I blink back the tears hard. “Really?”
“Can I hug you? Is that okay? I’m sorry I called you ‘kiddo’ again, I just.” He doesn’t finish the sentence, and he doesn’t blink back his tears. They start streaming down his cheeks one at a time, sliding along his jaw and dropping off his chin with loud plops.
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s okay.” And Pop wraps his arms around me, and I finally let myself lean into him. The neck of his sweater is damp with tears. It’s been a long time since I’ve let either of my dads hug me for longer than a few seconds, and it doesn’t feel the same as it used to. When I was little, it felt like the only safe place in the whole world. Now it’s nice, but also kind of awkward, like trying to fit into clothes that are just a little too small.
I’m so glad he didn’t say that he loves me anyway. And as he hugs me and cries, something occurs to me that should have occurred to me a long time ago. That should have occurred to me while he was telling me the story about his mom.
The thing he was probably expecting me to tell him.
“Pop?”
“Yeah?” His voice is strained.
I clear my throat. “You, um. You know I’m not straight, right? I know we’ve never really talked about it, and I kind of assumed that you guys knew, but. In case I have to tell you. I don’t totally know what the right word is for what I am, but … I’m definitely not straight.”
He laughs in that way that you do when you’re crying and overwhelmed and so, so, so thankful that there’s something, anything, to laugh about. “Yeah, bug.” He kisses me on top of the head. “I know.”
“Is it okay that I don’t want to talk about it?”
“Sure,” he says. “But if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or any kind of partner-person, I’d like to know.”
I hold back a smile. “I don’t. Yet.”
“Are you going to soon?”
“I don’t know.” I laugh, sitting up. “I don’t even know if I should ask her out or not.”
“Well, when you’re ready to, know that you have my blessing,” he says. “Roya’s always welcome in our family.”
“Wait, what did you—”
“Yeah,” he says. He wipes his face on the hem of his sweater, then slaps his knees with both palms. “Now, come on. We’ve got to go find your dad and blow his mind.”
18.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU TOLD them.” Marcelina cups her hands around the pile of kindling she’s crafted. “After all those years of arguing about whether or not any of us should tell any of our parents, I can’t believe you’re the one who broke first.” Her fingernails are dark with dirt, and the smell of turned earth lingers in the air around us. The kindling forms a perfect pyramid, rising out of the hole we’ve dug in a far corner of her family’s sprawling yard. I’m half lying down in the grass, damp with sweat from the digging.
I’m digging so much these days.
“Me either,” I say. “It feels like a dream.” I flinch as the words leave my mouth—I shouldn’t use the word “dream” so lightly anymore. Just like the word “explode.” They both have a new flavor now. A bitterness.
Smoke spirals up from the kindling. Marcelina doesn’t move her hands, but her forehead creases with focus. “Bad dream or good dream?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, they took it better than I could have hoped. But at the same time …”
“Yeah,” she says, nodding. I don’t say anything for a few minutes, letting her concentrate on heating the kindling enough to get a fire started.
It’s true—Pop and Dad both took the whole “I’m magic” thing shockingly well. They had a lot of questions, and what Pop said was right: sometimes, the questions kind of hurt to hear and none of them were easy to answer. Questions like “Did you do anything illegal to get this power?” and “Does it hurt you to do the things you’re doing?” and “Have you ever used this power to hurt anyone?” That last one was really tough to answer, because before prom night, the answer would have been “no.”
I didn’t tell them about Josh. I told them about other stuff, like cheating on a test once (disappointed Dad-glares) and fucking with Nico by getting birds to chase him (poorly smothered laughter). I told them about how there are things I can do and things I can’t do, and I don’t know what all of those things are yet.
And, after a lot of thinking and a lot of hesitation, I told them that I’m not the only one. I didn’t tell them who else is magic—I couldn’t betray the girls like that. I told them that there are a ton of people in town who can do what I can do, and I told them that I bet there are also a ton of people out there in the world who can do it too. I told them that I don’t think there’s something about this town that made me the way I am, but that really, I don’t know. None of us do. We don’t know if it’s genetic, or environmental, or just a fluke. We don’t know if we’re evolution or radiation or … or anything. We could be anything.
I didn’t tell them who’s magic, but I told them that I’m not alone. I told them that I found people like me, and that we support each other, and that I’d trust those people with my life. I told them about recognizing something different in each other, something special. Something magic.
I think they knew who I meant, but they told me not to tell them any names. They said that I shouldn’t ever share someone else’s secrets without their permission. They said that they were proud of me for honoring other people’s identities.
My dads listened to me in a way that I don’t think they’ve ever listened to me before—it didn’t feel like they were waiting to give me advice or instructions, and it didn’t feel like they were humoring me. It felt like they respected me. They took in everything I was telling them, and they asked questions as if I were teaching them things they’d never even imagined before. Which I guess I was.
Really, it couldn’t possibly have gone better. Except that they talked to me like an equal, which means that they didn’t really talk to me like they were talking to their daughter. They talked to me like they were getting to know me, which means that they didn’t act like they’d known me my whole life.
I felt like a stranger. A stranger they respected, but still—a stranger.
“Okay,” Marcelina says. She sits back on her heels, and when I look into the shallow pit we dug, there’s a little fire going. It’s small, but it’s crackling and growing every second. It climbs quickly up the twigs and paper curls, and before long, it’s leaping at the larger sticks she’s stacked onto the outside of the pyramid of kindling.
“Wow, nice!” I sit beside Marcelina and admire her handiwork. As usual, she wastes no time preening—she starts carefully placing wood, building a pyre that looks like a little house for fire to live in. She directs careful loops of magic to the fire, twisting threads around the kindling like she’s twirling a lasso.
“Paulie taught me this,” she says without being prompted. “I have no idea how it works, but it always makes the fire hotter.” Sure enough, it’s not long before the fire is so powerful that we both have to back away from it. Sweat soaks Marcelina’s black tank top, and she lifts the hem to wipe at her streaming face.