He grasped my elbows and lifted me toward him. “I’m real.” He was sweaty and smelled it, which made him all the more real. He kissed me.
“You two have gotten acquainted, I see!” a voice said. It was Amanda.
“Oh yes.” I felt my face grow hot. I was blushing as I had not since I was a girl the first time. I turned away so they could not see me shaking with unshed tears. “James is an old friend, from Boston. That’s why I was asking about him.”
“Very cool,” Amanda said. To James, she said, “You should take Kendra to the dance tomorrow.”
“I should,” he agreed, adding, “I should also probably take a shower,” after Amanda and Chris left.
“But I don’t want to let you out of my sight,” I said. “How did you find me? It’s not just a coincidence, is it?” I wanted to touch him, hold him, keep holding him so he couldn’t leave again.
“Hardly. I found you the way everyone finds everyone—on Facebook.”
I laughed. “Only old people use Facebook now.”
“No one’s much older than you.”
It was true. I’d made a Facebook profile only recently. I finally realized that here in Miami, no one cared if I was a witch. There were people calling themselves witches who weren’t even witches and plenty of voodoo ceremonies involving dead chickens in the woods. Probably no one would even believe me if I said I was one.
“I didn’t think they’d let a person list 1652 as a birth year,” he said. “That was a dead giveaway.”
“I may have used some magic for that.”
“And you listed this school. So I came here. I’ve been looking for you for a few days now.”
“Sixty years and a few days.”
“Maybe three hundred years and a few days.”
“And now you’ve found me.”
“And I’ll never leave,” he said.
“Never? No more wars? There’s always a war somewhere.”
“I’m too old. I’ve done my part.” He took me in his arms. “I used to fight because I had nothing else to live for. Now I have you, finally.”
“Finally!” I pulled him close.
I took James home with me that night. After three hundred years, I decided I was allowed to do that. And that Monday, we were married, secretly, at the courthouse. We had to ditch school, but it was okay. I’d been to school before, ten or twenty times.
Still, we decided to stay in high school a while longer. And then, maybe someday, we’d go to college. Take five years, maybe ten. It didn’t really matter. We had forever.
The End
Historical Note on Beheld
Kendra, James, and most of the people they encounter are fictional, but several of the people in the stories (and everyone else in the first one) are real—though there is no evidence they had magical experience.
The Salem Witch Trials have always interested me since I played Martha Corey in an eighth grade play, Reunion on Gallows Hill, and Ruth Putnam in the opera version of The Crucible in college. Both appear in this story, and both were real people, though Arthur Miller renamed Ruth Putnam. Her real name was Ann, and she was one of the principal witnesses in the Salem Witch Trials, sending many women, including Martha Corey, to their deaths at the scaffold.
Ann interested me because she was the only one of the various “crying out girls” who ever apologized to the families of the women she’d hurt. The text of her apology is included after this note, and it made me feel that, somehow, she was swept up in something she didn’t entirely understand. She was twelve at the time. Thus, this is a peer pressure story of sorts, with grave consequences as some peer pressure stories have. Ann’s real story played out as Tituba said it would in my story. Her parents died when she was nineteen, and she was left to raise her siblings. She never married and died at thirty-seven. There is no evidence that her father could morph into a wolf, though.
Prince Karl Theodor of Bavaria was a real person. There is no evidence that he was a cad or was involved in any gold-spinning activities. He married twice and fathered three children. He was a second son and, thus, not heir to the throne.
The baby hatch or “foundling wheel,” which Rumpelstiltskin describes to Cornelia, was also a real thing. In that way, a young woman could leave an unwanted baby so that it would be taken in. In modern times, all fifty states and numerous other countries have “safe-haven laws,” which allow young women to leave unwanted babies less than thirty days old in a safe place, often a fire station. Many of the older foundlings died, but this is not the case in modern times.