Beautiful Creatures

12.19

White Christmas

After the Disciplinary Committee meeting, I don’t think anyone believed Lena would show up at school the next day. But she did, just like I knew she would. No one else knew she had given up the right to go to school once. She wasn’t going to let anyone take it away from her again. To everyone else, school was prison. To Lena, it was freedom. Only it didn’t matter, because that was the day Lena became a ghost at Jackson—nobody looked at her, spoke to her, sat near her at any table, bleacher, or desk. By Thursday, half the kids at school were wearing the Jackson Angels T-shirt, with those white wings on their backs. The way they looked at her, it seemed half the teachers wished they could wear them, too. On Friday, I turned in my basketball jersey. It just didn’t feel like we were all on the same team anymore.

Coach was furious. After all the hollering died down, he just shook his head. “You’re crazy, Wate. Look at the season you’re havin’, and you’re throwin’ it away on some girl.” I could hear it in his voice. Some girl. Old Man Ravenwood’s niece.

Still, nobody said an unkind word to either one of us, at least not to our faces. If Mrs. Lincoln had put the fear of God into them, Macon Ravenwood had given people in Gatlin a reason to fear something even worse. The truth.

As I watched the numbers on Lena’s wall and hand get smaller and smaller, the possibility became more real. What if we couldn’t stop it? What if Lena had been right all along, and after her birthday the girl I knew disappeared? Like she had never been here at all.

All we had was The Book of Moons. And more and more, there was one thought I was trying to keep out of Lena’s head and mine.

I wasn’t sure the Book was enough.

“AMONGST PERSONNES OF POWERE, THERE BEING TWINNE FORCES FROM WHYCHE SPRING ALL MAGICK, THE DARKNESSE & THE LIGHT.”

“I think we’ve got the whole Darkness and Light thing worked out. You think we could get to the good part? The part called, Loopholes for Your Claiming Day? How to Vanquish a Rogue Cataclyst? How to Reverse the Passage of Time?” I was frustrated, and Lena wasn’t talking.

From where we sat on the cold bleachers, the school looked deserted. We were supposed to be at the science fair, watching Alice Milkhouse soak an egg in vinegar, listening to Jackson Freeman argue there was no such thing as global warming, and Annie Honeycutt counter with how to make Jackson a green school. Maybe the Angels were going to have to start recycling their flyers.

I stared at the Algebra II book hanging out of my backpack. It didn’t seem like there was anything worth learning at this place anymore. I’d learned enough in the last few months. Lena was a million miles away, still buried in the Book. I had started carrying it around in my backpack, out of fear Amma would find it if I left it in my room.

“Here’s more about Cataclysts.

“THE GREATEST OF THE DARKNESSE BEING THE POWERE CLOSEST TO THE WOLD & THE UNDYRWOLD, THE CATA-CLYSTE. THE GREATEST OF THE LIGHT BEING THE POWERE CLOSEST TO THE WOLD & THE UNDYRWOLD, THE NAT-URAL. WHERE THERE IS NOT ONNE THERE CANNOT BE THE OTHERE, AS WITHOUTE DARKNESSE THERE CAN BE NO LIGHT.”

“See? You’re not going Dark. You’re Light because you’re the Natural.”

Lena shook her head and pointed at the next paragraph. “Not necessarily. That’s what my uncle thinks. But listen to this—

“AT THE TYME OF CLAIMING, THE TRUTHE WILL BE MADE MANIFESTE. WHAT APPEARS DARKNESSE MAYE BE THE GREATEST LIGHT, WHAT APPEARS LIGHT MAYE BE THE GREATEST DARKNESSE.”

She was right, there was no way to be sure.

“Then it gets really complicated. I’m not even sure I understand the words.

“FOR THE DARKE MATTERE MAYDE THE DARKE FYRE, & THE DARKE FYRE MAYDE THE POWERES OF ALL LILUM IN THE DAEMON WOLD & CASTERS OF DARKNESSE & LIGHT. WITHOUT ALL POWERE THERE CAN BE NO POWERE. THE DARKE FYRE MAYDE THE GREAT DARKNESSE & THE GREAT LIGHT. ALL POWERE IS DARKE POWERE, AS DARKE POWERE IS EVEN THE LIGHT.”

“Dark Matter? Dark Fire? What is this, the Big Bang for Casters?”

“What about Lilum? I’ve never heard of any of this, but then again, nobody tells me anything. I didn’t even know my own mother was alive.” She tried to sound sarcastic, but I could hear the pain in her voice.

