So not, it turns out, because the moment I say I’m fine, and the whistling begins again? I hear: Azalistenlistenazaazaazalistencomeoutside.
I clench my teeth, don’t cough, and stand it. It is not easy to stand it.
When I get out of the thing, everyone’s looking at me, like What the hell? That isn’t the usual look that people give you when you come out of an MRI. Todd sighs, and pats me on the shoulder.
“You can’t say I said, but basically, there’s a feather in your left lung.”
“As in, I grew a feather?”
Of course I’m not growing feathers. But it’s the first thing I think.
Todd clarifies. “As in, we think you aspirated a feather. Which would explain the coughing.”
Except, no. It’s the sort of thing you’d notice. If you snorted in some air, and with that air came a feather big enough to show up on this scan? You’d so, sO, SOOOO know.
They give in and show me, and yes. A feather the size of my little finger. This feather can only have come from a pillow, and feather pillows aren’t allowed in my room. Whoever put a feather pillow on my bed is in trouble. (Eli, obviously. My dad is as appalled as I am.)
I don’t think about the voices I’ve been hearing.
I don’t think about the sky.
I don’t think about how everything feels apocalyptic all over my life. Apocalypse, we all know, is a sign of brain betrayal, and my brain’s the only part of me that’s ever been okay.
“Is there any explanation?” my dad asks, but the techs have nothing for him.
“Doctor Sidhu will call you in for a follow-up,” says Todd. “Seriously, don’t tell her you saw this.”
I have, of course, seen scan results for years. Everyone shows me everything. It’s that way when you’re a lifetime patient. I’ve been interpreting MRIs longer than Todd has. That does not mean this doesn’t totally freak me out.
Todd’s freaked out too. I can tell. He’s whistling under his breath, in a way that’s meant to make me feel more comfortable but actually makes me panic.
His whistling, of course, does not have any sort of words or patterns of words hidden under it. It doesn’t, except that I’m hearing words in every whistle. Everything sounds sentient to me now, and I can’t help myself. The squeaks of the floor. The creaks of the doors.
I put my clothes and various metal things back on. Earrings. Necklace. Unnecessary bra.
Aza, come outside.
The fact that I hear that combined with some kind of birdsong?
Is not relevant to any of my fears, any of my bad dreams, any of the things I’ve been worrying about.
It’s meaningless.
It’s nothing at all.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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It’s amazing that we’re allowed to leave the hospital, but we are. Back tomorrow for little pinchers down my windpipe. I’ve had worse. At least it’s not a full-on surgery. I try not to think about the fact that it’s a feather, not a swab; the fact that everything is wrong; the fact that my birthday is only five days away.
I don’t think about the center of my chest, where my ribs come together, and how that might look, opened up wide: French doors into someone’s poisonous overgrown garden.
That’s not how surgeons get into the lungs anyway. But something about this seems not-just-lungs. My ribs rattle like a birdcage. There’s nothing in there that’s not supposed to be in there. I swear it to myself as we walk across the parking lot.
The sky is full of huge storm clouds, which I very emphatically don’t look at. I have no urge to see any more ships. That’s where this wrongness started, and I want it un-wronged. I shiver, even though I’m bundled up.
“Alright. I’m the one you tell,” my dad says. “Give it up, Az. Have you been smoking?”
I give him a look.
“This is serious, Henry. You act like it’s not serious.”
“I’m Henry, now? No, you can keep right on calling me Dad. Cigarettes? Pot? Hookahs?”
Hookahs. He really asks that. As though we are, where? There are hookahs in the world, yes. I’ve seen the parlors in the university district, people in there, smoking and looking kind of queasy and too excited, but really? The only place I can imagine anyone actually smoking a hookah is in The Thousand and One Nights.
“I don’t have a thousand and one nights left to smoke in, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, because no one smokes hookahs unless they’re in a story, and unless they’re completely not me,” I tell him.
“You do have a thousand and one nights,” my dad says, sounding sure. “You have two thousand and one. You have three thousand and one. You have thirty thousand and one.”
He’s smiling like he’s telling me the truth.
When I was ten, my dad carried me up onto our neighbor’s trampoline, and we jumped and jumped together. This was supremely not allowed, but he did it anyway, against doctor’s advice, against my mom’s rules. We jumped. And when we were done, he put me down, did a backflip, and bowed for me. He looked as though maybe he’d pulled something crucial, but he was grinning.
“Right,” my dad said then. “That was someone who shouldn’t flip upside down flipping upside down. In case you were wondering how that’d look.”
“Don’t worry about the feather,” he tells me now. “I can see you worrying. We’ll get through this. I’m a master fighter. If it turns out Big Bird’s hanging out in your bedroom, I’ll slay that bird.”
This is actually weirdly comforting for someone who’s pretty sure that she’s about to die. Having a dad who’s willing to declare war against an institution as deeply rooted as Big Bird is not nothing.
“Even if the bird goes Hitchcock?” I ask him.
For a moment, my dad and I sit in silence in the car, imagining The Big Birds, a sky horrifically full of big, yellow, leggy birds, dive-bombing us. At first, it’s funny, but then, more worrying than you’d think.
