I rubbed my messy hair with one hand. “Whatever it is, you can tell me. I know what it’s like to have a crazy family.”
“You think you know crazy. You have no idea.”
She took a deep breath. Whatever she was about to say, it was hard for her. I could see her struggling to find the words. “The people in my family, and me, we have powers. We can do things that regular people can’t do. We’re born that way, we can’t help it. We are what we are.”
It took me a second to understand what she was talking about, or at least what I thought she was talking about.
Magic.
Where was Amma when I needed her?
I was afraid to ask, but I had to know. “And what, exactly, are you?” It sounded so crazy that I almost couldn’t say the words.
“Casters,” she said quietly.
“Casters?”
She nodded.
“Like, spell casters?”
She nodded again.
I stared at her. Maybe she was crazy. “Like, witches?”
“Ethan. Don’t be ridiculous.”
I exhaled, momentarily relieved. Of course, I was an idiot. What was I thinking?
“That’s such a stupid word, really. It’s like saying jocks. Or geeks. It’s just a dumb stereotype.”
My stomach lurched. Part of me wanted to bolt up the steps, lock the door, and hide in my bed. But then another part of me, a bigger part, wanted to stay. Because hadn’t a part of me known all along? I may not have known what she was, but I had known there was something about her, something bigger than just that junky necklace and those old Chucks. What was I expecting, from someone who could bring on a downpour? Who could talk to me without even being in the room? Who could control the way the clouds floated in the sky? Who could fling open the shutters to my room from my front yard?
“Can you come up with a better name?”
“There’s not one word that describes all the people in my family. Is there one word that describes everyone in yours?”
I wanted to break the tension, to pretend she was just like any other girl. To convince myself that this could be okay. “Yeah. Lunatics.”
“We’re Casters. That’s the broadest definition. We all have powers. We’re gifted, just like some families are smart, and others are rich, or beautiful, or athletic.”
I knew what the next question was, but I didn’t want to ask it. I already knew she could break a window just by thinking about it. I didn’t know if I was ready to find out what else she could shatter.
Anyway, it was starting to feel like we were talking about just another crazy Southern family, like the Sisters. The Ravenwoods had been around as long as any family in Gatlin. Why should they be any less crazy? Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself.
Lena took the silence as a bad sign. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. I told you to leave me alone. Now you probably think I’m a freak.”
“I think you’re talented.”
“You think my house is weird. You already admitted that.”
“So you redecorated, a lot.” I was trying to hold it together. I was trying to keep her smiling. I knew what it must have cost her to tell me the truth. I couldn’t run out on her now. I turned around and pointed to the lit study above the azalea bushes, hidden behind thick wooden shutters. “Look. See that window over there? That’s my dad’s study. He works all night and sleeps all day. Since my mom died, he hasn’t left the house. He won’t even show me what he’s writing.”
“That’s so romantic,” she said quietly.
“No, it’s crazy. But nobody talks about it, because there’s nobody left to talk to. Except Amma, who hides magic charms in my room and screams at me for bringing old jewelry into the house.”
I could tell she was almost smiling. “Maybe you are a freak.”
“I’m a freak, you’re a freak. Your house makes rooms disappear, my house makes people disappear. Your shut-in uncle is nuts and my shut-in dad is a lunatic, so I don’t know what you think makes us so different.”
Lena smiled, relieved. “I’m trying to find a way to see that as a compliment.”
“It is.” I looked at her smiling in the moonlight, a real smile. There was something about the way she looked just at that moment. I imagined leaning in a little farther and kissing her. I pushed myself away, up one step higher than she was.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired.” But I wasn’t.
We stayed like that, just talking on the steps, for hours. I lay on the step above; she lay on the step below. We watched the dark night sky, then the dark morning sky, until we could hear the birds.
By the time the hearse finally pulled away, the sun was starting to rise. I watched Boo Radley lope slowly home after it. At the rate he was going, it would be sunset before that dog got home. Sometimes I wondered why he bothered.
Stupid dog.
I put my hand on the brass doorknob of my own door, but I almost couldn’t bring myself to open it. Everything was upside down, and nothing inside could change that. My mind was scrambled, all stirred up like a big frying pan of Amma’s eggs, the way my insides had felt like for days now.
T. I. M. O. R. O. U. S. That’s what Amma would call me. Eight across, as in another name for a coward. I was scared. I’d told Lena it was no big deal that she and her family—were what? Witches? Casters? And not the ten and two kind my dad had taught me about.