“Maybe Lilum is an old word for Casters, or something.”

“The more I find out, the less I understand.”

And the less time we have.

Don’t say that.

The bell rang and I stood up. “You coming?”

She shook her head. “I’m going to stay out here a while longer.” Alone, in the cold. More and more, it was like that; she hadn’t even looked me in the eye since the Disciplinary Committee meeting, almost as if I were one of them. I couldn’t really blame her, considering the whole school and half the town had basically decided she was the institutionalized, bipolar child of a murderer.

“You better show up in class sooner or later. Don’t give Principal Harper any more ammunition.”

She looked back toward the building. “I don’t see how it matters now.”

For the rest of the afternoon, she was nowhere to be found. At least, if she was, she wasn’t listening. In chemistry, she wasn’t there for our quiz on the periodic table.

You’re not Dark, L. I would know.

In history, she wasn’t there while we reenacted the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, and Mr. Lee tried to make me argue the Pro-Slavery side, most likely as punishment for some future “liberally minded” paper I was bound to write.

Don’t let them get to you like this. They don’t matter.

In ASL, she wasn’t there while I had to stand up in front of the class and sign “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while the rest of the basketball team just sat there, smirking.

I’m not going anywhere, L. You can’t shut me out.

That’s when I realized she could.

By lunch, I couldn’t take it anymore. I waited for her to come out of Trig and I pulled her over to the side of the hall, dropping my backpack to the floor. I took her face in my hands, and drew her in to me.

Ethan, what are you doing?

This.

I pulled her face into mine with both hands. When our lips touched, I could feel the warmth from my body seep into the coldness of hers. I could feel her body melting into mine, the inexplicable pull that had bound us together from the beginning, bringing us together again. Lena dropped her books and wrapped her arms around my neck, responding to my touch. I was becoming light-headed.

The bell rang. She pushed away from me, gasping. I bent down to pick up her copy of Bukowski’s Pleasures of the Damned and her battered spiral notebook. The notebook was practically falling apart, but then again, she’d had a lot to write about lately.

You shouldn’t have done that.

Why not? You’re my girlfriend, and I miss you.

Fifty-four days, Ethan. That’s all I have. It’s time to stop pretending we can change things. It’ll be easier if we both accept it.

There was something about the way she said it, like she was talking about more than just her birthday. She was talking about other things we couldn’t change.

She turned away, but I caught her arm before she could turn her back on me. If she was saying what I thought she was saying, I wanted her to look at me when she said it.

“What do you mean, L?” I almost couldn’t ask.

She looked away. “Ethan, I know you think this can have a happy ending, and for a while maybe I did, too. But we don’t live in the same world, and in mine, wanting something badly enough won’t make it happen.” She wouldn’t look at me. “We’re just too different.”

“Now we’re too different? After everything we’ve been through?” My voice was getting louder. A couple of people turned and stared at me. They didn’t even look at Lena.

We are different. You’re a Mortal and I’m a Caster, and those worlds might intersect, but they’ll never be the same. We aren’t meant to live in both.

What she was saying was she wasn’t meant to live in both. Emily and Savannah, the basketball team, Mrs. Lincoln, Mr. Harper, the Jackson Angels, they were all finally getting what they wanted.

This is about the disciplinary meeting, isn’t it? Don’t let them—

It isn’t just about the meeting. It’s everything. I don’t belong here, Ethan. And you do.

So now I’m one of them. Is that what you’re saying?

She closed her eyes and I could almost see her thoughts, tangled up in her mind.

I’m not saying you’re like them, but you are one of them. This is where you’ve lived your whole life. And after this is all over, after I’m Claimed, you’re still going to be here. You’re going to have to walk down these halls and those streets again, and I probably won’t be there. But you will, for who knows how long, and you said it yourself—people in Gatlin never forget anything.

Two years.

What?

That’s how long I’ll be here.

Two years is a long time to be invisible. Trust me, I know.

For a minute, neither of us said anything. She just stood there, pulling shreds of paper from the wire spine of her notebook. “I’m tired of fighting it. I’m tired of trying to pretend I’m normal.”

“You can’t give up. Not now, not after everything. You can’t let them win.”

“They already have. They won the day I broke the window in English.”

There was something about her voice that told me she was giving up on more than just Jackson. “Are you breaking up with me?” I was holding my breath.

“Please don’t make this harder. It’s not what I want, either.”

