems so stupid now. I didn’t know about Heather. I didn’t know.”
“Jesse,” I said loudly, trying to focus her. “Glow-stick hula hoop Jesse?”
“My friend Jesse.” Her expression shifted from defensive to angry to devastated, all in less than a second. “Something happened to him, and I thought … well, I thought Heather could help. Or maybe Heather did it in the first place. Or maybe both, I don’t know. But neither now, I guess. God. Sorry. I sound like a crazy person.”
“No, you don’t,” I lied, trying to sound as gentle as I could. “What happened to Jesse?”
Leah sniffled. “It’ll sound stupid. To you, I mean.”
“I bet I’ve heard stupider.”
“Like seriously stupid.”
“It’s after midnight,” I said. “Nothing sounds seriously stupid after midnight.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then:
“Jesse went blind.”
“Like … recently?” I said carefully, trying to remember the pictures that Sadie had shown me. Jesse, on the roof, colored lights all around him. It was a ballsy stunt to pull even if you did have sight. And if you didn’t? Eesh.
“Yes!” Leah said, throwing her hands up. “See, that’s it. You don’t get it.”
“Get what? Leah. Tell me.”
She began to back away, slowly, toward the window. “Never mind. I should … Hold on. Wait a sec.” She stopped. Narrowed her eyes at me. “February. She’s been gone since February. How long have you been here?”
“Me?” I said. “Just a few weeks. End of June. Why?”
Leah drew in a soft breath, and I could see something clicking into place behind her eyes. “Ohhh,” she said. “It wasn’t Heather. It was you.”
“Whoa, hold up,” I said, taking a small step back. “Wha
t was me? What’d I do?”
“What’d I do?” she mimicked, her voice snotty and high. “Oh, come on.”
“Okay, seriously, though. What did I do?”
She tilted her head a little, looking at me like she couldn’t decide if I was messing with her. Which I wasn’t. I totally wasn’t.
“My cup at the party,” she said. “And my phone, when you came into the bookstore.”
“I told you, I was putting my number in—”
“Your number isn’t in my phone,” she interrupted smoothly. “I checked.”
“Well, you have a different phone than me,” I said. “You caught me before I could figure out how it worked.”
“So you’re saying you can’t do what Heather could do.”
I blinked, dumbfounded. She knew. Grandma had insisted that nobody in this entire town knew what the Quick family was capable of, but she was wrong.
Leah totally knew.
“Um.” I tried willing my voice back toward normalcy. “What, ah … what is it that Heather could do?”
Leah raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking because you want me to tell you her secret? Or are you asking because you already know, and you want me to say it first?”
A chill swept over me. She knew, she knew, she knew.
Before I could think of a suitable answer, she went on: “Heather can take things away from people. She reaches—reached—into their possessions, or things they’ve touched, and she took pieces of them away, and she fed them to the Cliff for that weird ritual thing.”
“I …”
“And you can do it, too,” she added. It wasn’t a question anymore. “Can’t you.”
An eternity passed between us. Leah, looking all goddess-of-truth-and-justice despite her drowned-rat hair and the stupid pink bathrobe. Me, in my glasses and pajamas and bare feet.
I’d never told a single person my secret. Not Theo. Not Brandy. Not anyone.
I tried to smile, but all it did was make my face feel stretched out. So I took a deep breath and said, plainly, “Yeah, I can.”
And then, before I could even process what was happening, Leah was running at me, shoving me with both hands, sending me stumbling back far enough that my legs banged into the wooden framework of Heather’s bed.
“Why did you do it?” she demanded, dark brown eyes alight with fury. “Why his sight, of all the—”
“I didn’t do anything!” I said, my hands flying up instinctively to protect my chest, in case she decided to hit me again. “Well, I mean, that’s maybe not exactly true, but I didn’t take his sight. I swear I didn’t.”
“Then tell me who did!”
“Shh!” I hissed, glancing toward the door. “Keep it down, okay? I don’t want them hearing this.”
“Them? Heather’s mom?”
“And my friends, and my grandmother. Everyone’s sleeping.”
She blinked. “Since when does Heather’s grandmother live here?”
“Since …” Oh. Right. Leah had probably been one of the legions of people who’d had her memories of Grandma stolen away. Oops. “Eh, I don’t know. But okay. Listen. Why’d you think it was Heather who made him blind? Couldn’t it have just … you know … happened? Somehow?”
“Happened somehow,” Leah repeated flatly, like she was willing me to hear exactly how dumb the words sounded. It worked. I winced. “So what did you do?”
“Um … ?”
“You just said you didn’t do anything.” She crossed her arms impatiently, glaring. “Then you said that wasn’t exactly true. So? What did you do?”
“He had a competitive streak,” I said. “That’s what I took. That’s all I took.”
“Then why … ?” Leah began, but this time the unfinished question seemed directed more at herself than at me.
“I have no idea why. It was the same ritual as always.”
“His competitive streak,” said Leah, with a weird look that was almost a smile. “Man. His coaches’ll love that. Just in time for senior year. He’s captain of the basketball team, you know.” She swallowed hard, dropping her gaze to the floor. “Although, now that he can’t see …”
“Yeah.” And that was when I remembered the hunch I’d had. The reason I’d gone back to the bookstore to look for Leah. “Wait, can you do it, too?” I asked her. “I mean, taking stuff from people. Are you—”
“No.” Her shoulders sagged. “I mean, I wish … but no.”
