“Good. I don’t want you to think that’s why I’m here with you.”
“Why are you? Here with me?”
We’re quiet for a long time.
“Because when I’m with you, I see colors that don’t exist.” It isn’t suave or debonair, how he says it. Only a little shy and a lot too honest.
As he’s parallel parking, the reflection in the side mirror makes me do a double take. Lando’s walking down the sidewalk, headed right toward us. The lettering on the mirror catches my eye: OBJECTS IN MIRROR MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. I slide down the leather of the seat until my knees touch my forehead.
I hold my breath, as if not breathing will make me smaller, an invisible thing Lando won’t see through the transparency of glass. “That guy outside, he can’t see you with me.”
“That guy up there?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Spencer punches the accelerator and joins the stream of traffic. “Tell you what. Let’s forget dinner out. My parents aren’t home. We can hang out there.”
Gravel pings against the doors until Spencer breaks the silence. “Tal, why are you still doing this? If that guy we saw on Main Street scares you so much, then why?”
“What else would we do? Get all socially secured, with cards to prove it?”
“You could get a job. Go to school for a while or get your GED. Then you could go anywhere. See all the things you want to see. Travel the world.”
“Wen’s fifteen. I’m sixteen. Some social worker would have us both in foster care in no time if we got caught.”
He works the watch around his wrist. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. You’d have to find a way of keeping yourselves from social services until you both turned eighteen.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It wouldn’t be easy. I’m not saying it would. But, Tal . . .” He swallows so hard I see his throat bounce. “I don’t want you to leave Cedar Falls.”
I’m a force when I want something, moving time and space to get the money in my pocket, shiny things into my hands. But Spencer’s stolen all the swagger from my step, the seduction from my eyes—the con man inside me—leaving me this nervous, uncalculated girl before him. He’s the first thing I’ve wanted that I can’t find a way to own.
Words bubble up from deep inside me. They’re sitting in my mouth: I don’t want to leave, either. Swallowing them down is going to hurt us both.
He peels his eyes away from the road and looks at me like he can see right through me. “Tal—”
Sound explodes around us. The car swerves left, then right, throwing us against the windows as we cling to our seats. It feels like thunder and an earthquake and a hurricane—every natural disaster at once.
The brakes bring us to a screeching halt. I follow his unwavering stare to the windshield. It’s shattered into a million pieces. Around a bloody center.
We’ve killed something. I’ve done some terrible things before. Nothing’s ever felt so sickening.
Wordlessly, Spencer opens the driver door, and I slide out behind him.
In the road, he takes a knee. A few steps closer, I notice the gray, dead mass in the road.
“Spencer,” I breathe, “is it . . . ?”
He whispers the unthinkable: “It’s an owl.”
If for only a second, I might believe.
Several houses up the street, another gray and bloody thing lies unmoving on the asphalt.
“Just fell from the sky,” he mutters. “All of them.”
All of them.
I skim the road slowly, starting with an owl by a light pole, then by a brick mailbox, then by a parked motorcycle. And up a ways, there’s another. And another. And another. They’re everywhere, bloody, feathered corpses. All fallen from the sky.
CHAPTER 28
Spencer drives to a repair shop and calls Ella to tell her about the accident and ask if he can put a new windshield on her credit card. Ordinarily, I’d marvel at someone coming by money so easily.
Scratchy news reports come through the radio inside the waiting area of the repair shop. Talk of hail at high altitudes, sonic booms, lightning strikes, noxious fumes, and the apocalypse.
Owls are still tumbling from the clouds and smacking onto the courthouse steps. They’re crashing into driveways, clogging up roadways, diving into swimming pools. Two traffic accidents have been reported, shutting downtown for at least another hour.
But none of the markies’ explanations can be right.
Once, we were on a long journey, before Mom’s arrest, when my brother and I were kids. We stopped for the day in this town that might have been in Kentucky, or maybe it was Tennessee. State lines sometimes run together in the same way as memories.
It was raining tiny drops of water that floated down so slowly four-year-old Wen kept trying to catch them on his tongue. We walked through this gas-lamp district full of curious little shops with windows lined with handmade dolls and confections.
Mom sat us on a park bench and bent to the ground, big gold hoops skimming her shoulders and the beginnings of a scam glowing in her eyes. “Stay right here, and don’t you move a muscle,” she said. “Mommy is going to come back with some money for lunch.”
Stiff as the toy soldiers standing at attention in the shop windows, Wen did what Mom asked. But I was never good at sitting still.
As soon as Mom’s coat swished around the corner, I pressed my nose against the glass of one of those windows, mesmerized by a giant snow globe. Inside the globe was a tiny town, with tinier cars and even tinier people, and a thin road winding around the perimeter, a perpetual loop. I wondered if those people wandered around that loop, always ending up in the exact place they’d started.
A woman came to the window. I almost ran, but she smiled at me and picked up the snow globe, inverting it and spinning it around in three slow circles before she tipped it upright and let snow float down over the houses. I imagined the people inside stepping outside their tiny houses, watching the snow coat their world in a white blanket.
The woman smiled, but when she did, her hip bumped the table. The snow globe teetered against the edge before crashing to the floor. Breaking their world.