Then don’t do it.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. It was like time had stopped again, the way it had at Thanksgiving dinner. Only this time, it wasn’t magic. It was the opposite of magic.

“I just think things will be easier this way. It doesn’t change the way I feel about you.” She looked up at me, her big green eyes sparkling with tears. Then she turned and fled down a hallway that was so quiet you could’ve heard a pencil drop.

Merry Christmas, Lena.

But there was nothing to hear. She was gone, and that wasn’t something I would have been ready for, not in fifty-three days, not in fifty-three years, not in fifty-three centuries.

Fifty-three minutes later, I sat alone, staring out the window, which was a statement right there, considering how crowded the lunchroom was. Gatlin was gray; the clouds had drifted in. I wouldn’t call it a storm, exactly; it hadn’t snowed in years. If we were lucky, we got a flurry or two, maybe once a year. But it hadn’t snowed a single day since I was twelve.

I wished it would snow. I wished I could hit rewind and be back in the hallway with Lena. I wished I could tell her I didn’t care if everyone in this town hated me, because it didn’t matter. I was lost before I found her in my dreams, and she found me that day in the rain. I knew it seemed like I was always the one trying to save Lena, but the truth was she had saved me, and I wasn’t ready for her to stop now.

“Hey, man.” Link slid onto the bench across from me at the empty table. “Where’s Lena? I wanted to thank her.”

“For what?”

Link pulled a piece of folded notebook paper out of his pocket. “She wrote me a song. Pretty cool, huh?” I couldn’t even look at it. She was talking to Link, just not to me.

Link grabbed a slice of my untouched pizza. “Listen, I got a favor to ask you.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“Ridley and I are goin’ up to New York over break. If anyone asks, I’m at church camp in Savannah, far as you know.”

“There’s no church camp in Savannah.”

“Yeah, but my mom doesn’t know that. I told her I signed up because they have some kind of Baptist rock band.”

“And she believed that?”

“She’s been actin’ a little weird lately, but what do I care. She said I could go.”

“It doesn’t matter what your mom said, you can’t go. There are things you don’t know about Ridley. She’s… dangerous. Stuff could happen to you.”

His eyes lit up. I had never seen Link like this. Then again, I hadn’t seen him too much lately. I’d been spending all my time with Lena, or thinking about Lena, the Book, her birthday. The stuff my world revolved around now, or did, until an hour ago.

“That’s what I’m hopin’. Besides, I got it bad for that girl. She really does somethin’ to me, ya know?” He took the last slice of pizza off my tray.

For a second I considered telling Link everything, just like the old days—about Lena and her family, Ridley, Genevieve, and Ethan Carter Wate. Link had known everything in the beginning, but I didn’t know if he would believe the rest, or if he could. Some things were just asking too much, even from your best friend. Right now I couldn’t risk losing Link, too, but I had to do something. I couldn’t let him go to New York, or anywhere else, with Ridley. “Listen man, you’ve gotta trust me. Don’t get mixed up with her. She’s just using you. You’re gonna get hurt.”

He crushed a Coke can in his hand. “Oh, I get it. If the hottest girl in town is hangin’ out with me, she must be usin’ me? I guess you think you’re the only one who can pull a hot chick. When did you get so full of yourself?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

Link got up. “I think we both know what you’re sayin’. Forget I asked.”

It was too late. Ridley had already gotten to him. Nothing I said was going to change his mind. And I couldn’t lose my girlfriend and my best friend in the same day. “Listen, I didn’t mean it like that. I won’t say anything, not like your mom is speaking to me anyway.”

“It’s cool. It’s gotta be hard to have a best friend who’s good lookin’ and as talented as me.” Link took the cookie off my tray and broke it in half. It might as well have been the dirty Twinkie off the floor of the bus. It was over. It would take a lot more than a girl, even a Siren, to come between us.

Emily was eyeing him. “You’d better go before Emily rats you out to your mom. Then you won’t be going to any church camp, real or imaginary.”

“I’m not worried about her.” But he was. He didn’t want to be stuck in the house with his mom the whole winter break. And he didn’t want to be frozen out by the team, by everyone at Jackson, even if he was too stupid or too loyal to realize it.

On Monday, I helped Amma bring the boxes of holiday decorations down from the attic. The dust made my eyes water; at least, that’s what I told myself. I found a whole little town, lit by little white lights, that my Mom used to lay out every year under the Christmas tree, on a piece of cotton we pretended was snow. The houses were her grandmother’s, and she had loved them so much that I had loved them, even though they were made of flimsy cardboard, glue, and glitter, and half the time they fell over when I tried to stand them up. “Old things are better than new things, because they’ve got stories in them, Ethan.” She would hold up an old tin car and say, “Imagine my great-grandmother playing with this same car, arranging this same town under her tree, just like we are now.”

