I take a whiff of the stopper and I guess I make a face.
“My dad’s rye.” She smiles up at me. “Not the smoothest, but it gets the job done.”
“Are you sure it’s okay?”
“We do it all the time.” She hands me a glass. “Do you have any idea how boring the council meetings are? It’s the only perk.” She positions herself directly in front of me, clinking her glass to mine. “To us.…”
We both take a drink. It burns my eyes, but it feels good going down my throat. Instant warmth radiating throughout my body.
“Now,” Ali says as she picks up one of the candles, moving it along the spines of a row of books. “They showed us all this stuff when they turned over the council to us last year, but I never gave it much thought until you started telling me Miss Granger’s theory. There’s a prophecy, but not like Miss Granger thinks.”
She pulls down an old book from the shelves, thumbing through the pages until she finds what she’s looking for.
“Here,” she says, pointing to the text.
I read over her shoulder, “The sixth generation will inherit the earth, paving the way for a new age.”
“That’s pretty self-explanatory,” Ali says. “When our ancestors founded Midland, formed the council, everything they built was for the sixth generation. For us.”
“Okay … but there’s six of us … from the sixth generation.”
“I see where you’re going with this, but where’s the other six?”
“2016?”
“Grasping.” She shakes her head and takes another drink.
I read the next line. “In exchange for our sacrifice and obedience, the lord has placed a protective seal over this covenant.” I take another drink. “A seal over this covenant? Like a witch thing?”
“No.” She pulls me over to the original land map hanging on the wall. “They’re talking about the county.”
“Okay. If you squint your eye just right, the dividing lines kind of look like they form a pentagram. How do you explain that?”
“Those were the original plot lines,” she says. “Our ancestors certainly didn’t get to choose that, or believe me, our plots would all be shaped like potatoes or something.”
I study the book with the prophecy in it, holding it up to the light. “It looks like a page might’ve been torn out.”
“Oh my God … alert the media, it’s a conspiracy.” She laughs as she refills our glasses. “Or maybe Jethro just needed a piece of toilet paper. You could go crazy thinking about all this stuff.”
“Believe me … I know.”
“Here, check this out.” She pulls an old ledger from the shelf, filled with stats. “These are all the natural disasters to hit Oklahoma in the last hundred or so years. Famine … drought … tornados … floods … earthquakes … the dust bowl…”
“Exactly. And Midland escaped every single one of them. How do you even begin to explain that?”
“You can’t. Isn’t it amazing? It sounds more like God than the Devil, if you ask me.”
“I don’t know,” I mutter into my glass as I take another drink.
“The way I see it, it’s all about perspective. It’s like that time we were at the lake, on the floating dock, and we were looking up at the clouds. I saw a dancer. You saw a football player going for the extra point.”
“Did I really say that?” I cringe.
“You really did.”
“Wow. I was super smooth, wasn’t I?”
She studies me, her hazel eyes smoldering in the candlelight. “You were perfect … still are.”
She clinks my glass again and we drink. It doesn’t burn anymore, but there’s a weird chalky aftertaste coating the roof of my mouth. The rye moves through my body, coaxing the tension out of my muscles like warm liquid fingers.
“My point is, I can see how somebody like Miss Granger might want to string all this together, connect the dots. I really do, but she’s an outsider, she doesn’t understand. This town has always been a little off-kilter. I mean, look at our ancestors.” She takes my hand, leading me to their photo on the wall. “They came over on a boat from Ireland with no money, no prospects. And when they heard about the land rush, only the craziest of the crazy decided to head west to fight it out for the tiniest chance at free land. We come from a long line of risk takers with nothing to lose. It’s in our DNA. But they did it for us. I’m not saying our ancestors were saints, but think of Noodle. She’s a Tate through and through. Do you think she’s evil?”
“No way.” I laugh.
“Well, there you go. We have to hang on to the light. Wherever we can find it.”
She laces her fingers through mine, her thumb lingering on my palm, and something vibrates inside me.
“What if we’re not cursed … but blessed.”
“What about Jimmy? Or Ben?” I ask, my gaze settling on their family trees. “The last time I saw them, they looked far from blessed.”
“Free will. That was their choice. It says right here in the next line, ‘Only the strong will prevail.’”