I sit in my wheelchair in the bathroom crumpling a section in my fist, ready to tear it out and pretend that all this never happened. None of this. Just rip it up and throw it away and it will be gone. If I leave all these words here in the hospital, I’ll be free of them, and eventually I will forget that they were ever more permanent than a passing thought.
Why did I write any of this down? I made it real. I’m the one who’s killing George, after all.
My fist clenches, but I don’t throw it away. I can’t. Trying not to remember is remembering. So you have to remember. Even if it’s embarrassing. Even if it’s true.
The thing is, though, facts can say a lot of things. You choose where the story starts and ends, and what lines you draw between the things that are true. You can tell a lot of stories with the same facts. I thought I knew what story I was telling. Now I’m not so sure.
I smooth out the pages and start looking through them. So much is changing. Maybe leaving a hospital is always like that. Your world is destroyed on the way in and re-created on the way out. I’m going home and everything is different.
And…
I think I want it to be.
Knowing what she had to do didn’t make it any easier. Sadie stood at the window for a long time, her feet cold on the linoleum floor. It would be so easy to hide George in the Antarctic, in a distant kingdom, even at Hogwarts. It would be so easy to lock him up safe in the Star Palace, tell a few lies, and be on her way. She had the strength to do it.
She gathered all her bravery and summoned him into the lucid night.
George came reluctantly, with wilting red flowers. He handed them to her with downcast eyes.
“I tried to find better ones,” he said.
“They’re perfect.” Sadie put them on the nightstand, and as soon as her hand left them, they turned to dust.
“Everything is getting weaker,” he explained. “It’s been hard.”
Sadie held him close. He was hardly dust. He smelled like he always did: an innocent’s dream of bourbon and smoke. He felt so real.
“Are you angry?” she asked into his white shirt.
“No, darling. Only a little sad.”
He wrapped her in his arms. It was such a relief, like being closed in by a tree that would last a thousand years. She imagined the rings of wood encasing her, building her in for eternity in the complete embrace of George.
She realized her face was wet, so she pulled away, wiping her cheek. Her hand came away red.
“Why are you bleeding?” She felt the panic rise.
“You’re killing me, Sadie.” He put her hand over the wound, and she closed it with magic that seemed harder and harder to control. She could heal him or destroy him in an instant.
“Oh, George. What are we going to do?”
“Can we leave?” George asked. Sadie nodded and took his hand. Effortlessly, they were gone.
* * *
They crept slowly down the long hallway in their museum of memories, where the once-grand dioramas had succumbed to ruin. Portraits hung ripped to shreds. The cafeteria was full of food that had hardened to plates. The lights flickered and threatened to die. It only got worse as they journeyed closer to the palace. Every step drew them deeper into decay.
They rushed along the now dingy celestial patterns in the floor, barely distracted by all the wonders that had tempted them before. They passed an Aston Martin—the one Sadie had always coveted—under a spotlight in a circle of red velvet ropes. “Come on, it might be faster,” George said, climbing in and turning the key. The whole car shuddered and fell to pieces.
“What happens to all this?” Sadie asked as she helped him out of the wreckage.
“Anything can be fixed. That’s what your dad always says.”
A painting of George’s victory over the basilisk fell down with a deafening crack, startling them both. They moved along at a brisker step.
Before, the museum had conspired against them, every twist and turn leading them away from the star on the map. Now they seemed to fly across continents of memory. In no time at all they’d nearly made it to the place where the map claimed the palace would stand, though Sadie had begun to lose hope that it would still be there. So deep in, even the walls had started to fall, and the palace was nowhere in sight.
“Wait,” George said suddenly, darting off into a side room. “Come here,” he called.
“George, the whole building could come down. We have to hurry.”
“But look. It’s what I wanted to show you last time.”
Sadie looked into the room. The roof was missing, and a cold night wind blew in from above. There was a storm outside, snow fluttering into the room. On a pedestal, she saw herself in elementary school wearing a princess costume she’d once worn for Halloween with a witch’s hat. She didn’t look real. She looked like a ballerina in a music box.
“Don’t you remember? On The Tape? ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ is in waltz time. That’s when I first taught you how to waltz,” George said. Sadie watched herself twirling with her Walkman in her hand, a ghost of George in his prince’s white coat and gloves towering over her, dancing with her.
“But we’re not waltzing,” Sadie pointed out. It was true. They weren’t even remotely in time.
“But you thought you were. To you, we were. To me, we were. In our heads, we were perfect. You just can’t see it anymore because…”
“Because what?”
“I’m worried that it might already be too late.”
She looked again at the scene, trying to see the magic. Something wasn’t right.
“We didn’t even know each other then,” Sadie said.
“Don’t you see, Sadie? It’s always been me. Even before you knew it was me, even before you gave me a name, I was every dream you ever had.”