I hadn’t seen the town since, when? Since I’d seen my mom, at least. It looked smaller than before, the cardboard more warped and tattered. I couldn’t find the people in any of the boxes, or even the animals. The town looked lonely, and it made me sad. Somehow the magic was gone, without her. I found myself reaching for Lena, in spite of everything.

Everything’s missing. The boxes are there, but it’s all wrong. She’s not here. It’s not even a town anymore. And she’s never going to meet you.

But there was no response. Lena had vanished, or banished me. I didn’t know which was worse. I really was alone, and the only thing worse than being alone was having everyone else see how lonely you were. So I went to the only place in town where I knew I wouldn’t run into anyone. The Gatlin County Library.

“Aunt Marian?”

The library was freezing, and completely empty, as usual. After the way the Disciplinary Committee meeting had gone, I was guessing Marian hadn’t had any visitors.

“I’m back here.” She was sitting on the floor in her overcoat, waist high amidst a pile of open books, as if they had just fallen off the shelves around her. She was holding a book, reading aloud, in one of her familiar book-trances.

“‘We see Him come, and know Him ours,

Who, with His Sun-shine, and His showers,

Turns all the patient ground to flowers.

The Darling of the world is come…’”

She closed the book. “Robert Herrick. It’s a Christmas carol, sung for the king at Whitehall Palace.” She sounded as far away as Lena had been lately, and I felt now.

“Sorry, don’t know the guy.” It was so cold I could see her breath when she spoke.

“Who does it remind you of? Turning the ground to flowers, the darling of the world.”

“You mean Lena? I bet Mrs. Lincoln would have something to say about that.” I sat down next to Marian, scattering books in the aisle.

“Mrs. Lincoln. What a sad creature.” She shook her head, and pulled out another book. “Dickens thinks Christmas is a time for people ‘to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures.’”

“Is the heater broken? Do you want me to call Gatlin Electric?”

“I never turned it on. I guess I got distracted.” She tossed the book back onto the pile surrounding her. “Pity Dickens never came to Gatlin. We’ve got more than our share of shut-up hearts around here.”

I picked up a book. Richard Wilbur. I opened it, burying my face in the smell of the pages. I glanced at the words. “‘What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.’” Weird, that was exactly how I was feeling. I snapped the book shut and looked at Marian.

“Thanks for coming to the meeting, Aunt Marian. I hope it didn’t make trouble for you. I feel like it was all my fault.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Feels like it was.” I tossed the book down.

“What, now you’re the author of all ignorance? You taught Mrs. Lincoln to hate, and Mr. Hollingsworth to fear?”

We both just sat there, surrounded by a mountain of books. She reached over and squeezed my hand. “This battle didn’t start with you, Ethan. It won’t end with you either, I’m afraid, or me, for that matter.” Her face grew serious. “When I walked in this morning, these books were in a pile on the floor. I don’t know how they got there, or why. I locked the doors when I left last night, and they were still locked this morning. All I know is, I sat down to look through them, and every single book, every one of them, had some kind of message for me about this moment, in this town, right now. About Lena, you, even me.”

I shook my head. “It’s a coincidence. Books are like that.”

She plucked a random book out of the pile and handed it to me. “You try. Open it.”

I took the book from her hand. “What is it?”

“Shakespeare. Julius Caesar.”

I opened it, and began to read.

“‘Men at some time are masters of their fates:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

“What does that have to do with me?”

Marian peered at me, over her glasses. “I’m just the librarian. I can only give you the books. I can’t give you the answers.” But she smiled, all the same. “The thing about fate is, are you the master of your fate, or are the stars?”

“Are you talking about Lena, or Julius Caesar? Because I hate to break it to you, but I never read the play.”

“You tell me.”

We spent the rest of the hour going through the pile, taking turns reading to each other. Finally, I knew why I had come. “Aunt Marian, I think I need to go back into the archive.”

“Today? Don’t you have things you need to be doing? Holiday shopping at least?”

“I don’t shop.”

“Spoken wisely. As for myself, ‘I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.’”

“More Dickens?”

“E. M. Forster.”

I sighed. “I can’t explain it. I think I need to be with my mom.”