“I don’t care. I’d still fight them for you,” he says. “I’d pluck them into oblivion.”
I’m actually semi-laughing as we pull up to the house.
Jason Kerwin’s waiting for me on our front steps. It’s only two o’clock, which means Jason isn’t where he’s supposed to be, namely, school. My dad notices this at the same time I do and sighs.
“Do you need me to call attendance?” my dad asks him.
“Seriously?” says Jason. “What do you take me for? It’s covered. I’m at a dentist appointment. Routine cleaning that’ll turn into a small gum surgery, with a couple of days of recovery time.” He turns to me. “I’m coming with you to the hospital tomorrow.”
How he knew anything about me going to the hospital tomorrow is anyone’s guess.
Jason has long been a collector of information. He’s also an entrepreneur with three patents, one of them for a chemical compound that can be sprayed on clothes, dry-cleaning them in seconds. It comes in a tiny can the size of a battery, and can be hung from a key chain. He invented it for people who don’t want their parents to know they smoke. Jason doesn’t smoke, because you don’t smoke if your best friend has a mortal-terror lung disease named after her, but he saw a market.
He has another patent for a small piece of plastic that attaches to hotel—or hospital—fitted sheets, kind of like a shoehorn, and enables people to make beds in half the time it previously took. These bits of plastic are manufactured in a small place known as the Kerwin Factory, in New Delhi. Jason runs the whole thing from his cell phone. We’ve had discussions about labor and questionable policy regarding outsourcing, but I haven’t won. There are parts of Jason that are more OCD than even I can penetrate. His vision of a factory trumped my utopian idea of handcrafted things made primarily of wood. So, he’s not perfect. He sometimes does things just because he can—and not the way he necessarily should.
He’s killing time in hi
gh school. He barely passes his classes because he says he’s proving a point. He plans to graduate at the bottom and then take over the world. Better for the inevitable, eventual biographies, I guess.
Jason is notoriously frustrating to all teachers. He doesn’t work up to his genius potential. He merely looks at you, blankly, and conquers.
“A feather in your lung,” he says. “Really? You snorted a feather? Going for an Icarus thing?”
When we were ten, I did go for an Icarus thing. Jason built the wings, from plans drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. Turns out that canvas and balsa-wood Renaissance wings don’t cut it when you’re hopping from the top of the garage. He broke his arm, and I broke my leg, and that was the end of Icarus. Our parents were relieved. It was one of our few displays of semi-normal. They told everyone the story of the wing fail for years, with these hopeful voices, an oh, kids, they do the craziest things tone. All the while not itemizing any of the other craziest things Jason and I did.
When we were twelve, we stole Jason’s mom Eve’s Pontiac, and drove it three hundred miles in order to acquire the correct feathers for the taxidermy of a hoax griffin. We paid a weirdo in cash, got back onto the freeway, and drove home, busted by Eve in Jason’s driveway. The Pontiac had a trunkful of dead turkey and roadkill lynx on ice, along with assorted talons from vultures, and a serious stash of superglue and glass eyeballs. Eve, to her credit, had an expression of hell yeah on her face when we opened the trunk, because Eve is the kind of person who’d build a hoax griffin on a moment’s notice, but then she had to pretend parental upset. Carol, Jason’s Mother Number Two, went to bed for four days.
Jason and I did normal things, too, knee-skinning things, bug-capturing things. But it’s the griffin-building that sticks in everyone’s minds.
Jason will either be recruited by the CIA or he’ll live a life of crime. No one is sure which. I mean, like those are opposites anyway.
“What?” I ask him. “Do you really think you get to have an opinion about me snorting feathers?”
I sit, despite the frost on the step. My dad sighs, takes off his coat, and buttons it around my own.
“Five minutes,” he says. “Then I’m coming back for you.”
“Don’t snort that,” Jason says, pointing to the coat, though of course it’s fake down, not really feathers.
We sit a minute in comfortable quiet, except that today has sucked so much nothing’s comfortable.
“There’s an increased likelihood of something,” I say experimentally.
“Of?”
“You know. Soon. Very soon.”
“You’ve been dying since forever,” says Jason, who doesn’t respect the rules. “And if they think things are accelerating, they’re wrong. You look good.”
He glances at me.
“For you, you look good.”
His face tells me I don’t. The fact that he suddenly takes off his scarf and wraps it around my throat tells me I don’t. Jason doesn’t normally seem nervous, even though he’s spent his entire life on a constant loop of calculation, worried about everything.
“How are you?” I ask him. “You seem weird.”
“Good,” he says, talking too fast. “I’m fine, I mean, I’m not the one we need to be worried about, obviously. So stop worrying about me.”
This version of Jason doesn’t bode well.
“Did you take your pill?”
“Stop,” he says. “Of course I did.”
I’m suspicious. Also guilty. Because if Jason’s this worried, it’s my fault.
My dad makes us come in, but he leaves us alone in the kitchen. Jason begins speedy work on baked goods. I watch him from behind as he pushes up his sleeves and puts on my dad’s apron. His hair is the color of the chocolate he’s melting. He has freckles on the back of his neck, five of them. His most distinctive feature is the serious furrow between his eyebrows, which he’s had since we were nine and he realized we definitely weren’t immortal.
