Climbing onto a mound of dirt, I take a look around. A flower garden towers above, casting enormous shadows. Between openings in the trunklike stems, a beach stretches along an endless ocean. An empty rowboat waits on the shore—gigantic compared to me. Salt and pollen season the air.
"It can't be," Jeb's voice thunders.
I spin on my heel to face him, covering my ears. One huge eye peers out from the rabbit hole's door.
"Drink from the brown bottle," I answer.
"I can't hear you." His mumble shakes the ground under my feet.
I mime drinking something and hold out a forefinger, signaling the number one.
Then he's gone.
I hope he wears the backpack for the transition. Judging from the current size of my clothes, everything touching him will shrink.
In a matter of seconds, Jeb plunges through the opening with the backpack in tow. The door snaps shut behind him, with the key on the other side.
Catching me around the waist, he pulls me against him. "What were you thinking?"
"I'm sorry."
"'Sorry' won't fix this mess. We're the size of bugs and locked out of our only exit."
"Well, you're the one who left the key!"
His face flushes. "What are we supposed to do now?"
"We eat a bite of cake and get big again."
He slaps his brow in feigned shock. "Of course. We're just going to eat a piece of hundred-year-old magical cake."
"You can stay this size if you want to. I'll carry you in my pocket."
Snarling, Jeb slips the backpack from his arms. "Whatever. Let's just do this. We're smaller than the stinking flowers, for crying out—"
"The boy thinks we stink, Ambrosia." A craggy, witchlike voice erupts out of nowhere. Movement sweeps along the garden, as if wind blows the blooms.
Jeb and I edge backward, nearly tripping over the fallen pack.
One of the giant daisies bends low, casting a long blue shadow. A distorted mouth widens in the flower's yellow center, and rows of eyes blink on every petal. "That he did, Redolence. The nerve," she says. "After all, if anyone stinks, it would be him. We haven't any sweat glands."
Jeb drags me behind him, reversing our direction. "Um, Al? I'm not the only one seeing a talking flower, right?"
I clutch his waist, my heartbeat pounding into his spine. "You get used to it." I try to suppress the panic stabbing me.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
I don't have the chance to answer, because Jeb crashes us into a huge stem.
A nasturtium leans down, snarling. A hundred gray eyes nestle on her bright orange petals. "Watch where you're going, would you?"
Several dandelions bob the fuzz on their heads, scolding. Tiny eyeballs protrude from their tufted seeds like snails' antennae.
I swallow a scream as they all start talking at once:
"How long has it been since we've had such delectable visitors?"
"In our living-backward years or their moving-forward years?"
"Doesn't matter, really. I was more just making a point."
Jeb eases us into a small clearing in the midst of the chattering creatures and turns me to face him. "Did they just call us 'delectable'?"
Behind us, a dandelion sneezes. Her seeds burst from her head in tufts, leaving bald spots. "My eyes! Someone catch my eyes!" She reaches out with her leaves to try to grab them.
Two places down, a geranium bends at midstem and opens a bucket on the ground. The word Aphids glitters on the side in red paint. Fishing out a pinkish bug the size of a mouse, the flower pokes the writhing victim into his mouth and chews, drool oozing down the petals that make up his chin. His eyelids close underneath the slobber.
Jeb's expression grows wild. "A flower eating an aphid. The eater becoming the eaten! People sometimes eat flowers, Al. Delectable…"
That stab of unease becomes a full-blown punch. "We should—"
"Run!" Jeb grabs my hand and jerks me into a sprint toward the rabbit hole's door.
"How do we get in?" My thighs strain with each jarring step.
"We break the friggin' lock."
I almost trip on my boot heels. Jeb is unrelenting, dragging me along. "We don't have to go so fast! They're rooted in the ground!"
"Don't bet on it," he says.
I follow his gaze over my shoulder. It's like a zombie movie—the flowers moan and rip their stems up from the dirt; their mouths stretch wide, pressed open by long, spindly teeth, clear and dripping with slobber like melting icicles. The balding dandelion gets free first and sprouts humanlike arms and legs. She uses her roots for added momentum, as if she's being propelled by snakes. She whips out a strand of ivy and loops it around Jeb's ankle, lassoing him. With one tug, she drops him to the ground.
