by Patrick Ness
“Think Dad can get us some cars for the summer?” I ask.
“As payment for missing the ceremony?” Mel says. “Oh, yeah. Henna and Jared and Nathan, too. Though, actually, if he’d come today, he might not have been able to run fast enough, so maybe it’s for the best.”
“I can’t believe they blew up the school,” Nathan says, his head resting on Jared’s stomach.
Henna drinks the last of her soda. “I know. It felt so inevitable, you kind of thought it would never actually happen.”
“As long as they rebuild it by the time I graduate,” Meredith says.
“I’m sure they will, Merde Breath,” Jared says. “They can only have really good insurance, you’d think.”
“Don’t call me that,” Meredith says.
“You know we mean it with love, don’t you, Bite Size?” Jared asks her.
“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “That’s why I keep hoping you will. So I can keep saying, ‘Don’t call me that.’”
“Weirdo,” Mel says, affectionately, and hands some more fries to our sister.
The sun’s still out, but it’s late afternoon. We’ve been here a couple hours, and the fire guys are still no closer to having it under control. Fortunately, the school’s in the middle of a huge clearing, so there’s not much chance of the forest catching. That would really suck.
Instead, it’s like a town-sized picnic. We wave to people we know as they walk by or come up to us and chat. We’ve all found our parents and figured out we’re all safe. I even let Mr Shurin give me a hug. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said.
“You don’t need to,” I said back.
He let us be and started walking the couple miles back to his house, his car having been toasted, too. I feel bad for him, despite also wanting to kill him for involving Mel. But he’s not a loser. He’s never been a loser. And his only family is leaving for college. And after that, leaving forever, as far as I understand it. What’s he going to have left?
What are any of us?
“You okay?” Jared says, frowning at me now.
“Just thinking,” I say.
We’re lying on a grassy stretch. Graduation robes turn out to make decent picnic blankets, though I doubt we’ll get our deposits back. Jared gently scoots Nathan off his stomach. Nathan takes the hint and turns his full attention to Henna. Which, all right, is nice of him.
“I really could, Mike,” Jared says. “Heal you.”
“I know. I saw it with Finn.”
“I want to. I’ve always hated seeing you suffer.”
I look at him. I don’t answer. He straightens up suddenly. “Oh, my God,” he says. “I’m such an idiot.” He turns to Henna. “Can I see your arm?”
Surprised, she holds it out to him. “Why?”
I’m still a little surprised myself she doesn’t know already. Then I’m kind of pleased. No one else knew. He told me first.
“Do you mind if I totally heal this?” Jared asks her.
“Can you do that?”
“I can now.” He puts his palms on her cast. The white lights shoot out briefly one more time and stop. Henna flexes her hand at the end of her cast and frowns.
“It doesn’t feel weird any more,” she says. “You healed the whole thing?” She grabs some loose plaster at the end of the cast, which is looking pretty grimy. “Think I can take this off?”
“Wait, wait,” Steve says, sitting up. “What the hell’s going on? You can’t just take off a–”
But Henna’s already ripping at the rough plaster. Nathan helps her, and they get it off pretty quickly. She rolls her hand around. “It’s healed,” she says. “It’s completely healed.” She turns her whole wrist around and looks at Jared. “You even fixed the scar.”
They all look at me. My hand goes up to my own scar. “I thought you guys said you liked it.”
“What’s going on?” Steve asks again.
Mel takes his hand gently. “I told you,” she says. “You’re going to have to have an open mind around us.”
“But if he can do that–”
“Think of all the other good I can do,” Jared says. Then he says, more quietly, so only I can hear. “Until I ascend.”
I feel the pang in my stomach again. That’s still there. Jared going away forever. He hasn’t told the others about this yet either. For now, it’s just me and him knowing. I finally understand what a burden a secret can be.
Tony Kim walks through some trees, sees us and comes over. Henna stands and throws her arms around him. “Thank God, you’re okay,” she says. He barely recovers his surprise in time to hug her back. “Come,” she says, taking his hand. “Sit with us.”
