by Tracy Deonn
Containing her is a full-time job.
Alice doesn’t know about After-Bree. Nobody does. Not even my dad. Especially not my dad.
Alice clears her throat, the sound breaking like a wave against my thoughts. How long did I zone out? A minute? Two? I focus on the three of them, face blank, wall up. Evan gets antsy in the silence and blurts out, “By the way, your hair is totally badass!”
I know without looking that the curls springing out of my puff are wide-awake, reaching toward the sky in the night’s humidity. I bristle, because his tone is the one that feels less like a compliment and more like he’s happened upon a fun oddity—and that fun oddity is Black me with my Black hair. Wonderful.
Alice shoots me a sympathetic glance that Evan misses entirely, because of course he does. “I think we’re done here. Can we go?”
Charlotte pouts. “Half an hour more, I promise. I wanna check out the party.”
“Yeah! Y’all come watch me shotgun a PBR!” Evan slings an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders and leads her away before we can protest.
Alice grumbles under her breath and takes off after them, stepping high over rangy weeds at the edge of the tree line. Fall panicum and marestail, mostly. My mother had called the stuff “witchgrass” and “horseweed fleabane” back when she was alive to call out plants to me.
Alice is almost to the trees before she realizes I’m not following. “You comin’?”
“I’ll be there in a sec. I wanna watch some more jumps.” I jerk a thumb over my shoulder.
She stomps back. “I’ll wait with you.”
“No, that’s okay. You go ahead.”
She scrutinizes me, torn between taking me at my word or pushing further. “Watch, not jump?”
“Watch, not jump.”
“Matty.” Her childhood nickname for me—Matty, short for my last name—twists at something deep in my chest. Old memories have been doing that lately, even the ones that aren’t about her, and I sort of hate it. My vision goes fuzzy with the threat of tears, and I have to blink Alice’s features into focus—pale face, glasses perpetually sliding to the tip of her nose. “I… I know this isn’t how we thought it would be. Being at Carolina, I mean. But… I think your mom woulda come around to it. Eventually.”
I cast my gaze out as far as the moonlight allows. Across the lake, treetops are the shadowed fringe between the quarry and the murky sky. “We’ll never know.”
“But—”
“Always a but.”
Something hard slips into her voice. “But if she were here, I don’t think she’d want you to… to…”
“To what?”
“To become some other person.”
I kick at a pebble. “I need to be alone for a minute. Enjoy the party. I’ll be there soon.”
She eyes me as if gauging my mood. “ ‘I hate tiny parties—they force one into constant exertion.’ ”
I squint, searching my memories for the familiar words. “Did you—did you just Jane Austen me?”
Her dark eyes twinkle. “Who’s the literary nerd? The quoter or the one who recognizes the quote?”
“Wait.” I shake my head in amusement. “Did you just Star Wars me?”
“Nah.” She grins. “I New Hope’d you.”
“Y’all comin’?” Charlotte’s disembodied voice shoots back through the woods like an arrow. Alice’s eyes still hold a pinch of worry, but she squeezes my hand before walking away.
Once I can no longer hear the rustle of her shoes in the underbrush, I release a breath. Dig out my phone.
Hey, kiddo, you and Alice get settled in okay?
The second text had arrived fifteen minutes later.
I know you’re our Brave Bree who was ready to escape Bentonville, but don’t forget us little people back home. Make your mom proud. Call when you can. Love, Dad.
I shove my phone back into my pocket.
I had been ready to escape Bentonville, but not because I was brave. At first I’d wanted to stay home. It seemed right, after everything. But months of living under the same roof alone with my dad made my shame intolerable. Our grief is for the same person, but our grief is not the same. It’s like those bar magnets in physics class; you can push the matching poles together, but they don’t want to touch. I can’t touch my dad’s grief. Don’t really want to. In the end, I left Bentonville because I was too scared to stay.