"Jeb!" I catch his wrists in a tug-of-war against the hissing flower.
"There's no out the way you came in," another flower growls as it squirms from its grave of dirt a few feet away. That's when I realize none of them are flowers, not really. Just like with the dandelion, arms and legs appear as they burst out of the ground.
They're part humanoid, part plant—multi-eyed mutants.
"The rabbit hole only opens into our realm. The portals that open out to yours are guarded in the castles far across the ocean, inside the pulsing heart of Wonderland," one flower says while waving an arm. Vines cling to the greenish flesh along its naked biceps. "Therein is the only escape. Don't you think we would've already left, were there a way out of the hole?"
I picture all the furniture pinned up along the tunnel wall with ivy. So, they'd been trying to build a way into our world? I shiver.
Jeb struggles under the vines now roped around his waist. "Al, run," he mumbles.
"Yes, run," the dandelion mutant taunts. She cups my chin with mossy fingertips and tilts her head to see me with her three remaining eyeballs. "Run or be eaten."
A fresh wave of terror trickles through my spine. I shake it off as a flash of knowing comes to me: The netherling boy from my memories once taught me how to defeat this flower.
It's as easy as blowing tufts in the wind.
On impulse, I reach up and pluck off what's left of her seeds, leaving her blind. A white, gooey liquid dribbles down my hands from the exposed eye sockets. She shrieks and droops to the ground, incapacitated.
I'm peripherally aware of Jeb fishing the knife from his pocket beneath the greenery binding him. If I can provide a distraction, maybe he can get us out of this.
I hold up the dandelion seeds. The sticklike eyeballs writhe in my hand, trying to stare at me. I toss them down, stomping them. "Who's next?" I hope to sound tough, but my voice quavers.
The zombie flowers howl and fling their vines around my ankles. Ivy snakes around my legs and torso and up my chest, sealing me within a leafy cocoon so thick only my head and upheld arms are free. Then two strands cinch my wrists together. With a yank, they flip me onto my stomach. I can't budge.
Jeb and the incapacitated dandelion are all but forgotten as the others surround me.
Misshapen hands, green with chlorophyll, skim across me—cold and rough like leaves shaken from trees after a storm. Dizziness clouds my head. The vines are too tight. I can't jerk away. I can't even get enough air to scream.
Hot gusts blow over me. Eyes clenched shut, I sob. Slobber drizzles along my nape from someone's mouth, glomming strands of my hair together.
"Wait!" one of them shouts close enough to my ear that it rings. "She's wearing the gloves!"
Sliding my cheek against the gritty ground, I peer up at hundreds of eyelashes blinking in rapid succession.
"It is true!" a white-rose-headed freak gasps. "Do you have the fan, as well?"
Neck craned, I nod. My left nostril fills with dirt at the effort.
"We should celebrate!" They pass the bucket of aphids around among them.
"Do you think it's her? After all this time?" a flower with pink petals asks, munching on her snack.
"She does look rather like you know who."
"Even more of the devil's seed in this one, to be sure," Pinky adds. "The eyes of a tiger lily she has."
"Just think of it." One of the flowers pops a screeching aphid into its mouth as the bucket passes by. "We'll soon be connected to the heart of Wonderland once more!"
The rose-head leans low, intent on me. "So, are you here to set things right?"
My gaze drifts between their body stems. Jeb has almost sawed his way out of the vines. Just a little longer. Over the fear nested in my chest, I force myself to talk. "Yes. Set things right."
"About time. We can pick up roots, but we can't traipse across the water, even in a boat. We must stay connected to the soil. The path to Wonderland's heart has to be opened to us. For that to happen, Alice's tears must be dried up. That's your job!"
"Hear, hear!" they all say in unison. "Your job to fix her messes."
The rose snaps two thorny fingers to silence the rest of the garden. "You must go across the ocean and onto the island of black sands. Inside the heart of Wonderland, the Wise One waits. He has been here since the beginning. He smokes the pipe of wisdom. He knows what must be done."
"Pipe? You mean the Caterpillar?" I ask.
Wicked laughter erupts among my captors.
