Aerie

  And, unlike here, our song would never accidentally tangent off onto some long, wrong discussion about things like FOR EXAMPLE SURELY THIS NEVER HAPPENED, the item of legend that has fallen from the sky since at least the fourteenth century, which is called star jelly.

  Run-on sentence. Forgive. Only way to get that out.

  Star jelly. Seriously?! No, surely no one named Jason Kerwin would ever bring that unsexiness up IN THE MIDDLE OF HOOKING UP WITH ME, and surely I would never have to stop everything in order to do internet research, because dear god. Star jelly??

  Yes.

  Star jelly, it turns out, is little blobs full of random, probably poisonous bacteria, which exist all the time environmentally, but are apparently activated only by rainfall. They drop to earth in globs.

  Oh, there are other names for it. Star rot, anyone? Star slubber? Because that’s romantic.

  Or, if you speak Welsh (I do not; Jason, of course, does), pwdre ser. In Latin (also Jason) stella terrae, or star of the earth.

  There’s a horrific school of thought that says that shooting stars are sperm trying to impregnate the eggs of the planets, and here, I die, because in that scenario, this star jelly is . . . well. Exactly what it sounds like.

  Or, how about another horrible theory?—

  The boy beside me opens his eyes.

  “Stop thinking, Aza Ray,” he says sleepily. “I feel you thinking.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I’m made of thinking.”

  So he figures out a way to, if not stop me, at least to put my thinking on pause. And it’s a pretty perfect non-flat-tire way.

  Maybe this is how love is. I don’t know any other version. I try not to worry about a version in which something goes very wrong, in which we’re alive and not together.

  But even as we’re kissing, I’m worried.

  About singing.

  About Heyward.

  I’m worried and worried and worried.

  At 5:30 a.m., as I’m slinking out of Jason’s house, I run smack into his mom. Eve’s sitting on the front steps drinking coffee. At least she’s not Carol, Jason’s other mom, whose attitude is far more depth-charged. Eve’s way more accepting of the inevitability of girlfriends.

  She grins at me, her precision-wicked grin, a grin that doesn’t remotely belong on the face of anyone’s mom. Eve has gray eyes, dark brown skin, and dreads, which she rocks in varying ways, depending on what she’s doing in the world, be it talking to the UN or digging in the compost, with either cargo pants or a suit. Her expertise is the kind of thing that makes other scientists sit down and shut up, but people who don’t know anything assume she’s, like, a really killer gardener, rather than an expert on genetic modification, plant plagues, and world hunger strategy, among other things.

  Jason comes by his brain honestly. Eve usually just factoid-slays everyone who misjudges her. And then hands them a giant organic pumpkin so they’re confused all over again. The Kerwin garden is legendary.

  Eve’s casually like: “So, Beth, you spent the night?”

  And I’m casually like: “. . .”

  I didn’t spend the entirety of the night in Jason’s bed. Like, really, NONE of the night. Only the early morning hours. But she has the look that says we’re about to have a Discussion.

  “Condoms?” says Eve, and I wriggle throughout my entire hidden self. “Protection” is the preferred parental euphemism, hello!

  “Yeah,” I say. “Obviously. The prophylactics and the et cetera et cetera ET! CET! ERA!”

  She looks at me for slightly longer than she should be looking. I realize I’ve just Aza Rayed that answer. I grab up the London accent I’ve been using.

  “I mean . . . we’re definitely using the rubbers, so . . .”

  Oh god. Did I say that? Is that what I said? Where did it even come from? Why would I use that word?! Why would I add a “the” to the already wrongful term?! Why would I be hunting British birth control slang in the back of my memory and find that?

  Eve agrees. She’s giving me a look that clearly says You Have Broken the Code of Euphemism, Dear Son’s Girlfriend. Now: Further Questions.

  It’s not like there hasn’t been, FOR YEARS, a giant jar of condoms in the hall closet, which they pretended they weren’t checking in on, so much so that when we actually did start having sex, we didn’t even use any of those, but bought our own secretly on the internet.

