It took me a while to form the words. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I know I need to break the curse. I need . . .” My mouth went thin, down at the edges. “I need to get to the bottom of this. Even if Mandy is—if she did—if she isn’t at the end of the map.”
“The end of the world,” Ida said softly.
Above us the sky was low, touching the tips of the branches of trees. Around us old stone settled deeper into the grooves of centuries.
“It all looks like the end of the world to me.”
It was strangely warm in the ruins of Mary Ellen’s cottage, several degrees warmer than it had been on the road, as if some residual heat from the ancient fire lingered. Birds sang from the ghost orchard behind the house. The carved symbols on the walls looked down on us.
“Wait,” Ida said, grabbing the letter. “Where’s the address?”
“What?”
“You didn’t read the next address.”
The last page of Mandy’s letter was written on until the end. “We must be missing a piece. A page. It must have fallen. Blown away.”
“No,” Ida said loudly. “It has to still be here. We need to know where to go next.”
We split up, turned on the flashlights on our phones, lifted tree branches and brambles, shuffled through dead leaves, ran our fingers over each corner of stone.
I watched Cale hop over the back wall into the orchard, phone-flashlight beaming through branches. Her short hair, the vest she wore over her shirt, the easy way she’d said If I’d been alive back then I’d’ve been basically screwed on both counts, were as loud as a rainbow pin or a pair of purple plastic Venus earrings. That relationship she’d talked about back at the bar was most likely with another girl. I felt too large for my clothes, the nondescript jeans and hoodie, felt itchy and wrong behind my glasses, my mane of curls.
I swung my legs over the back wall and followed her into the overgrown orchard.
“No sign of the page so far, but these are still good,” Cale’s voice called from farther through the trees. “Catch.”
An apple came out of the darkness, smacked straight into my open hands. “Don’t go too far,” I called back. The fruit crunched perfectly when I pressed it between my teeth. Its juice was sharp and sweet.
“I’m right here,” Cale said. “Don’t worry.”
She emerged from the trees like a shadow herself, apple in hand like Eve in jeans and a vest. She took a bite, licked her lips.
“Are you not afraid?” I asked her.
“Of the dark?”
The candles on the walls behind us flickered. “Of the ghosts.”
“I think the ghosts can tell we’re family,” she said.
“Do you think they can tell we’re the same?”
“The same?”
I was glad of the darkness now, hiding my blush. My skin was warm, almost too warm to be comfortable. “I mean that if we’d been alive then, we might have been kicked out of home too. Locked up. Punished. Just the same.” I could almost see embers smoldering under my feet. A sound like crackling.
Suddenly she was right in front of me. The scent of apples and smoke. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Would have had to hide, you mean,” she said. “Pretend.”
If I hadn’t hidden, hadn’t pretended, my father would have kicked me out already like it was 1877. I knew that. I had always known that. But was that a reason to stay silent? To sit out the protests? To let the insults of the girls in school slide? To feel sick at the thought of coming out to my sisters?
I said, “I’ve been pretending my whole life.”
The heat was rising. I couldn’t hear the others. My world narrowed to the trees and the sound of the flames.
“What are you looking for here?” she asked. “Really?” She stood so close to me, the only solid thing in miles. She was so unexpected.
“I don’t know.” It felt like the truest thing I’d ever said. I shook my head and the orchard spun in circles. Sparks danced when I closed my eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. It’s okay.”
Her hands were on my upper arms. Her feet next to my feet. Her eyes wide in the darkness.
“Mandy was right,” I whispered. “I am a bad apple. Not because I’m gay. But because I’m a liar.”
Cale squeezed my arms softly. “Everybody lies,” she said. “If you don’t feel safe coming out, you have to pretend.”
“I couldn’t even say it to Ida.”
“You only just met her.”
“I only just met you.”
She pressed her palm against the side of my cheek, stroked my skin with her thumb. “Yeah. But we’d’ve both burned,” she said.
The burning. I felt it in my belly, in my bones. As though somebody else was lighting up inside me. I’d been feeling it this whole time. Somebody with rough skin and callused hands, chapped lips, salt-stained hair. She was as hot as a flame tip you flick your fingers through, a magic trick. She stared out of my eyes.
The girl looking back at me wasn’t Cale, not exactly. Her hair was fairer, her skin lighter, her eyes blue instead of black in the darkness.
We stood in the quiet dark of the orchard and her hands were in my hair, mine around her waist. I wondered how much of this moment wasn’t ours at all. The taste of apple in my mouth. Since the first bite, I’d felt the burning. We had only just met, but this was an old love. This was a love that ended in flames. I pressed closer to her, knowing that this wasn’t really me, it wasn’t really her, but it also was, like the kind of knowledge that comes in dreams.
She tilted her head to kiss me, but before our lips could touch a shout rang out in the night.
“I found it!” Ida’s voice came as if from far away, but in reality she was just there, behind the tumbledown wall of the cottage. “The next address! We only read half the letter. The rest was hidden here in the doorway.”
Cale and I sprang apart. The spell was broken. Cold returned, blanketed me in goose bumps; I hugged my arms to my chest to warm myself. The thing that was in me had left, but it also felt as if something that hadn’t been there before had now appeared.
Cale shook her head, took a shaky breath.
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay here too much longer,” she said.
“Yeah.” I wanted to sit with this new thing, examine it up against the light. “Let’s go see what the rest of the letter says.”