Our Crooked Hearts(43)

“We had our feet in the water and the sun was almost gone and I wanted to kiss you so badly. But I knew I’d look like a turtle even trying to reach your lips. Then you slid all the way into the water, right over your head, and when you came up you pulled me in, too. Then you kissed me. And I was…” He moved his hand in the arc of a paper plane. “Gone.”

I could see it. Looking at him now, soaked through with rain, I could picture a younger Billy standing in the bowl of the creek, grinning at me.

“That was a Monday,” he said. “The week before school started. The next day your mom had to go to the hospital—it was her appendix, I think—and for a while you couldn’t see me. Then I started to worry you didn’t want to see me. I came over on Saturday and your mom said you couldn’t come to the door. I tried twice on Sunday. The second time…”

I leaned back to see him. His face, this close, was almost blinding. “She broke your heart.”

“She told me you’d … I can’t believe this is still so hard to say. She told me you’d outgrown me. You were my best friend since I was seven. You were my first kiss. I thought you were my first girlfriend. Then it all just stopped.” He winced. “So I decided to make a grand gesture.”

“Oh, no,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth. “When you asked me to be your girlfriend … oh, no. You must’ve thought I was awful.”

He didn’t deny it. “After that I was too mad and embarrassed to talk to you. But eventually I got over it. I guess. And that was that, until last night.” Gently he moved my hand from my mouth and laced his fingers in mine, tentatively. Like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to. “You remember none of that?”

I shook my head. “I’m so sorry. My mother was lying to you, I would never—all of this was her. I can’t fully explain it, I know it sounds impossible, but she did this.”

Billy blinked the rain from his lashes, his face filling with a slow-breaking light. He brought his hands up to cup my face. His skin was warmer than the air, our lips so close I could feel it when he spoke. “Oh, my god,” he breathed. “I should’ve known.”

I smiled at him, confused. “How could you possibly have known?”

“Ivy? Ivy, what’s going on?”

My dad’s voice, sudden and strangely severe. His car was in our drive and he was slamming its door. I started to step away from Billy, but he took my hand and held it tightly. Together we watched my father hustling across the street to meet us.

“Dad.” My voice wasn’t quite steady. “You’re home early.”

His work clothes were streaming, the hip glasses Hank and I picked out for him fogging over. He kept pinching the condensation away. “I should’ve come home last night. Your mom’s not back, is she?”

“Not yet.”

“Ah. How are you, Billy?”

Billy gripped my hand like it was an anchor. His face was expressionless. “All good, Mr. Chase.”

My dad kept looking between us, then down at our clasped hands. I couldn’t tell if it was the rain on his lenses that made him look so off-balance. “What were you two talking about?”

That was when my heart dropped low. Because he knew. Whatever my mom had done to me to make me forget Billy, my dad was in on it, too.

“Come into the house.” His eyes were unreadable. “I need to talk to you. Now.”

I watched, chest aching, as he hurried away. When I looked back at Billy his face was almost afraid.

“Ivy,” he said. “Don’t forget about this.”

I nodded, but I didn’t say the words. It wasn’t a promise I was sure I could make.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE



The city

Back then

I had a shift that afternoon. Dipping fry baskets, making change, wishing I knew a spell that could make my mind sleep while my body kept trucking.

Something was happening to me. I was sure of it now. It wasn’t blowback or hangover or the scum of bad dreams. It was in my body, growing like a virus, making a home for itself inside my skin. What was it the spell had said? I heard Marion’s voice again, reading the occultist’s promises. That I may not die but live in you.

I looked at my hand on the counter and felt the raw red terror of not recognizing it as my own. Not knowing what exactly it might do.

“Dana. Dana.”

One of the shop’s full-timers, Lorna, was snapping her fingers in my face. I didn’t know how she managed it with her nails. Church nails, she called them, long as Elvira’s but painted a pearlescent Sunday color. When I kept staring she clapped her hands for emphasis. “Go. Home. I can’t keep looking at your miserable face.”

She was fifty and one of my dad’s first hires. She got to talk to me like that. On the way out I peed and washed my hands and sprayed down the closet-sized employee bathroom with watered bleach. Then I glanced at myself in the pitted camp mirror stuck to the wall and screamed.

Astrid was there, looking back at me. Pretty face, pretty dolly hair, bottomless golden eyes. I shoved a hand in my pocket. There was a toothpick in there, birchwood. I snapped it and spat a quick curse, the first piece of magic I’d tried since the summoning.

Undo unmake

shatter break.