Chapter One
With hesitating glance, they stumble on,
Hushed whispers fill the vales of golden hue.
Something lives here, a wonder heavn’ly drawn
From coral sunset skies, and sweet cold dew.
Then coursing through the vale, and spewing black,
A monstrous thing unfolds, its talons raised.
It shreds and tears, a blind brutal attack
Without a thought for all that once here praised.
So this is friendship forced to separate,
Bleak existence, a desolated fate.
I bite the inside of my cheek, rolling my eyes at myself as I tap out the syllables on my leg. Of course I would be crafting a sonnet on the last good night I would have until November 20th. God forbid trying to enjoy myself. The last good night was probably weeks ago anyway. A black cloud of the inevitable tomorrow flings fat raindrops onto the window. It’s been there all week, reaching in with its misty arms and squeezing my heart at random moments. Every time I forget, a storm of thick drops plunk on my head just to remind me that all the goodness in my life is about to be ripped away for two and a half months. There’s no way I can fully enjoy tonight, not when tomorrow is sulking in every corner of the room. I try, though.
Paris and Sam lie belly down on the floor, fingers flying as they tie tiny knots in a flurry of colorful threads. We’re making friendship bracelets, something we’ve done for years but somehow seems more important now. When they’re done we’ll trade and wear them until we see each other next, which will be Thanksgiving break. They don’t seem as fazed by the black clouds pushing on the walls of the room. I can hardly breathe, and I think they know it. Like good friends, they’re trying to make this easier for me by acting like everything is fine. By acting like I’m not about to leave for college tomorrow, and Paris in three days, and Sam in five days.
“Head out of the clouds, Mal,” Sam waves a palm in front of my face. His shock of blue-green hair wriggles like flames. Paris is sprawled beside him, her thick eyebrows drawn together in concentration as her fingers move rapidly, multi colored threads tangled through them. I wrinkle up my mouth to one side, lightly amused that Sam guessed my metaphor. We’re always on the same wavelength.
“It’s out,” I sigh.
“Oh, Mallory Beckett,” Paris’s low voice interjects. She sounds perpetually sarcastic, her voice always edged with rasp. “Your head will always be at least halfway in the clouds.”
“At least that means I’m off the ground,” I shrug.
“It means you’re in the fog.”
“I can see better from up there.”
“Sure, you can see more ground. But not what’s right in front of your face.”
She’s not looking at me. She talks lazily, her words blending into each other like she can’t be bothered to separate them. Her gust of auburn, wavy hair hangs over her face. It gets lighter as it gets longer, melting down onto the shaggy carpet. There are little flyaway hairs sticking up at the top, especially around her hairline and temples, like they’re drawn by some invisible balloon. Sam leans over, taking a peek at her bracelet.
“How can you be almost done? I’m barely an inch in.”
“Maybe because I haven’t been texting my boyfriend the whole time?” She lifts an idly amused brow. Sam rolls his eyes, but his cheeks flush pink. He shoves his phone in his pocket.
“He is not my boyfriend.”
“I didn’t say anything,” she smirks, crinkling her freckled nose. She raises her eyes to give me a knowing look that, despite my mood, shoots a little ray of sunlight through my chest. I purse my lips into a smile, exhaling audibly in an understanding sigh. Sam had officially come out to us freshman year of high school, but we’d known that he was gay since the fifth grade. He was a short, skinny blur of blue hair and bubbly laughs that had only ever dated boys, and had been serially dating a string of them since sophomore year.
“He’s barely even my type anyway,” Sam waves his hand. “He’s too smart.”
“How is that a bad quality? You’re smart,” I object.
“Exactly. I like to be smarter than all the guys I date, that way I always have the upper hand. I like wearing the pants in a relationship.”
“Except for when you go full makeout in the bathroom at Casey Migg’s graduation party,” Paris lilts, smirking. “Then you definitely don’t like wearing the pants. Or much else, if I recall your painfully detailed synopsis.” Sam’s face is bright red against his blue hair.
A nasal, goofish laugh erupts from above me and I twitch in surprise. I carefully keep my head down, hoping that Sam and Paris don’t notice that anything is amiss.
Caleb is here.
I slowly look up, trying to appear as natural as possible. Sure enough, there’s Caleb, hovering in front of the window like he’s stuck mid-jump. At the sight of him, the familiar squeeze of grief tightens around my rib cage. I struggle to take a breath, concentrating on the rhythm of inflating my belly and exhaling it all out like Dr. Vanda says to do. The little oxygen molecules moving through my blood loosen my chest, easing the sudden startling emotion. Behind Caleb, the stars glitter teasingly, reminding that he’s not real. He can’t be.
Caleb is dead.
I don’t say anything to him because I don’t want Sam and Paris to notice. Caleb talks for me, spectrally understanding the situation.
“Last night before college, Mal?” He crosses his arms behind his head, reclining into the air like a hammock. I bite my cheek silently, willing him to come back later. I can talk to him alone just fine, but it’s not exactly something I can do in public without looking like a nut job.
