Beautiful Darkness

  “Is that so?”

  “Definitely. You have to come back.”

  “And that will make me feel better how, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. How about, it’s so bad, it’ll make the rest of your life seem great in comparison?”

  “By your logic, I should spend the day with Principal Harper.”

  “Or try out for cheerleading.”

  She twirled her necklace around her finger, her distinctive collection of charms knocking against each other. “It’s tempting.” She smiled, almost a laugh, and I knew she was going with me.

  Lena rested her shoulder against mine the whole way to school. But when we got to the parking lot, she couldn’t bring herself to get out of the car. I didn’t dare turn off the engine.

  Savannah Snow, the queen of Jackson High, walked past us, hitching her tight T-shirt above her jeans. Emily Asher, her second in command, followed behind, texting as she slid between cars. Emily saw us and grabbed Savannah by the arm. They stopped, the response of any Gatlin girl whose mamma had raised her right, when faced with a relative of the recently departed. Savannah clutched her books to her chest, shaking her head at us sadly. It was like watching an old silent movie.

  Your uncle’s in a better place now, Lena. He’s up at the pearly gates, where a chorus a angels is leadin’ him to his ever-lovin’ Maker.

  I translated for Lena, but she already knew what they were thinking.

  Stop it!

  Lena slid her battered spiral notebook in front of her face, trying to disappear. Emily held up her hand, a timid half-wave. Giving us our space, letting us know she was not only well bred but sensitive. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what she was thinking either.

  I’m not comin’ over there, because I’m a lettin’ you grieve in peace, sweet Lena Du-channes. But I will always, and I do mean always, be here for you, like the Good Book and my mamma taught me.

  Emily nodded to Savannah, and the two of them walked slowly and sadly away, as if they hadn’t started the Guardian Angels, Jackson’s version of a neighborhood watch, a few months ago with the sole purpose of getting Lena kicked out of school. In a way, this was worse. Emory ran to catch up with them, but he saw us and slowed to a somber walk, rapping on the hood of my car as he walked by. He hadn’t said a word to me in months, but now he was showing his support. They were all so full of crap.

  “Don’t say it.” Lena had rolled herself down into a ball in the passenger’s seat.

  “Can’t believe he didn’t take off his cap. His mamma’s gonna kick the tar outta him when he gets home.” I turned off the engine. “Play this right and you might make the cheer squad after all, sweet Lena Du-channes.”

  “They’re… they’re such—” She was so angry for a minute I regretted saying it. But it was going to be happening all day, and I wanted her to be prepared before she set foot in the halls of Jackson. I had spent too much time being Poor Ethan Wate Whose Mamma Died Just Last Year not to know that.

  “Hypocrites?” That was an understatement.

  “Sheep.” That, too. “I don’t want to be in their squad, and I don’t want a seat at their table. I don’t want them to even look at me. I know Ridley was manipulating them with her powers, but if they hadn’t thrown that party on my birthday—if I had stayed inside Ravenwood like Uncle Macon had wanted…” I didn’t need her to finish. He might still be alive.

  “You can’t know that, L. Sarafine would have found another way to get to you.”

  “They hate me, and that’s how it should be.” Her hair was beginning to curl, and for a second I thought there was going to be a downpour. She put her head in her hands, ignoring the tears that were losing themselves in her crazy hair. “Something has to stay the same. I’m nothing like them.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but you never were, and you never will be.”

  “I know, but something’s changed. Everything’s changed.”

  I looked out my window. “Not everything.”

  Boo Radley stared back at me. He was sitting on the faded white line of the parking space next to ours, as if he had been waiting for this moment. Boo still followed Lena everywhere, like a good Caster dog. I thought about how many times I had considered giving that dog a ride. Saving him some time. I opened the door, but Boo didn’t move.

  “Fine. Be that way.” I started to pull the door closed, knowing Boo would never get in. As I did, he leaped up into my lap, across the gearshift, and into Lena’s arms.

