The Uncrossing

by Melissa Eastlake

  He gestured to Straight Wesley. “The court got too big.”

  “It’s weird, though,” Short Wes said, “because he’s talking about basketball, and you’re talking about a person.”

  “I’m talking about a crossing.”

  “A crossing on a person. Who you were going out with.” Short Wes gestured with his horchata, scattering drops on Luke’s face.

  Luke scrubbed them away. “Watch out, man.”

  Short Wes put his drink down. “It isn’t a game, is all. You think you know everything sometimes, because you know a lot about this one thing—”

  “I know I messed up,” Luke interrupted. “Thanks.”

  “That’s not it.” Wes shoved him. “Listen. You’re beating yourself up so hard for messing up, your mom has to call me to babysit. You can’t live like that.”

  Luke snorted, and it felt sort of good, so he let it open into a laugh. That was the perverse joy of being friends with the Wesleys: they never treated each other like they were fragile, so they could never be too broken. The proof was in the practice.

  “There you go.” Short Wes shoved him again, lighter. “That’s what I’m saying. You lost one. That doesn’t make you a loser.”

  Straight Wesley grimaced. “He’s been a loser, though.”

  Short Wes made a sound halfway between a groan and cheer. “Merciless!”

  Straight Wesley waved him off and leaned toward Luke. “Everybody knows girls, and whoever, hate it when you solve their problems. You have to just be supportive and shit while they suffer.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Short Wes looked surprised. “I did know that.”

  “See?” Straight Wesley said. “Even the virgin knows.”

  Short Wes cheer-groaned again.

  “Why?” Luke demanded. “For real, why do they want that?”

  Short Wesley gestured with his horchata. “Because your solutions end up like this?”

  At home, Luke did not get back in bed. He helped his mother make dinner and took a shift in the store. He got back to normal, more or less, as another week passed. He gave his dad most of his summer’s earnings and spent the rest fixing his phone. He didn’t say another word about the Kovrovs or Jeremy and didn’t hear it from his family, either.

  He pushed thoughts of Jeremy (stuck in that house, alone in the attic) down, down, away, below the surface of his consciousness, but they swamped him at night. He got in bed and remembered Jeremy there. Every midnight, he thought about texting. To say something angry. To say he was sorry. To say something dumb and get a laugh. Just to make sure Jeremy was safe. He wouldn’t put his family in danger by trying, but whether he would if he could was a problem he could circle for hours.

  He woke up over and over from obvious, exhausting dreams: Jeremy was calling as Luke dropped the phone; Jeremy was drowning as Luke floated away. He dreamed that he failed to catch the crossed man in the restaurant, and Jeremy got shot, collapsing against Luke; he dreamed that it happened just like it did, except when he went to the body, it was Jeremy’s, and he had Jeremy’s wet blood all over his hands.

  Luke was lying awake with his pillow on his face when his phone buzzed on the floor. Jeremy? He was a scramble of limbs trying to get to the phone and he flicked the call open without looking. “Hello?”

  It was static crackling and a whoosh of air, nothing that made any sense. He pulled his phone away from his ear and checked the name on the screen three times before it broke through his fog. “Max?”

  “I’m sorry.” Max was slurring, but he sounded different—he wasn’t drunk. He was crying. “I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Sergei and Alexei agreed that they would help Jeremy fill the holes in Luke’s story, but they couldn’t agree about how. They couldn’t simply talk about what had happened so long ago, the story Luke had dug up—too many memories were hidden from them. Worse, they couldn’t manage a conversation without fighting about it. They hated each other and always had. They grumbled over small things and battled over big ones. If one decided to try to be nicer, the other would act even more insufferable. They worked together fine, but the strain of the job pushed them even further apart.

  Sergei believed that someone was trying to hurt Jeremy and was willing to find the information to stop it. He wanted to investigate from the world in—study the records or stalk the Malcolms. Alexei didn’t say what he believed, but Jeremy suspected that hearing the girl’s name, Annabel, had hurt him more than he could admit. He wanted to scour his bindings the way he always did, over a bowl of blood, but he wanted to build a full ritual around it with Sergei’s blood, too.