  “The Rubbers?” Eve says. “Do we need to do a review? Because, kiddo, that sounds like a band, not birth control.”

  I die.

  Eve is staring at me, waiting for a real response.

  “We’re using tons AND TONS of protection,” I say. This is the wrong set of words. I smile in a way that I hope is convincing, but which probably has never convinced any parent ever. “There will be no accidental babies!”

  We could have parents who’d lose their minds over this. I guess they figure it’s better to have us having sex at home than, for example, in a certain person’s orange Camaro.

  “Without fail,” says Eve, sounding exactly like Jason.

  “Without fail,” I repeat.

  She toasts me suspiciously with her coffee cup, and I walk home, texting Jason on the way.

  He texts back the woeful and unsurprising lines: BOTH MOMS HERE NOW. IN DEPTH SEX-ED REVIEW, WITH FOOTNOTES AND READING LIST.

  For a second, we’re, like, normal people who are normally in love, and normally being suspected of sins by our parents. There’s a script for this version. We both feel calmer when there’s a script.

  I take one last glance at the sky as I walk into my house, but even though today is Aza Ray’s birthday/deathday there’s nothing to suggest that today’s anything but ordinary.

  So why is every nerve in my body screaming that something’s about to change?

  CHAPTER 4

  {JASON}

  I scan the sky with my anomaly app before I drive to pick Aza and Eli up for school. Nothing wrong up there, or at least nothing my phone wants to report. Still, I’m on edge. This doesn’t feel like any kind of birthday to me.

  By which, I mean, it does.

  Every birthday of Aza’s has been a countdown toward something bad, and every year I’ve been hanging streamers and making cake. The only birthday party at which I remember feeling clueless and thus hopeful was the first one I went to, when we were five. By the time we were six, I’d learned about death, and I knew it was going to try to steal Aza from me. By the time we were seven, I’d started writing my apology list, and by the time we were fifteen, it was forty pages long. Not that I ever read it to her. Not that she ever knew.

  It’s not like I haven’t been faking celebration all these years, while going home after every birthday dinner to scan the entirety of the internet for ways to cure someone incurable.

  In some ways, freaking out about just the weather is an improvement. I’ve spent hours looking at old tabloids, comparing them to medical research, curiosity cabinet and freak show stuff, the horrible things that happened to people unlucky enough to be born spectacular, strange, and inexplicable.

  Aza is, of course, all of the above. There are things I wish I didn’t know: Magonian ships yanked out of the sky, experiments in secret government labs in the desert, Magonian bodies taken apart in the name of science. Given what Aza’s told me, some of them were probably thrown off ships for the crime of being mouths to feed. And that idea cracks my heart open.

  Before Magonia, Aza had no good-bye mode, but there’s always a preemptive good-bye on her face now. She thinks she has me fooled, but I know she’s just-in-casing. Maybe she’s always ten minutes away from taking hold of a skyrope and climbing.

  Fine, there are things to be nervous about. Things I seem to be unable to shake.

  When the girl you love says oh, right, this guy Dai is imprinted on me as my universally fated life and song partner it’s hard to take it in stride. I’m not a jealous guy, normally, but—

  Yeah, I’m full of shit. I’m com
pletely jealous, even when Aza Ray is in my arms.

  Zal and Dai want Aza up there. I want Aza down here.

  Aza wants—

  Aza wants everything.

  But what if everything is elsewhere?

  “You look way weird,” Eli says to me when she gets into the car. “Aza walked. You’re late.”

  “You look way weird too,” I tell Eli, and she snorts.

  “Please. Nothing about this is weird.”

  Eli’s wearing her uniform of perfectly symmetrical everything, buttoned and ironed. She’s like someone unrelated to the messy chaos of Aza-now-Beth, and in reality she is, except she isn’t. They’re sisters. Just weird sisters.

  “It’s not a minor day,” I tell her.

  She gets it. Eli was with me on the last day of Aza’s life as Aza, in the ambulance in the last moments, and she was with me at Aza’s funeral too. Exactly 365 days ago, I was heading to school wearing a rental alligator, and Eli was wearing wrinkled black clothing and a crooked haircut, and both of us had broken hearts.