He sits down next to her on her graduation gown and they instantly fall into deep conversation.
Henna’s not going to Africa. She told me while we waited in the disaster-swollen line at the fast-food place. “I’m eighteen,” she said. “I realized they can’t actually make me. It was only a matter of willpower.” She shrugged. “I stayed nice through the whole thing. I never yelled or went crazy. I just said it was my last summer to see you, that the Central African Republic was too dangerous for any of us to go, and that I needed to start making important decisions for myself.”
“What’d they say?” I asked.
“What could they say? I was right.”
Strangely, the first reaction they had was to try for a compromise. They agreed the Central African Republic and its civil war was probably not the wisest choice, so how about Romania?
“Romania?” I said, surprised. “Does Romania need missionaries? Or foot specialists?”
“They’ve got the Romanian Orthodox Church and, as far as I know, hospitals. So, no, not really. But they want to go anyway.”
“And?”
She smiled at me, more relaxed than I’ve ever seen her. “I said no.”
I watch her and Tony talk now. I watch the closeness they have. I watch the way he won’t stop looking into her eyes and she won’t stop looking into his and the way they touch each other here and there and I bet she’s got the desire feeling in her stomach for him. I bet he’s got it for her, too. Will they end up together and getting married? Who knows? But looking at them, I’m not even jealous.
I’m happy.
Which is the weirdest thing of all.
“That’s the guy!” we hear and see the still-alive Finn coming up with the girl who warned us all. She gets all kinds of looks from people she passes, but she ignores them. They come straight over to Jared and she throws a hug around him. “Oof,” he says.
“You saved him,” she says. “That wasn’t supposed to happen, but you did.”
“She was going to have to sacrifice herself to save us,” Finn says. “But because of you, I could help her and we destroyed the fissures of the Immortals once and for all!”
There’s a silence.
“Am I allowed to say, What the hell are you talking about this time?” Steve asks.
“You know what?” Mel says. “All I really want to know is if it’s over.”
The girl, who I remember now is called Satchel – which explains why Finn was asking for a satchel earlier – blows out a long breath and nods. “Yeah,” she says. “It’s over.”
“Thank goodness,” Mel says, seriously.
Satchel and Finn stand there, looking a little lost.
“Where are the other indie kids?” I ask.
She looks confused. “The other who?”
“I think that’s what they call us,” Finn says to her.
“Really?” She seems genuinely surprised. Then she looks around the woods. “I’m not sure, actually. We’ve all got kind of scattered.” Her chin crumples up a bit. “And not all of us made it.”
“Hey,” Mel says, kindly. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry for all this,” Satchel says, through tears. “I don’t know why it always happens to us. I don’t know why we always have to blow up the high school–”
“
Don’t worry about it,” Mel says, making a space for Satchel and Finn to sit. “Everybody’s got something.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Jared says.
Satchel and Finn sit. We all, all of us, together, watch the school still burn.
“You know what?” I say, quietly, to Jared.
“What?”
“I think… I think I don’t want you to heal my scar. Or anything else yet.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. If it gets bad again. Bad enough to… Well, I’ll think about it then. But not yet.”
“Is the medication working that well?”
“No, but if you heal all that stuff, I’ll live the rest of my life not knowing if I could have figured it out on my own.”
He nods, solemnly. “That makes sense. In fact, what do you wanna bet that’s what your sister will say, too?”
I smile at that. “That you offered, Jared. That you bargained. For me…” I find that I can’t go on.
He knows what I mean. “I’m always here for you,” he says. “If you need it.”
“For another four years,” I say, wiping my eyes.
“Four years is a long time. A lot could happen.”
“Maybe.”
And as I put my own hand up to feel my scar, I think he’s right. A lot could happen. Mel and Steve could stay together. Or not. Henna and Tony could get back together. Or not. Me and Jared could stay firm friends. Or we could drift apart. Maybe there’s a chance even the God stuff will change. Maybe Nathan will get run over by a bus that I’m not anywhere near. Maybe I’ll come off my medication. Or stay on it. Maybe my mom won’t win her race after all. Maybe my dad will become a new person and what will that be like? What will this summer be like?