“I know. I miss her, too.” I hadn’t really thought about what I would say to Marian about how I was feeling. About the town, and how everything was wrong. Now the words seemed stuck in my throat, like another person was stumbling through them. “I just thought, if I could be around her books, maybe I could feel how it was before. Maybe I could talk to her. I tried to go to the graveyard once, but it didn’t make me feel like she was there, in the ground.” I stared at a random speck on the carpet.

“I know.”

“I still can’t think about her being there. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you stick someone you love down in a lonely old hole in the dirt? Where it’s cold, and dirty, and full of bugs? That can’t be how it ends, after everything, after everything she was.” I tried not to think about it, her body turning into bone and mud and dust down there. I hated the idea that she had to go through it alone, like I was going through everything alone now.

“How do you want it to end?” Marian laid her hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know. I should, somebody should build her a monument or something.”

“Like the General? Your mom would have had a good laugh about that.” Marian pulled her arm around me. “I know what you mean. She’s not there, she’s here.”

She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. We held hands all the way back to the archive, as if I was still a kid she was babysitting while my mom was at work in the back. She pulled out a thick ring of keys and opened the door. She didn’t follow me inside.

Back in the archive, I sank into the chair in front of my mom’s desk. My mom’s chair. It was wooden, and bore the insignia of Duke University. I think they had given it to her for graduating with honors, or something like that. It wasn’t comfortable, but comforting, and familiar. I smelled the old varnish, the same varnish I’d probably chewed on as a baby, and right away I felt better than I had in months. I could breathe in the smell of the stacks of books wrapped in crackling plastic, the old crumbling parchment, the dust and the cheap file cabinets. I could breathe in the particular air of the particular atmosphere of my mother’s very particular planet. To me, it was the same as if I was seven years old, sitting in her lap, burying my face in her shoulder.

I wanted to go home. Without Lena, I had nowhere else to go.

I picked up a small, framed photograph on my mom’s desk, almost hidden among the books. It was her, and my father, in the study at our house. Someone had taken it in black and white, a long time ago. Probably for the back of a book jacket, on one of their early projects, when my dad was still a historian, and they had worked together. Back when they had funny hair, and ugly pants, and you could see the happiness on their faces. It was hard to look at, but harder to put down. When I went to return it to my mom’s desk, next to the dusty stacks of books, one book caught my eye. I pulled it out from under an encyclopedia of Civil War weapons and a catalog of native plants of South Carolina. I didn’t know what the book was. I only knew it was bookmarked with a long sprig of rosemary. I smiled. At least it wasn’t a sock, or a dirty pudding spoon.

The Gatlin County Junior League cookbook, Fried Chicken and Sass. It opened, by itself, to a single page. “Betty Burton’s Buttermilk Pan Fried Tomatoes,” my mom’s favorite. The scent of rosemary rose up from the pages. I looked at the rosemary more closely. It was fresh, as if it had been plucked from a garden yesterday. My mom couldn’t have put it there, but no one else would use rosemary as a bookmark. My mom’s favorite recipe was bookmarked with Lena’s familiar scent. Maybe the books really were trying to tell me something.

“Aunt Marian? Were you looking to fry up some tomatoes?”

She stuck her head in the doorway. “Do you think I would touch a tomato, let alone cook one?”

I stared at the rosemary in my hand. “That’s what I thought.”

“I think that was the one thing your mother and I disagreed on.”

“Can I borrow this book? Just for a few days?”

“Ethan, you don’t have to ask. Those are your mother’s things; there isn’t anything in this room she wouldn’t have wanted you to have.”

I wanted to ask Marian about the rosemary in the cookbook, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to show it to anyone else, or to part with it. Even though I had never and probably would never fry a tomato in my entire life. I stuck the book under my arm as Marian walked me to the door.

“If you need me, I’m here for you. You and Lena. You know that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” She pushed the hair out of my eyes and gave me a smile. It wasn’t my mother’s smile, but it was one of my mother’s favorite smiles.

Marian hugged me, and wrinkled her nose. “Do you smell rosemary?”

I shrugged and slipped out the door, into the gray day. Maybe Julius Caesar was right. Maybe it was time to confront my fate, and Lena’s fate. Whether it was up to us or the stars, I couldn’t just sit around and wait to find out.

When I walked outside, it was snowing. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up into the sky and let snow fall on my freezing face. The thick, white powdery flakes were drifting down with no particular purpose. It wasn’t a storm, not at all. It was a gift, maybe even a miracle: a white Christmas, just like the song.