  Eli shrugs, puts her hand on my shoulder, because actually Eli’s kind in the heart, and gives me a look.

  “We move forward,” she says. “There is no reverse when it comes to reasonable course of action. We don’t freak out, Kerwin.”

  I actually have to turn my head to stare at her. She sounds like she’s been reading something self-help. She shrugs again.

  “Yoga,” she says. “And meditation. And tai chi. And a therapist. I had to keep Magonia a major secret, but still. Ballet and gymnastics weren’t enough to deal with this. I had to do something or I was gonna spend all my time staring at the sky. No one else has that problem, I’m sure.”

  She gives me her own version of a Significant Look. It’s not fair.

  “I have a new place I’m working out. You could come too, you know. Like, leave your computer behind and see the sun. Stop thinking for up to ten minutes at a time.”

  I’m not sure how I got roped into a friendship with my girlfriend’s little sister, except that she was the only one who understood the loss and return of Aza. No one else can talk to me about it. Her parents are way too sensitive, and it’s a secret from the rest of the world. Eli and I have a survivor bond. But since when does she get to shame me for being housebound?

  “You’re looking badly pitiful. And pallid,” says Eli.

  “Pallid?” I say.

  “I thought I’d speak your language,” she says. “Today I can actually see your brain oozing out your ears. It’s not a good look. Also, you have wrinkles in your forehead that’re new. You didn’t have those three months ago. You look way, way old. You’re acting like somebody’s dad.”

  I sigh. We’re in the parking lot.

  “Why’d she walk?” I finally ask.

  “Birthday nerves,” Eli says. “Neither of you are in good form today. But you’re going to have to deal. There needs to be cake later, and candles, and it needs to be amazing. Not for you, for my parents. I know you love my sister, but you aren’t the only one. And you can’t just worry about her all day long. You’re going to make her feel suffocated.”

  I wince at that word choice.

  “She didn’t say that, did she?”

  “You’re supposed to be her boyfriend, not her bodyguard. Get yourself together.”

  Then she’s out of the car and into the building. I stew a moment longer.

  I’m allowed to be worried. Aza’s still technically dying. Just differently, wearing a degrading skin stolen from off a Magonian ship, and who knows what, or who, this skin was meant for? Beth Marchon—the identity Aza’s had since last year—is an exchange student from London in America staying at the Boyle house for the next couple years. Little Women reference on purpose. Aza decided Beth March, who died before her time, wrapped in a blanket she didn’t ask for, should get another chance at being alive. Beth March marches on.

  And if Beth happens to have a voice very much like the voice of a certain deceased Aza Ray, the London accent disguises it. There are other differences too, pretty major ones on the disguise front. Aza Ray Boyle was fish-belly white tending toward pale blue. Beth Marchon’s skin is brown. As a result the past year has been full of a uniquely earth-based brand of bullshit, people reacting to her in ways I’d never have imagined.

  It’s been a bad education in the way the human world still sees things. Particularly bad if you’d had delusions that humanity might be okay accepting someone from Magonia. Nope. Humanity isn’t even okay accepting someone from earth.

  People have had a few things to say about the fact that we’re dating. Nothing I could pin down closely as a Basic Racist Comment, but still, it’s there. You can feel it. And it’s not like I’m from some clueless zone. My mom Eve is black, and when I was little, walking around with her—

  Let’s just say I thought the world had gotten better since then. Mind you, I don’t actually know which of my moms is biologically my mom. Could be either of them. My skin tone is somewhere between. That’s the awesomeness of my moms for you, actual awesome, not being sarcastic. They don’t care what people think. They do it their way, and I do it mine.

  It’s not like the history of humans is full of perfect examples of how to live. Why not invent a new way?

  Magonians: same deal. Tons of things about both places, fucked up. Rostrae, after all, are up there, enslaved by Magonians. There’s that, and all the ways I’m trying to figure that out. The scientific ways. The daily ways.

