• Twenty-Three •
SEA FOAM
The following days were bright and crisp, announcing the official end of September with the onset of October’s subtle moodiness. And October was promising everything: cool breezes, tinges of yellow brushing the trees, milky clouds dragging shadows over the suburb—they were the details Kane always looked forward to. October was the month he loved most.
But Kane was not in a loving mood.
At all.
“Honey, you’ve been brooding for days,” his mom said. She and Sophia had convinced Kane to come shopping with them in preparation for a barbecue in honor of their dad’s birthday tonight. They did it every year, even when it was too cold.
“For years,” his sister added.
Kane ignored Sophia, which he was incredible at by now. If there were an Olympics for ignoring Sophia, Kane would be unrivaled.
“Did something happen at school?”
“Yeah, tell Mom what’s up at school, Kane.”
Kane twisted around and gave her a hard look. Sophia, since learning about the Others, had adjusted into an outright asshole. After that first night, she’d had so many questions—questions Kane refused to answer. Now she was making him pay. He didn’t care. He’d told her he couldn’t keep her safe if she knew more than she already did, and she hated that. Go figure that the moment Kane started finally acting like an older brother was the point at which Sophia went from simply resentful to outright hostile. When guilting him didn’t work, she turned to threats of exposure, and when that clearly wasn’t going to work, either, she went full-blown brat. Always, she leveraged their parents.
“You’re a dick,” he told her.
She winked.
Kane turned to look out the window, gazing at the changing trees. Their beauty made him feel worse. He reminded himself that autumn, for all its cozy brilliance, was actually a flamboyant sequence of decay. And there was more melodrama where that came from, all of it dripping through Kane with nowhere else to go.
There was one bit of brightness that Kane couldn’t shake, though. Adeline had told him something amazing: Poesy may have been the true culprit behind the unraveling of Maxine Osman’s reverie. If that were true, and if she’d been taken in just like Helena, then she lived.
She lived.
“What happened in school?” his mom asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then what?”
Oh, you know, I fell into the path of an omnipotent, dream-harvesting drag queen, and now a pair of queer elders have been quarantined in the form of kitschy jewelry, and even though we’re all a lot safer for it, my friends hate me!
“Everything is fine,” he told her.
His mother sighed.
“You’re not sleeping,” Sophia piped in from the back seat.
“How would you know?”
“I can hear you stomping around at night.”
Oh, actually I’m asleep, but I’m having such vivid nightmares that I wake up floating, because a fun new thing about my uncontrollable reality-bending magic is that I now sometimes levitate myself and objects nearby!
“I’ll be quieter,” he said.
Forcefully, the subject was changed to Sophia’s day, which had been—as always—particularly eventful. She told an elaborate story about how Headmistress Smithe had announced a required fall seminar that would cut into elective hour, which Sophia reasoned was exactly the sort of maneuver the vindictive Headmistress Smithe had been concocting ever since Sophia managed to finagle two electives in a row at the beginning of the year, both of which she spent practicing viola anyways.
This is why Kane didn’t want her involved. Everything about her was a plot twist. He tuned out her story, only tuning back in when his mother threw some cash in his lap.
“Here,” she said. “Buy candy while I get gas. As much sugar as it’s going to take to bring you back to life.”
“I’ll come with you,” Sophia said with a wicked grin.
All through the gas station’s aisles, she served Kane theories about the sick fantasies she suspected her classmates of harboring.
“Pemberton’s School for Girls,” she implored, “is full of weirdos.”
Kane went right for the Slurpee machine, per usual.
“Kane, this stuff is radioactive. How can you drink it?”
He shrugged. The bright blue mixture in the machine whirled around and around as the slush looped into Kane’s cup.
Sophia bounced on her heels, clearly wanting to say something, so he finally gave her a sideways glance.
“I figured something out, Kane. I know,” she said.
“Know what?”
Her voice was golden with pride. “Your accident wasn’t real, was it? It was related to the reveries, wasn’t it? The whole car thing—was that just a cover-up?”
Kane set his jaw and started rooting around for a lid. Sophia blocked his path.
“I’m not stupid, Kane.”
“I know.”
“If I knew I was in a fake world, I never would have acted that way. I’m smart.”
“It’s not about being smart. It’s about staying lucid.”
“I can stay lucid. I can help you guys. I see stuff that no one else sees.” She held out a straw but whisked it away before he could grab it. “For instance! I know you’re into that boy. And I get why. He’s super cute.”
Kane rolled his eyes. Of course she had a crush on Elliot. It must run in the family.
Sophia’s prodded him with the straw. “I’ve met him before. It took me a long time to remember, though. But I remember seeing him at the fair with you. And I know you two would sneak out together at night. I even knew your secret signal.”
Seeing Kane’s surprised reaction, Sophia said, “What? You thought you were discreet? Drawing those number eights everywhere? I don’t know why you didn’t just text each other. Or maybe you did. I don’t know. But then I’d see him outside, late at night, waving for you to come down, and it’d be hours before you got back.”
Kane grabbed away the straw. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
That was true.
“He seemed…different than the others,” she said. “When you were with him, you seemed…happy.”
Something about this sentence softened Sophia’s accusations, filling her words with sad wonder. And now Kane was full of his own questions. He and Elliot, happy together?