“That bargain was made willingly. I cannot alter it.”
“I don’t care! Do it anyway!” But I knew she wouldn’t, even as I said it.
“There are always consequences.”
Like me. The Crucible.
I closed my eyes and thought about Lena and Amma and Link. Marian and my dad. My mom. All the people I loved.
All the people I’d lost.
The people I couldn’t risk losing.
There wasn’t a lot to decide. Not as much I thought there would be. I guess some decisions are made before you make them. I took a step and found my way back into the light. “Promise me.”
“It is binding. An oath. A promise, as you call it.”
That wasn’t good enough. “Say it.”
“Yes. I promise.” Then she said a word that wasn’t in any language or even any kind of sound I could understand. But the word itself sounded like thunder and lightning, and I understood the truth in it.
It was a promise.
“Then I’m sure.”
A second later, I was standing in Lilian English’s parlor again, while she lay collapsed in the flowered chair. I could hear my father’s voice coming from the other end of the phone in her hand.
“Hello? Hello—”
My brain shifted to autopilot. I picked up the phone, hung up on my dad, and called 911 for the very Mortal Lilian English. I had to put the phone down without saying a word, because Sissy Honeycutt worked dispatch down at the station house, and she’d recognize my voice for sure. I couldn’t get caught at my unconscious English teacher’s house twice. But it didn’t matter. Now they had the address. They would send out the ambulance, like they did before.
And Mortal Mrs. English wouldn’t remember I had been there at all.
I drove straight to Ravenwood without stopping, without thinking, without turning on the radio or rolling down the window. I didn’t remember how I got there. One minute I was driving through town, and the next I was pounding on Lena’s front door. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was trapped in the wrong atmosphere, in some kind of terrible nightmare.
I remember slamming my fist on the Caster moon as many times as I could, but it didn’t respond to my touch. Maybe there was no way to hide how different I was. How incomplete.
I remember calling and crying and Kelting her name, until Lena finally opened the door in her purple Chinese pajamas. I remembered them from the night she told me her secret, that she was a Caster. Sitting on my front steps in the middle of the night.
Now, sitting on hers, I told her mine.
What happened after that was too painful to remember at all.
We lay in Lena’s old iron bed, tangled together like we could never be taken apart. We couldn’t touch, but we couldn’t not touch. We couldn’t stop staring at each other, but every time our eyes met, it only hurt more. We were exhausted, but there was no way we could sleep.
There wasn’t enough time to whisper all the things we needed to say. But the words themselves didn’t matter. We were only thinking one thing.
I love you.
We counted the hours, the minutes, the seconds.
We were running out of all of them.
12.21
The Last Game
It was the last day. There was nothing left to decide. Tomorrow was the solstice, and my mind was made up. I lay in my bed and stared up at my blue plaster ceiling, painted the color of the sky to keep the carpenter bees from nesting. One more morning. One more painted blue sky.
I got home from Lena’s and went back to sleep. I left my window open, in case anyone wanted to see me, haunt me, or hurt me. No one came.
I could smell the coffee and hear my dad walking around downstairs. Amma was at the stove. Waffles. Definitely waffles. She must have been waiting for me to wake up.
I decided not to tell my dad. After everything he’d gone through with my mom, I didn’t think he would be able to understand. I couldn’t stand to think what this might do to him. The way he went crazy when my mom died, I understood now. I had been too scared to let myself feel those things before. And now, when it didn’t matter how I felt, I was feeling every one of them. Sometimes life was weird that way.
Link and I tried to have lunch at the Dar-ee Keen, but we finally gave up. He couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t either. You know how prisoners get to choose their last meal, and it’s such a big deal? It didn’t work that way for me. I didn’t want shrimp ’n’ grits or brown sugar pound cake. I couldn’t keep anything down.
And they can’t give you the one thing you really want, anyway.
Time.
Finally, we went to the basketball court at the elementary school playground and shot some hoops. Link let me win, which was weird because I used to be the one who let him win. Things had changed a lot in the last six months.
We didn’t talk much. Once, he caught the ball and held it after I passed it to him. He was looking at me the same way he had when he sat down next to me at my mom’s funeral, even though the section was all roped off and only the family was supposed to sit there. “I’m not good at this stuff, you know?”