  As it usually went, Alexei didn’t fight as hard, but he won anyway.

  Alexei was over every other day, consulting Ivan’s records or measuring angles in the dining room. He bickered with Marta, glowered at Sergei, gave the babies nickels for saying cuss words. He made increasingly outrageous sexual comments to Jeremy, and Jeremy got sad and weird, and Sergei yelled at Alexei for being a pervert and Alexei called Sergei a prig and Sergei threw him out, and they did it all again a couple days later.

  “What is with you two?” Jeremy asked after the door slammed the last time.

  Sergei stomped away. “You want to dig around in our heads, you’re going to find out.”

  As the hour of the ritual approached, all he and Sergei had to do was smoke a bowl of weed. Jeremy, strung out on anxiety, and Sergei, utterly earthbound, were both terrible at meditation. They needed help to melt into a ritual.

  Alexei could slip off as quick as a blink, following the trails of his own blood to other places and times the way most people could recall a memory. He went almost too easily, drooping over his bowls of blood for hours. Every time he left, Jeremy worried that was the day he’d forget to wake up, soil himself and get sick with dehydration, and they’d have to put him away like Ivan had done for his older brother. Like one day Seryozhka or baby Dmitri would have to do for Vanya. Like younger Kovrovs had done in the courts of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

  “Kid, I think you’ve had enough.” Sergei took the bowl from Jeremy’s hand and took one last puff before he wrapped it in foil. Weed made Jeremy feel large and porous, like he might float away. Like floating away would be fine.

  It took the scraping edges off his worries—Alexei, Luke, Sergei, the contract, Luke—but it brought down the walls he’d built around all that, too. The part of his brain that had been writing messages to Luke all day every day for the past two weeks got bigger and truer. I’m sorry, these messages might say, or How could you?

  “You made Alexei hide your phone.” Sergei grabbed the hand Jeremy was patting against his pockets. “So you wouldn’t do anything you’d regret.”

  “Oh.” Jeremy studied his hands and found himself giggling. “I think I’m stoned.”

  Sergei laughed, too. “We should do this more often.”

  “No!” Marta stuck her head in the living room, glaring. “Come on, slackers. He’s ready for you.”

  As the only one of them who had to get up at a regular hour, she was the most annoyed at having to stay up all night. Alexei was adamant about doing his rituals precisely at midnight, which Marta and Sergei dismissed as meaningless, another of his showman’s flourishes. Jeremy had no way to know who was right, but he believed. Midnight meant real magic to him.

  He trailed them down the hall as Sergei tried to pinch Marta’s butt and she pretended to be mad at him. They usually kept that stuff hidden, for themselves, but it was late and everyone was jumpy, and the two of them were taking comfort from each other. Jeremy felt—in the detached, crystalline way of the weed—like he was being stabbed.

  He stepped over a line of salt at the dining room doorway. Alexei sat at the end of the table in front of a candle and his metal bowl, arms crossed over his chest. He looked a lot like Sergei—his scowl made his brow sink over his eyes and his tank showed the eagle tattoo on his shoulder. There was something scary ab
out it, all his shine worn off to reveal the Kovrov underneath.

  He lifted his face and the impression faded. He looked like himself, but sadder. “Are you sure you want to see this?”

  Jeremy blinked. “If you know what we’re going to see, you can just tell me.”

  Alexei raked a hand back through his hair and didn’t answer. It was Sergei, sitting down on his other side, who said, “He means, neither of us is going to look good at the end of this.”

  Jeremy figured out their faces—they were scared. “I thought it was just memories. They can’t hurt us.”

  Alexei sat up straighter. “It is just memories, and stay on your guard, because they absolutely can hurt you.”

  Marta took a chair at the other end of the table, put her feet up, and opened a blue paperback. “Make good choices.”

  Jeremy wrapped his right hand around Alexei’s left wrist and found his hummingbird pulse. He extended his arm across the table for Sergei to hold. Alexei looked back and forth, making sure they were all ready, before he took Sergei’s wrist, closing the circle and them into the dark.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Alexei took his skateboard instead of one of the cars. It wasn’t far to Coney Island from his family’s house in Brighton Beach, and he liked keeping his destination secret.