  She buried her face in his fur, breathing deeply, as if the mangy dog created some kind of air that was different from the air outside.

  They were one quivering mass of black hair and black fur. For a minute, the whole universe seemed fragile, like it could fall apart if I so much as blew in the wrong direction or pulled the wrong thread.

  I knew what I needed to do. I couldn’t explain the feeling, but it came over me as powerfully as the dreams had, when I saw Lena for the first time. The dreams we had always shared, so real they left mud in my sheets, or river water dripping onto my floor. This feeling was no different.

  I needed to know what thread to pull. I needed to be the one who knew the right direction. She couldn’t see her way clear of where she was right now, so it had to be me.

  Lost. That’s what she was, and it was the one thing I couldn’t let her be.

  I turned on the car and shifted into reverse. We had only made it as far as the parking lot, and I knew without a word that it was time to drive Lena home. Boo kept his eyes closed the whole way.

  We took an old blanket back to Greenbrier and curled up near Genevieve’s grave, on a tiny patch of grass next to the hearthstone and the crumbling rock wall. The blackened trees and meadows surrounded us on every side, tufts of green only beginning to push through the hard dirt. Even now it was still our spot, the place where we had first talked after Lena shattered the window in English class with a look—and her Caster powers. Aunt Del couldn’t stand to see the burnt cemetery and ruined gardens anymore, but Lena didn’t mind. This was the last place she had seen Macon, and that made it safe. Somehow, looking at the wreckage from the fire was familiar, even reassuring. It had come and taken everything in its path, and then it was gone. You didn’t have to wonder what else was coming or when it would get here.

  The grass was wet and green, and I wrapped the blanket around us. “Come closer, you’re freezing.” She smiled without looking at me.

  “Since when do I need a reason to come closer?” She settled back into my shoulder and we sat in silence, our bodies warming each other and our fingers braided together, the shock moving up my arm. It was always that way when we touched—a gentle jolt of electricity that intensified with our every touch. A reminder Casters and Mortals couldn’t be together. Not without the Mortal ending up dead.

  I looked up at the twisted black branches and the bleak sky. I thought about the first day I followed Lena to this garden, the way I’d found her crying in the tall grass. We had watched the gray clouds disappear from an otherwise blue sky, clouds she moved just by thinking about them. The blue sky—that’s what I was to her. She was Hurricane Lena, and I was regular old Ethan Wate. I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like without her.

  “Look.” Lena climbed over me and reached up into the crumbling black branches.

  A perfect yellow lemon, the only one in the garden, surrounded by ash. Lena pulled it loose, and black flakes flew into the air. The yellow peel gleamed in her hand, and she let herself fall back into my arms. “Look at that. Not everything burned.”

  “It’ll all grow back, L.”

  “I know.” She didn’t sound convinced, turning the lemon over and over in her hands.

  “This time next year, none of this will be black.” She looked up at the branches and the sky above our heads, and I kissed her on her forehead, her nose, the perfect crescent-shaped birthmark on her cheekbone, as she tilted up toward me. “Everything will be green. Even these trees will grow again.??
? As we pushed our feet against each other, kicking off our shoes, I could feel a familiar prick of electricity every time our bare skin met. We were so close, her curls were falling into my face. I blew, and they scattered.

  I was caught in her drag, struck by the current that bound us together and kept us apart. I leaned in to kiss her mouth, and she held the lemon in front of my nose, teasing. “Smell.”

  “Smells like you.” Like lemons and rosemary, the scent that had drawn me to Lena when we first met.

  She sniffed it, making a face. “Sour, like me.”

  “You don’t taste sour to me.” I pulled her closer, until our hair was full of ash and grass, and the bitter lemon was lost somewhere beneath our feet at the bottom of the blanket. The heat was on my skin, like fire. Even though all I could feel was a biting cold whenever I held her hand lately, when we kissed—really kissed—there was nothing but heat. I loved her, atom by atom, one burning cell at a time. We kissed until my heart began skipping beats, and the edges of what I could see and feel and hear began to fade into darkness.…

  Lena pushed me away, for my own good, and we lay in the grass as I tried to catch my breath.