Too fast, probably. Too many nights at Grillers, but also nights together, all of us. Like we are now.
I look at us. Jared and Mel, who I’m so proud of, and Henna and Meredith and Steve and even Nathan and even the two indie kids, who really do seem just like the rest of us. Just normal people, having a burger above the crater where their school once was.
“What metaphor are we going to use for this?” Nathan asks. “Our childhoods burning down?”
“I think our childhoods burnt down a long time ago,” Mel says, leaning against Steve.
“High school is like living through fire?” Henna suggests.
“That’s kind of true,” I say.
“What about, from the ashes, phoenixes will rise?” Meredith suggests.
“That sounds too much like hard work, Merde Breath,” Jared says. “I think it’s just a high school that burnt down. I don’t think it’s a metaphor at all.”
“Spoilsport,” Nathan says. They laugh together. And I’m only a little bit jealous.
“Why does everything have to mean something, though?” Jared asks. “Haven’t we got enough life to be living?”
But then, nodding at the tower of smoke that stretches up against the Mountain – it’s actually kind of beautiful – I say, “Everything’s always ending. But everything’s always beginning, too.”
“God,” Henna says, “that would have been a much better prom theme than ‘Forever Young’.”
We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there’ll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again. But right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it’s good. It’s a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever.
I know, if I need it, they’ll save me.
I also know that I might not need it quite so often.
We watch the fire. We watch the fire.
And still we watch.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Shortly after the devastating Typhoon Haiyan, the YA authors Keren David, Candy Gourlay and Keris Stainton (who you should all read) set up Authors for the Philippines, a fund-raising drive for the Red Cross. Authors donated various prizes for which people bid. It was wildly successful – raising over £55,000 – and I was very proud to be a part of it.
I auctioned off the chance to have the winner’s name in this book, and I became the luckiest author in the world when the auction was won by Henna Silvennoinen, a name so amazing and gorgeous I want to use it in every book from now on. Henna the character was new on the page and looking for a name; Henna the person gave her the perfect one.
Coming in second place in the auction was a friend called Jared Shurin. Wanting to help out the good cause, Jared and I agreed that if he made his donation to the Red Cross anyway, he could be in the book, too (mainly because I liked the name Jared so much for the character, who up until then had been a non-committed “Josh”).
Needless to say, the characters and the real people only have their names in common, and any other similarities are coincidental, as book characters grow into lives of their own. Though I know for a fact the real Jared Shurin now has business cards that say, “Three-quarters Jewish, one-quarter God.”
ABOUT PATRICK NESS
Patrick Ness was born in the USA, but has lived in London since 1999.
He writes both novels and short stories for adults and children, but is best known for his books for young adults. His first books for teenagers made up the Chaos Walking trilogy, of which the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize, followed by The Ask and the Answer, which won the Costa Award. All three titles in the trilogy were shortlisted for the prestigious Carnegie Medal, an unprecedented event, and in 2011 the third title, Monsters of Men, won the award.
Patrick’s sixth book, A Monster Calls, was based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd and illustrated by Jim Kay. It won every major prize in children’s fiction, including the Galaxy National Book Award, the UKLA Book Award and the Red House Children’s Book Award. In 2012 it became the first book ever to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. Patrick has also written the screenplay for the film of A Monster Calls. Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and starring Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver and Felicity Jones, the film is set for release in 2016.
In 2013 he published his next novel More Than This to great critical acclaim. It was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
ALSO BY PATRICK NESS
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published 2015 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Copyright © 2015 Patrick Ness
Cover design by Walker Books Ltd
Endpaper illustration by Richard Merritt
The right of Patrick Ness to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
“Hunter” written by Björk © 1997. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
All rights reserved
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-6405-7 (ePub)
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