Our Crooked Hearts(66)

Working magic had set her apart from other kids her age. She was too self-possessed, too immune to other people’s influence. She had soccer friends, camp friends, school friends, but she didn’t really have friend friends.

Until a family moved in across the street the year she turned eight. A single dad, a toddler, and a freckle-faced seven-year-old cannonball named Billy.

I hadn’t actually realized Ivy was lonesome until he showed up, and they merged like two raindrops meeting on a window. She nodded with great seriousness when I reminded her that magic was a secret even Billy couldn’t know. Months became years and there were no explosions but I wasn’t an idiot: the little boy from across the street knew something.

I looked out the window once and saw them in the grass at the end of the yard. Both were keeping an eye on the ground between them, with an absorbed stillness few grade schoolers possessed. I couldn’t see what they were looking at.

Then Billy’s face opened up into startled delight. Ivy grinned at him and he grinned back. I knew how pride looked on her and I knew she wasn’t showing him something ordinary.

I upgraded my assumptions. The boy from across the street knew everything.



* * *



My appendix burst at the worst possible time. Rob was on a work trip, Fee and Uncle Nestor were visiting family in San Antonio. Hank was going through some kind of emotional upheaval he refused to talk about, and Ivy was being an adolescent nightmare. I didn’t have loads of mom friends, so I turned to Google. Twelve-year-old daughter incredibly defiant normal?

The next day Ivy came into the kitchen, brandishing my laptop. The search was pulled up. “First of all,” she said, “learn how to erase your search history. Second, I’m not defiant, I’m assertive.”

I stood too fast, lunging to yank the laptop from her hands. Just as quickly, I was bent over my knees, gut neon with pain.

Ivy crouched beside me, grabbing my hand. “What is it? What hurts?”

I showed her with my fingers, gasping.

“Uh-oh.” She looked scared and a little thrilled. “I bet it’s your appendix.”

She wanted to try a healing charm and I said absolutely not and she was still sulking when a neighbor showed up to drive us to the hospital. Ivy stayed until late showing me videos on her phone, then got a ride home from another neighbor. I had to stay overnight, my appendix so thoroughly ruptured my whole gut was shot through with poison.

“People die from this,” a nurse told me, with too much relish. She was pissed because I fought everything they wanted to do. I needed Fee here, running interference. I needed Rob to come take me home. I was furious at them for being so far away.

Rob couldn’t get a flight home until the next morning, but the kids were old enough to keep each other alive for a night. It was fine. It should’ve been fine.

When I got home, I knew right away that it wasn’t.





CHAPTER FORTY



The suburbs

Back then

Ivy’s mom was a total freaking hypocrite.

She talked all the time about balance and responsibility and being careful what you put into the world and blah blah blah, when all along you just knew she’d done some bad, bad things.

You could see it in her refusal to talk about the web of scars on her hand. The abrupt silence that fell when Ivy walked into a room where Mom and Aunt Fee were talking. The stormy weather that blew through the house at random, and made Dad say, Guys, give your mom some space.

Most of all it was in the look on her face when Ivy pulled something off. Ivy was so good now, so strong, her mother’s pride should’ve grown accordingly. Instead she seemed to shrink as Ivy expanded, becoming more watchful, more controlling and afraid. If she could’ve lassoed Ivy’s ability and broken it like a colt, she probably would have.

Ivy was certain it had to do with the thing she wouldn’t talk about—the thing she’d done. She waited for Mom to let something slip, or Aunt Fee to spill the secret. And when neither happened, she made other plans.

She was waiting for a night when both her parents were out. If it made her feel a little guilty that it finally happened because her mom was in the hospital, well, guilt was rarely a useful emotion.

It was just past eight. Hank was on the other side of the wall watching Battlestar Galactica and her room was soft in the gloaming.

Ivy propped a mirror against her footboard. She pressed a blend of clarity oils into seven crucial places. She looped a thread of dark hair around her right ring finger—spirited off of her best friend Billy’s shoulder—and incanted as she used that fingertip to trace a sigil over the mirror. Mist spilled into the glass, displacing her reflection. She made her voice cool and commanding.

“Show me what Billy’s doing right now.”

Out of the mist, like a photo dipped in developer, a boy with freckles and wet dark hair appeared. When she made out what he was doing—pulling a shirt over his head, damp from the shower—Ivy squeaked and yanked the strand off her finger.

The boy in the glass gave way to a many-toned nothing, a galactic vista that tinted the room with gauzy light.

Ivy counted breaths, waiting for them to slow. She could smell her own sweat beneath the bright spice of frankincense.

It had worked.

But that was just a test, to see if she could. Now it was time to do it for real. It might not work the second time, she reminded herself. The question she wanted to ask was fuzzy. But she didn’t know enough to ask a better one.