  Are you okay?

  I’m—I’m good.

  I wasn’t, but I didn’t say anything. I thought I smelled something burning and realized it was the blanket. It was smoldering from underneath, where it was touching the ground.

  Lena pushed herself up and pulled back the blanket. The grass beneath us was charred and trampled. “Ethan. Look at the grass.”

  “What about it?” I was still trying to catch my breath, but I was trying not to show it. Since Lena’s birthday, things had only gotten worse, physically. I couldn’t stop touching her, though sometimes I couldn’t stand the pain of that touch.

  “It’s burnt now, too.”

  “That’s weird.”

  She looked at me evenly, her eyes strangely dark and bright at the same time. She tossed the grass. “It was me.”

  “You are pretty hot.”

  “You can’t be joking right now. It’s getting worse.” We sat next to each other, looking out at what was left of Greenbrier. But we weren’t really looking at Greenbrier. We were looking at the power of the other fire. “Just like my mom.” She sounded bitter.

  Fire was the trademark of a Cataclyst, and Sarafine’s fire had burnt every inch of these fields the night of Lena’s birthday. Now Lena was starting fires unintentionally. My stomach tightened.

  “The grass will grow back, too.”

  “What if I don’t want it to?” she said softly, strangely, as she let another handful of charred grass fall through her fingers.

  “What?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Because life goes on, L. The birds do their thing, and the bees do theirs. Seeds get scattered, and everything grows back.”

  “Then it all gets burnt again. If you’re lucky enough to be around me.”

  There was no point arguing with Lena when she was in one of these moods. A lifetime with Amma going dark had taught me that. “Sometimes it does.”

  She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. Her shape cast a shadow much larger than she actually was.

  “But I’m still lucky.” I moved my leg until it caught the light, throwing a long line of my shadow into hers.

  We sat like that, side by side, with only our shadows touching, until the sun went down and they stretched toward the black trees and disappeared into dusk. We listened to the cicadas in silence and tried not to think until the rain started falling again.

  5.1

  Falling

  In the next few weeks, I successfully convinced Lena to leave the house with me a total of three times. Once to the movies with Link—my best friend since second grade—where even her signature combination of popcorn and Milk Duds didn’t cheer her up. Once to my house to eat Amma’s molasses cookies and watch a zombie marathon, my version of a dream date. It wasn’t. And once for a walk along the Santee, where we ended up turning around after ten minutes with sixty bug bites between us. Wherever she was, she didn’t want to be.

  Today was different. She had finally found somewhere she was comfortable, even if it was the last place I expected.

  I walked in her room to find her lying sprawled across the ceiling, arms flung across the plaster, her hair spread out like a black fan around her head.

  “Since when can you do that?” I was used to Lena’s powers by now, but since her sixteenth birthday they seemed to be getting stronger and wilder, as if she was awkwardly growing into herself as a Caster. With every day, Lena the Caster girl was more unpredictable, stretching her powers to see what she could do. As it turned out, what she could do these days was cause all kinds of trouble.

  Like the time Link and I were driving to school in the Beater, and one of his songs came on the radio as if the station was playing it. Link was so shocked he’d swerved a good two feet into Mrs. Asher’s front hedge. “An accident,” Lena said with a crooked smile. “One of Link’s songs was stuck in my head.” Nobody had ever gotten one of Link’s songs stuck in their head. But Link had believed her, which made his ego even more unbearable. “What can I say? I have that effect on the ladies. This voice is as smooth as butter.”