“It’s a shame. But you’ll love it at Granate. If you can actually pass your classes this year, that is. What’s that saying they use now? C’s get degrees?”
I look back down at my friendship bracelets, trying to get back into the rhythm of braiding and tying knots. I’ve been staring at the window far too long to be dismissed as wistful. Sam and Paris are still boy-chattering. They’re completely oblivious that my dead older brother is casually lounging midair, poking fun at me as though his heart were still beating.
“Lucky me that I don’t have to deal with school anymore. I mean, not that I wasn’t great at it. But we have to look on the bright side, now don’t we.”
Go away, I say in my head, widening my eyes at him. He can hear me when I talk to him in my head. Probably because he’s a projection of my grieving imagination, but I reject that thought. He has to be the real Caleb—he looks and acts exactly like he always did. I think he’s some sort of spirit or ghost, though that sounds a bit too eerie to be true. It’s the only explanation I can think of that makes some semblance of sense.
Caleb, my older brother, died on November 6th, 2017. He’s technically my half-brother, but we grew up together, so I always thought of him as just my brother. We even have different last names. Mallory Beckett, Caleb Montgomery. None of that ever mattered. We were brother and sister.
He died last year when he was studying abroad in Denmark. He got sick so rapidly that he was already in the hospital by the time we heard about it. Bacterial meningitis. It was just a week and a half after he got sick that he died.
I can’t picture the sick Caleb that died on a hospital cot in a mountain town. When he died, he had a fever of 105 degrees, half of his face was paralyzed, and he was about to lose his left leg from the knee down. The tiny bacterium that wormed their way into his spinal cord did the job fast. I never knew that Caleb. The sick, falling apart Caleb that died in Ebeltoft on starched white sheets.
Caleb’s ghostly apparition looks like I remember him from home—healthy, six feet tall, with thick glasses, girlish shoulders, even wearing those stupid wordy T-shirts that he loved. Right now he’s wearing a shirt that says “Keep Calm and Save the Whales”.
This Caleb, not the sick, dying Caleb, is the mirage of Caleb that follows me around, poking his head into my life and acting like he never left.
Subtly, I flick my eyes from Caleb to the window, hoping he gets the hint to leave me alone for a little while. He holds his hands up in the air, his classic peace-making gesture.
“I know, I know. You can’t talk in front of your friends, you want me to go, I get it,” he shrugs, faux guilt tripping me. I suck on the side of my cheek in a sorry-not-sorry expression. I’ve learned to communicate with him in the tiniest movements. Come back later, I think. I can’t talk right now. I want him to know that I’m not trying to ignore him. I don’t want him to disappear forever.
As confusing as this Caleb is, I don’t want him to leave. I just don’t want to look like I’m schizophrenic. Mom has enough to worry about-- Caleb’s death destroyed her in a different way than it destroyed me. A way that made her shrink in on herself and quietly disappear. I don’t want her to worry about me going bonkers while she’s just getting back on her feet.
Caleb understands. He drops to the ground and climbs out the window as though he suddenly had to submit to gravity. He salutes me before he climbs down, and I allow a small one-sided smile to let him know his tricks amuse me. He drops out of sight and once again I’m in a reality that actually makes sense. I feel his absence making the air heavy, and once again I find myself doing breathing exercises. If I let the pain settle in too long, my lungs forget how to breathe on their own.
Sam and Paris haven’t noticed my long silence. Especially after my brother’s death, long silences are quite typical Mallory behaviour.
“I think it’s about time for the tradition,” I interject, my words punching through the fantasy-charged air. I remember where I am and what I’m doing.
This is our final night before everything changes. Tomorrow is the day I lose them, and this is the reality that I’m living in. Paris’s eyes wilt a little—she’s realizing the same thing.
“It only got dark a few minutes ago,” she says gently, her voice crackling a little. I swallow. Sam is quiet, twirling tufts of carpet fluff around his pointer finger.
“I know. But I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Don’t think about tomorrow,” Sam says, though wisps of black clouds are starting to swirl over his head. Over all three of us.
“How can I not think about tomorrow?” I say sadly. “Tomorrow has been a big carnivorous swirling black hole over our entire summer.”
“Tomorrow doesn’t change anything, though. It’s still us, the three of us, forever. No matter what. We can survive anything.” Paris puts her hand on my arm. It burns straight through to my bone.
“We’ll be in different places, but we’re connected,” Sam says, his black nail polished hand lacing in mine. I give him a little smile that I actually feel. He’s right.
“I know. But it’s going to be so hard.”
They nod. Sam whistles out.
We sit for a moment, light humming around us. My preschool best friends, about to leave for college fifteen years later. Sam and Paris are the ones who stuck with me through the disaster of Caleb’s death. They were the ones who found a grief counselor for my mom and I, who brought us food, who made me still go to school. They were the ones who dealt with my moods, who didn’t let me suffer alone, who showed me that they really cared. I knew that Caleb’s death was devastating to them too, but they never once made me feel guilty for my paralyzing grief. I owe them so much.
If our friendship can survive a death, we can survive distance. That doesn’t mean it won’t be difficult, but we will always be able to rely on each other.
