“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I used to think she was interesting. But when we started dating… she just became this weird mirror image of me. Everything I liked, she liked. Everything I wanted to do, she automatically wanted to do. It started driving me up the wall. I wasn’t dating her so I could be in a relationship with myself, you know? And half the time, those weren’t even the real things that I liked and wanted. Hell, I just wanted to sit in my room and work on music. But that wasn’t a couple activity.” He put air quotes around those last two words, rolling his eyes hard. “Plus, and this will sound terrible—”
“What?” I said. Terrible was exactly what I wanted to hear.
“Well, she was kind of obnoxious about… money. Not like her family’s rich or anything. But the way she spent it. Like one day she bought a soda at lunch. And then she left it in the science hall—and when she went back, someone had already taken it. So she bought another one… and didn’t even finish it. Just threw it out half full. Around her I just constantly felt… poor, I guess.”
“Ah.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Okay,” he said, “can we change subjects now? I’m overdue for a dose of normal.”
I gave him a weird smile.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that… it hasn’t exactly been normal over here, either.”
“What’s going on?”
He’d known about the weirdness with my grandparents for forever, so I jumped right into how Caro got me thinking I should do something about it.
“How far are you into the boxes?” he asked.
“Not even halfway. But I’m hoping I’ll find something when I get to the older ones buried in the back.”
Axel nodded. “Can I help?”
The question surprised me. Even Caro hadn’t offered, but then that was probably out of respect for my privacy. That was the kind of person she was—careful and considerate, especially when it came to personal stuff.
But this was different. Axel was practically family.
“Of course,” I said.
He let out a breath that sounded like relief. “So, I’m forgiven? We’re okay?”
I picked up my charcoal. “I’ll let you know the color when I figure it out.”
Half of winter break was gone in a blink, swallowed by the basement. With Axel’s help, we were cutting through the boxes way faster.
Caro and her family were snowboarding in Colorado for the week, and I’d promised to text her if I found anything interesting. Every once in a while she’d send a random photo. I smiled at the shot of her high in the air midjump, and one of Gaelle and Charles fallen in the snow but still holding hands, and later rushed to hide my phone when she sent her snow sculpture of a giant vulva.
“Your cell is awfully busy these days,” said Axel.
“Jealous?”
I was only teasing, but the uncertain look on his face made me wonder if my words hit the mark. He straightened out his expression with a roll of his eyes.
“You’ll like Caro,” I told him. “When she gets back, you’ll see.”
Bad weather messed up Dad’s flight. It was our first Christmas without him. His absence was like a crack we stepped over so often we usually forgot it was there—but not on Christmas. On Christmas it was an empty black pit gaping up at us. We weren’t religious or anything, but this was Mom’s favorite time of year.
All morning she wore around this false holiday cheer like a garish sweater. Dad called from his hotel—I talked to him for about twenty seconds before my mother took the phone and carried it upstairs. I stood in the hall with my ear turned up, waiting to hear the crest of an argument. But she was back in the kitchen after just a few minutes, frying up a batch of pot stickers.
Axel came over after dinner so we could do presents. We turned off all the lights except for my winking icicle strands, and settled onto my bed cross-legged and facing each other. It had been an unspoken rule since seventh grade: Our gifts had to be homemade.
He unzipped his backpack, and what he dumped out was the last thing I would have expected: a projector from school. I recognized the last name of a history teacher scrawled on its side in Sharpie.
“You stole a projector?” I said.
“Borrowed indefinitely. For presentation’s sake.” He’d opened up his laptop and clicked through folders. “Close your eyes.”
I snorted.
“I’m serious!” He folded the laptop halfway shut. “Close your eyes, or you don’t get your present.”
I threw myself back so I was horizontal and held a pillow over my face. I could hear him typing away.
“It’s hard to breathe like this, you know.”
“You’re bad at following directions. I didn’t say to smother yourself.” More typing sounds. Some clicking. “Okay. You remember that thumb drive I gave you? With the Lockhart Orchard tracks?”
“Of course.” I immediately wished I’d said something more casual.
“This goes with those. You can come back.”
I sat up. It took my eyes a minute to adjust: He’d turned the light of the projector up toward the ceiling and placed the mouth of a glass fishbowl upside down over the lens to distort the projection. Bold watercolor strokes domed against my ceiling and walls.
“Ready? Set. Listen.” Axel’s finger came down on his space bar. The music started up, and I immediately recognized it. The swell of strings, the cutting edges of electric guitar. The watercolors shifted. Royal-blue sketches of playground spun around us. The music darkened and the playground crumbled. Black streaks of lightning stabbed down from the ceiling in time to the jumping notes of the low bass.
The world was made of jagged pieces that spun and twisted. He’d somehow taken his watercolors and spliced them into elements that tiled and tessellated and fit themselves back together again.
“I made a video to go with every track,” he said, sounding almost shy.
“It’s incredible,” I told him. “Seriously. I don’t even know how you came up with this.”
“I designed them to work best like this, projected in a bubble,” he said with a grin. He pushed a button, and the next piece began to play.
I fell onto my back and lay there hugging my pillow as the images bent and shifted. After a few seconds, Axel let himself go horizontal, too, tucking his sweatshirt under his head. I could smell his shampoo. It was a comforting scent and made me want to touch his hair. I snuck a glance at him.
But he wasn’t watching the projection. He was watching me. Our eyes locked and heat surged up into my face. I didn’t look away.
38
Every time I rise up out of those memories it’s like coming up for air. I try to shake the feeling of reliving my life. Try to think about something else, something that doesn’t have to do with Axel. Because to think about Axel is to think of that day on the couch in his basement, the same day my mother became a bird. The day that everything changed irreversibly.
What I need is a different kind of remembering. My hands are aching from all the cutting now, so I set down the shirts and the scissors and yank open the drawer with the incense and matches.
Since the feather burned up and showed me the past, I’ve been trying to puzzle out how it worked. The first stick brought me things I’d nearly forgotten. But when I lit the incense with the feather—it triggered something in the smoke. Something different. It mixed in memories that weren’t mine, moments I didn’t know had happened.
Alone in my room, wrapped in the quiet of insomnia, I light a new stick of incense. Unfold the damp rag, take up my handful of tea leaves—
39
—SMOKE & MEMORIES—
There’s the spark, the colors of time changing.
There’s a burst of light and a smell like woodsmoke.
Slowly, my eyes settle into the dimness. I’m in a small cottage where a low fire burns in a pit carved out of the wall. As I turn and look, some pieces are blurrier than others, their colors faded like in old photographs.