"The Caterpillar," Pinky scoffs. "Well, I suppose you could call him that. That's what the other one called him."
"The other one?" I ask.
"Your other," the rose says. "The one whose tears formed the ocean that now isolates us from the rest of our kind. High time a descendant came down to mend things."
Before I can respond, an orange monstrosity steps up to speak. Spindly fronds fall from her mouth, where they cling to her drool. Stinging nettles tip her fingernails. "We could ask the octobenus to take her across. We'll use the elfin knight as leverage. His blood alone is worth all the white gold in the Ivory Queen's palace. The octobenus can trade it for a bevy of clams. He'll never go hungry again. He cannot refuse such a bargain."
"This boy is no knight," the rose says. "He came down with her."
Orangey shakes her petals. "He was sent to escort her. He has emerald eyes, and the blood droplet beneath his lip has crystallized to a gem. He's indubitably and undeniably an elfin knight of the White Court."
I try to calm my racing thoughts enough to analyze their conversation. They think Jeb's garnet labret marks him as one of the netherlings. I shoot a gaze toward him to see if he heard, but he's no longer trapped by vines.
"Well, he hasn't the uniform!" Pinky screeches. "Let us see if his ears are pointed."
They turn around. "He's escaped!"
They surge toward the sound of the backpack's zipper, but Jeb already has the cake in hand.
In less than two blinks, he grows high above us. Body coiled and tense, he takes a swipe at the garden with one of his giant boots. The blossoms scream, grouped together in a bouquet of trembling petals.
He's as graceful and majestic as a Greek god, lovely and appalling in his wrath. He lifts me so I hang from his fingers by strands of ivy, strung up in my cocoon like a helpless yo-yo.
Nervous energy courses through my limbs. I have to escape… the bindings are too tight… I can't expand my lungs.
"Can't breathe!" I struggle, but the effort only swings me faster. My stomach flops like a pendulum. The flower creatures cry out and grapple for me, but Jeb curls his fingers and nestles me within his fist—a snug, tender darkness.
"Shh. I got ya, Al…" His whispered breath rushes over me as he opens his palm.
My fear of heights battles a newborn claustrophobia. I roll along his warm flesh until his thumb, careful and tender, stops me. I freeze on my back to let him unwind the strands of ivy. His giant, callused fingers are gentle despite their size.
The minute I'm free, I catch his thumb—almost bigger than me—and nuzzle it. He tastes like grass and icing and all the flavors of Jeb, magnified. My heart hammers against his inner knuckle. "Thank you," I say, knowing he can't hear me.
Carefully, he holds me level to his face. His eyes are the size of teacup saucers, huge and framed with eyelashes like a thicket of moss and shadows. "Hang on," he whispers.
He lifts me to his shoulder. I straddle the backpack's strap. With one hand and both boots tucked under for security, I wave.
Taking my cue, Jeb kicks over the bucket of aphids, freeing them. He roars at our captors and they root themselves back into the ground, re-creating the flower forest that once surrounded us. He walks over them in one step. They're lucky he doesn't crush them.
We arrive at the rowboat and Jeb offers a palm to lower me onto the closest seat. The wood grains look like ripples of sand on a desert, and splinters peak like porcupine quills. I find a smooth spot and wait.
Jeb sets the backpack into the hull of the boat. He digs through it, and his hand reappears with a chunk of cake balanced on his fingertip. To him, it's probably nothing but a crumb. I stand and eat from his finger, closing my eyes as my bones and skin strain and expand like rubber bands. When I look again, I'm perfectly proportioned, sitting on the seat, with Jeb crouched in front of me, watching anxiously.
"You okay?" He rubs his palms along my thighs.
I grip my stomach. "Yuck."
"Yeah. Let's hope we're done playing musical sizes. It's hard on the innards." His jacket is crumpled in the bottom of the boat, and his bare arms sparkle with sweat. He rakes a hand through his hair, leaving it disheveled. "Those gloves saved your life," he says. "What gave you the idea to wear them in the first place?"
I'm unable to put into words the fluttery feeling or the memory of a childhood here, so I try to downplay it. "Lucky guess?"