I pace along the cliff, away from the crowd, and keep the quarry to my left. The scents of damp soil and pine rise up with every footstep. If I breathe in deeply enough, the mineral smell of ground stone catches at the back of my throat. A foot over, the earth falls away below my feet and the lake stretches out wide, reflecting the sky and the stars and the possibilities of night.
From here, I can see what the jumpers were working with: whatever cleaved the dirt and rocks to form the quarry had dug at a thirty-degree angle. To clear the face entirely, one has to run fast and leap far. No hesitation allowed.
I imagine myself running like the moon is my finish line. Running like I can leave the anger and the shame and gossip behind. I can almost feel the delicious burn in my muscles, the rush sweet and strong in my veins, as I sail over the cliff and into emptiness. Without warning, the roiling spark of After-Bree stretches up from my gut like a vine on fire, but this time I don’t shove her away. She unfurls behind my ribs, and the hot pressure of her is so powerful it feels like I could explode.
Part of me wants to explode.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
A wry voice from behind startles me and sends a few birds, hidden in the canopy above, squawking into the sky.
I hadn’t heard anyone approach through the underbrush, but a tall, dark-haired boy leans casually against a tree as if he’d been there the whole time; arms over his chest and black combat boots crossed at the ankles. The boy’s expression is lazy with disdain, like he can’t even be bothered to muster up a full dose of the stuff.
“Forgive me for interrupting. It looked like you were about to jump off a cliff. Alone. In the dark,” he drawls.
He is unsettlingly beautiful. His face is aristocratic and sharp, framed by high, pale cheekbones. The rest of his body is borne from shadows: black jacket, black pants, and ink-black hair that falls over his forehead and curls just below gauged ears bearing small black rubber plugs. He can’t be more than eighteen, but something about his features doesn’t belong to a teenager—the cut of his jaw, the line of his nose. His stillness.
The boy who is both young and old lets me study him, but only for a moment. Then, he levels his tawny gaze in challenge. When our eyes meet, a stinging shock races through me, head to heels, leaving fear in its wake.
I swallow, look away. “I could make that jump.”
He snorts. “Cliff jumping is asinine.”
“No one asked you.” I have a stubborn streak aggravated by other stubborn people, and this boy clearly qualifies.
I step to his right. Quick as a cat, he reaches for me, but I twist away before he gets a grip. His eyebrows lift, and the corner of his mouth twitches. “I haven’t seen you around before. Are you new?”
“I’m leaving.” I turn, but the boy is beside me in two steps.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I’m Selwyn Kane.”
His gaze sends tiny, invisible sparks of electricity dancing across my cheek. I flinch and throw my hand up between us like a shield.
Fingers, too hot, too strong, instantly close around my wrist. A tingling sensation shoots down to my elbow. “Why did you cover your face?”
I don’t have an answer for him. Or myself. I try to yank away from him, but his hold is like iron. “Let go!”
Selwyn’s eyes widen slightly, then narrow; he is not used to being shouted at. “Do you—do you feel something? When I look at you?”
“What?” I pull, but he holds me tightly without effort. “No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not—”
“Quiet!” he orders. Bright indignation flares in my chest, but his unusual eyes rake across my face. Snuff it right out. “Strange. I thought—”
Suddenly, shouts break the night, but this time they’re not from the cliff jumpers. We both twist toward the forest and beyond it, to the party in the clearing. More yelling—and not the happy, drunk kind.
A low growl close by my ear. I jump when I realize the sound is coming from the demanding boy whose fingers are still locked around my wrist. As he stares into the trees, his mouth curves into a satisfied smile, exposing two canines that nearly touch his bottom lip. “Got you.”
“Got who?” I demand.
Selwyn startles, as if he’d completely forgotten I was there, then releases me with a frustrated grunt. He takes off, speeding into the woods, a silent shadow between the trees. He’s out of sight before I can form a response.
A jarring scream echoes from the party on my left. Raised voices ring out from the cliff jumpers on my right, who are now sprinting for the clearing too. Blood freezes in my veins.
Alice.