I ran.
Now, in Cedar Falls, the world is broken just the same. Instead of artificial snow falling gently, it’s dead owls.
I can’t ignore the very real possibility I’ve been wrong all along, that everything is real. And maybe by storing the secrets of these omens inside me—by not believing in them or fearing them—I was the one who broke the world.
After the windshield is replaced, I make excuses to Spencer and ask him to drive me home.
We idle at a stoplight, and he turns to me. “Did I do something, Tal?”
It’s always him, that’s what he thinks.
But it’s never him. It’s always me and my Wanderer ways or my restless feet or my bad omens dropping from the sky.
My voice is grit and anger. “It’s not you.”
That kills all conversation, so there’s nothing to do but close my eyes and listen to his wheels on the road. The sound is both a breath of fresh air and a dunk in the lake’s freezing, murky waters. Not at all like it was before I came to Cedar Falls. I want to hate Spencer for ruining my turning wheels, my one great love.
And I want to hate him for being someone I could never hate.
We’re almost there when he says, “You’re upset about the owls. That’s okay. I’m sure lots of people are having a heart attack right now, too.”
He parks at the edge of camp as usual and turns to me. “The thing you told me about the owls, how they’re omens, you said you don’t believe. You don’t, right? You heard that guy on the radio. There’s got to be an explanation.”
Rona read us a children’s book when camp was stopped near the mountains a long time ago. The sky is falling. The sky is falling. That’s what it said. And now it is.
Spencer would find a
way to reach to the clouds and hold them in place for me if I asked him to try.
“Don’t you worry, Spencer Sway. Of course I don’t believe.” My voice doesn’t sound convincing.
“I’ll see you soon.”
I nod, but as I walk away, I’m not sure he’ll see me soon, or ever again.
Spencer pulls the car beside me and rolls down the passenger window. He arches himself across the seat. “I don’t know much about falling for someone, Tal, but I think I might be.”
Dropping low, I tilt inside his car. And I say the truest thing I’ve said in my life. “If this isn’t falling, then the rest of the world is doing it wrong.”
Dead owls are gathered around the outermost edge of camp, not thrown away like trash but laid together lovingly. The epidemic has reached camp, but we won’t have the same reaction as the markies, looking to science to subdue their fears. We’ll turn ourselves upside down.
Sonia and Emil sit in lawn chairs a few doors down from my trailer. Sonia’s eyes are closed, and a paperback romance dangles from her fingers while Emil smokes a cigar.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
Emil glances up but doesn’t say a word, and Sonia opens one eye.
“Do you guys know about the owls?” They still don’t speak, so I fold my arms. “Is someone going to answer me? Sonia?”
She scoots to the edge of her chair. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Tal, and you don’t even know it.”
I step back. This isn’t the Sonia who I went shooting with in the woods, or the one who’s been wanting to patch things up, or the girl I spent my childhood tromping through the forest beside.
She grabs the arms of the chair and arches from her seat. Leaving her novel behind, she meets me in the middle of the road, out of earshot of Emil. “Felix told me what he offered you—he’d make sure Wen always had a home with the two of you.”
“That’s not any of your business.”
“It’s camp business, which makes it everyone’s business. Why the fuck haven’t you taken him up on it? How could you do that to Wen? Take the offer while it’s still on the table. You might as well. You’re marrying Felix, no matter what.”
“Not no matter what.”
She snatches my wrist and hisses into my ear, “I saw you getting in the car with that boy last month. Tell me you’re not being stupid. Grow up already.”
Calling me stupid is one thing. Telling me to grow up is another. I won’t grow up if it means selling out the way Sonia did. I won’t trade my dreams for Sonia’s reality.
I shake her off. “Go to hell, Sonia.”
Inside my trailer, I press my back against the screen door until the cold metal seeps through my sweater and chills my skin.
Wen tosses his encyclopedia aside and leaps off his bed. “You’re finally back.” Behind him, encyclopedia A is open to apocalypse. “Do you know what’s happening? Dead owls are falling out of the sky. Well, we don’t know if they’re dead before they fall or when they smack down on the pavement—”
“I know. I saw them. One of them crashed into Spencer’s windshield.”
“You don’t think this is ’cause of us, do you?” He moves closer. “Because we buried that owl?”
I work my hands through my hair, collecting it in one big heap and tying it back with a rubber band. “Don’t be silly.”
As long as I’m breathing, I can keep up lying to Wen. I don’t know how much longer I can lie to myself.
Camp is abuzz as we wind down the main road. Wen heard there’s a meeting in a few minutes. Some of the children are crying. A group of old men are sitting under Boss’s awning, sharing stories of owls that warned us of famine and flood.
At the center of camp, Felix’s eyes sink into me. Wen and I move to the back of the crowd.
Lando walks to the middle of the half circle the camp’s formed. “Everyone, gather ’round.”
People push inward until I feel like I’m being crushed.
Someone yells from the back, “Where’s Boss?”
Lando lifts his chin and projects his voice. “My father’s real under the weather today, so you’re stuck with me.”
Murmurs rise and then fade away.
