“See you later.” My sinuses burn. I force myself to smile. “Oh shit! Hold on.”
I scramble to unclasp the necklace from around my neck. I forgot what it was like to walk around without its gentle weight pressed into my skin. I swing the chain around Riley’s neck.
“Here,” I say, fumbling with the clasp. How did Xander make this look so easy? My thumbnail can barely open the damn thing. “Take it with you. Your mom would be so pissed if she knew.”
She laughs, and it’s wet and husky and so very much hers, even though it’s coming out of cracked, gray lips. “Fuck a duck. She would hate it. That’s awesome.”
The four of us take one last moment together. The urge to rip the grimoire out of Riley’s arms and find the recipe for putting off this goodbye is almost too much to bear. But our paths are diverging, and all I can do is be grateful that we had this week that I extorted from the universe.
I’m a witch. I’m always grateful.
The girls wander to their graves. They kick off their stolen shoes and set their toes in the dirt. The coven edges nearer again, sensing midnight. It is the witching hour, after all.
Since there isn’t a choir here, I pull up a karaoke track on my phone. The computerized instruments sound like they’re being played inside a tin can, all metallic dissonance and echoes. There are way more flutes than I think are really necessary, and the piano sounds more like a wheezy organ. But Dayton doesn’t seem to mind. She smiles dreamily and opens her hands, conjuring the song out of herself.
“I’m always chasing rainbows, waiting to find a little blue-bird . . .”
After the last verse, her notes are still floating on the air, trapped in fog, when the earth trembles and the graveyard goes silent.
TWENTY-FIVE
ALEXANDER GREENWAY WAS buried next to his sister. The singular news article on the Cross Creek Examiner website didn’t mention the books that burned with him or the remnants of three fancy dresses with traces of formaldehyde. There was no report of Xander’s body having any wounds or anomalies. Looking too deep into one of those things would mean having to answer for the others. I think that no one involved in the investigation wants to know how Xander got his sister’s burial dress out of the grave or why he was covered in fungus or why he showed no signs of struggle.
Or our police department just sucks?
Either way, his death was ruled an accident, but everyone at Fairmont Academy is treating it like the fourth suicide.
To be fair, they’ve had too much practice to do anything else.
Ms. Chu isn’t eulogizing today. Neither is Mr. Greenway. He hired another funeral director to come in and perform the service. Having both of his kids die in the span of one week has obviously been too much for him to take. His face is as gray and shadowed as Riley’s was the last time I saw her. Mrs. Greenway is in a haze like she’s sleepwalking. Suspicion and silent accusations seem to stand like a force field between them and everyone else. Their pew has no family members, just members of the church Xander and Riley never attended. I think I recognize Dayton’s parents.
I’m sitting with my family, sandwiched between my sisters. Mom seemed pretty sure that I’d try to walk out of the service, so she trapped me. I don’t blame her. I probably would walk out of this if I could. I already know that this will be the last time I ever walk through the doors of the Greenway Funeral Home. Everything—from the yellow wallpaper to the too-thick carpet—makes me think of the sharpest edges of knowing Riley and Xander. The scab they left on my life might never fully heal, but I can at least avoid infecting it.
After another awful performance by the show choir, I skip the receiving line with the totally real excuse that I need to get to work. My hours at Lucky Thirteen flex since there are very few customers and I’m not being paid, but my parents don’t know that. I told them that working there is helping me make peace with Riley’s death. I’ve even started toeing the line and referring to it as “her suicide,” even though I know that she didn’t mean to die. It makes them feel like I’ve made emotional progress. It makes them less scared of me.
The graveyard took back Riley, June, and Dayton but kept the iron rose hematite, so I’ll be working off my three-hundred-dollar debt to Toby by stocking shelves and tying together different kinds of herb brushes. On top of my new weekly meetings at school with Dr. Miller to discuss my PTSD and depression—apparently wanting to stay in bed for weeks at a time and not talk to anyone isn’t the healthiest coping tool?—my life is suddenly full of those meddling old witches.
The sky is blanketed in white, the sun’s light and warmth smothered by clouds. I stop at the edge of the bright green lawn to button up my jacket. I adjust my cuffs over the seed-bead bracelets I’ve started making again. Dr. Miller thought it would be a good idea to return to some of my non-magical hobbies so that I don’t accidentally fuck with the balance of the universe again out of sheer boredom. It feels good to craft. Counting out the tiny beads is almost meditative. And they’re prettier than wearing a hair tie on my wrist every day.
Binx prances out of the neighbors’ shrubs and rubs himself against my ankles, his tail swishing through the air. I scoop him up, rubbing my thumb behind his ear until he purrs. “You think the Greenways are going to remember to feed you now? Mrs. Greenway wouldn’t even let you live indoors.”
“So witches really do talk to cats? Does he talk back?”
Aniyah Dorsey is walking down the driveway toward me. Her silver frames have been switched out for sunglasses. She’s wearing all black, down to her lipstick. It makes her teeth look especially white when she flashes me a smile. I resent how cool she looks. She doesn’t look like she just went to a funeral; she looks like she just buried someone.
“I didn’t see you in there,” I say, gesturing toward the house with Binx, who makes his grumpy mooing sound.
“I snuck out the side door during the slideshow when Chloe Wellington started scream-crying,” she says. Her tongue wedges under her upper lip. “I didn’t want to see him again anyway.”
I understand the feeling. It’s hard to see his face and not see a monster. I guess people have been trying to warn us forever that the boogeyman would be just some guy. Man is in his title, after all.
I know that I couldn’t have saved him, even if I’d wanted to.
Maybe one day the guilt will be easier to bear.
“You doing okay?” I ask Aniyah.
“Since running for my life out of a burning house with a group of zombies from a mushroom demon that I can never tell anyone about? Yeah. I only wake up screaming sometimes. Otherwise, I’m hella chill.” Her lips purse, and she tips her head up toward the sun, her hair swishing around her back. “It’s getting easier, but only because it’s starting to feel fake.”
I nod. “Nightmares have a way of doing that.”
“And we’re the only ones who even know that it was real.”
“Us and Caleb Treadwell.”
“Oh shit.” She hops with excitement, then has to right her sunglasses. “Did you hear he had to pull his Rausch Scholarship application because he plagiarized the essay?”
“I’m out of the loop at Fairmont right now. Rumors don’t really make it to you when you don’t have any friends,” I say.
“Uh, I’m telling you the rumor right now. Consider yourself in the loop.”
Dr. Miller has been harping on me for not giving people a chance. By people, she mostly means Caleb, who has invited me to join the honor society despite my mediocre grades. I think he pities me because I’m partially responsible for Xander dying. Dr. Miller thinks that he just misses our dead mutual friends and is trying to be nice.
If I spend the rest of my life avoiding people who could die on me, I’ll be alone for a long time. And what are the chances that I’ll immediately befriend another murderer?
You know what? I really don’t want to know the statistics on that.