Who was the other? Me?
Was that who I was now, Nobody?
Did al guys have to work this hard to figure out their girlfriends? Untwisting the twisted poems written al over their wal s in Sharpie or cracked plaster?
All that remains are remains.
I touched the wal , smearing away the word remains.
Because al that remained was not remains. There had to be more than that -- more to Lena and me, more to everything. It wasn't just Macon. My mom was gone, but as the last few months had shown, some part of her was with me. I had been thinking about her more and more.
Claim yourself. It had been my mom's message to Lena, written in the page numbers of books, scattered across the floor of her favorite room at Wate's Landing. Her message to me didn't have to be written anywhere, not in numbers or letters or even dreams.
Lena's floor looked a little like the study that day, books lying open al over the place. Except these books were missing their pages, which sent a different message altogether.
Pain and guilt. It was the second chapter of every book my Aunt Caroline had given me about the five stages of grief, or however many stages of grief people say there are. Lena had covered shock and denial, the first two, so I should've seen this one coming. For her, I guess it meant giving up one of the things she loved the most. Books.
At least, I hoped that's what it meant. I stepped careful y around the empty, burnt book jackets. I heard the muffled sobs before I saw her.
I opened the closet door. She was huddled in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.
It's okay, L.
She looked up at me, but I wasn't sure what she was seeing.
My books all sounded like him. I couldn't make them stop.
It doesn't matter. Everything's okay now.
I knew things wouldn't stay that way for long. Nothing was okay. Somewhere along the way between angry and scared and miserable, she had turned a corner. I knew from experience there was no turning back.
Gramma had final y intervened. Lena would be going back to school next week, like it or not. Her choice was school or the thing nobody said out loud. Blue Horizons, or whatever the Caster equivalent was. Until then, I was only al owed to see her when I dropped off her homework. I trudged al the way up to her house with a Stop & Steal bag's worth of meaningless worksheets and essay questions.
Why me? What did I do?
I guess I'm not supposed to be around anyone who gets me worked up. That's what Reece said.
I'm what gets you worked up?
I could feel something like a smile tugging at the back of my mind.
Of course you are. Just not the way they think.
When her bedroom door final y swung open, I dropped the sack and pul ed her into my arms. It had only been a few days since I'd seen her in person, but I missed the smel of her hair, the lemons and rosemary. The familiar things. Today I couldn't smel it, though. I buried my face in her neck.
I missed you, too.
Lena looked up at me. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black tights, cut into al kinds of crazy slits up and down her legs. Her hair was squirming loose from the clasp at the back of her neck. Her necklace hung down, twisting on its chain. Her eyes were ringed with darkness that wasn't makeup. I was worried. But when I looked past her to her bedroom, I was even more worried.
Gramma had gotten her way. There was not a burnt book, not a thing out of place in the room. That was the problem. There wasn't one streak of Sharpie, not a poem, not a page anywhere in the room. Instead, the wal s were covered with images, taped careful y in a row along the perimeter, as if they were some kind of fence trapping her inside.
Sacred. Sleeping. Beloved. Daughter.
They were photographs of headstones, taken so close that al I could make out was the rough stubble of the rock behind the chiseled words, and the words themselves.
Father. Joy. Despair. Eternal Rest.
"I didn't know you were into photography." I wondered what else I didn't know.
"I'm not, real y." She looked embarrassed.
"They're great."
"It's supposed to be good for me. I have to prove to everyone that I know he's real y gone."
"Yeah. My dad's supposed to keep a feelings journal now." As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Comparing Lena to my dad couldn't be mistaken for a compliment, but she didn't seem to notice. I wondered how long she had been climbing around His Garden of Perpetual Peace with her camera, and how I had missed it.
Soldier. Sleeping. Through a glass, darkly.
I came to the last picture, the only one that didn't seem to belong with the rest. It was a motorcycle, a Harley leaning against a gravestone. The shiny chrome of the bike looked out of place next to the worn old stones. My heart started to pound as I looked at it. "What's this one?"
Lena dismissed it with a wave. "Some guy visiting a grave, I guess. He was just kind of ... there. I keep meaning to take it down, the lighting's terrible." She reached up past me, pul ing the tacks out of the wal . When she reached the last one, the photo vanished, leaving nothing but four tiny holes in her black wal .
Aside from the images, the room was nearly empty, as if she'd packed up and gone to col ege somewhere. The bed was gone. The bookshelf and al the books were gone. The old chandelier we'd made swing so many times I had
thought it would fal from the ceiling was gone. There was a futon on the floor, in the center of the room. Next to it was the tiny silver sparrow. Seeing it flooded my brain with memories from the funeral -- magnolias ripping out of the lawn, the same silver sparrow in her muddy palm.