  The sidewalk vibrated in his bones. When he jumped over cracks, his joints clacked with a vicious thrill. There wasn’t wind in Brooklyn in July, but he made some with his speed, clothes flapping against his sweaty skin.

  Though most of Alexei’s left forearm was scabbed over from his last fall, he wasn’t afraid of hurting himself on the skateboard. Some of the things he was afraid of at sixteen years old included rejection, commitment, his desires for boys, his desires for girls, his desire for Annabel, his family, Annabel’s family, his body, Annabel’s body, wealth, power, shame, hope, all feelings, premature ejaculation, his own blood, and magic.

  Annabel Malcolm wasn’t afraid of anything at all.

  She waited for him outside the line for the Spook-A-Rama with a Diet Mountain Dew in her hand and the sun fiery on her red-gold hair. A triangle of sweat soaked through her pale blue dress at the top of her stomach and one of the thin straps drooped off her shoulder, gliding across her freckles. She was perfect, and she was smiling at him.

  He kicked up the board with a flourish right in front of her, flipping it into his hand, and she put a hand on her hip. “Do you think you’re cute when you do that?” she asked.

  “I know I am.” Alexei grinned in a way he hoped was roguish. His heart pounded with exertion as the wind of his flight died, and sweat slithered down his back. He must look a wreck.

  Annabel grinned back. “You are, actually. You dirtbag.”

  He zipped his skateboard into his backpack as they waited in line for their own little cup on the Spook-A-Rama’s tracks. It rattled forward, and Annabel climbed into Alexei’s lap, hotter than the boiling day.

  “Jesus, we get it.” That was Sergei, more the feeling of him talking than the sound of it, and he ripped Jeremy back into his own mind. He remembered where he was, at home, and what he was seeing. Alexei’s hidden memories.

  “You go, then,” Alexei said.

  Sergei was plodding through his pre-algebra homework as dutifully as a monk, so he was sure he wasn’t doing anything wrong when the door flew open and his father roared in like a squall. “Liar,” Ivan Kovrov said.

  Jeremy felt Sergei’s heart start to race, a ghost of his own slow pulse and the faint flutter of Alexei’s against his fingers. At thirteen, Sergei was barely an adolescent, his lanky body and ill-made features still promising to grow into themselves. Ivan looked a lot like the Alexei they knew, but his body was thicker and his face hidden by doughy jowls.

  Sergei had a twin bed and a messy desk and a small mountain of hooded sweatshirts.

  “Where is your brother?” Ivan asked.

  “He went skateboarding,” Sergei replied. His thoughts, hectic with fear, chanted he’s the liar not me he’s the liar not me, but they didn’t settle on Coney Island or Annabel.

  “You said he was with a boy,” Ivan said. “I was barking up the wrong tree for two weeks.”

  “I just saw those videos. I don’t know. I didn’t—I don’t know why you think he talks to me about this stuff, Papa!”

  “You’re hiding for him.” Ivan’s voice was calmer, and more frightening that way.

  “No,” Sergei said. “No, Papa, I don’t know what he’s doing. He’s the liar. He has it all bound—”

  Ivan closed the distance between them and took a fistful of Sergei’s hair, twisting his face up. Jeremy felt it in his own scalp and neck.

  “Gregori says he’s with the Malcolm girl,” Ivan said. “It’s bound away from me. You find out what he’s up to.”

  They were with Sergei, tapping his pencil against his homework, when Alexei came home. Sergei listened thoughtfully to the hollow roll as he coasted down the hall on his skateboard, the shower starting and stopping, and the muffled crash of grinding, feedback-heavy guitars in another room.

  Sergei kept tapping. He didn’t trust his father, and he didn’t trust Alexei, and he hated the Malcolms. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, but mostly, he didn’t want to get hurt himself.

  If Alexei was messing around with a Malcolm, he must really love her. He wondered what that was like.