“Tradition, then?” Sam says. Paris’s mouth smiles, but her eyes stay the same.
“Tradition.”
We lock my bedroom door and turn on the radio in case Mom comes upstairs to check on us. The sadness hovering over us mixes with anticipation. I hear Sam let out a giggle as he pulls his shirt over his head. Paris and I look at each other, holding back smiles, and we each strip down to our underwear.
I unlatch the window, pushing out the screen and hopping up onto the windowsill. I look around for good measure—Caleb is truly gone.
The air is already starting to get cold, even though it was barely mid August. I feel my skin prickle with goosebumps, feeling naked in just my bra and underwear, but mostly just nervous. It smells like soil and campfires outside.
We have a crosshatched planter on our wall with vines of ivy crawling up it. Carefully, I shift my legs over, flipping to face the window, and shimmy down like I’ve done a hundred times. It’s dark outside, and I have to feel around the slats with my toes to find my footing. My heart skips as the wood makes little creaking sounds, and I pray both that my mom doesn’t hear and that the crosshatching holds.
Now that I’m six freaking feet tall, sneaking out the window has become more of a feat. And I’m not gangly either—when Caleb died, I got a bit pudgier. Some people can’t eat when they’re grieving, but for me, my appetite became insatiable. Food became the only thing that could give me sensation. The only thing that reminded me I existed in an alive body. So I ate a lot and I didn’t have to feel as much.
A particularly loud crack on the window fixture halts me, and for a moment I think I’m about to come crashing down into jumbles of jasmine bushes, but it holds. I step down gingerly the rest of the way, my jaw clenched and stomach pressing into my spine.
I land on the mossy ground with a light thump, raising a thumbs up to Sam’s head poking out the window. His spindly legs step carefully over the windowsill, maneuvering around the creeping ivy vines. His boxers are bright orange, making his hair look even more blue. He overestimates the reach down the last step to the bottom, stumbling down the last few steps. I catch his arm, and his gap-toothed grin reaches all the way around his head.
Paris comes down last. She makes it look easy, soundlessly slipping down the wooden slats. Even in the darkness, I can see the two dimples in her lower back, almost covered by her swishing hair. It looks dark brown in the lack of light, tumbling down like the branch of a weeping willow. She practically dances to the ground, landing and turning to us in a graceful swoop, a close-lipped smile lighting her face.
Our hands find each other, grasping hard. We tiptoe through moss and ivy in our underwear, shivering and holding back giggles, leaving a trail of stars behind us.
That’s when the feeling starts, and I know we’re really doing this. It’s a feeling that only shows up on certain occasions, catching me by the shoulders and lifting me up. I feel like magic is bubbling up inside of me, spilling out over the edges of my skin. It’s an uncontrollable sensation of lightness and buoyancy, like I’m tumbling into another realm. I’ve never been able to explain it to anyone else, but I can tell that Paris and Sam can feel it too by the way they’re both careening cartwheels through the air. Things are turning whimsical, and my heart races into the sensation.
The river jumps in front of us quickly, a pour of liquid glass in the moonlight. It dribbles softly, but it’s the loudest sound other than the crickets and our feet squelching on the mossy ground. I dig my toes in the mud, rooting them all the way down to the hot lava core of the earth. Sam is doing the same but smushing his hands in too. His hair looks like a Croatian sea under a neon blacklight right now, the long top part wriggling like fireflies are about to burst out of it. It’s shaved shorter on the sides, making his oval shaped face look taller, his narrow nose look longer.
Paris seems to be floating on top of the mud, no smears on the tops of her feet. She’s staring into the creek, watching the moon marble the water. The reflections dance in her eyes, and her freckles dance with them, pirouetting off her face straight into the sky. She’s got a whole constellation on the bridge of her nose.
“Paris?” My voice sounds high, giddy. I feel like I could let go of gravity for a moment, pushing off into the atmosphere.
“We should have all chosen the same school.” Her freckles stop dancing as she crosses her arms. I suddenly feel tomorrow’s big black eyes staring a hole through my back.
“We couldn’t have,” Sam says what I can’t.
“We should have.”
My brain knows that Sam is right, but I hate it all the same. I need an Arts school for poetry and writing, so I chose Granate. Sam is smarter than the both of us, and he chose Haplin. Paris wouldn’t have fit in at either place. She’s going to a state school only thirty minutes away from here. There was no school that could have fit all three of us. Our high school did, and it practically burst at its linoleum corners from it.
“Paris,” Sam says. “We’ve known each other for fifteen years. We’re a family. Leaving isn’t going to change anything.”
“I know,” she says, her voice crackling with rasp. Sam grabs my hand. I grab Paris’s. Sparks run through the three of us like a circuit. “Let’s jump into this damn river.”
Hands linked, palms clammy, we jump. And for a moment we’re floating, suspended in the atmosphere, and there’s no black cloud for my head to get stuck in. It’s just Sam, Paris and I, sparks and fireflies zipping around us, until we crash feet first into the icy dark blue.