Like a shadow of a song carried by the wind, Sadie could hear “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” very faintly. He continued:
“I am every prince, every song, every car, every street. I am not just me. I’m in everything you’ve built. And this, here, is the monument to all you have created. To me. To you. This is the Museum of Us.”
The music rose. When she looked again, she saw not a dingy costume but a flowing gown.
“This place is our lives, our stories, and everything that means something to you. It’s the true world, Sadie. That’s what this museum protects. And if you let it fall apart, and the Star Palace at its center falls…then that true world will be gone too. That is what is at stake. Darling, you must understand. This is what you stand to lose.”
All of a sudden, thunder cracked and the storm outside the museum flooded the room with snow. It was so cold she could barely breathe. George grabbed her hand and they ran to safety. The walls caved in behind them, closing off the room entirely.
“Did you see?” he asked desperately. Sadie didn’t answer. They had to get to the Star Palace. They needed sanctuary. They needed time to sort this out.
“Come on,” she said, helping him up, leaving the destruction behind them. “The star on the map should be just around the corner.”
* * *
“This must be the entrance,” George said, his fingers tracing thorny letters. The point on the map where the palace was meant to be was no more than a tiny door of wrought silver. The little branches that made up the frame entwined themselves in the center to form words: TO SEEK AND FIND.
Sadie twisted the handle. It gave little resistance and swung open.
Behind the door was not the Star Palace’s great lawn, with its magnificent gardens of impossible flowers. Not the ballroom with its glass ceiling and celestial floors, of which the museum’s were a dull imitation. It wasn’t even her bedroom at the palace, with its canopy bed under a cascade of velvet and its great marble balcony with its view of planet Ea
rth and the moon. It was only her bedroom in the basement at home.
They squeezed themselves through the door.
“Well, this is a surprise,” George said, sitting at the desk. He tapped some keys on the computer and it sprang to life. Google Maps was up, exactly as it was when she’d left. The floor was still littered with markers and purloined atlases.
“Why did the map say the palace was here?” Sadie asked. She unfurled one of the maps on the floor: one of their red Sharpie plans. She could see the little bend in the park where they’d gone into the tree. She pulled the lid off a Sharpie and drew an X over the spot: the zero point.
She jumped back as two figures appeared on the floor, thin and hollow as fog. George caught her and she braced herself against him.
“It’s us,” George said, inspecting the unseeing ghosts.
“It’s us before we left.” Sadie recognized the pajamas she’d worn the night before the crash. The memory chilled her. She went to the door they’d come through, but it was locked. She looked desperately at George. There weren’t any windows. They were trapped.
The ghost of Sadie-two-weeks-ago was lying facedown on the floor in her pajamas, her eyes closed, neither awake nor asleep. In the present, Sadie could remember clearly the feeling of carpet on her cheek, how the pain of that felt almost pleasant.
“I don’t want to see this,” present-Sadie said to George.
“I don’t think we have a choice. This is the last monster to slay before we make it through the door.”
“How are we slaying it?”
“By seeing it how it really was.”
So they kept their eyes open, and they watched as the truth unfurled before them in ghostly wisps of fog:
“Let’s go outside.” George paced the floor, stepping over Sadie’s unmoving arm. She didn’t say anything.
“Well, we can’t just sit down here all night,” he continued. “Don’t you want to go for a walk? It’ll clear your mind. Then we can go—”
“George, I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said softly.
Tears fell down the sides of her face. She had her hand resting on a book but she couldn’t even read it. She just wanted to sleep.
She’d seen her parents off for their red-eye, then come downstairs. For a moment, the thrill of being alone had been exciting. But she’d passed the itinerary they’d left for her and felt the noose of her life closing around her. She was free, but she wasn’t. She started receding into her own mind past George and into darkness.
She glanced at an empty bottle of pills on the bureau. She’d grabbed it from her parents’ bathroom to use as a prop in a fantasy. There’d been a lot of prescriptions in the house since the crash, forgotten in cabinets and drawers, pills of all shapes and sizes. The sight of them now sickened her, making her think of the overturned car and the screaming. Her whole mind shut down just to avoid it.
“Come on,” George said.
“I just want to sleep.”
“No you don’t. We haven’t gone anywhere for so long. We’ve been down in this room for a week. You just put on your mask for your parents and then sleep all the time.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. No one sees anything about anyone. No one really notices.”
“Then no one will notice if we’re gone on an adventure! There’s no mask to wear: it’s just us! Let’s go sneak out to U City! Come on, your parents are on their plane already.”
“Just leave me alone,” Sadie said. The words came out slowly. Even speaking had begun to feel like a weight on her chest.
“I bet Lucie’s up for a night out,” he said. She didn’t answer. She was supposed to go to Lucie’s in the afternoon the next day and stay for a week. She wasn’t sure she could keep her normal person act up for that long.