I don’t know how someone who’s a genius might have thought we’d live forever, but he’d been working on some kind of chemistry compound related to both starfish and tortoises, and he was pretty sure, up until it exploded in his garage, that it was totally going to be a Thing. I think he was trying to grow me some new lungs, but he’s never admitted it.
Jason looks like someone recently emerged from a sealed city. Last week, he wore the T-shirt top of a pair of ancient Star Wars pajamas to school, with his grandfather’s suit jacket over the top of that. The pajamas dated from when he wasn’t the height he is now. The sleeves ended not far below his elbows. The shirt was tight. He didn’t care. I saw girls looking at him all day long, not with the expected look of horror, but with happy surprise.
It was like he’d grown boobs over the summer. Well, except not, but you know. He’d become stealth hot or something.
Jason, however, didn’t notice the girls. I mean, he’s straight, but he’s never cared whether anyone knew it or not. He has two moms. The last time anyone commented critically on that, he gave that guy a black eye. Jason’s right hook, and the resultant bruise, startled everyone, including Jason, I think, because it isn’t like Jason normally punches people.
When Jason feels inclined, he’s been known to make chocolate éclairs. Today he feels inclined. If I weren’t already worried, this’d worry me. Chocolate éclairs are for birthdays. If he’s making them early, I must really look bad.
Yeah. I think I’ll avoid the mirror.
“I’m home, aren’t I?” I say. “They’d never have let me come home if things were that awful.”
Jason just looks at me with his particular hazel-eyed stare. The stare claims he doesn’t give a shit what I say, and that nothing could possibly surprise him. He’d pull it off, if not for the furrow, which is especially deep today, and the rapid way he’s stirring.
Maybe it’s that furrow, maybe it’s me, also feeling worried, but I tell him everything. The whistles, the ship, all of it. The way it just drifted out of the clouds. Hunting.
Hunting?
I don’t know why I think of it that way, but that’s how it felt. Hunting. I tell him about Mr. Grimm, too, who acted weird, in my opinion, though maybe that was me acting weird. For a second, I was pretty sure Mr. Grimm saw the ship, too, but then he pretended not to.
Jason puts the pastries in the oven, whisks their filling for a moment, and considers, as though he’s rifling through papers inside his brain.
“Ship was a cloud formation. Basic answer.”
I start to protest.
“Stay with me,” he says. “Unexplained visual phenomena. Green ray starts UFO panics all the time.”
I raise my hand.
“People understand like half of why light does what it does,” Jason continues without answering my question. “There’s a whole category of mirage where people see ships in the sky. Some people actually think the Titanic sank because a mirage made the iceberg invisible.”
I’m researching while he talks, on my phone. Boy’s a Wikipedia sinkhole, though he’s doing it without any internet connection. He’s just whipping the éclair filling, casually facting me into oblivion.
What I saw, though, was not any of the things he wants to make it. I feel bitey. He should believe me. He’s the person who always believes me. I count on him to be my primary enabler of Vivid Imagination.
“You looking it up? Pissed off with me for not swallowing your story without questioning anything? Well, how about spooklights,” he says. He turns around and grins at me, which disgruntles. “UFOs, black helicopters, phantom dirigibles. All those things.”
Then he says one more word and for some reason, it stops me dead.
“Magonia.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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“Magonia?” I repeat, feeling twitchy.
The word isn’t unfamiliar. I try to joke it out.
“Is that a disease? A kind of architecture? A poisonous plant? If it’s a disease, I don’t want to know, I warn you right now. I’m not in a disease textbook mood—”
“We’re not talking about diseases. We’re talking about mirages. Check the Annals of Ulster,” Jason says, and sighs his long-patented Sufferer’s Sigh.
“Ulster. Like blisters crossed with ulcers? Leprosy of some kind?” I blather to disguise the fact that the word immediately haunts me. I feel a memory of this lurking somewhere in the black holes of my brain. Maybe I read about it somewhere. After all, everything I know, I read about.
Jason snorts.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t read the Annals.”
“I’ve read them.” I lie, because maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. I cough, part fake. I don’t know why I’d even try to lie to Jason. When someone hangs out with you every day since you were five, they pretty much know what you’ve read, and they definitely know when you’re emergency-skimming internet synopses beneath the kitchen table.
The Annals of Ulster are Irish histories, according to the wikis.
“No one’s read the Annals of Ulster. But I studied the relevant sections today. Mass hallucinations. About seven forty-eight AD, there’s this: ‘Ships with their crews were seen in the air.’ Does that ring any bells? Anything at all?”
Nope, nothing. He goes into his favorite mode, fast-talking, clipped words, robot boy.
“Basics. Not the Annals, but part of the same story. Eight thirty or so AD. France.” He grand-gesture sketches out the date and place in the air with his hand, subtitling his documentary. “This Archbishop of Lyons reports four messed-up people in his town, three guys, one woman, insisting they fell out of the sky. Fell from ships. In. The. Sky. Are you hearing me?”
I’m hearing him. So hearing. I pretend I’m not.
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