  A week after that, Link and I had been walking down the hall, and Lena came up and gave me a big hug, right as the bell was ringing. I figured she had finally decided to come back to school. But she wasn’t actually there at all. It was some kind of projection, or whatever the Caster word was for making your boyfriend look like an idiot. Link thought I was trying to hug him, so he called me “Lover Boy” for days. “I missed you. Is that such a crime?” Lena thought it was funny, but I was starting to wish Gramma would step in and ground her, or whatever it was you did to a Natural who was up to no good.

  Don’t be a baby. I said I was sorry, didn’t I?

  You’re as big a menace as Link in fifth grade, the year he sucked all the juice out of my mom’s tomatoes with a straw.

  It won’t happen again. I swear.

  That’s what Link said back then.

  But he stopped, right?

  Yeah. When we stopped growing tomatoes.

  “Come down.”

  “I like it better up here.”

  I grabbed her hand. A current crept through my arm, but I didn’t let go, pulling her down onto the bed next to me.

  “Ouch.” She was laughing. I could see her shoulder shudder even though her back was to me. Or maybe she wasn’t laughing but crying, which was rare these days. The crying had mostly stopped and had been replaced by something worse. Nothing.

  Nothing was deceptive. Nothing was much harder to describe or fix or stop.

  Do you want to talk about it, L?

  About what?

  I pulled her closer, resting my head on hers. The shaking slowed, and I held her as tight as I could. Like she was still on the ceiling, and I was the one hanging on.

  Nothing.

  I shouldn’t have complained about the ceiling. There were crazier places you could hang out. Like where we were now.

  “I have a bad feeling about this.” I was sweating, but I couldn’t wipe my face. I needed my hands to stay right where they were.

  “That’s weird.” Lena smiled down at me. “Because I have a very good feeling about it.” Her hair was blowing in a breeze, though I wasn’t sure which kind. “Besides, we’re almost there.”

  “You realize this is insane, right? If a cop drives by, we’re gonna get arrested or sent to Blue Horizons to visit my dad.”

  “It’s not crazy. It’s romantic. Couples come here all the time.”

  “When people go to the water tower, L, they aren’t talking about the top of the water tower.” Which is where we would be in a minute. Just the two of us, a wobbly iron ladder about a hundred feet above the ground, and a bright blue Carolina sky.

  I tried not to look down.

  Lena had talked me into climbing to the top. There was something ab
out the excitement in her voice that made me go along with it, as if something so stupid might be able to make her feel the way she did the last time we were here. Smiling, happy, in a red sweater. I remembered, because there was a piece of red yarn hanging from her charm necklace.

  She must have remembered, too. So here we were, stuck on a ladder, looking up so we didn’t look down.

  Once we reached the top and I looked out at the view, I understood. Lena was right. It was better up here. Everything was so far away that it didn’t even matter.

  I let my legs dangle over the edge. “My mom used to collect pictures of old water towers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Like the Sisters collect spoons. Only for my mom, it was water towers and postcards from the World’s Fair.”

  “I thought all water towers looked like this one. Like a big white spider.”

  “Somewhere in Illinois, there’s one shaped like a ketchup bottle.”

  She laughed.

  “And there’s one that looks like a little house, this high off the ground.”

  “We should live there. I’d go up once and never come back down.” She lay back on the warm white paint. “I guess in Gatlin it should be a peach, a big old Gatlin peach.”

  I leaned back next to her. “They already have one, but it’s not in Gatlin. It’s over in Gaffney. Guess they thought of it first.”

  “What about a pie? We could paint this tank to look like one of Amma’s pies. She’d like that.”

  “Haven’t seen one of those. But my mom had a picture of one shaped like a corncob.”

  “I’d still rather have the house.” Lena stared up at the sky, where there wasn’t a cloud in sight.

  “I’d take the corncob or the ketchup, if you were there.”

  She reached for my hand and we stayed like that, at the edge of Summerville’s plain white water tower, looking out at Gatlin County as if it was a tiny toy land full of tiny toy people. As small as the cardboard village my mom used to keep under our Christmas tree.