“No one ever does,” Martin says.
He finally finishes, gently pats the blood away, then covers it with a square of clingfilm, taping it to her body. “No swimming for a month,” he says. “And try to keep it out of the sun for as long as you can.”
“Do you have a mirror?” Henna asks.
Martin gets up and brings over a large mirror that reflects her side and the brand-new tattoo.
Under the cling film, her skin is livid from where it’s been poked and written on. Blood wells up but not as much as I might have thought. The tattoo is there, clear as day, reflected in the mirror. It’s just one word, in some really amazingly beautiful lettering. No wonder she wanted Martin specifically.
Henna takes my hand again. And she cries again. And I wipe away her tears again. “I don’t even think your parents would mind if those were the rails you were coming off of,” I say.
“I don’t want them to know,” she says. “This is mine. All mine.”
In the mirror, reflected backwards, Henna now has a tattoo that reads, simply, Teemu.
I wake in the middle of the night for some reason or another. Maybe my own snoring was getting too loud or a dream I can’t remember.
I say this because I know it’s not the car that wakes me. I don’t hear it until I’ve turned over and made myself comfortable again. A car not my family’s is rare at our end of this very, very wooded road, but not impossible. There’s a turning just before us and sometimes people miss it.
But then I realize it’s heading in the wrong direction.
It’s coming from the Field.
I get up without turning my light on and look out through my curtains. There’s a car pulling slowly out of the entrance of the Field, like you have to do because of all the mud and bumps. It’s got its headlights off and all I can make out are those small yellow lights on the side that some cars have for no apparent reason.
I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that it’s dark out here. We’ve got streetlights, but they’re spaced far apart and the closest is down the road a bit, only enough to cast a shallow light as the car pulls out of the Field and past my driveway.
But it’s enough to see the driver.
It’s Nathan. He’s been parked in the Field in the middle of the night, and now he’s driving away with his lights off, hoping nobody sees him.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH, in which Satchel doubts the Prince’s intentions towards her; he weeps, professing his eternal love, one that he’s been waiting to give for millennia but had never found a repository for until he met Satchel; they kiss, it might lead to something, but then they hear the explosion from the outskirts of town.
“But you said you didn’t want to go,” Meredith says to our mom. “You said people took advantage of politicians in crowds and that it was like having squirrels crawl all over your naked skin.”
“Try not to say that in public, sweetie,” Mom says. “And while that may be true, Mommy’s running for Congress now and to be seen at a Bolts of Fire charity concert in my own future district, hopefully–”
“But you said you didn’t want to go,” Meredith says again, apparently too stunned to get past her main point.
“I didn’t then, but I would like to go now.”
Me and Mel wait behind Meredith. The concert’s in an hour, pre-dusk so all the little kiddies get home in time for bed. Meredith is covered head-to-toe in Bolts of Fire fan gear: T-shirt, twisty bracelets, belt, shoe buckles, tasselled trousers like Sapphire wears in the “Bold Sapphire” video, a cowboy hat that has the clean-shaven Caucasian faces of Bolts of Fire around the brim.