When I walked up to my front porch, there she was, sitting bareheaded on my front steps with her hood down. The moment I saw her, I recognized the snow for what it really was. A peace offering.

Lena smiled at me. In that second, the pieces of my life that had been falling apart fell back in place. Everything that was wrong just righted itself; maybe not everything, but enough.

I sat down next to her on the step. “Thanks, L.”

She leaned against me. “I just wanted to make you feel better. I’m so confused, Ethan. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”

I ran my hand through her damp hair. “Don’t push me away, please. I can’t stand to lose anyone else I care about.” I unzipped her parka, slipping my arm around her waist, inside her jacket, and pulled her toward me. I kissed her as she pressed into me, until I felt like we would melt the whole front yard if we didn’t stop.

“What was that?” she asked, catching her breath. I kissed her again, until I couldn’t take it any longer, and pulled back.

“I think that’s called fate. I’ve been waiting to do that since the winter formal, and I’m not going to wait any longer.”

“You’re not?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait a little longer. I’m still grounded. Uncle M thinks I’m at the library.”

“I don’t care if you’re grounded. I’m not. I’ll move into your house if I have to, and sleep with Boo in his dog bed.”

“He has a bedroom. He sleeps in a four-poster bed.”

“Even better.”

She smiled and held onto my hand. The snowflakes melted as they landed on our warm skin.

“I’ve missed you, Ethan Wate.” She kissed me back. The snow fell harder, dripping off us. We were practically radioactive. “Maybe you were right. We should spend as much time together as we can before—” she stopped, but I knew what she was thinking.

“We’re gonna figure something out, L. I promise.”

She nodded half-heartedly, and snuggled inside my arms. I could feel the calm beginning to spread between us. “I don’t want to think about that today.” She pushed me away, playfully, back among the living.

“Yeah? What do you want to think about, then?”

“Snow angels. I’ve never made one.”

“Really? You guys don’t do angels?”

“It’s not the angels. We only moved to Virginia for a few months, so I’ve never lived anywhere it snows.”

An hour later, we were soggy and wet and sitting around the kitchen table. Amma had gone to the Stop & Steal, and we were drinking the sorry hot chocolate I had attempted to make myself.

“I’m not sure this is the way you make hot chocolate,” Lena teased me as I scraped a microwaved bowl of chocolate chips into hot milk. The result was brown and white and lumpy. It looked great to me.

“Yeah? How would you know? ‘Kitchen, hot chocolate, please.’” I mimicked her high voice with my low one and the result was a strange cracking falsetto. She smiled. I had missed that smile, even though it had only been days; I missed it even when it had only been minutes.

“Speaking of Kitchen, I have to go. I told my uncle I was at the library, and it’s closed by now.”

I pulled her onto my lap, sitting at the kitchen table. I was having trouble not touching her every second, now that I could again. I found myself making excuses to tickle her, anything to touch her hair, her hands, her knees. The pull between us was like a magnet. She leaned against my chest and we just sat there until I heard feet padding across the floor upstairs. She bolted out of my lap like a frightened cat.

“Don’t worry, that’s my dad. He’s just taking a shower. It’s the only time he comes out of his study anymore.”

“He’s getting worse, isn’t he?” She took my hand. We both knew it wasn’t really a question.

“My dad wasn’t like this until my mom died. He just flipped out after that.” I didn’t have to say the rest; she’d heard me think it enough times. About how my mom died, and we stopped cooking fried tomatoes, and we lost the little pieces of the Christmas town, and she wasn’t there to stand up to Mrs. Lincoln, and nothing was ever the same again.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Is that why you went to the library today? To look for your mom?”

I looked at Lena, pushing her hair out of her face. I nodded, pulling the rosemary out of my pocket and placing it carefully on the counter. “Come on. I want to show you something.” I pulled her out of the chair and took her hand. We slid across the old wood flooring in our damp socks and stopped at the door to the study. I looked up the stairs to my dad’s bedroom. I didn’t even hear the shower yet; we still had plenty of time. I tried the door handle.

“It’s locked.” Lena frowned. “Do you have the key?”

“Wait, watch what happens.” We stood there, staring at the door. I felt stupid standing there, and Lena must have too because she started to giggle. Just when I was about to laugh, the door began to unbolt itself. She stopped laughing.

That’s not a Cast. I would be able to feel it.

I think I’m supposed to go in, or we are.

I stepped back and the door bolted itself again. Lena held up her hand, as if she was going to use her powers to open the door for me. I touched her back, gently. “L. I think I need to do it.”

