I push his hand away. “Real mature, William.”
Penny tugs her tunic down over her thighs. “You guys already know this, but you two are my best friends.” Uh-oh, Penny is already starting to tear up. This could be rough. “Will, we’ve been friends forever and, if it wasn’t for you, I’m pretty sure everyone at school would just think I was a weird hippie or witch or something, but no offense, it’s nice having a girl around.”
“A little offended,” he says, cocking his head.
I shove his shoulder and he topples over onto the blanket. “Penny, continue,” I say.
“Right.” She holds a knife out to us. “So this.”
“Christ, Penny,” Will says, dramatically dusting off his elbows and reseating himself. “If you’ve been doing all of this to murder us, I have to give you credit, you’ve really been running the long game.”
“I’m not planning to kill you, but if you don’t cut it out I reserve the right to change my mind.” She flashes a sweet smile. “Anyway, as I was saying, ancient civilizations have been doing blood rituals to seal relationships for, like, thousands of years.” Her voice lowers to nearly a whisper. “The rituals are sacred, for only the deepest bonds. I don’t have a brother or a sister,” she says. “You guys…are my blood.” I can see the ropy veins in her throat tighten. Her eyes are shining.
And all I can think is that I used to have a brother that I tried hard to keep until it burned me up inside, and when he finally wanted me—if he finally wanted me, because I’ve made my choice and now I’ll never know—there was nothing left of our relationship but ash. I swallow down the memory of Matt’s face after he recited the movie times to me, after he told me about the pelican. I swallow down my own broken heart, rough and jagged as if made out of glass, chipped to pieces every time I reached out to him. I wonder if it could have been different between us. If he had tried sooner and I had tried longer. I…just wonder.
“Then let’s make it official,” I say at last, voice catching on one of those glass shards.
Will doesn’t even make another joke. He offers us each a hand to pull us up. Penny’s gone all trembly and the knife is shaking in her hands.
“Are you sure about this?” Will asks, and he’s instantly the Will I’m used to, the one I like best. When I had to watch Will and Penny from afar, I noticed how he cared for her gently, the way he would a baby bird, scooping her into the nest. I didn’t quite understand it until I knew Penny too. She’s strong and brave in her own way, but if Penny is to be Penny, sometimes Will and I have to be there to hold the world at bay. Now that I’m no longer watching from the outside, I’ve noticed something about Will. He’s at his most magnetic when he’s doing things for other people, and I wish that I didn’t feel what I’m feeling when he gently presses his hand between her shoulder blades and looks Penny squarely in the eyes.
She nods. “It’s just the thought of the blood.” She laughs softly at herself. “Probably should have considered that.” Her eyes close and she must mentally travel to a different place, because her features ease. “I wish sometimes that I was as brave as you.” And then her piercing green eyes are staring straight at me.
I wonder what it must be like to feel the whole world stampeding around inside your heart. “You’re braver,” I say, and mean it.
She pinches my cheek like an old grandma, teasing me. “You’re pretty even when you’re lying,” she says.
Will goes first. “Cheers,” he says. He holds his hand up in salute. After that, he takes the tip and drags it across one palm straight through the crease that fortunetellers call the lifeline. He scrunches his nose, then closes his hand into a tight fist and wipes the blade over his shorts.
I take the knife from him. I don’t have to think about it. I dig the metal straight into my flesh until I feel something hot rise to the surface, and I fold my fingers into a matching mushed-up ball, same as Will’s.
Last is Penny. Her teeth dig into her lip. She holds the knife all limp so that it couldn’t cut a wet a noodle if it had to.
“Pen,” Will says so tenderly, it microwaves my insides into a puddle. “Pen, you don’t have to do this. It’s just symbolic.”
I’m not sure what makes her do it, but she resolves then and there to. She cuts the line the worst way—while staring at it. Then she drops the knife in the dirt and looks at us, wide-eyed. “I did it,” she says. “I did it.”
My own hand stings, even worse when I try to open it so that the breeze can touch the open gash. I close it right back up and hold it close to my heart.
“We have to make the covenant,” she says. “Now, before our cuts dry up.”
We grow still and watch Penny swipe her shoe to smooth a spot in the dirt. “Swear,” she says, “that no matter what, the three of us will always be friends. Swear that we’ll be there for each other. Even if in college I go through some weird pixie-haircut phase and move to Mumbai or Lake starts hanging out with the skaters and grows dreadlocks.”
“Hey! That’s not me,” I interject, but Penny shushes me.
“Once our blood mixes, we’ll be bound forever,” she says. “Swear.”
“Swear,” I say.
“Swear,” says Will.
Penny stretches her arm out over the ground and lets two drops of her blood drip onto the dirt. Will and I both follow suit. Our blood mixes, forming a damp blotch on the ground.
“Make a wish,” she says, like she knows something magical about full moons for sure and not just for maybe. “Make a wish on the moon, but don’t tell a soul.” She returns to her bag and pulls out scraps of paper and pens, Mary Poppins–style. She hands me one, and each of our bloody thumbprints appears on the page. “That was for us, now this is for you.” Will gets a scrap too. “The universe demands balance.”
I stare at the page and think about balance and how a year ago I was losing it all, crumbling away piece by piece like a sandcastle built too close to the sea. Somehow the events of the last few months have led me to a cave of bones where I can sit beside my two best friends and watch them worry over their wishes. I rest my chin on my knee, hoping to lock down the dorky swell of emotion. But I can’t help feeling that if I’m a sandcastle, I’m finally being built farther up on land by Will and Penny together.
I write my wish and don’t tell a soul for fear that it won’t come true.
“What’s so wonderful,” says Dr. McKenna, the sound of her voice snapping my attention on like a light switch, “is how present your love for your friends still is. I want you to try to think about that bolstering feeling of overarching love in your life when you feel yourself getting bogged down with grief, okay?”
I blink and look up from my fingers, which I’ve been knitting together in my lap. How long have I been talking? I glance up at the clock.