I’d fought for this life. Normal. Boring. All the days proceeding in an orderly fashion. I’d been imprisoned fighting for it, broken my mother’s heart on my way to it, ripped through cosmic walls to win it. I hated all of them for reminding me how flimsy my normal could be: Daphne. That awful man. Whoever had killed poor Hansa.
What if it was the man from my tale who’d done it? It seemed possible. I’d only met one figure from my story in this world before: the man’s younger, better brother. Once when I was six years old, and he coaxed me into a stolen car, and again when I was seventeen. But I hadn’t seen him since. Not all of us had left the Hinterland after my broken tale tipped over like a domino, knocking the rest of the world askew. After I got out—after someone long gone helped break me out—the tales fell apart faster than the Spinner could spin them. There was a time I’d thought the Hinterland was gone completely, but I learned that it was still out there, still bleeding, like a slashed-up magical apple dripping its juice. Only its doors were now closed.
I stood beside a cooler of watermelon halves stuck like oysters in ice, smelling rain and exhaust and cut tulips. I closed my eyes just long enough to trace the memory of his face: the boy who helped me break free.
When this place felt too hot and bright, too busy too angry too iced with electric lights, I thought of Ellery Finch, traveling through other worlds. Finding them behind hidden doors, under acorn caps, inside steamer trunks. It was nice in there, inside this daydream. I used to never let myself think of him, but lately I figured, what’s the harm? It’s better than a meditation app.
When I was calm again, when I’d hardened my skin against the trio of deaths, against the man’s words and the violence inside them, I started walking. When I was sure nobody from the meeting had followed me, I got on the subway.
And I wondered. I wondered what it said about me now that I’d run from the man in the meeting, when in the Hinterland, I’d killed him.
4
Ella wasn’t home when I let myself in. Our AC was broken and she kept insisting she could fix it, which meant there was a scatter of tools by the overturned window unit and the air was so hot it practically wobbled. I stood in front of the fridge in rain-soaked clothes and ate a slice of leftover pizza, fanning the freezer door back and forth. I’d moved on to gelato out of the tub when something made me stop: from the back of the apartment, a quiet creak. The singular sound of a foot placed carefully on old floorboards.
I put the ice cream down. Behind me, the fridge strained and settled. Outside, a mockingbird imitated a cell phone. And from the back of the apartment came another creak.
My breath switched from automatic to manual. I walked down the hall, peering into the quiet rooms. Mine, Ella’s, our bathroom the size of a crow’s nest.
“Hello?”
My voice dropped like a pebble into the quiet, and I knew I was alone. A shaken-up idiot in an empty apartment, hallucinating the thing I was always waiting for: the return of bad luck.
In the bathroom I washed my face, splashing water into my eyes, my mouth, swishing the ice cream off my tongue. My heart was still banging like an offbeat drum. When I came up dripping I saw a face in the mirror behind me.
I saw the blue and white and black of it, the pale smear of teeth. I stopped breathing, and didn’t breathe again till I had them pinned to the bathroom wall, my hands pressed like butterfly wings over their throat.
Ella’s throat. Her blue eyes and black hair. Skin pearling up with sun freckles. It happened so fast she didn’t look shocked till I’d already pulled away.
We stared at each other. I heard a dog barking through the open windows, and a child’s cut-glass scream.
“I snuck up,” she said, a little breathless. “I startled you.”
We nodded in unison, like a pair of metronomes. “Sorry,” I said, then coughed and tried again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was.”
She reversed her way out of the bathroom, like she didn’t want to turn her back on me. “You’re home early. You didn’t have to work after all?”
It took me a second to remember, to understand. “I didn’t,” I said. “I got it wrong.”
* * *
We waded through dinner, through small talk of graduation and Ella’s coworkers at her nonprofit gig, eating to the sound of one of our old car tapes. I’d gotten her a vintage cassette deck for her birthday so she could play the music she loved to listen to on the road: PJ Harvey and Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and bands with names like paint colors—Smog, Pavement, Gabardine. We stayed at the table long enough to pretend the thing in the bathroom hadn’t happened. She’d put my graduation flowers in an empty pickle jar. I kissed her cheek and made a big thing about carrying them to my room.
I tried to lose myself in the solitary mysteries of A Wild Sheep Chase, but my eyes kept going to the door. To the window. Around midnight I heard Ella’s radio go quiet. At one I finally got up, giving in to the itch running under my skin.
I moved through the house like a thief. Ella was breathing easy in her bed, and the front door locks held. Nobody hid behind the shower curtain, or in the shadows of the couch. Hansa was still dead somewhere, and the awful man from my tale wasn’t, because no world ever balanced itself just right.
In the kitchen I brewed coffee by the city’s borrowed lights, sweetened it with honey and cooled it with milk, then dropped in ice. June came in through the windows, slinky and edged with a gasoline tang. There was a mimosa tree in the yard; when I pressed my forehead to the screen I could see breeze pouring itself through the blossoms.
In my fairy tale I’d been a black-eyed princess, unloved. My hands were filled with a killing cold, my touch was death. When I left the Hinterland I took the barest chip of it with me. But I’d let that last little bit melt away.
I didn’t want to mourn the loss of the thing that made me wicked, but hearing about three ex-Stories being killed made me feel disarmed without it. My head was full of formless black thoughts I couldn’t allow to settle. I didn’t want to think about things I couldn’t have, that I shouldn’t want.
I took the coffee back to my room. In the minutes I’d been gone, the room had filled up with the scorched-earth scent of unfiltered cigarettes. I unlatched the barred window that let onto our fire escape and stuck out my head.
“Those things’ll kill you,” I said.
Sophia took a last drag and stubbed the butt out on her shoe. “Funny.”
She dropped into my room, then did what she always did: started to case it, like a criminal or a cop. Ran a finger over the spines of my books, took a sip of my coffee. Moved over to the dresser and picked things up, inspecting them one by one. Dr Pepper lip gloss. A bloom of blue hibiscus. The rosette my mother had made from the dirty silk of the dress I’d worn home from the Hinterland. I didn’t know what she’d done with the rest of it.
“Can’t sleep?”
I shook my head, though she wasn’t looking. She’d always had a knack for showing up when I was restless. Or maybe she showed up even when I wasn’t, and I slept right through it.
“So,” she said, inspecting herself in the mirror bolted to my closet door. “You ran away.”