Just admit it, you were.
Guys. You think everything is about you. Maybe I just like that book.
Can you just drop in whenever you want, now?
There was a long pause.
Not usually, but tonight it just sort of happened. I still don’t understand how it works.
Maybe we can ask someone.
Like who?
I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to figure it out on our own. Just like everything else.
Another pause. I tried not to wonder if the “we” spooked her, in case she could hear me. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the other thing; she didn’t want me to find out anything, if it had to do with her.
Don’t try.
I smiled, and felt my eyes closing. I could barely keep them open.
I’m trying.
I turned out the light.
Good night, Lena.
Good night, Ethan.
I hoped she couldn’t read all my thoughts.
Basketball. I was definitely going to have to spend more time thinking about basketball. And as I thought about the playbook in my mind, I felt my eyes closing, myself sinking, losing control….
Drowning.
I was drowning.
Thrashing in the green water, waves crashing over my head. My feet kicked for the muddy bottom of a river, maybe the Santee, but there was nothing. I could see some kind of light, skimming the river, but I couldn’t get to the surface.
I was going down.
“It’s my birthday, Ethan. It’s happening.”
I reached out. She grabbed at my hand, and I twisted to catch it, but she drifted away, and I couldn’t hold on anymore. I tried to scream as I watched her pale little hand drift down toward the darkness, but my mouth filled with water and I couldn’t make a sound. I could feel myself choking. I was starting to black out.
“I tried to warn you. You have to let me go!”
I sat up in bed. My T-shirt was soaking wet. My pillow was wet. My hair was wet. And my room was sticky and humid. I guessed I’d left the window open again.
“Ethan Wate! Are you listenin’ to me? You better get yourself down here yesterday, or you won’t be havin’ breakfast again this week.”
I was in my seat just as three eggs over-easy slid onto my plate of biscuits and gravy. “Good morning, Amma.”
She turned her back to me without so much as a look. “Now you know there’s nothin’ good about it.
Don’t spit down my back and tell me it’s rainin’.” She was still aggravated with me, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I had walked out of class or brought the locket home. Probably both. I couldn’t blame her, though; I didn’t usually get in trouble at school. This was all new territory.
“Amma, I’m sorry about leaving class on Friday. It’s not gonna happen again. Everything’ll be back to normal.”
Her face softened, just a little, and she sat down across from me. “Don’t think so. We all make our choices, and those choices have consequences. I expect you’ll have some hell to pay for yours when you get to school. Maybe you’ll start listenin’ to me now. Stay away from that Lena Duchannes, and that house.”
It wasn’t like Amma to side with everyone else in town, considering that was usually the wrong side of things. I could tell she was worried by the way she kept stirring her coffee, long after the milk had disappeared. Amma always worried about me and I loved her for it, but something felt different since I showed her the locket. I walked around the table and gave her a hug. She smelled like pencil lead and Red Hots, like always.
She shook her head, muttering, “Don’t want to hear about any green eyes and black hair. It’s fixin’ to come up a bad cloud today, so you be careful.”
Amma wasn’t just going dark. Today she was going pitch-black. I could feel it coming up a bad cloud, myself.
Link pulled up in the Beater blasting some terrible tunes, as usual. He turned down the music when I slid into the seat, which was always a bad sign.
“We got trubs.”
“I know.”
“Jackson’s got itself a regular lynch mob this mornin’.”
“What’d you hear?”
“Been goin’ on since Friday night. I heard my mom talkin’, and I tried to call you. Where were you, anyway?”
“I was pretending to bury a hexed locket over at Greenbrier, so Amma would let me back in the house.”
Link laughed. He was used to talk about hexes and charms and the evil eye, where Amma was concerned. “At least she’s not makin’ you wear that stinkin’ bag a onion mess around your neck. That was nasty.”
“It was garlic. For my mom’s funeral.”
“It was nasty.”
The thing about Link was, we’d been friends since the day he gave me that Twinkie on the bus, and after that he didn’t care much what I said or did. Even back then, you knew who your friends were.
That’s what Gatlin was like. Everything had already happened, ten years ago. For our parents, everything had already happened twenty or thirty years ago. And for the town itself, it seemed like nothing had happened for more than a hundred years. Nothing of consequence, that is.