I can still see the flowers morphing into monsters before our eyes. Like Jeb said, this is not the Wonderland Lewis Carroll created. Yet somehow, my instincts have served us so far. Thanks to my absent netherling guide.
I have to find him. The longer I'm here, the more I feel drawn to him. We'll go to the Caterpillar, like the flowers said. In his wisdom, he can help me find my guide and break the curse.
As if reading my mind, Jeb hops out of the rowboat and shoves the bow toward the expanse of glistening waves. Sand grates along the bottom and he leaps inside once we hit the water. "They said there's a way out across the ocean. Guess that's our only option." Taking the seat opposite mine, he works the paddles, biceps straining.
"Do you really think these are Alice's tears?" I ask. "That I'm supposed to make them go away somehow?"
"I'm the wrong guy to ask. I just saw a skeleton with antlers and a forest of aphid-noshing flower zombies."
I prop my elbows on my knees. "I'm sorry I freaked back there, when I was wrapped in the vines." I finally know what it's like to be Alison, trapped inside a nightmare.
"Are you kidding?" Jeb says. "You threw yourself out as bait so I could escape. I'm not thrilled about your putting yourself in the line of fire, but those were great distraction tactics. Hey." He nudges my boot with his. "Get some rest."
I lean back to relax my aching muscles. The sound of lapping waves lulls my eyes closed. I've rested for less than a second when Jeb whistles.
"Look." He gestures behind me.
Instead of the beach we just left growing smaller in the distance, there's nothing. We're surrounded by water in every direction. While I'm trying to make sense of that, the sun vanishes, as if someone flicked a light switch. I stiffen in my seat, fingers clenched on the boat's edges.
"What just happened?" Jeb asks, his voice strained.
"It's nightfall. There's no twilight here," I answer, as sure as I am that we're going in the right direction to find the winged guy from my past.
Jeb just stares at me and keeps rowing.
Stars twinkle in the purple heavens, reflecting in the dark water that swirls all around us. We swirl, too, the boat turning in slow circles until it's impossible to differentiate between water and sky.
Jeb sets the oars in their grooves. "My rowing's not getting us anywhere. We're going to have to leave it to the currents and hope for the best." Starlight flashes across his labret.
"Could you hand me the backpack?" I have a sudden urge to look at those sketches in the Alice book.
Jeb digs out two energy bars and a bottle of water, then steps over the oars toward me, rocking us gently. "You need to eat." He hands off the backpack and the snack, then sits cross-legged in front of me.
I set the bar aside, open the water, and take a swig. Then I slide the Wonderland book from the bag. "They thought you were an elfin knight of the White Court."
Jeb rips open his energy bar. "Yeah, whatever that is."
I flip to the sketches. "Here." The likeness could be Jeb's twin: muscular build, square chin, dark hair, jeweled red dots lining the outer corners of his temples and lips. Eyes as dark velvet green as the underside of leaves. The only difference is the pointed ears.
Jeb studies the picture, chewing.
"They serve the Ivory Queen," I explain, "in her castle of glass. Their blood crystallizes when the air hits it. That's how they mark themselves, by piercing holes in their flesh so their blood can leak out and become jewels. They're trained to be emotionless, to act only on instinct. Having so much self-control makes them fierce protectors, but it also makes for a very lonely queen."
Swallowing, Jeb looks up. "You sound like you're reading from an encyclopedia. How do you know all that?"
I turn the pages until I come to the skeletal rabbit. "The same way I know that Rabid White was tortured by an evil spell that was eating his skin from his bones. But Queen Red rescued him, stopping the bad magic before it could get to his face. He swore to serve her and no other until the day he died. So, why's he serving someone named Grenadine now?"
"Huh?"
I shake my head. "Nothing. Look, you saw me back there. I knew how to stop that dandelion creep. I knew how to walk through a mirror. It's because I've been taught."
Jeb crumples his food wrapper and stuffs it into the backpack, then waits for me to explain.
"I don't know how, but before Alison left for the asylum, I came here. It must've been a lot of times—I'm remembering more and more. I think it was mostly at night. In our world, anyway. While my parents were sleeping."
Jeb doesn't budge, just stares up into the sky.
