He came unfrozen gradually, in slow motion, thawing out, his cheeks flushing pink. He held the figurine in his hands, cupping it carefully. His thumb was on the boy’s head. Alvin. “Williams,” he said, in the softest possible voice.
“You knew her,” I said.
“I told you, I took her class.”
“No,” I clarified. “You knew her.”
“I can explain.”
“She dedicated the book to you.”
“We were friends,” he said.
“She left you something in her will.”
“She . . . did?”
“Mr. Williams,” I said.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“And you were friends.”
“We were friends. I’ve known your aunt for a long time.”
“How could you have known her for ‘a long time’? You only audited her class. That’s one semester.”
“It’s complicated, Lottie.”
“I’m so tired of this cryptic thing with you,” I said, and my words came out harder than I’d meant them to, but once they were out I realized that my pulse was racing and my entire body felt hot and itchy with anger. “I’m so tired of it. With you, with Aunt Helen . . . These letters, these secrets. Why won’t anybody just be honest with me?”
“I can’t. . . . You have to trust me,” Sam said.
“I don’t have to do anything. I’ve only known you for a couple weeks; I don’t have to trust you. You have to earn someone’s trust. If you had known my aunt, you should have told me.”
“I tried, I swear—it’s just not that easy.”
“So tell me now. Go on. I’m all ears.”
I wanted to scream; I wanted to explode; I wanted to know whatever it was that Sam wasn’t telling me.
But he didn’t say anything. He squeezed the figurine hard in his hands; his knuckles turned white and his face was unreadable, completely devoid of emotion.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Pretty sick of hearing people tell me they’re sorry. That won’t bring Aunt Helen back, and it won’t excuse you for lying. Now throw it.”
I raised the bat back up and squeezed my hands around it, lining my knuckles up like my mother had shown me.
“What?” he said.
“THROW IT,” I yelled, not even looking at him, my eyes trained on the figurine in his hand, my single desire in that moment being to hit the absolute shit out of something.
He threw it; the figurine left his fingers in a slow arc. I followed it with my eyes and the bat flew and blurred and connected with a loud smash, and the brother and sister exploded to smithereens and went everywhere, pieces everywhere, sailing through the air like they had momentarily figured out how to defy gravity.
I dropped the bat and looked down at the wood floor of the observation tower, expecting it to be covered in ceramic dust, but it was clean. Then I was running down the stairs and Sam was following so closely behind me I could feel the wind his body made, and we were looking all around the tower for pieces of the boy and the girl, for a single piece, for just some proof that it had existed at all, but we couldn’t find any. There was nothing left. Poof.
I whirled around to face Sam.
“Who are you?” I said.
But he didn’t answer me. He wouldn’t even look at me.
E. sat down with Margo and Alvin the next day. He was alone, having neglected to bring any of the other initials with him to their meeting. Alvin appreciated this. Margo was still prickly. She didn’t trust E. as far as she could throw him.
“I hope you’ll forgive my associate’s behavior last night,” E. began. “We’re all just a little bit on edge, you see. The house in the woods has not been breached for many, many years.”
“How come?” Alvin asked, cutting Margo off before she could say something rude.
“The house is under an enchantment. It will not open to just anyone. I believe it was waiting for you to reach the age of thirteen, at which point it made itself known to you, and you were able to open the door.”
Next to him, Margo huffed. Alvin knew it was a sore spot for her that she couldn’t open the door.
“That house contains great secrets. Many years of magical study. I wonder . . . if you were able to do a bit of looking around?” E. asked.
Alvin shot a sideways look at his sister.
The look did not escape E.
“In particular,” he continued, “perhaps you came across a small bottle. It would have had a label on it—Everlife Formula. A little thing, really. Of no great importance.”
“If it’s of no great importance, why are you asking about it?” Margo said.
“It has a certain sentimental value,” E. explained.
“Our parents have a pretty big sentimental value to us. Maybe we could concentrate on finding them,” Margo spat.
“Of course, of course. But if you’d only be so kind as to tell me whether you’d found anything like that?”
Margo shrugged, and through a great effort made her face look less volatile, less combative. She smiled her sweetest smile, the one that only looked fake to Alvin because he knew her so well, and said, “Nope.”
So that was that. They weren’t going to tell him. And Alvin thought it was just as well.
—from Alvin Hatter and the Everlife Society
20
Em came over late that night, and we made a fort in my room between my bed and my desk, like we had done when we were kids and we didn’t have to worry about things like ceramic figurines vanishing into thin air. We turned our phone flashlights on and pointed them up at the blanket-ceiling of our new world, and I couldn’t help but think of the poor me in some poor alternate reality that had never met Em and was not, at this moment, sharing a bowl of popcorn with her and thinking up the weirdest possible scenarios for how Sam had known my aunt and why he hadn’t told me.
“He could be a sort of boy genius? Like maybe he edited all her books, but they had to keep it a secret because his parents don’t want him to be famous?” she said, chewing. I couldn’t tell if she was serious. I couldn’t tell if any of this was serious.
“You don’t think they were like . . .”
“Oh god, Lottie. No, I do not think that,” she said, covering her eyes with the palm of her hand. “I truly don’t think that.”
“Good. Me neither.”
“I think it’s probably something really simple. Like, he said he took her class, right? They probably just got close that way, in a mentor-student type of way.”
“But why wouldn’t he have told me that?”
“Maybe he didn’t want you to think he only wanted to be your love interest because of her?”
“Please never call him my love interest again.”
“Fine. Maybe he didn’t want you to think he only wanted to be your kissy-face partner because—”
“We haven’t kissed. You know that, right?”
Oh no. Was there a universe where we had kissed? I didn’t know if I wanted that universe to exist. I hadn’t made up my mind about that universe yet, and I didn’t want some version of me to have figured it out before this version of me.
“I think that’s probably it,” Em said. “It’s weird, you know, how famous she was. Some people don’t know how to deal with that. Remember when Mae Bryant started crying because you knew what was going to happen to Alvin and Margo before she did?”