Magonia(24)

Aza’s Mom: hugs him and passes him a piece of colored paper. I can’t see the I Love You list she’s given him, but he looks at her for a second, his face saying she just saved him.
Eli: “Last year someone gave me a valentine and Aza claimed she hated it. I liked it. She did too, but she kept pretending she didn’t. I’m going to give it to her now.”
Eli gets some confetti out, and we throw it into the air. It’s heart-shaped. It glitters as it falls.

I think: why did I never give Aza a valentine? I did not know she liked confetti. I did not know she liked hearts. She would’ve made fun of me. She would’ve told me I was sappy. But maybe I—
Looping.
I get the balloons. There are a couple hundred of them. It’s like we’re at a Party Palace, and we’re all five years old. Except it’s a Party Palace where some of us are dead.
Everyone attaches notes to the strings. Eve objected to these, because questionable materials. I had to go in several directions and find biodegradable. I feel momentarily like I’m getting it right.
It’s raining hard now. Some of the balloons pop the moment we let go, but others get up into the sky the way they should. That’s what always sucks about balloons. In your hand they’re big, but once you let them loose, they’re instantly tiny.
Mine’s a huge green one, because it has to carry a long letter, inside of its own waterproof tube. I wanted it to get as close to outer space as possible. Therefore, it’s a reinforced weather balloon, spray-painted to evade Eve.
And then—
Thunder.
Lightning.
People are fleeing to their cars as quickly as they can without being disrespectful.
Where am I supposed to go, exactly? Aza’s in a little box in the ground.
The grave is too small for me to get into it, scrunch my knees up to my chest, and let them cover me up. But how can there be a rest of my life?
Trees are leaning over. A branch cracks off and hits the ground not very far away, and my moms are trying, not subtly, to get me to come with them.
I look up, and I let my balloon go. As I do, I see something gleam—
a flash of white sail billowing, and a bright spot of light, something blazing out of the darkening clouds. I see something, ropes, the pointed prow of a—
An object falls down out of the clouds, and I hear Aza’s voice. I swear I do.
I hear Aza screaming my name.









“Aza Ray,” says someone, way, WAY too loudly. “Aza Ray, wake up.”
I put my head under the covers. Absolutely not. There will be no waking up for me, because it is clearly five a.m., and this can only be cruel night phlebotomy. I have a spinny, achy head, leftover from whatever got me here, and yes, I remember some of it, and yes, some of it was bad, but it’s been bad before, but here I still apparently am, so it can’t have been that bad.
I’ve been sleeping like the dead. That’s a joke I’m allowed to make. Whatever drug they’ve got me on, it’s working. If they ask me, I can say pain scale zero, which has never happened before, not in my entire history of hospitals.
The voice gets sharper. This nurse has no sense of nice. Her voice is both way too loud and way too high-pitched. I yank the covers higher over my face.
“AZA RAY QUEL. It’s time to wake up now!”
Something sharp pokes me. My bed shakes.
I reluctantly open my eyes and I’m looking at—
An owl.
A HUMAN-SIZE OWL, a, what? WHAT? A WORLD-CLASS HALLUCINATION.
The owl stretches long yellow fingers and runs one over my forehead. It clacks its beak at me.
“Still fevered,” it says.
Oh, oh, no no no. Hallucinations in my experience don’t talk, though who knows because I seem to be an entirely new Aza lately, someone who hallucinates ships and gigantic birds and—
“HELP!” I scream. I don’t care if I’m breaking hospital rules by freaking out. This is me giving up on my carefully cultivated hospital-patient-since-forever coolness. “SOMEBODY HELP ME!”
The bed swings so hard I get instantly nauseous. I’m tangled in ropes and twigs, and wrapped in a blanket made of—feathers?
The bird thing has a beakish nose and lips. It’s not a bird. It’s not human. It’s neither. It’s also both.
This: you don’t know what real hallucinating is until you’re doing it. It’s a gigantically big deal.
At least everything’s not on fire, Jason says in my head. Yeah, except everything kind of is on fire. Bent brain, boiled brain, broken brain. The owl’s wearing clothes, but also has plumage. She’s covered in feathers and stripes. She has wings AND hands and she stretches her fingers out to me. She’s the size of a human, but wings, oh, definite wings, and she’s wearing a gray uniform with an insignia. There’s a ship shaped like a bird embroidered on her chest.
Angel? Angel-bird-creature-thing? What the hell am I looking at?
“Who are you? Where am I? Don’t touch me!”
The owl is definitely trying to check my vitals, but hell no, I’m doing it myself. If you’re a person who’s professionally sick, you get to be ridiculously expert in checking yourself for signs of death.
Maybe the poor owl’s a human nurse and I’m a raving feral thing. It’s not my fault if I am. Morphine? But morphine means bad things. If I’m on a morphine drip in a hospital, they’re making it hurt less. Which means I’m dying painfully.
Which means—
Rewind. Back to the ambulance. Back to the dark. Back to the silence and the snow falling down over the world.