I slump. "You think I'm crazy, right?"
He huffs. "Have you taken a look around? If you're crazy, I'm riding the banana train right alongside you."
I let out a relieved laugh. "Good point."
"Okay, it's time you were straight with me." He digs out the other recliner treasures and lays everything at my feet. "Start with your mom. Why she was really sent to Soul's." He pauses. "And what it has to do with your scars, since you obviously didn't get them in a car accident."
After another slow drink of water, I tell him my history, from the pruning shears to the bleeding daffodils. But I'm not ready to share details of the moth or my dark guide. Those memories feel private, somehow.
When I get to the part about the talking bugs and plants that Alison and I both hear, his gaze intensifies.
He plays with the laces on my boot. "So, you chose bugs for your art because it was the only way you could—"
"Shut them up? Yeah."
He shakes his head. "And I thought my childhood was warped. No wonder you've been scared of ending up at Soul's, too." He leans back on his elbows. "Now I get it. That battle I always see in your eyes. Light and dark. Like my gothic fairies." He's studying me as if I'm a piece of artwork again.
"So the sketches you made of me… they're the basis for your paintings?"
His eyebrows rise.
"All those times I caught you looking at me like I'm a palette of paint."
Thumping his fingers on the boat, he frowns. "Not sure what you're talking about."
"I know about the sketches Taelor found."
Something—either shock or embarrassment—flickers through his eyes.
I clench my fingers. "She's right, huh? The morbid and revolting are such fascinating subjects." It hurts to say it almost as much as it did to hear it.
"Is that what she said?"
I lift a shoulder in silent affirmation.
He sits up again and places a hand on my shin. "Look, she lashes out when she feels threatened. After finding the sketches… well, she kind of lost it. I mean, the guy she's been dating has an aesthetic obsession with another girl. You can see her side, can't you?"
"Maybe." I never would've guessed I was anyone's obsession, aesthetic or otherwise. If I inspire his art, then why is Taelor the one he chooses to have in his life? "Jeb… why do you put up with her?"
He pauses. "I guess because I'm the only stable thing she has."
"And by fixing her problems, you hope to make up for everything your dad did to Jen and your mom?"
He doesn't answer. That's as good as a yes.
Hatred for his father's weakness and violence flashes through me. "You're not accountable for his mistakes. Only for your own. Like going to London with Taelor."
"That's not a mistake. It's going to help with my career."
I stare at my boots. "Right. Just like my 'mortician sense of style' will help with mine." I attempt a laugh, but even to me it sounds false.
"Hey." The insistence in Jeb's voice makes me look up at him. "Tae was wrong, you know. About that. Do you think my paintings are ugly or freakish?"
I think of his watercolor paintings: darkly beautiful worlds and gothic fairies weeping black tears over human corpses. His depictions of misery and loss are so poignant and surreal they break the heart.
I twist my gloved hands together. "No. They're beautiful and haunting."
He squeezes my shin. "An artist is only as good as his subject."
For one raw, drawn-out moment, we're silent. Then he lets go of me.
I rub my knees, warming my leggings. "Can I see them someday?"
"The sketches?"
I nod.
"Tell you what. We get out of this in one piece, and I'll give you a private viewing." He holds my gaze for a minute too long, and my blood runs hot. How am I supposed to figure anything out when I can't even read my own body's signals anymore?
"Okay." He looks down at the Wonderland book in his lap and slides out the pictures of Alice, moving close. "What's up with these?" Flicking on the flashlight, he points its yellow glow at them, effectively distracting me from my whacked-out emotions.
The pictures are faded and worn, one of a sad and lovely young girl with dirty smudges on her dress and pinafore. The words Alice, seven years of age and fresh from the rabbit hole are handwritten on the back. The other picture is of Alice as an eighty-two-year-old woman.
I place them side by side. What was it Alison said? "Photographs tell a story. But people forget to read between the lines."
She said the same thing when she traced my birthmark—insisting there was more to the story than people realized.
Peering more closely at the pictures, I search the young Alice's face and body. There's a shadow on her left elbow that seems to match the pigmented maze Alison and I share. I study the same spot on the elderly Alice, but there's no birthmark.