"Everything looks so different." I tried not to think about the sparrow or the reason it would be next to her bed. The reason that had nothing to do with Macon.
"Wel , you know. Spring cleaning. I had kind of trashed the place."
A few tattered books lay on the futon. Without thinking, I flipped one open -- until I realized I'd committed the worst of crimes. Though the outside was covered with an old, taped-up cover from a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the inside wasn't a book at al . It was one of Lena's spiral notebooks, and I had opened it up right in front of her. Like it was nothing, or it was mine to read.
I realized something else. Most of the pages were blank.
The shock was almost as terrible as discovering the pages of my dad's gibberish when I had thought he was writing a novel. Lena carried a notebook around with her wherever she went. If she had stopped scribbling every fifth word into it, things were worse than I thought.
She was worse than I thought.
"Ethan! What are you doing?"
I pul ed my hand away, and Lena grabbed the book.
"I'm sorry, L."
She was furious.
"I thought it was just a book. I mean, it looks like a book. I didn't think you would leave your notebook lying around where anyone could read it."
She wouldn't look at me, clutching the book to her chest.
"Why aren't you writing anymore? I thought you loved to write."
She rol ed her eyes and opened the notebook to show me. "I do."
She fluttered the blank pages, and now they were covered with line upon line of tiny scribbled words, crossed out again and again, revised and rewritten and revisited a thousand times.
"You Charmed it?"
"I Shifted the words out of Mortal reality. Unless I choose to show them to someone, only a Caster can read them."
"That's bril iant. Since Reece, the person most likely to read it, happens to be one." Reece was as nosy as she was bossy.
"She doesn't need to. She can read everything in my face." It was true. As a Sybil, Reece could see your thoughts and secrets, even things you were planning to do, just by looking you in the eye. Which was why I general y avoided her.
"So, what's with al the secrecy?" I flopped down on Lena's futon. She sat next to me, balancing on her crisscrossed legs. Things were less comfortable than I was pretending they were.
"I don't know. I stil feel like writing al the time. Maybe I just feel less like being understood, or less like I can be."
My jaw tightened. "By me."
"That's not what I meant."
"What other Mortals would be reading your notebook?"
"You don't understand."
"I think I do."
"Some of it, maybe."
"I would understand al of it if you'd let me."
"There's no letting, Ethan. I can't explain it."
"Let me see it." I held out my hand for her notebook.
She raised an eyebrow, handing it to me. "You won't be able to read it."
I opened it and looked at it. I didn't know if it was Lena, or the book itself, but the words appeared on the page in front of me slowly, one at a time. It wasn't one of Lena's poems, and it wasn't song lyrics. There weren't many words, just strange drawings, shapes and swirls snaking up and down the page like some col ection of tribal designs.
At the bottom of the page, there was a list.
what i remember
mother
ethan
macon
hunting
the fire
the wind
the rain
the crypt
the me who is not me
the me who would kill
two bodies
the rain
the book
the ring
amma's charm
the moon
Lena grabbed the book out of my hand. There were a few more lines on the page, but I never got to read them. "Stop it!"
I looked at her. "What was that?"
"Nothing, it's private. You shouldn't have been able to see that."
"Then why could I?"
"I must have done the Verbum Celatum Cast wrong. The Hidden Word." She looked at me anxiously, her eyes softening. "It doesn't matter. I was trying to remember that night. The night Macon ... disappeared."
"Died, L. The night Macon died."
"I know he died. Of course he died. I just don't feel like talking about it."
"I know you're probably depressed. It's normal."
"What?"
"It's the next stage."
Lena's eyes flashed. "I know your mom died, and my uncle died. But I have my own stages of grief. This isn't my feelings journal. I'm not your dad, and I'm not you, Ethan. We aren't as much alike as you think."
We looked at each other in a way we hadn't in a long time, maybe ever. There was a nameless moment. I realized we'd been speaking out loud since I got there, without Kelting a word. For the first time, I didn't know what she was thinking, and it was pretty clear she didn't know how I felt either.
But then she did. She held out her arms and drew me into them because, for the first time, I was the one who was crying.
When I got home, al the lights were out, but I stil didn't go inside. I sat down on the porch and watched the fireflies blinking in the dark. I didn't want to see anyone. I wanted to think, and I had a feeling Lena wouldn't be listening. There's something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world real y is, and how far apart we al are. The stars look like they're so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can't. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are.
I stared into the darkness for so long that I thought I saw something move by the old oak in our front yard. For a second, my pulse quickened. Most people in Gatlin didn't even lock their doors, but I knew there were plenty of things that could get past a deadbolt. I saw the air shift again, almost imperceptibly, like a heat wave. I realized it wasn't something trying to break into my house. It was something that had broken out from another one.