“I wish I could talk more,” Levi said, “but my mom’s weird about phone calls during family time. I’ll call you tomorrow from the road, okay?”
“Only if the road is straight and flat, and there’s no other traffic.”
“Will you be back tomorrow?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I miss you.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “I saw you this morning.”
“It’s not the time,” Levi said, and she could hear that he was smiling. “It’s the distance.”
A few minutes later he texted her: “IDEA .. if your bored and you miss me you should write some dirty fan fiction about us. you can read it to me later. great idea right?”
Cath smiled down at the phone stupidly.
She tried to imagine what it would be like to move back home now, to leave Levi behind. She couldn’t even think about what it was going to be like this summer without him.
Their dad wouldn’t really do this. Make Wren drop out of school. That would be crazy.…
But their dad was crazy. And maybe he was right: Wren was out of control. She was the worst kind of out of control—the kind that thinks it’s just fine, thanks.
Cath liked the idea of Wren here. Wren and her dad, all in one place, where Cath could take care of them. If only Cath could break off a piece of herself and leave it here to keep watch.
The front door opened and her dad huffed in from his run, still breathing hard, dropping his keys and his phone on the table. “Hey,” he said to Cath, taking off his glasses to wipe his face, then putting them back on.
“Hey,” she said. “I put your burrito in the oven.”
He nodded and walked past her into the kitchen. Cath followed.
“Are you coming to plead her case?” he asked.
“No.”
“She could have died, Cath.”
“I know. And … I think it’s been bad for a long time. I think she’s just been lucky.”
“As far as we know,” her dad said.
“I just … dropping out of school?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Cath shook her head. “Maybe she should talk to a counselor or something.”
Her dad made a face like Cath had thrown something wet at him. “God, Cath, how would you feel if somebody forced you to talk to a counselor?”
Somebody has, she thought. “I’d hate it,” she said.
“Yeah…” He had the burrito out of the oven and onto a plate, and he was pouring himself a glass of milk. He looked tired still and completely miserable.
“I love you,” she said.
He looked up, holding the carton of milk over the glass. Some of the strain disappeared from his forehead. “I love you, too,” he said, like it was a question.
“It just seemed like a good time to tell you,” she said.
Her dad nodded, his eyes full of some dense feeling.
“Can I borrow your laptop?” she asked.
“Yeah. Of course. It’s in—”
“I know. Thanks.” Cath went to the living room and picked up her dad’s silver laptop. She’d lusted over this thing, but he always said she didn’t need an eighteen-hundred-dollar word processor.
When Cath got upstairs, Wren was on the phone, crying. She got up off her bed and walked into the closet, sitting on the floor and closing the door behind her. This wasn’t strange behavior, except for the crying—it’s what they always did when they needed privacy. They had a big closet.
Cath opened her FanFixx account and paged idly through the comments. There were too many to respond to individually, so she posted a general, “Hey, everybody, thanks—too busy writing to write back!” then opened up the draft of her most recent chapter.…
She’d left off with Baz kneeling at his mother’s gravestone. He was trying to explain to her why he was turning against his father, why he was turning his back on the house of Pitch to fight by Simon’s side.
“It’s not just for him,” Baz said, running his long fingers over his mother’s name. “It’s for Watford. It’s for the World of Mages.”
After a while, Wren came out of the closet and crawled onto Cath’s bed. Cath scooted over and kept typing.
After another while, Wren got under the covers and fell asleep.
And after that, a while later, their dad peeked up over the top of the stairs. He looked at Cath and mouthed, Good night. Cath nodded.
She wrote a thousand words.
She wrote five hundred more.
The room was dark, and Cath wasn’t sure how long Wren had been awake or how long she’d been reading over Cath’s elbow.
“Is the Mage really going to betray Simon, or is it a red herring?” Wren was whispering, even though there was nobody to wake up.
“I think he really is,” Cath said.
“That chapter where he had Simon burn the dragon eggs made me cry for three days.”
Cath stopped typing. “You read that?”
“Of course I did. Have you seen your hits lately? They’re through the roof. Nobody’s bailing on Carry On now.”
“I thought you had,” Cath said. “A long time ago.”