I touched the handle again. The door unbolted and swung open, and I stepped into the study for the first time in years. It was still a dark, frightening place. The painting, covered with a sheet, was still hanging over the faded sofa. Under the window, my dad’s carved mahogany desk was papered with his latest novel, stacked on his computer, stacked on his chair, stacked meticulously across the Persian rug on the floor.

“Don’t touch anything. He’ll know.”

Lena squatted down and stared at the nearest pile. Then, she picked up a piece of paper and turned on the brass desk lamp. “Ethan.”

“Don’t turn on the light. I don’t want him to come down here and freak out on us. He’d kill me if he knew we were in here. All he cares about is his book.”

She handed me the paper, without a word. I took it. It was covered with scribbles. Not scribbled words, just scribbles. I grabbed a handful of the papers closest to me. They were covered with squiggly lines and shapes, and more scribbles. I picked up a piece of paper from the floor, nothing but tiny rows of circles. I tore through the stacks of white paper littering his desk and the floor. More scribbles and shapes, pages and pages of them. Not a single word.

Then I understood. There was no book.

My father wasn’t a writer. He wasn’t even a vampire.

He was a madman.

I bent down, my hands on my knees. I was going to be sick. I should have seen this coming. Lena rubbed my back.

It’s okay. He’s just going through a hard time. He’ll come back to you.

He won’t. He’s gone. She’s gone, and now I’m losing him, too.

What had my father been doing all this time, avoiding me? What was the point of sleeping all day and working all night, if you weren’t working on the great American novel? If you were scribbling rows and rows of circles? Escaping from your only child? Did Amma know? Was everyone in on the joke but me?

It’s not your fault. Don’t do this to yourself.

This time I was the one out of control. The anger welled up inside me, and I pushed his laptop off his desk, sending his papers flying. I knocked over the brass lamp, and without even thinking, yanked the sheet off the painting over the couch. The painting went tumbling to the ground, knocking over a low bookshelf. A pile of books went flying to the floor, sprawling open on the rug.

“Look at the painting.” She righted it, amidst the books on the floor.

It was a painting of me.

Me, as a Confederate soldier, in 1865. But it was me, nonetheless.

Neither one of us needed to read the penciled label on the back of the frame to know who it was. He even had the lanky brown hair hanging down in his face.

“About time we met you, Ethan Carter Wate,” I said, just as I heard my father lumbering down the stairs.

“Ethan Wate!”

Lena looked at the door, panicking. “Door!” It slammed shut and bolted. I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t think I was ever going to get used to that.

There was pounding on the door. “Ethan, are you okay? What’s goin’ on in there?” I ignored him. I couldn’t figure out what else to do, and I couldn’t stand to look at him right now. Then I noticed the books.

“Look.” I knelt on the floor in front of the nearest one. It was open to page 3. I flipped the page to 4 and it flipped back to 3. Just like the bolt on the study door. “Did you just do that?”

“What are you talking about? We can’t stay in here all night.”

“Marian and I spent the day in the library. And as crazy as it sounds, she thought the books were telling us things.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know. Stuff about fate, and Mrs. Lincoln, and you.”

“Me?”

“Ethan! Open this door!” My dad was pounding now, but he had kept me out long enough. It was my turn.

“In the archive, I found a picture of my mom in this study and then a cookbook, opened to her favorite recipe, with a bookmark made of rosemary. Fresh rosemary. Don’t you get it? It has to do with you, somehow, and my mom. And now we’re here, like something wanted me to come here. Or, I don’t know—someone.”

“Or maybe you just thought of it because you saw her picture.”

“Maybe, but look at this.” I flipped the page of the Constitutional History book in front of me, turning it from page 3 to page 4. Once again, no sooner had I turned it than the page flipped back by itself.

“That’s weird.” She turned to the next book. South Carolina: Cradle to Grave. It was open to page 12. She flipped it back to 11. It flipped to 12.

I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “But this page doesn’t say anything, it’s a chart. Marian’s books were open to certain pages because they were trying to tell us something, like messages. My mom’s books don’t seem to be telling us anything.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of code.”

“My mom was terrible at math. She was a writer,” I said, as if that was explanation enough. But I wasn’t, and my mom knew that better than anyone.

Lena considered the next book. “Page 1. This is just the title page. It can’t be the content.”

“Why would she leave me a code?” I was thinking out loud, but Lena still had the answer.

