Sign Here(25)

I laughed but covered it with my hand like a cough.

“Please don’t make me hang out with anyone else in this shitbox tonight. I’m begging you.”

Most of the smells in Hell are very unpleasant. People smell like old coffee and plaque, sweat covered in perfume. But Cal smelled like soap. Just soap. I’m sure it doesn’t sound like much to you with your gorged senses, but to me it was perfect.

I shook my head.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and I walked past her.

I’d like to think I was in love at some point on Earth. I must’ve been, right? I don’t remember a thing about it. But I’ve seen people sign the craziest deals while high on that homemade drug. I had one kid who sold his soul so a girl in his tenth-grade class would ask him to a Sadie Hawkins dance. He could’ve asked for her to strip naked every time he came into the room. He could’ve asked for her to fall to her knees and beg him to let her carry his child, or whatever it is that humans in love want to hear most. But, nope. He just wanted her to ask him to a dance. When I go Downstairs, sometimes I think about that kid; if it was worth it. The romantic answer is yes, of course. Anything for a single moment of her hand in mine. But even after just one day Downstairs, no one answers like that. After just one hour, most people would serve their beloved on a silver platter, lobster forks and bibs for all. Love is all-powerful, until you learn firsthand what happens when a vegetable peeler meets the far-back surface of your tongue.





MICKEY





THE PAST COUPLE OF years of Mickey’s life, magic seemed to be going extinct. Games of make-believe, movies she could watch over and over without getting bored, all of the ways she used to explore outside her own little existence—they had all faded, cheapened, like turning the lights on in a movie theater. So as they drove down the familiar highways, she worried the New Hampshire house would also lose its magic. That it would feel different, less than. She worried about what Ruth would think. But then they arrived, and the weight of worry rose off her.

She knew it for sure when she saw Ruth’s face as they took the bend in the gravel driveway and the house came into full view for the first time. The white wooden clapboards with black shutters, the long green lawn unfurling into the lake. The battered wood of the boathouse, a dark blue gone light gray. The way the water sloshed against the concrete of the dock. Ruth saw it all exactly as Mickey saw it, as Mickey had always seen it.

Regardless of whatever happened in the outside world, magic made its home here.

“How far does your property go?” Ruth asked after she and Mickey rushed from the freezing water to the sand, sunbaked and crispy on the top. She flipped her head over and wrapped one of their worn beach towels around her hair, twisting it. Mickey fell headlong into her own outstretched towel and rolled over onto her back, sun from the sky and the sand warming her all over.

“I can show you!” Mickey said, looking toward the woods between her house and the Watersons’, where the lawn went from cropped green grass to underbrush. She didn’t fully realize how much she had worried about Ruth’s seal of approval until she received it. Now her heart thumped with pride.

Ruth dropped her towel back in the sand.

“Lead the way!”

The woods were as untamed as always, and Mickey regretted not putting on her flip-flops. The path was still there, but branches weaved under the fallen leaves in unknowable places, unpredictable patterns. She stepped quickly but with caution, picking her way down a hill. Ruth followed.

“Mick, this is seriously so beautiful.”

Ruth had used the word many times since they arrived. She said it about the lake, and the view of the house from the wooden float off the dock. She said it about the sand and the grass and the way the tied-up canoe slapped the surface of the water.

“Come on,” Mickey said, stepping over a fallen log.

The woods opened up to a small clearing. Instead of being all sand like the little man-made beach next to the boathouse, this clearing was mostly trampled grass and the mulch of old leaves. There were exposed roots and flat stones perfect for skipping. A small slope like a dirt tongue extended into the water, which made quiet sounds as it met and remet the earth.

“This is so cool!” Ruth said, spinning in a circle, her arms out and her eyes directed up at the treetops. In the middle of the clearing there was a firepit, sloppily made but resilient. Stones encircled a pile of wet pine needles and old ash like sediment.

“Did you and Sean make this?”

“My dad did,” Mickey said. “With my uncle, when they were our age.”

Ruth squatted over the firepit. She lifted up a curled strip of aluminum, a piece of a crushed beer can burned beyond brand recognition.

“Your dad is kind of a badass, isn’t he?” Ruth asked, the aluminum glinting in the light of the low-hanging sun. “Or at least he was, in high school.”

Mickey laughed. She ran her finger over a rock from the shore, examining it.

“He definitely was,” Ruth went on. “He’s a total babe.”

“Gross!” Mickey shouted, kicking shallow water toward Ruth.

“I’m just saying, with those eyes and those arms, I bet he slayed.”

“That’s when he met my mom.” Mickey threw the stone in Ruth’s direction, missing on purpose. “High school.”