A tiny pause. chill. it’s job fair tomorrow, nobody’s collecting essays
I despised the job fair when I was at school. There aren’t really any jobs around here except breathing particulates at the power plant, so it’s just an AmeriCorps booth and somebody from the Baptist mission group handing out flyers. The main excitement comes at the end, when Don Gravely, CEO of Gravely Power, takes the stage and gives an excruciating speech about hard work and the American spirit, as if he didn’t inherit every cent of his money from his big brother. We all had to shake his hand as we filed out of the gym, and when he got to me he flinched, as if he thought poverty might be contagious. His palm had felt like a fresh-peeled boiled egg.
Imagining Jasper shaking that clammy-ass hand makes my skin feel hot and prickly. Jasper doesn’t need to listen to any bullshit speeches or take home any applications, because Jasper isn’t getting stuck in Eden.
i’ll call miss hudson and say you have a fever, screw the job fair
But he replies: nah I’m good
There’s a lull in our conversation while I leave the river behind and wind uphill. The electric lines swoop overhead and the trees crowd close, blotting out the stars. There are no streetlights in this part of town.
where are you now? im hungry
A wall runs beside the road now, the bricks pocked and sagging with age, the mortar crumbling beneath the wheedling fingers of Virginia creeper and poison ivy. just passing the starling place
Jasper replies with a smiley face shedding a single tear and the letters RIP.
I send him the middle-finger emoji and slide my phone back in my hoodie pocket.
I should hurry back. I should keep my eyes on the painted white stripe of the county road and my mind on Jasper’s savings account.
But I’m tired and cold and weary in some way that’s deeper than muscle and bone. My feet are slowing down. My eyes are drifting up, searching through the twilit woods for a gleam of amber.
There it is: a single high window glowing gold through the dusk, like a lighthouse that wandered too far from the coast.
Except lighthouses are supposed to warn you away, rather than draw you closer. I hop the gully at the side of the road and run my hand along the wall until the brick gives way to cold iron.
The gates of Starling House don’t look like much from a distance—just a dense tangle of metal half-eaten by rust and ivy, held shut by a padlock so large it almost feels rude—but up close you can make out individual shapes: clawed feet and legs with too many joints, scaled backs and mouths full of teeth, heads with empty holes for eyes. I’ve heard people call them devils or, more damningly, modern art,but they remind me of the Beasts in The Underland,which is a nice way of saying they’re unsettling as all hell.
I can still see the shine of the window through the gate. I step closer, weaving my fingers between the open jaws and curling tails, staring up at that light and wishing, childishly, that it was shining for me. Like a porch light left on to welcome me home after a long day.
I have no home, no porch light. But I have what I need, and it’s enough.
It’s just that, sometimes, God help me, I want more.
I’m so close to the gate now that my breath pearls against the cold metal. I know I should let go—the dark is deepening and Jasper needs dinner and my feet are numb with cold—but I keep standing, staring, haunted by a hunger I can’t even properly name.
It occurs to me that I was right: dreams are just like stray cats. If you don’t feed them they get lean and clever and sharp-clawed, and come for the jugular when you least expect it.
I don’t realize how tight I’m gripping the gate until I feel the bite of iron and the wet heat of blood. I’m swearing and wadding the sleeve of my hoodie against the gash, wondering how much the health clinic charges for tetanus shots and why the air smells suddenly rich and sweet—when I realize two things simultaneously.
First, that the light in the window has gone out.
And second, that there is someone standing on the other side of the gates of Starling House.
There are never any guests at Starling House. There are no private parties or visiting relatives, no HVAC repair vans or delivery trucks. Sometimes in a fit of hormonal frustration a pack of high schoolers will talk about climbing the wall and sneaking up to the house itself, but then the mist rises or the wind blows sideways and the dare is never quite made. Groceries are piled outside the gate once a week, the milk sweating through brown paper sacks, and every now and then a sleek black car parks across the road and idles for an hour or two without anyone getting in or out. I doubt whether any outsider has set foot on Starling land in the last decade.
Which means there’s exactly one person who could be standing on the other side of the gate.
The latest Starling lives entirely alone, a Boo Radley–ish creature who was damned first by his pretentious name (Alistair or Alfred, no one can ever agree which), second by his haircut (unkempt enough to imply unfortunate politics, when last seen), and third by the dark rumor that his parents died strangely, and strangely young.4
But the heir to Starling House doesn’t look like a rich recluse or a murderer; he looks like an underfed crow wearing a button-up that doesn’t quite fit, his shoulders hunched against the seams. His face is all hard angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, and his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becoming a mullet. His eyes are clawing into mine.
I become aware that I’m staring back at him from a feral crouch, like a possum caught raiding the motel dumpsters. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but I don’t have a fantastic explanation for why I’m standing at the end of his driveway just after dusk, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance he actually is a murderer, so I do what Mom did whenever she got herself in a tight spot, which was every day: I smile.
“Oh, I didn’t see you there!” I clutch my chest and give a girly little laugh. “I was just passing by and thought I’d take a closer look at these gates. They’re so fancy. Anyway, I didn’t mean to bother you, so I’ll head on my way.”
The heir to Starling House doesn’t smile back. He doesn’t look like he’s ever smiled at anything, actually, or ever will, as if he were carved from bitter stone rather than born in the usual way. His eyes move to my left hand, where the blood has soaked through the wadded sleeve to drip dramatically from my fingertips. “Oh, shit.” I make an abortive effort to shove the hand into my pocket, which hurts. “I mean, that’s nothing. I tripped earlier, see, and—”
He moves so quickly I barely have time to gasp. His hand darts through the gate and catches mine, and I know I should snatch it back—when you grow up on your own from the age of fifteen you learn not to let strange men grab ahold of any part of you—but there’s an enormous padlock between us and his skin is so warm and mine is so damn cold. He turns my hand palm up in his and I hear a low hiss of breath.
I lift one shoulder. “It’s fine.” It’s not fine: my hand is gummy mess of red, the flesh gaping in a way that makes me think superglue and peroxide might be insufficient. “My brother will patch me up. He’s waiting for me, by the way, so I really should get going.”
He doesn’t let go. I don’t pull away. His thumb hovers over the jagged line of the cut, not-quite-touching it, and I realize abruptly that his fingers are trembling, shaking around mine. Maybe he’s one of those people who faint at the sight of blood, or maybe eccentric recluses aren’t accustomed to young women bleeding all over their front gates.