* * *
Heart pounding in my chest, I race to the trailhead to follow Selwyn, but once I’m under tree cover, the ground is barely visible in the darkness. Three steps in, I trip and fall hard into bramble. Branches scrape my palms and arms. I take two shaking breaths. Let my eyes adjust. Stand. Listen for the sounds of yelling undergraduates. Then, adrenaline shooting through my veins, I jog half a mile in the right direction with quick, careful steps, wondering how the hell Selwyn could move so fast through the woods without a flashlight.
By the time I stumble into the clearing, the party is chaos. Undergrads push against one another to run down the long narrow path toward the cars parked at the gravel lot. Beyond the trees, car engines growl to life in a rolling wave. Two guys struggle to lift the kegs and push them onto truck beds while a small crowd beside them tries to help “lighten” the barrels by drinking straight from the hose. Beside the fire, a circle of twenty kids cheer while holding Solo cups and cell phones high in the air. Whatever or whoever they’re looking at won’t be Alice. She’d try to find me, like I’m trying to find her. I reach for my phone, but there are no missed calls or texts. She’s got to be freaking out.
“Alice!” I scan the crowd for her, for Charlotte’s ponytail and T-shirt, for Evan’s red hair, but they aren’t there. A half-naked, dripping-wet undergrad girl shoves past me. “Alice Chen!” Campfire smoke billows thick in the air; I can barely see anything. I push through sweating, churning bodies, calling Alice’s name.
A tall blond girl scowls when I shout too close to her face, and I scowl back. She’s beautiful the way a well-maintained dagger is beautiful: sharp, shiny, and all angles. A bit prissy. Absolutely Alice’s type. Damnit, where is she—
“Everybody out ’fore someone calls the cops!” the girl yells.
Cops?
I glance up right as the Solo cup–carrying circle parts. It only takes a second to see the cause of the screams from earlier and the reason why someone might call the cops: a fight. A bad one. Four drunken, enormous boys are rolling and swinging in a pile on the ground. Probably football players right out of preseason and fueled by adrenaline, beer, and who knows what else. One of the giants has another’s shirt in his hand, the fabric pulled so taut I hear the seam rip. The third is on his feet, rearing back for a kick to the fourth boy’s stomach. It’s like watching gladiators brawl, except instead of armor they’re covered in layers of muscle and have necks as thick as my thigh, and instead of weapons they’re swinging fists the size of award-winning grapefruits. The hurricane cloud of dirt they’ve created has put so much smoke and dust in the air that I almost miss the flicker of light and movement above their heads.
What the…?
There! There it is again. In the air above the boys, something is shimmering and dancing. A greenish-silver something that swoops, dives, and flickers in and out of transparency like a glitching hologram.
The image pulls at a string of memory. The shimmer of light… and the very feeling of it, punches the breath right out of my lungs.
I’ve seen this before, but I can’t remember where.…
I turn, gasping, to the student beside me, a wide-eyed boy in a Tar Heels T-shirt. “Do you see that?”
“You mean the jackasses fighting over nothing?” He taps his phone. “Yeah, why do you think I’m filming?”
“No, the—the light.” I point at the flickering. “There!”
The boy searches the air; then his expression turns wry. “Been smokin’ something?”
“Come on!” The blond girl pushes through the circle of spectators, standing between the fighters and the crowd with her hands on her hips. “Time to go!”
The boy beside me waves her away. “Get outta the shot, Tor!”
Tor rolls her eyes. “You need to leave, Dustin!” Her vicious glare sends most of the gawkers running.
The something is still there, beyond the blond girl’s head. Heart hammering, I take in the scene again. No one else has noticed the silvery mass hovering and flapping above the boys’ heads—either that, or no one else can see it. Cold dread creeps into my stomach.
Grief does strange things to people’s minds. This I know. One morning a couple of weeks after my mother died, my dad said he thought he could smell her cheesy grits cooking on the stove—my favorite and my mother’s specialty. Once, I heard her humming down the hall from my bedroom. Something so mundane and simple, so regular and small, that for a moment, the prior weeks were just a nightmare, and I was awake now and she was alive. Death moves faster than brains do.