“Because you always know the end of the movie. Because you grew up with Amma and the mystery novels and the crosswords. Maybe your mom thought you would figure out something that no one else would get.”

My father half-heartedly banged away at the door. I looked at the next book. Page 9, and then 13. None of the numbers went higher than 26. And yet, lots of the books had way more pages than that….

“There are 26 letters in the alphabet, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s it. When I was little, and couldn’t sit still in church with the Sisters, my mom would make up games for me to play on the back of the church program. Hangman, scrambled words, and this, the alphabet code.”

“Wait, let me get a pen.” She grabbed a pen from the desk. “If A is 1 and B is 2—let me write it out.”

“Careful. Sometimes I used to do it backward, where Z was 1.”

Lena and I sat in the middle of the circle of the books, moving from book to book, while my father banged on the door outside. I ignored him, just like he had been ignoring me. I wasn’t going to answer to him, or give him an explanation. Let him see how it felt for a change.

“3, 12, 1, 9, 13…”

“Ethan! What are you doin’ in there? What was all that racket?”

“25, 15, 21, 18, 19, 5, 12, 6.”

I looked at Lena, and held out the paper. I was already a step ahead. “I think—it’s meant for you.”

It was as clear as if my mom was standing in the study, telling us in her own words, with her own voice.

CLAIMYOURSELF

It was a message for Lena.

My mom was there, in some form, in some sense, in some universe. My mom was still my mom, even if she only lived in books and door locks and the smell of fried tomatoes and old paper.

She lived.

When I finally opened the door, my dad was standing there in his bathrobe. He stared past me, into the study, where the pages of his imaginary novel were scattered all over the floor and the painting of Ethan Carter Wate was resting against the sofa, uncovered.

“Ethan, I—”

“What? Were going to tell me that you’ve been locked in your study for months doing this?” I held up one of the crumpled pages in my hand.

He looked down at the floor. My dad may have been crazy, but he was still sane enough to know that I had figured out the truth. Lena sat down on the sofa, looking uncomfortable.

“Why? That’s all I want to know. Was there ever a book or were you just trying to avoid me?”

My dad raised his head slowly, his eyes tired and bloodshot. He looked old, like life had worn him down one disappointment at a time. “I just wanted to be close to her. When I’m in there, with her books and her things, it feels like she isn’t really gone. I can still smell her. Fried tomatoes…” His voice trailed off, as if he was lost in his own mind again and the rare moment of clarity was gone.

He walked past me, back into the study, and bent down to pick up one of the pages covered with circles. His hand was shaking. “I was tryin’ to write.” He looked over at my mom’s chair. “I just don’t know what to write anymore.”

It wasn’t about me. It had never been about me. It was about my mom. A few hours ago I had felt the same way in the library, sitting among her things, trying to feel her there with me. But now I knew she wasn’t gone, and everything was different. My dad didn’t know. She wasn’t unlocking doors for him and leaving him messages. He didn’t even have that.

The next week, on Christmas Eve, the weathered and warped cardboard town didn’t seem so small. The lopsided steeple stayed on the church, and the farmhouse even stood up by itself, if you set it just right. The white glitter glue sparkled and the same old piece of cotton snow secured the town, constant as time.

I lay on my stomach on the floor, with my head tucked under the lowest branches of the fat white pine, just as I always had. The blue-green needles scratched my neck as I carefully pushed a string of tiny white lights, one by one, into the circular holes in the back of the broken village. I sat back to take a look, the soft white light turning colors through the painted paper windows of the town. We never found the people, and the tin cars and animals were still gone. The town was empty, but for the first time it didn’t seem deserted, and I didn’t feel alone.

As I sat there, listening to Amma’s pencil scratching, and my dad’s scratchy old holiday record, something caught my eye. It was small and dark, and snagged in a fold, between layers of the cotton snow. It was a star, about the size of a penny, painted silver and gold, and surrounded by a twisted halo made of what looked like a paper clip. It was from the town’s pipe-cleaner Christmas tree, which we hadn’t been able to find in years. My mom had made it in school, as a little girl in Savannah.

I put it in my pocket. I’d give it to Lena next time I saw her, for her charm necklace, for safekeeping. So it didn’t get lost again. So I didn’t get lost again.

My mom would have liked that. Would like that. Just like she would have liked Lena—or maybe even, did.

Claim yourself.

The answer had been in front of us, all along. It was just locked away with all the books in my father’s study, stuck between the pages of my mother’s cookbook.

Snagged a little in the dusty snow.