Release(30)

Adam winced. “Oh, God, you know about that?”

“You honestly think social media would have kept me in ignorance?” He made a dismissive hand. “It passed in a week, but the whole time, all I thought about was how you were taking it.”

“Linus–”

“And we also,” he pressed on, “don’t pick who we fall for. We don’t make them turn out to be complete dickheads.”

Adam’s stomach was tumbling with how much Linus knew and how he’d found it all out (it would turn out he knew as much as nearly everyone else in the school, which was a lot, but it also turned out that – in that unreachable, possible world – most of them actually liked Adam or at least didn’t actively wish him harm, so they’d given his sorrow some space; when Adam thought about it now, it still made his head swim, still made him blush, still made him wish he could crawl under a blanket and die there forever) – but looking at Linus, he saw no malice, no gossip, saw instead someone who might actually know. He’d heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it first-hand.

Then Linus – and he actually did this, he really actually did – reached across the table and put his hand on Adam’s, a strangely old-fashioned gesture that went with everything else strangely old-fashioned about Linus Bertulis.

“No,” he said, “I guess we don’t really know each other. But maybe…”

He fell silent. Adam could feel himself holding his breath. “I’m kind of waiting for Angela here,” he said.

Linus smiled again. “Angela is a bit awesome.”

“She is.”

“And if she’s your friend, that makes you a bit awesome, too.”

“I’m not in third grade, Linus.”

Linus laughed. “This is coming across all Schoolhouse Rock, isn’t it?”

“A little.”

“Adam.” For the first time, Linus looked away, moving his hand and tapping his fingers in pretend interest on the side of Adam’s lemonade. “You–” he looked up on “you” then looked away again– “are a big, beautiful guy. You give off this vibe of somebody trying to hide their wounds, wounds you didn’t deserve but maybe you think you did.” He looked up again. “I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you money.”

But Adam had started blushing furiously at “beautiful” and was only thinking of how he could keep Linus from noticing.

“I’m not swooping in on someone vulnerable,” Linus said. “I want to be clear on that. That’s not me.” He shrugged. “But you’ve always seemed nice. Always seemed cute. And I just…” He tapped Adam’s lemonade glass again, and Adam was surprised to hear Linus’s voice do a little wobble. “I know what it’s like. I know what all of it’s like.”

“Hello,” Angela said, in a particular way, standing at the end of the table. “Hi, Linus.” But she was looking squarely at Adam.

“Hey, Angela,” Linus said, scooting back out.

“What are you doing?” Angela asked him.

He stopped, took a breath, looked at Adam. “Asking Adam out on a date. When he’s ready. Or, you know, just to hang out.”

With a little wave, he left them, not even sitting back at his own table. Turned out he’d been there waiting for his sister to finish a job interview to be a waitress. She got the job. Linus, eventually, got his date.





“My eyes are burning,” Sarah says, and she means it literally. She gazes now upon the unfiltered glory of the Queen, something no one is meant to see, certainly none of Sarah’s kind, not this close. She will be blind in moments if she does not look away.

For now, the faun does not care what happens to this clearly doomed mortal.

For here is his Queen, here she is.

“My Queen,” he asks, “can you hear me?”

“Where am I?” she answers, and his heart rejoices. “What is this place?”

“You are trapped, my Queen. This spirit holds you here–”

“This spirit holds me here.” She gazes still on Sarah, who is starting to whine at the pain. “This spirit holds me to this place, this body.”

The Queen looks to the faun. Sarah gasps with relief. “How dare they?” says the Queen. “By what presumption do they–”

And she is suddenly gone again as she lets go of Sarah’s hand.





For a moment there–

For a moment, she was herself again, but she cannot fully remember who that was or is. She is back in the company of this spirit, this one who has bound her.

This one who has come looking for her proper home.

In hopes that– thinks the Queen. In hopes that it will free her.

But is she the only one who needs freeing? And why this place? Why this person, rubbing her eyes and moaning on this foul-smelling couch in clothes that have gone too long without washing? What seemed so clear moments ago is now muddied.

“Why am I here?” she says aloud, and this person, this human, this Sarah, hears her.

“To punish me?” Sarah asks, fear covering her voice.