I exhale through the memories, shut my eyes tight, open them again. No one else can see this, I think, scanning the group a final time. No one…
Except the figure on the other side of the fire, tucked between the trunks of two oaks.
Selwyn Kane.
He glares upward, his expression calculating. Irritated. His sharp eyes watch the there-not-there shape too. Long fingers twitch at his sides, silver rings flashing in the shadows. Without warning, through wisps of smoke rising in eddies and waves over the campfire, Selwyn’s eyes find mine. He sighs. Actually sighs, as if now that the hologram creature is here, I bore him. Insult spikes through my fear. Still holding my gaze, he makes a quick, jerking motion with his chin, and a vicious snap of invisible electricity wraps around my body like a rope and yanks me backward—away from the boy and the something. It pulls so hard and so fast that I nearly fall. His mouth moves, but I can’t hear him.
I resist, but the rope sensation responds, tight pain in my body blossoming into a single utterance:
Leave.
The word materializes in my brain like an idea of my own that I’d simply forgotten. The command brands itself behind my eyes and echoes like a bell rung deep inside my chest until it’s all I can hear. It floods my mouth and nose with dizzying scents—a bit of smoke, followed by cinnamon. The need to go saturates my world until I’m so heavy with it that my eyelids drop.
When I open my eyes again, I’ve already turned to face the direction of the parking lot. In my next breath, I’m walking away.
2
LEAVE.NOW.
I’m leaving. Now.
That seems right. Good. Best, even.
Beside me, Dustin is leaving too. “I need to go.” He shakes his head, like he can’t fathom why he hadn’t left the party already. I find myself nodding in agreement. Tor told us to leave and we should do as she says. We’re on the gravel path now, the lot a few minutes’ walk through the trees.
I trip on a branch, lurch to the side, and catch myself against a trunk, hands slapping against jagged pine bark. The quick, stinging pain from my already-scratched palms cuts through the smokiness of Leave and the lingering spice of Now, until both words dissipate. Instead of pressing on me like a weight, the command flits gnatlike around my skull.
Dustin is long gone.
I gulp
oxygen until my thoughts feel like my own again, until I’m in my body enough to feel the sweat-damp cotton T-shirt clinging to my back and chest.
Memories rise like bubbles through oil, slow and sluggish, until they explode into rich Technicolor.
Selwyn. His bored expression. His mouth spilling words into the night like a cold wind until they swept away my intention to stay and replaced it with his command that I leave. His will wrapped around my memory of the flying creature and ground it down into a pile of dust and fractured images, then rearranged that pile into something new: an unremarkable blank space above the campfire with no creature in sight. But that new memory doesn’t feel real; it is a thin, flimsy layer created from silver smoke with the truth visible and concrete underneath.
He gave us both false memories, but now I remember the truth. That’s impossible—
A voice sends me ducking behind a tree. “It’s just these four. The rest made it to the parking lot.” It’s Tor, the blond girl who’d yelled at everyone. “Can we make this quick? I have a date with Sar. Drinks at Tap Rail.”
“And Sar will understand if you’re late.” Selwyn. “This one was nearly corporeal. I had to wipe those last two kids’ memories just in case.”
I stifle a gasp. They’re both still there at the clearing twenty feet away. Whatever they’re doing, they’re working together. Tor and Selwyn are visible between trees, circling the campfire, looking up. The murky green shape is still there in the sky, flashing in and out. The four drunk football players must be absolutely plastered, because they’re only now coming up for air. They sit back, chests heaving, faces bloodied, expressions disoriented. One of them moves to stand, but Selwyn is at his side in the blink of an eye. His hand drops like an anvil on the kid’s shoulder, forcing the larger boy back down so hard and fast that I hear his knees crack against the earth. The boy screams in pain, falling forward onto his hands, while I muffle my own cry.