She sounds the signal. Will throws a handful of Variants over his head and leaps from the dock. He and Leroy take off, their lights practically colliding as they fight to take the lead. They are evenly matched, carving across the water in tandem, their lights reflections of each other.
They reach the other side in a handful of breaths, slightly ahead of all the others, and simultaneously turn back toward us. For a moment they become a single bright smudge in the distance. Then they separate into distinct lines again as they rocket back across the lake.
From this distance, Will’s spark looks like Mars next to Leroy’s crazed sun. Leroy edges dangerously closer to Will, and I wonder if anyone has ever gone down into the black water before. How difficult it would be to find them once their armbands hit the surface and were extinguished. My stomach twists.
They shove into each other and ricochet apart. A murmur goes through the crowd, but somehow neither of them goes under.
We rise to our feet as they near, and the closer they get to the beach, the closer they get to each other. Both sides of fans are yelling, our attempts at quietness forgotten, and one of Leroy’s golden bands reaches out toward Will. But Will sidesteps the shove at the last possible second, a move that appears to catch Leroy off-guard.
A second before they reach the finish, Leroy loses his momentum and splashes into the water. He emerges, sputtering, as the other racers dodge to avoid running right over his head.
Will steps triumphantly onto the beach, his arms still ringed with blood and fire.
A loud cheer erupts that I’m sure anyone within a mile radius can hear. He’s taking large, measured breaths, as if his lungs were wings expanding under his ribs. Leroy emerges from the water a moment later, his shirt slicked to his chest. Scowling, he accepts a beach towel and a handful of Embers from one of his teammates.
I hang behind George as the crowd pushes toward Will and knocks him around in congratulations, ruffling his hair, punching him in the arm.
But just before he’s hoisted into the air and carried away, he searches through the crowd until he catches sight of me. Grins until his crooked tooth shows. And I think that for the rest of my life I will never forget this night—?when under an empty ink sky, a boy who shone brighter than the stars stopped long enough to smile at me.
The crowd scatters into the night, leaving apple cores and soda bottles and tattered copies of “The Mackelroy Misfortune” strewn in the sand, but a few of us stay behind to hide the evidence of the race.
George collects the abandoned Mackelroy papers and then digs a hole to set them alight. He douses the flames with lake water until the words are dark ash blending into white sand.
“I better get going,” he says. “Don’t want to risk the wrath of Agatha Mackelroy.” He bids us all goodbye and lopes off into the trees, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world.
Beas and Thom crouch near the lapping water, stalling for time, drawing in the sand with the edges of sticks. “So when will I see you again?” Thom asks.
I’m not trying to eavesdrop, but their voices carry.
Beas bends to draw half a dozen notes in the sand. She pushes her hair behind her ears. “Probably not until after the next Disappearance. My parents are being extra nuts lately.”
“When’s that again?”
She looks at him as if she can’t believe he would forget. “Two weeks.”
“Do you . . . have any guess for what might disappear?”
She shivers, then searches in her pocket for more Embers. She drapes them over him, then herself, and shakes her head.
“I hope it’s not something big,” he adds.
“Is there something in particular that would break the deal for you?” Her voice is suddenly brittle and high, and so unlike her. She tosses her stick in the sand.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t want to do this now. It’s been such a nice night.”
“No, really, what do you mean?”
She blows up the fringe of her bangs. “I mean, what happens if it is something big? I’m going to keep losing things, and you’re not. Our lives are going to keep looking more and more different.” She says softly, “I’m going to be more and more different.”
He comes up behind her, hugs her to him. “It’ll be all right,” he says. “Maybe it won’t be a bad one this time. Maybe it will hardly matter at all.”
“You should find someone else, Thom,” she says softly. “There is someone else out there who would be better for you, and I know that.”
“But I love you, Beas. I don’t want someone else. No one else is like you.”
I move away from them, suddenly not wanting to intrude on their moment anymore. I walk toward the dock, toward Will. But I stop short when I see Eliza approach him. She cocks her head. Runs her hands through her long, glowing hair.
“Congratulations,” she says. She smiles. “Remember what you told me on the afternoon of December seventeenth when we were fourteen?”
“Um, no,” he says, and laughs a little.
“Well, I do,” she says coyly, and hands him something in a glass globe.
Then she melts into the shadows of the trees until I can’t see her anymore.
“Ready?” Will asks after we’ve returned the beach to the way it looked before.
“Ready,” I say. Beas and Thom have slipped away without saying goodbye, and I wonder if they’ve broken up. But I see them kissing again in the shadows as Will and I walk by, and I smile down at my boots.
Will takes a deep breath. “It’s peppermint air.”
“What’s that?”
“When it was this cold when I was little, I used to say it felt like a peppermint on the back of my throat when I breathed.”
“Peppermint air,” I repeat. “Cute.” The wind has blown wisps of my braid free, and I begin to unwork the rest of it. “How did it feel to win? I think the Clifftons are truly Sterling’s golden family now,” I say, shaking out my hair so that it falls down my back.
He smiles shyly. “I have to admit I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at me that way. I mean, I’ve seen that expression before. It’s just always been for my father.”
“Has he ever seen you race?”
Will gives a short laugh. “No. And I doubt he ever will. He’d bust my chops if he found out I’ve bought Tempests and given money to the Larkins.” He clears his throat. “I don’t want to pull the wool over his eyes. He just doesn’t really understand, you know—?with the cane and all—?how it feels to run like that.” He falls silent for a minute, and all I can hear are our footsteps on the leaves. “We’ve sort of always just missed each other—?because I’d rather be running or building, and he’s perfectly happy to read about plants all day.” He clears his throat to change the subject. “But you enjoyed yourself?”
“I think I still have a buzz.” The words brighten out of my mouth like fireflies. “Can I go again? When’s the next one?”
“Usually every couple of months,” he says. “More frequently during the summertime. Or like tonight, when we all needed a distraction.”