“I’m not a fan theory, Finch! And they took Ella. They touched Ella. She’s more Althea’s than I am.”
I turned my head sharply. I couldn’t look at him anymore. The day was overbright, thrumming with menace. I blinked at a girl across the street, wearing a long peasant skirt and walking a pot-bellied pig on a braided leash. On the other side, moving toward us, a man in a baseball cap carried a bouquet of white roses. As he got closer, I could see how they glistened with fake raindrops. An old woman watched us through the second-floor window of the nearest building, her underbite telling us to get off her lawn. The flower man had a camera in one hand. The girl looked at me as she unhitched her pig from its lead. The man lifted the camera to his eye.
They were the Hinterland. They were all, all the Hinterland.
A migraine exploded like a bottle rocket inside my skull. My knees went woozy and my teeth and knuckles ached. I smelled the dusty perfume of the book again and my vision went green, before a black crow’s wing obscured my sight.
OceanofPDF.com
13
It scared me, sometimes, how little I could remember. When I looked back over my life, it melted together into one long, soft-focus shot of rain through the windshield. Focus my eyes one way, I saw drops on glass. Focus them another, and I saw the wet highway stretching out ahead. The things that stuck with me were the in-between places, not the places we landed—highways, dirt roads, truck stops. Motels with puddle-warm swimming pools clogged with leaves. An orchard we stopped at once on our way to Indianapolis, to pick apples that tasted like bananas and candy and flowers.
I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read. In Nashville I mainlined Francesca Lia Block. In Maine it was Peter Pan, then Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, then Peter and the Starcatchers. From the winter we spent in Chicago, while Ella worked as a custodian and apprentice costume designer at a tiny storefront theater, I remembered The Big Sleep, One Thousand and One Nights, and a cold so astonishingly complete it felt personal.
Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.
But every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way. Maybe it was my mother whispering in my ear. The bad luck won’t follow us to the next place. You don’t have to remember it this way. Or maybe it was the clean break of it, the way we never looked back.
But I didn’t think so. I thought it was just me. My mind was an old cassette tape that kept being recorded over. Only wavering ghost notes from the old music came through. I wondered, sometimes, what the original recording would sound like—what the source code of me might look like. I worried it was darker than I wanted it to be. I worried it didn’t exist at all. I was like a balloon tied to Ella’s wrist: If I didn’t have her to tell me who I was, remind me why it mattered, I might float away.
Passing out felt like doing just that: giving up, floating into the ether. Even the pain in my head faded away.
But gravity was insistent. The world wanted me back.
A voice lapped over me in slow motion. My eyesight returned in a paisley wash of swirls and blobs, before resolving into something true. Someone crouched in front of me. The sun at their back made them into negative space. My arm felt like a bag of wet flour, but I lifted it anyway, to touch the halo of their hair. The person grew very still as I tangled my fingers into the softness by their neck.
“Mom?” I croaked.
“No. Sorry.” Finch’s voice was careful and small. My memory came back with it. I dropped my hand, squeezed it into a fist.
“You passed out,” he said.
My back was propped against the low stone wall of a brownstone garden. The light had changed. It was hotter, more golden. After a couple of false starts, I spoke again. “What is it?”
He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t place. He looked like Ella after she ate pot brownies and took me to a show at the planetarium, his eyes all wide and reverent. He looked … he looked wonderstruck.
I must’ve been misreading it—I couldn’t have looked that good passed out. I glared at him a little, and some of the shine went out of his eyes.
“You weren’t out long,” he said. “You didn’t hit your head—you’ll be fine. You just need to eat something.”
“The girl,” I said. “With the pig. And the boy with the camera. Where’d they go?”
He frowned slightly. “I didn’t see them. I was busy with you, I guess.”
The street was empty, but I still felt the presence of watching eyes.
“I caught you kinda awkward,” Finch said. “You hurt your knees going down.”
But the pain was good. It was something to focus on. My body had that horrible heavy post-nap feeling, where you can’t tell what day it is and you could almost cry. I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can’t ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.
“We have to go. I have to get out of here.”
“Okay.” He lifted his hand like he was going to touch my face, then kept lifting and ran it through his hair. “We’ll go as soon as you can walk. Can you walk?”
I could. A rush of pins and needles ran through my legs as I stood, and the fresh scrapes ached.
We walked. Slivers of migraine stabbed the backs of my eyes every time I looked at a surface bright with sun. Finch saw me wincing, rummaged around in his bag, and placed a battered Rangers cap on my head.
It was the sort of easy flirtatious move I saw guys make all the time, even at Whitechapel, but his fingers were gentle and the look in his eyes complicated. In the wedge of shade beneath the cap, my thoughts started to clarify. What had I actually seen on the sidewalk outside of Perks’s place? A photography student. A girl with an eccentric pet. This wasn’t Twice-Killed Katherine territory, this was plain paranoia.
Paranoia so quick and overwhelming I’d passed out. How hard would Audrey mock me if she could’ve seen me swooning—and being caught by Ellery Finch?
“Audrey,” I said.
“What about her?”
“She stopped her dad— I mean, he wasn’t going to—he wouldn’t have actually shot me, but she stopped him. Maybe if I call I can catch her alone, make her talk to me.”
I waved him away, toward the bodega we’d stopped at to get food. My phone was nearly dead, but I dialed Ella for the thousandth time once Finch was out of sight, bracing myself to hear her voicemail.
I didn’t. Instead there was a long pause and a distant click, and my heart swelled into my throat. Then a nice mechanical voice told me her number had been disconnected.
I sat down hard on a Siamese pipe, pulling the brim of Finch’s hat over my face. I already knew the Hinterland could sneak in while we slept, plant creepy photos in books, and send crows to do their bidding, but turning off my mother’s number was so blunt, so rooted in the real world, it scared me more than anything.