“How’s my trap coming?” I whisper to Wen.
His hand goes to his pocket like he’s remembering the money he’s carrying and verifying it’s still there. “Nothing yet. I checked this morning.”
Lando clears his throat. “Today’s events are something none of us have seen before. Something evil is upon us. Even the markies are concerned. Our most sacred animal is dying around us, falling out of the sky. The Spirit of the Falconer is warning us against something, and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d rather not stick around and find out what he’s trying to tell us about this place. Way I see it, we don’t have any choice but to pack up our camp and get the hell out of here.” People stumble to their feet, but Lando holds out his hands. “No, no, no. Let’s hold our horses. We’ll load up tonight, and leave in the morning. Five o’clock. Before the town wakes up.”
Someone in the front asks about Rona, and Lando claims he’ll come back for her with bail money. Wen and I trade looks. We know we can’t put our faith in him.
The meeting ends, and people head to pack their trailers, find their kids, prepare for travel. I stay still, letting the others dip their shoulders and dodge me.
Leaving early means I’ll never see Spencer again—I’ll never say good-bye. The film of our relationship pans wide and comes into focus, startling me with sudden clarity of what was tucked away inside me. Spencer made me feel safe—the way nothing had before—without obligation.
Wen wraps his arm around my shoulders and nudges me onward.
As the day fades to twilight, a funeral pyre is set up. Wanderers lay the owls atop the straw one by one. Marius says a few solemn words before lighting them on fire.
Wanderers don’t bury their dead. Being buried is the worst fate of all: trapped underground and doomed to one place for all of eternity. Only if someone is hated is he buried. Instead, we burn the bodies and scatter the ashes over the nearest river so they’ll wander for all eternity.
Outside our trailer, Wen stops and looks to the sky. “I wonder if Rona knows about the owls. She was always talking about omens.”
“You feel bad about her, don’t you?”
“I feel—” Tears stream down his cheeks. He swallows and turns his face from me. “It’s not that I don’t want to help you with the bride-price, Tal. But we’ve got all this money. It feels like betraying Rona to not help her.”
The sight of my brother crying has always been my weakness. Wen may be sensitive, but he’s not a crier—Rona’s arrest is ripping him to shreds.
I take his hands in mine and tug him into the shadows before someone sees his tears. “I’ll help her, too, Wen. I promise.”
“You can’t promise that. It’s too much money.”
“No, I promise it. I don’t know how, but even if I have to come back for her myself, I’ll get her out.”
Wen fills one plastic tub with his books and another with his nice shirts. On my knees in my bed, I secure the latches on the cabinets with rubber bands.
“What are people saying in town?” he asks.
“Lightning, hail, a sonic boom, some kind of fumes, the apocalypse.”
“You know what a sonic boom is? It’s when an object moves through the air faster than the speed of sound—”
“It doesn’t matter, Wen.”
He stops packing and moves to my end of the trailer, then rests his chin on his hands on the edge of my mattress. “You’re upset because of the markie. How are you gonna walk away from him?”
I plaster on a dark smile to keep from crying. “The same way we always leave.”
CHAPTER 29
Towns are just towns to us. No town is better or worse. They’re all the same. Jumping-off points in the journeys that make up our lives.
That’s a lie, actually. We try re
al hard to believe it now, but Wen and I weren’t as good of liars when we were kids.
Back then, we couldn’t help but make a judgment about each location we tumbled into. We loved and hated places for the silliest of reasons. We’d love a town for having cool arcades or a carnival, even if it was the kind without a real Ferris wheel, like the ones that go up in the Kmart parking lot. And we’d hate a town for a stupid reason, too—because it smelled like sulfur or because the McDonald’s didn’t have a PlayPlace.
Wen and I would bawl our eyes out when we had to leave the good places and jump and shout over leaving the bad ones. Now we live by the rule Rona imposed right after Mom got put away. “What’s the rule?” she’d ask, her eyes dreamy flashes in the rearview mirror.
Wen and I would lift in our seats, craning our necks like little birds, as we said, “We never look back.”
I’ve never been much for rules, but that’s one I’ve always followed. I wish I could follow it now.
Wen snores softly as I dress in the dark.
My hands pause as I lace my boots because hanging from the doorknob of one of the high-up cabinets is my equinox crown. The one Rona made me. She’d stop me if she knew I was going to betray our traditions.
But she’s locked up, and I’m free as a bird, and my decisions are all my own. At least for tonight.
Sheets snap behind me, and Wen sits up in his bed. “Are you running away?”
“No.” I stuff the keys to the Chevy into my pocket. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
He yawns and rubs his eyes. “But we’re leaving at daybreak—”
“Before sunup, I’ll be back. Nobody will ever know.”
He blinks the rest of the way awake. “Are you going to spend the night with him?” Louder this time, he says, “Wait! You’re going to spend the night with him?”
My silence answers the first question he’s ever been uncomfortable straight-out asking me.
He swings a leg over his bed and then falls all the way to the floor. His feet make a sound so loud it’s a wonder he doesn’t bust through to the ground. “Tal, wait, please! You can’t do this. Not without a blessing. It’s just not done.”
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