Of course River doesn’t see this. Of course my soul is older than his. Think of the world he’s grown up in versus the one I have. Think of the body he’s grown up in versus the one I have. So you see why he imagines that, like him, like Mab, like anyone, I will head toward unbound horizons with no fear of darkness brought by storm clouds or by night nor any need to save my power to get back home. His assumption is not naivete. It’s not unheedful. It’s not disregard. At least, it’s not only those things. It’s also him seeing me, how smart I am, yes, but also how capable. Sure, it’s a little oblivious and myopic, but it’s also empathetic and generous and kind. And, mostly, unexpected. That I’m seen and treated as normal by everyone else here is only because I am normal to everyone else here. That River sees me that way too is miraculous and magical. Like if he really could bend spoons with his mind.
One
Everything feels different.
It is a new feeling, difference. That difference should feel different makes sense I guess, but it means I feel it twice, once because you get to the other side and find everything’s changed, which is probably what change means, but what I didn’t expect was how change feels while it’s going on.
I am not explaining this well.
It’s a little because of River. When I catch him looking at me in calculus, I forget the integral of 1/x, and when I catch him looking at me in World History, I forget who built the Suez Canal, and when I catch him looking at me in English, his eyes make me remember how Juliet says, “If love be blind, it best agrees with night.” I have not forgotten what his family did to mine. I have not forgotten he comes from a different world than I do. But I can’t ignore how he’s helping us, how he’s choosing loyalty to my family over loyalty to his own, how he promised to find us information and is doing so.
It’s a little because work is progressing so quickly at the plant, construction equipment everywhere, a new welcome center that went from hole in the ground to solid structure over what seems like the course of a week, like it was built by ants or bees or whatever, whichever the super-industrious one is. But honestly, once the initial shock wore off, Belsum’s return seemed predictable as mud after three days of rain. It’s funny how something can be both shocking and inevitable, which Monday would here point out are opposites.
It’s a little because of the sister pact we’ve made to make certain Belsum’s decision to reopen the plant is shocking, inevitable, and ultimately futile. Monday would object that this is yet another opposite, and besides, Monday would further object, you can’t have three opposites, but somehow I seem to have found them.
So it’s a little bit those things. But also it’s this: maybe surreptitious bottled water isn’t illegal, but if Nathan’s lying about that, think what else he’s probably lying about, and River’s promised to get his father’s phone and find out. What feels so different is having, for the first time in my life, in our lives, a little bit of control, a plan, some sense that what happens next might not be something done to us but something, for better or for worse, we do ourselves.
Everything feels different.
And different changes everything.
I start skipping tutoring more often than I go. It’s embarrassing, actually, that I never thought to before. The only person ever helped by tutoring was River because, since I talked to them, the Kyles have left him alone and made everyone else leave him alone. Tutoring itself was never doing them much good. It was never dulling my guilt, only sharply insisting I had something to feel guilty for. Someone is at fault. Someone should feel ashamed. But for the first time in my life, I realize it’s not me.
See? Everything is new.
So I stop going.
Petra is happy to skip tutoring but not to skip studying. “You should excogitate upon the matter.”
“I am convinced of this eschewal,” I assure her.
“What about college?” Ironically, none of our SAT vocabulary words have anything to do with higher education.
“I have other, clamant things on my mind now.”
“It’s our way out,” she says. “Our only way out.”
“Let’s take a peregrination,” I compromise, and make her drive me all the way to Greenborough—thirty-nine minutes there, forty-two back—for an ink cartridge.
“Why can’t he just forward you whatever he finds on his father’s phone?” Petra says on the way to her car.
“He wants to print it out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He says it’s a gesture. He says it’s momentous.”
“Because he’s flirting with you.”
“How is hard copy flirting with me?”
“I have no idea,” Petra says.
The next day at school I hand the cartridge over to River from both my hands into both of his. The task he’s undertaking feels heavy to me, and I know he feels it too. I guess that’s why he wanted to print out whatever he finds on actual paper. Plus, we’ve driven all that way; I don’t want him to drop it. I also give him two brand-new packs of paper, five hundred sheets apiece. Probably he won’t find a thousand pages’ worth of secret memos, damning internal correspondence, buried transcripts, and incriminating emails, but who knows what he’ll find? Better to err on the side of too much than too little. Better to make sure no one notices all that missing paper and ink.
“I shall put it to immediate good use, my liege”—he bows his head and pretends he’s receiving a sword like I’m knighting him—“and honor you in the doing of it.”
It’s awkward, the way he talks sometimes, but I get that our relationship is kind of awkward. On the one hand, I did save him from getting beat up, which was nice but not very ladylike of me, not super respectful of his manliness. On the other, it’s not like I beat the offenders up myself; I just asked them, as old friends. On the one hand, his family did poison mine. On the other, we weren’t involved or even there, neither one of us. It makes me think of Romeo and Juliet again, how they had nothing to do with starting the feud, only with ending it, and how they ended it only by also ending their lives, and whether that means River’s not just flirting with me and talking like an Elizabethan courtier but actually destined to help put to right our ancient grudge with the Templetons or fall in love with me or die. And die, Monday would insist. Though of course Romeo poisoned himself, and that’s a whole different thing.
So my thoughts are dark, but my feelings are pure joy anyway, bubbling up, curling the corners of my mouth, my feet dancy little cheerleaders waving Pooh’s silver tassels like pom-poms. It is the irrepressible giddiness of doing something. It’s hope and optimism and expectation. Who knows what he might find and what it might change and what new differences it might kick off? (“Engender,” Petra would say.)
I guess it’s good to be the liege.
But when he comes into the cafeteria the next day already halfway through lunch period, River looks grim.
He hands me a folder, a thin one, and three ten-dollar bills, damp and crumpled.
“You’re paying me?”
“Returning your money for the ink and the paper. I didn’t use much. I only got one little email thread.”