Yeah, no big deal.
I was a big liar. I bet even that stupid dog could sense that.
9.24
The Last Three Rows
You know that expression, “It hit me like a ton of bricks”? It’s true. The minute she turned the car around and ended up on my doorstep in her purple pajamas, that’s how I felt about Lena.
I knew it was coming. I just didn’t know it would feel like this.
Since then, there were two places I wanted to be: with Lena, or alone, so I could try to hammer it all out in my mind. I didn’t have the words for what we were. She wasn’t my girlfriend; we weren’t even dating. Up until last week, she wouldn’t even admit we were friends. I had no idea how she felt about me, and it wasn’t like I could send Savannah over to find out. I didn’t want to risk whatever we had, whatever it was. So why did I think about her every second? Why was I so much happier the minute I saw her? I felt like maybe I knew the answer, but how could I be sure? I didn’t know, and I didn’t have any way to find out.
Guys don’t talk about stuff like that. We just lie under the pile of bricks.
“So what are you writing?”
She closed the spiral notebook she seemed to carry around everywhere. The basketball team had no practice on Wednesdays, so Lena and I were sitting in the garden at Greenbrier, which I’d sort of come to think of as our special place, though that’s not something I would ever admit, not even to her. It was where we found the locket. It was a place we could hang out without everyone staring and whispering. We were supposed to be studying, but Lena was writing in her notebook, and I’d read the same paragraph about the internal structure of atoms nine times now. Our shoulders were touching, but we were facing different directions. I was sprawled in the fading sun; she sat under the growing shadow of a moss-covered oak. “Nothing special. I’m just writing.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.” I tried not to sound disappointed.
“It’s just… it’s stupid.”
“So tell me anyway.”
For a minute she didn’t say anything, scribbling on the rubber rim of her shoe with her black pen. “I just write poems sometimes. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I know it’s weird.”
“I don’t think it’s weird. My mom was a writer. My dad’s a writer.” I could feel her smiling, even though I wasn’t looking at her. “Okay, that’s a bad example, because my dad is really weird, but you can’t blame that on the writing.”
I waited to see if she was going to just hand me the notebook and ask me to read one. No such luck. “Maybe I can read one sometime.”
“Doubtful.” I heard the notebook open again and her pen moving across the page. I stared at my chemistry book, rehearsing the phrase I’d gone over a hundred times in my head. We were alone. The sun was slipping away; she was writing poetry. If I was going to do it, now was the time.
“So, do you want to, you know, hang out?” I tried to sound casual.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
I chewed on the end of an old plastic spoon I had found in my backpack, probably from a pudding cup. “Yeah. No. I mean, do you want to, I don’t know, go somewhere?”
“Now?” She took a bite out of an open granola bar, and swung her legs around so she was next to me, holding it out toward me. I shook my head.
“Not now. Friday, or something. We could see a movie.” I stuck the spoon in my chemistry book, closing it.
“That’s gross.” She made a face, and turned the page.
“What do you mean?” I could feel my face turning red.
I was only talking about a movie.
You idiot.
She pointed at my dirty spoon bookmark. “I meant that.”
I smiled, relieved. “Yeah. Bad habit I picked up from my mom.”
“She had a thing for cutlery?”
“No, books. She would have maybe twenty going at a time, lying all over our house—on the kitchen table, by her bed, the bathroom, our car, her bags, a little stack at the edge of each stair. And she’d use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork.”
“A dirty old spoon?”
“Exactly.”
“Bet that drove Amma crazy.”
“It drove her nuts. No, wait for it—she was—” I dug deep. “P. E. R. T. U. R. B. E. D.”
“Nine down?” She laughed.
“Probably.”
“This was my mom’s.” She held out one of the charms suspended from the long silver chain she never seemed to take off. It was a tiny gold bird. “It’s a raven.”
“For Ravenwood?”
“No. Ravens are the most powerful birds in the Caster world. Legend has it that they can draw energy into themselves and release it in other forms. Sometimes they’re even feared because of their power.” I watched as she let go of the raven and it fell back into place between a disc with strange writing etched into it and a black glass bead.
“You’ve got a lot of charms.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked down at the necklace. “They aren’t really charms, just things that mean something to me.” She held out the tab of the soda can. “This is from the first can of orange soda I ever drank, sitting on the porch of our house in Savannah. My gramma bought it for me when I came home from school crying because no one put anything in my valentine shoebox at school.”
“That’s cute.”
“If by cute you mean tragic.”