My heart beats so fast it makes me dizzy. “So you’re not going?”
Henry picks at a cuticle. “I don’t know. My mom says she’s still leaving. She’s going to take Lisa and just go without my dad.”
“And you?” Henry can’t move to New Hampshire. He just can’t.
“She says it’s my choice. I can stay with my dad or go with her and Lisa.”
Breathe, Azra, breathe. “So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” Henry drops his head into his hands. He rubs his face roughly. When he reemerges, his cheeks and eyes are red. “Because there’s only one reason to go and only one reason to stay.”
He doesn’t have to say it. Even if I couldn’t read his thoughts I’d know what both those reasons are. The only reason to go is to be with Lisa. And the only reason to stay is to be with me.
26
“Stop the moping,” Henry says. “It’s not a done deal or anything.”
It’s my day off, and Henry and I are walking to the far end of the beach. We stroll down the path over the dunes and wind our way through the overpopulated swathe of beach dominated by families. Loaded down with toddlers, toys, and tents, moms and dads plop themselves on minuscule patches of sandy real estate rather than haul themselves any farther down the beach.
Amid this first wave of beachgoers sit the lifeguards. Including Nate.
In the week since Henry first told me about New Hampshire, my feelings about my probation have vacillated between love and hate. And that line is not just fine, it’s dotted, it zigzags, and it occasionally stabs me square in the chest.
I wave to Nate and my bangle shimmies down my wrist. On the love side of the line is how freeing it is to be relieved of the temptation and the pressure of using magic. My probation has turned being Jinn into a job. I’ll clock in, grant a wish, and clock out. Strangely, my bronze bangle has made me feel more like a normal HIT than ever before.
Henry hops over two boys buried up to their necks in the sand. “Don’t make a big thing out of it yet. My dad’s track record is far from encouraging.”
Mr. Carwyn has two job interviews within easy driving distance of Henry’s grandparents’ house, so his mom, dad, and Lisa are staying in New Hampshire for a few days. The only reason Henry was allowed to stay behind is so he can let in the real-estate agent who needs to assess the property and determine a fair price for renters and for … for buyers. And that’s what makes me scurry on over to the hate side of my probation line.
Because if I had my powers, maybe I could help his family and Henry wouldn’t have to leave. Though, in truth, from the way things sound, what’s been going on inside the walls of Henry’s house may take more than magic to solve.
At the very least though, if Henry does have to ditch civilization to go live free or die in the woods of New Hampshire, having my magic back would mean I could app there to visit him.
“It’s not fair,” I say as we transition into the stretch of beach home to the second category of beachgoers: couples and surreptitiously day-drinking teens whose respective intolerance for screaming children and desire for privacy outweigh the ten-minute trek to the restrooms.
“You know what’s not fair?” Henry says. “You being a total tease.”
My neck spins like I’m possessed. With the amount of time Henry’s been spending with Chelsea, I figured we were past whatever may or may not have been going on between us because of boy-girl, Nate-Chelsea drama.
“I mean,” he says, smirking, “you can’t even shape-shift.”
That book. That stupid encyclopedia of spirits book. He checked the monstrous tome, half the size of my cantamen, out of the library again and keeps taunting me with supposed Jinn facts. Many cultures, especially in the Middle East and Africa, believe in spirits called djinn who, like angels, are supposedly part of a community of intermediary spirits who run the world, each having a specific function and dominion.
“Isn’t granting wishes enough?” I say. “I need to be able to turn into a rabbit or something?”
“Dog. Or snake, mostly, according to the book.”
“And the book is always right.”
Henry peers over his sunglasses at me. “Do I need to remind you it was spot-on with how to summon the djinn? Entice them with their favorite gifts of sweets and alcohol and you can get them to do everything from guard your house to chase away your bad luck. Then again, I’ve been feeding you wine-soaked marshmallows in those s’mores, but so far my luck hasn’t changed.”
“Hilarious.” I bump into a thick, tattooed arm carrying a guitar. “Now do I need to remind you what it said about us hating crowds?” I grasp onto the rash guard shirt he’s wearing, which happens to be the last item I conjured before my probation, and let him lead us through the bustling boat town.
This third and final group of beachgoers sees beer-bellied dads anchoring their floating vessels and spending the afternoon off-loading and then reloading what appears to be the entire contents of a small house (standing grills, full-height tables and chairs, coolers the size of a five-year-old).
Henry guides me around a nearly invisible fishing line. “Hating crowds and the cold, a given. But that thing about feeding you salt provoking you? That I had to learn the hard way.”
I forgot about the salt thing. Grains of truth actually do seem to lurk in most of what Henry read in that book. Who influenced who will forever be a mystery.
Approaching the estuary where the ocean meets the river, we arrive at the empty span of beach home to a cornucopia of large black rocks. During high tide, they disappear. It being low tide, I weave through until I reach the widest one.
I climb up and sprawl out. “Earlier you could walk right by and never know these were here.” Seaweed and unidentifiable slime creep through the cracks and dampen the backs of my arms and legs. “If something can’t be seen by the naked eye, does that mean it ceases to exist?”
My powers, my father, my Henry.