"That's it!" I point to the pictures. "There and there. Alice had a birthmark that matches mine and Alison's when she was a kid, but she lost it as an old woman."
Jeb holds both pictures up to the light. "Could be the photo was retouched."
"Why would anyone do that?"
Jeb reaches for the energy bar on the seat beside me, tears the wrapping, and curls my fingers around it—unspoken insistence that I eat. "Are there any answers in the book?"
Chewing a bite of granola, I flip through page after page. I trace a finger over Alison's blurred notes in the margins while Jeb holds the flashlight. "There might've been, if these were legible." I reach the end, past the sketches and final pages, and am just about to put it away when Jeb tugs it out of my grasp.
"Look here."
If he hadn't pointed it out, I wouldn't have noticed the blank page bent in half and glued to form a pocket against the inside of the back cover. I dig out a folded piece of paper. It's old, yellow, and wrinkled.
The word Deathspeak is scribbled across the back, followed by a trail of crooked question marks, then a handwritten definition. Deathspeak: the language of the dying. One can only speak it to the one who was the cause of one's ill fate. It is the final recompense, to appoint a task that the offender must either carry out or die himself.
Jeb and I look at each other. I unfold the paper so we can see what's written inside. I know after the first sentence that it's something I wish I'd never laid eyes on. Yet I can't look away…
November 14, 1934: On the date of mental evaluation, Alice Liddell Hargreaves is an eighty-two-year-old woman of petite height who was brought in by concerned family members. According to relatives, her mental state began deteriorating months ago, when she awoke one morning with no recognition of her whereabouts and only a vague sense of her identity.
The psychologist conducting the interviews notes that the patient is preoccupied with inner thoughts, often brooding and overwhelmed by the size of the room. She occasionally crouches in a corner or perches on a chair when being interviewed. She is inattentive and vague, and has lively interactions with inanimate objects but detached human exchanges.
Patient is not oriented in physicality or place, with a marked impairment of time, inclined to melancholy dissertations over the loss of the seventy-five years she claims to have been locked in a birdcage in "Wonderland," having been "seduced by a statue boy at the age of seven to dive into a rabbit hole."
The examining psychologist attributes this to a grandiose delusion originating from a childhood given to vivid imaginings that were fed by the Liddell family's close friend Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll. Patient has fallen back on these fantasies to account for her selective memory loss.
Inasmuch as the patient exhibits the following symptoms: (1) grandiose delusions and selective amnesia, (2) marked diminished interest or pleasure in social interactions unless socializing with bugs or plants, (3) absence of appetite; prefers only fruit and desserts and refuses to ingest nutrition unless drink is served in a thimble and food on a birdcage tray—she is diagnosed as suffering from Mania and Schizophrenia.
Recommended treatment: electroshock twice daily—natural voltage administered by applying an electric eel to the head. Supplement with psychiatric counsel until all delusional lapses are contained, memory is reinstated, and mood of the patient is elevated.
I shove the report at Jeb.
He watches me. "Are you okay?"
How do I answer that? My great-great-great-grandmother tripped so far into her psychosis that she couldn't remember her past or present. The thimble and birdcage-tray idiosyncrasies are too close to Alison's teacup fetish. The consistency disturbs me.
Could something else be going on… not a delusion but a manipulation? Is that why Alison is so into the Alice charade? Whatever it is, it's obvious that she's headed for the same fate as my other ancestors.
"Do you see why I can't let her go through with those treatments?" I point to the paper. "The date of Alice's death. She died just two days after the report. The shock treatments must have killed her!"
I yank my dreadlocks out—ignoring the rip at the roots of my hair—and fling them into the ocean. I'm done fighting my resemblance to Alison. Since we're teammates in this bizarre game, we might as well look the part.
Jeb pulls me off the seat to sit me beside him, but the boat rocks, and I end up falling into his lap. We both freeze. When I start to ease off his legs, he holds me there. My heart hammers; I can't deny how amazing it feels to be so close to him. Ignoring the alarms going off inside me, I give in and press my cheek to the soft knit of his tank, my arms folded between us. He strokes my hair as I snuggle beneath his chin, legs curled in the fetal position.