“Then how’d you know?” I asked. “My grandmother said nobody in town knew about … about … you know. Us. What we do.”
“Heather told me. Back when we were best friends. She wasn’t allowed to tell me, technically,” she added—then winced. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
She hunched her shoulders. “Speaking ill of the … you know. You’re not supposed to.”
“Oh,” I said, even though I was pretty sure that stating facts didn’t count as speaking ill.
“But yeah, nobody else knows,” said Leah. “Just me. Even Jesse only knows that he can’t see anymore. He doesn’t know why.”
Jesse. Right. As I heard his name again, my thoughts began to put themselves in order. I narrowed my eyes. “Yeah. About that. What exactly happened tonight? Since it was apparently enough to send you racing over here in the middle of …” I gestured toward the window, toward the storm.
Leah sighed and sat on the floor, leaning her back against the dresser. I sat down on the bed opposite her. She drew her knees up toward her chin, like a shield.
“He’d been missing for almost two weeks,” she said. “Not answering my calls. Not even answering Sadie’s calls, or Harry’s. That’s our boss at the bookstore. And nobody could find his parents, either.”
I nodded.
“And then tonight, just when I’m getting ready for bed, my phone rings. It’s him. He says he just got back, and he’s sorry he didn’t call, but …” She trailed off, then shook her head sharply, like she was trying to focus. “So apparently, this one morning, he just woke up and couldn’t see. Simple as that. His dad took him to the eye doctor, but the guy had no idea what to make of it. Took him to a different eye doctor—still no dice.
“So they made an appointment with a specialist down in the city. Still nothing. They stayed there for more than a week, seeing doctor after doctor after doctor, and nobody could find anything wrong. No detached retinas, no diseases where sudden blindness is a side effect, no nothing. In the end, it was a choice between staying and being a lab rat for some university scientist, and coming home.”
“Yeeeah, I wouldn’t have picked the lab rat thing, either,” I said.
“Right?” said Leah. “He said he didn’t call because he didn’t know what to say. Like, he didn’t want to tell everyone he was fine, and then find out two days later that he had some weird rare disease, you know?”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“No, it doesn’t!” said Leah. “I gave him hell for it, too, the bastard. But I also tried to be reassuring … and then, when he hung up to call Sadie, I hauled ass out the door and came over here and climbed in through the window, and here we are.”
And she hadn’t even stopped long enough to put on a pair of shoes.
“Why here?” I asked.
“Because,” she replied immediately, “Heather’s family is the source of everything weird and supernatural that’s ever happened in this town.”
I frowned. “Is there a lot of weird supernatural stuff that happens here? I mean, obviously there is, but like … noticeable stuff?”
“Well, maybe not noticeable to anyone but me,” she said. “You know. Someone’ll stop being into something they used to love, or vice versa. Little stuff. I dunno. Some of it’s probably not because of the ritual at all. But I guarantee some of it totally is. Especially when it’s big stuff.”
“Huh,” I said. “What kind of big stuff?”
“Well, Jesse’s eyesight, obviously,” she said, anger creeping back into her tone. “And
other things, too, like there was this one time our algebra teacher suddenly forgot how long division worked. Heather hated that guy, so I know it was her. Or when that girl—god, what was her name?—anyway, this girl who used to star in all the school musicals. One day, the most annoyingly gorgeous singing voice ever. The next day? Tone-deaf.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“Like I said, it’s not very often.” She paused. “Or, I dunno, could be all the time. But half the stuff under the May Day tree gets left by tourists, so there’s really no way to be sure.”
“Tourists? Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah?” said Leah. “May Day’s kind of a big deal … ?”
“Oh, I didn’t know—”
But just then, a loud crack boomed through the house. I swore I could feel the floor shaking under me—and if the way her body tensed up was any indication, Leah could feel it, too.
“What the hell was that?” My voice came out about seven octaves higher than usual. The wind was whistling so loudly that it sounded like a chorus of people shrieking.
“A tree,” whispered Leah. “Big one, from the sound of it.”
My first thought was the May Day tree, but that was much too far away for us to have heard it here. Besides, I had no doubt that some kind of magical something-or-other protected it from mundane things like storms. My second thought was of the tree right outside my window—the one that Leah had climbed to get up here. But I could see its branches whipping madly in the storm. It was still intact.
“Shit,” said Leah, standing up abruptly. “My bike.” Her face suddenly looked a whole lot whiter than before.
“You biked here?” I said. “Are you crazy?”
“I left it under the eaves. I have to go check—”
“No way,” I said. “You are so not going out there.”
She narrowed her eyes. “And you so don’t get to tell me what to do.”
Rising from the bed, I moved to stand between Leah and the window. “Look, if your bike’s already survived this much, it’ll still be fine when the storm’s over. But if it’s already gone … well, not much you can do about it now, right?”
She frowned, first at me, then at the window. “I guess not… .”
“Really, though. You shouldn’t have biked here.”
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