  God. I’m on high alert for everything today.

  Not only am I on high alert, I suddenly remember, I’m also in high school. I make my way in, passing a variety of people in the hallway, all of whom give me the look that says apparently I’m not hiding anything well today.

  I pass Mr. Grimm, who’s been looking at me too closely ever since last year and the lightning strike. I prefer less attention.

  “Jason,” he says. “Don’t think no one noticed you sitting in your car. You get a pass today, but that’s it. Are you sick?”

  Why is he everywhere?

  “I’m okay,” I say, but actually—

  Maybe Eli was right. I’ve missed two class periods by sitting in my car gnawing on the universe. I didn’t even feel time passing.

  Once I get into the room, I look over at Aza, who’s three desks away being Beth. I discover that I have no idea what’s going on in her head.

  She looks happy. But not like she’s thinking about me.

  I wasn’t thinking about her either, was I? I was thinking about everything else in the sky and sea and wilderness. I was thinking about failures on every level, and about how I don’t know how to fix them.

  So, we’re even?

  Aza’s staring into space.

  I’m staring into Aza.

  I catch a flicker of expression on her face, her forehead crinkling, her eyes far away, and I wonder if she’s talking to Caru, her heartbird, or if she’s got a headache. Or, maybe, she’s thinking about how to go back to her sky kingdom.

  Paranoid, Kerwin. Paranoid.

  I change my focus and run in-brain stats on fixing the problems between Magonia and earth. All the old-school data on skyships is still part of my collation. Centuries of reports of temperature crises, and weather meltdowns. Miracle books from the 1400s, the parts that depict rains of leaves and tendrils, and other things. Triangulating that with the activities of people on earth.

  I know from super plants, at least a little bit. There’s no magic food crop I’ve hit on that can provide enough for everyone on earth and above, not without huge vulnerabilities.

  I think about, alphabetically, almonds (which require too much water), bananas, catastrophic chemicals, drought, dust, garbage patches, GMO, heat waves, ice storms, Magonia, oil spills, ozone, parasites, parch, pesticides, shrivel, whirlwinds. There are plenty of other categories in the alphabet of collapse. What if they all happened at once? What if Magonia stopped making weather?

  I’m trying to pluck things th
at’re Magonian apart from things that are earth-based, and trying to figure out how much of earth knows about Magonia. Some people definitely have known over the years.

  There was a rain of something called angel hair the other day, a shiny fiber, like a ticker tape parade, falling from the sky. The official version is that it’s chaff dropped by military aircraft to keep them from being recognized on radar. The reflective strips confuse things.

  According to Aza, though, it’s also a thing Magonian ships do, making a cloud of tiny objects around themselves so that they don’t look like ships. It’s a kind of surveillance camouflage. Except Magonian ships employ Rostrae and canwr to do that job, not little showers of reflective aluminum strips. I imagine standing beneath a fall of that. Imagine the confetti of camouflage falling down over you.

  More things are hidden than you’d think. Camouflaged in plain sight.

  I look at Aza again, but her pen is moving quickly over her paper.

  She looks human. She looks like she’s mine.

  I know I can trust her.

  I look at her, and she’s writing in the handwriting she’s always had, her pen moving the way it always does, and it’s her birthday.

  I wish there was a support group for people dating people who aren’t people.

  How does that sound? Wrong. And like the reverse of some seriously weird song lyrics. But still. I have a vision of a bunch of guys whose girlfriends are Magonians, all of us sitting around a table getting a turn at saying . . .

  “I’m worried every time there’s a storm. Every time there’s weather at all. I’m worried every time she coughs. I’m worried every time she doesn’t answer the phone.”

  But there’s no support group like that. I’m the only one in it. Just one guy, at a table, in a room alone.

  Aza glances at me. She smiles. She blows me a kiss.

  And like that, I’m not the only one at the table. Aza Ray’s there across from me.

  Breathe, Kerwin. Keep breathing.

  CHAPTER 5

  {AZA}

  Despite what I told Eli, the very idea that Heyward is here fills me with nervous energy for the entire day.