"I'm scared," I whisper. For more reasons than I can say.
"You have every right to be," he answers softly. "But we're going to get back home. We're going to tell your dad everything. With both of our accounts and this lab report, he has to believe."
"No. This only proves that Alice was as crazy as he thinks Alison is. In the end, she didn't even remember getting married and having a family. Even with the living evidence of children and grandchildren around her, she still didn't remember."
Jeb is silent.
"I don't want to end up in a straitjacket," I say, holding back a sob. "With every memory I've made lost… or so meaningless it could belong to someone else."
Jeb's arms tense around me. "That's not in your future, Alyssa Victoria Gardner." He's never called me by my full name. He says it like my dad would, loading power into every syllable, which is exactly what I need.
"What, then?" I ask, hungry for any crumb he can spare.
"You're going to be a famous artist." His voice is deep velvet—soothing and sure. "You'll live in one of those artsy, upscale apartments in Paris with your rich husband. Oh, who just happens to be a world-renowned exterminator. How's that for a twist of fate? You won't even have to catch your own bugs anymore. That'll give you more time to spend with your five brilliant kids. And I'll come visit every summer. Show up on the doorstep with a bottle of Texas barbecue sauce and a French baguette. I'll be weird Uncle Jeb."
Uncle Jeb? I like the idea of him always being in my life. But as I stare at his ribbed tank and envision those circular ridges on his chest—a tragic dot-to-dot of each time he accidentally spilled a drink or left a toy out for his dad to trip over—I'm floored by how fast old feelings sweep in. Though fabric hides the scars, I know every one by heart. I've seen them countless times when we've gone swimming together or worked in his garage. I dreamed about them in sixth grade, about how it would feel to trace each one with my fingertip.
Right now, I'm wondering the same thing. How it might feel to heal his wounds with my touch.
"Not an exterminator," I blurt against the pulse pounding in my neck.
"Huh?"
I pause. "I'm going to fall in love with an artist. And we'll have two kids and live in the country. A quiet life, so we can hear our muses and answer when they call."
Tipping up my chin to meet his gaze, he gives me a tender, starlit smile—one that melts my insides. "I like your version better."
His mouth is so close to mine, his breath warm, sugary, and tempting, but thoughts of Taelor and London resurface. I can't let my heart get stolen by a guy who's hot for another girl, or be the kind of person who steals another girl's guy. I've already stolen money from Taelor and I've let this go far enough. I slip off his lap, my net skirts scraping his tuxedo pants.
As if waking from a trance, Jeb sits back on his palms and looks out over the rippling water.
"What do you think will happen tomorrow?" I ask, my voice as shaky as the rest of me.
"Whatever it is, don't jump into things without me. We do everything together. Deal?" He lifts one of my hands, smooths the wrinkles on my glove, and curls my fingers into a fist while waiting for an answer.
"Deal," I say.
"Good." He bumps my fisted knuckles with his. I shiver—both from the chilly breeze and the sweetness of the gesture.
"Here." Jeb picks up his tux jacket and helps me slip my arms inside. Then he puts everything into the pack. "Let's try to get some sleep."
He cradles my back against his chest, and we spoon in the hull of the rocking boat. His nose nestles in my hair. A spiral of white stars coils and uncoils in feathery sparks. It looks like curls of lightning, just like the spider and beetle mosaic I worked on earlier today before I went skating at Underland. Another tremor rolls through me. I remember watching these same constellations with my netherling guide years ago. No wonder it came through in my art.
"I hope that's not a storm coming," Jeb whispers against my nape, arms tensing around me. "This boat won't hold up to thrashing waves."
Tucking my hand absently into my skirt pocket, I prod the sponge my guide wanted me keep.
"It's only a constellation," I answer, and Jeb doesn't question how I know.
Without speaking, we watch the display overhead until it bursts into a thousand glittering colors, like silent fireworks. When it's gone, nothing remains but common white stars.
"Wow," we both say.
After a few quiet minutes, Jeb relaxes, and his breath rasps, slow and even, against the back of my head. Although it's Jeb's body keeping me warm, the last things I envision before falling asleep are inky black eyes and a spread of satiny wings.
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