George shuffled around, thumbing through books they’d read. When was the last time they’d been awake enough to read a book? He sighed, then ventured reluctantly:
“What about Henry?”
“You hate Henry. And anyway, he’s not even in town.”
“You could call him,” George said, grabbing her phone and pushing it under her fingers. She curled into a ball on the floor, turning her back on it.
“What’s the point?”
“Sadie, can’t we go on an adventure?”
“ ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure,’ ” she said, quoting Peter Pan. The usual flourish with which she delivered this line sounded dim.
George gritted his teeth. “Sadie. That’s not funny.”
“Do you think if I died, we could be together?”
“No,” George said. He followed Sadie’s eyes to the empty pill bottle on the bureau. He put it into his pocket. “No, I’m pretty sure we’d never see each other again. And I like being alive. And I like you being alive. So let’s not even talk like that.”
George shuffled nervously, then sat down on the floor next to her. He hesitated, then kissed her.
“Stop it,” she said with a sigh. “Please just leave me alone. I’m so tired.”
“I don’t know how to make you happy.”
“Neither do I.”
Her eyes were closed. She turned away, and instead of carpet, she landed nose-first on a pile of oversized maps. George stood over her, looking down into the greens and blues of other countries.
“I have an idea. Let me give you one perfect day,” George said. He pushed her aside, jolting her awake. She sat up and watched as he started scribbling in red Sharpie on the map, drawing in all the places they would go. Sadie looked at the snaking lines: the park, ice cream, her favorite diner, the zoo, the museum…and home again.
“That’s just all around town.”
“It’ll be more than that. Look: All our favorite things. A whole day, just you and me. Let me show you how magic I can make the world.”
She looked at it again. It was almost a square.
“It’s a red frame,” she said. “Boxing us in.”
“No, it’s…” He struggled to come up with something. “It’s a bright red line toward destiny. Just because it ends where it started doesn’t make it any less of a path. You see a trap. I see an adventure!”
“But it won’t be real.”
“How? You’ll really be there. I’ll be with you. I promise, this will be an adventure.” He capped the pen and pointed dramatically at the map. “Let’s do something amazing. You’ve got a hundred pictures here of adventures you wanted to have with me. Maybe if we just go on those adventures, you won’t feel so…”
“Feel so what?”
“I don’t know what’s happened to you. But I know that we were happier before. All you have to do is take the first step. I’ll carry us the rest of the way. An all-new exploration. A brand-new frontier. Come on, Sadie—to seek and find.”
“To seek and find…,” Sadie repeated.
And with that, the ghosts faded and were gone.
Sadie almost couldn’t bear to look over at George, who had been ruined by that fateful trip. He was inspecting his shoes.
“George—”
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“George, we can’t keep orbiting it.”
“I just wanted to help.”
Before she could say more, they noticed: the closet was glowing. The light from beyond the door was celestial, familiar. It glittered and beckoned. When they opened the door, it was not Sadie’s disaster of a closet at all, but the long green hill up to the Star Palace at last. It was completely overgrown with thicket and thorns.
* * *
The great door to the palace was sealed with vines. George removed his sword from his belt and hacked away at them.
“It’s abandoned,” Sadie said.
“No, just…a little…overgrown,” George grunted between thwacks with his sword. Sadie
placed her hands on the vines, whispering a spell. They withered away, but in their death throes strangled the door even tighter. George sliced through the dead vines and managed to pull open the door just enough for them to slip through.
“Is my obsession with dark things locked behind doors too psychologically transparent?” Sadie asked as she pushed herself through the tiny entry.
“Not in the least. The real world is full of doors too.” George stood in the booming, echoing great hall, looking up at their decrepit home. Bats, disturbed by their entrance, fluttered across the shattered ceiling. So the ceiling really was destroyed, she thought. Sadie stood beside him looking at what remained of the glass above.
George reached for her and she hesitated. “Come on. The lights don’t work either.”
“That seems too poetic.”
“It’s dark, darling. Just take my hand.”
She did. Even in the dark, she could feel him grin.
Upstairs, the blood-red carpet led to the tower, which had the best view of heaven and earth. It held their bedroom, the heart of the palace. When they reached the door, they were grateful to find it unlocked. George stepped into the room over a pile of mangled picture frames. He lifted her easily over the mess. A cold wind blew through the window and the door slammed behind them.
“There, see? Everything is still here. It just needs some cleaning up,” George said, gathering fallen mementos and broken pictures in his arms. He opened a trunk to dump them inside but instead set them on the floor and gazed into the trunk.
“What is it?” Sadie asked. He reached in and held up his white jacket.
“Do you remember when this was all you wanted? All you needed to be truly happy?” George asked, putting the old costume on: white jacket and gloves, hair swept back. He closed the jacket carefully, looking at himself in the tall mirror. The gold braid had frayed, knots of it crossing his chest.
She couldn’t help but smile. George looked at her in the reflection.
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