  He growled aloud and shoved his homework onto the floor, though the sound of the papers falling was muted and unsatisfying. Jeremy followed him down the hall.

  “What were you doing?” Sergei asked.

  Alexei scoffed. “Mind your own business, shrimp.”

  “Do you love her?”

  Alexei’s face was horrified, and then flat. “It’s not like that. We’re having fun.”

  Jeremy wouldn’t have believed him even if they weren’t in his mind, but young Sergei did. “Okay,” he said, and left the room.

  Alexei rolled off his bed and pulled open a drawer in his nightstand. He retrieved three candles, red, black, and white, and a pin he used to start scratching into their waxy sides. He was creating a binding spell, doubling down on an already-bound secret as his mind sizzled with panic.

  “You were binding it while it was happening?” Jeremy asked. “Isn’t that dangerous? What were you thinking?”

  “By now you must know I wasn’t thinking at all,” Alexei replied.

  They rifled through Alexei’s memories: Annabel’s bedroom, a cocoon of light blue; Alexei’s feet in the sand and Annabel’s gold hair whipping in the wind off the water; Alexei’s finger tracing constellations in the freckles on her shoulder; Alexei whispering into the phone in the middle of the night, the sandpaper weight of his tired eyes.

  Helene and Yuri Melnyk ran their business out of a small, meticulously clean apartment in the South Bronx. Helene, who carried a pregnancy like a planet orbited the sun, hugged Sergei.

  “You’re so big!” Sergei said.

  Helene laughed. “I’ll give you that one. But trust me, don’t ever say that to a woman again.”

  Ivan growled at Sergei and turned a serene, professional face toward Helene. “Should you be up?”

  Helene shrugged. “I’m hanging on as long as I can. We should have a few more months.”

  “There’s two in there!” Yuri walked out of the galley kitchen. “Two at once! Mr. Kovrov, can I get you anything?”

  “We can’t stay. The product, if you would.” Ivan handed Yuri a wad of cash, and he vanished into the other room.

  “Ah!” Helene pressed a hand against the side of her belly.

  “Is it okay?” Sergei’s eyes went round with panic.

  She smiled wanly. “Just one of the babies kicking. I think it’s the boy, on this side. Do you want to feel?”

  Sergei shrank back, shaking his head, and Helene and Ivan both laughed at him.

  Yuri reappeared with a large cardboard box. Ivan waved, and Sergei took it.

  The box was heavy in his arms.
Candles, in red, black, and white. Sergei felt squeamish. “Papa?”

  Ivan cut his hand quickly, Not right now, and kissed Helene’s cheek. “Beautiful. I hope I won’t have to ask you for any more before the babies come.”

  Helene patted her stomach where her son had kicked her. “They’ll be all right. Maybe it will be lucky, having them stew in some heavy mojo in there.”

  Back in the car, Sergei didn’t dare repeat his question, but Ivan put a heavy hand on his shoulder and answered it anyway. “I want you to get those to Alexei for me.”

  Sergei’s mouth fell open, but protest and fear collided in his throat and nothing came out.

  “He’s got that binding on me, so I’ll forget, but you remember.” Ivan smiled, bringing his eyes down to Sergei’s level. “He thinks he can win because he’s got that power. But we’re a team, you and me, right?”

  Sergei’s heart was yes and no and please and help, but there was only one right answer. “Yes, Papa.”

  A floodgate was open between Sergei and Alexei, memories pouring out and buffeting Jeremy like he was a little boat. He saw Annabel, Ivan, his brothers’ smaller and softer faces, and in every image he could feel their fear. Alexei’s tapping pulse against his fingers was his only connection to his own body, and he wasn’t sure if he was breathing. I want to wake up.

  The swirling stopped with a slam. His Alexei’s voice whispered, “I’ve got it, I’ve got you,” as the younger Alexei whispered into a cell phone so huge it was like a joke on a TV show. “It’s okay, baby. I promise you’re okay.”

  He sounded like Luke, which was to say, he was probably wrong.

  Annabel cried into the phone, slurry with tears. “Corey told him, he knows. He took my keys and my wallet. He’s going to freak if I see you again.”