Sari came up the stairs to my room on Thursday night with a bag of gas station candy, two cans of soda, and the expression of a woman who had made a decision.
"Okay," she said, kicking the door shut behind her. "We need to talk, and I need sugar to do it."
She dumped the bag out on my bed. Gummy worms. Peanut butter cups. Something sour and electric blue. She cracked open a soda, handed me the other one, and sat down cross-legged at the foot of the mattress, facing me.
"I've been keeping a list," she said.
My stomach dropped.
"Not, like, a creepy list. A mental list. Of stuff." She ticked it off on her black-polished fingers. "Manny's hand. Lily Haugen's fever. That high school kid with the wrist, his mom told my mom the X-ray was like a miracle. Mrs. Kowalski's cane, Eva, she left her cane, she's had that thing since the Clinton administration, I found it by the door. I called to tell her she left it and she told me she didn't need it anymore." She took a breath. "And Kade."
I didn't say anything. I held the cold soda can in both hands and looked down at it.
"And your back," Sari said, softer.
I looked up.
"At Walmart. In the fitting room." She wasn't looking at me now. She was picking at a gummy worm. "I saw them. The scars. And I thought—you know what I thought. Clay thinks it too. We both thought somebody did that to you. Some guy. Some cult leader. Somebody with a belt." Her jaw tightened. "I've been so mad about it I couldn't sleep."
"Sari—" I said.
"But I keep thinking about them. And they're not right." She finally met my eyes. "They're too neat. They're the same on both sides. Exactly the same. Nobody hurts somebody that neat. And they're right where—" She stopped.
"Where what?" I asked.
She swallowed.
"Where wings would go," she whispered. "If you had them."
The room went very still. Outside, a truck rumbled by on Main Street and the window rattled faintly in its frame.
"I know that sounds insane," Sari said quickly. "I know. I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm just saying, I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my life, my mom worked night shifts in the ER, you hear things. And I don't know what you are. I don't. But you're not a girl who escaped from a compound. You're something else. And I'm your friend, and I'm not scared of you, and I just—" Her voice cracked. "I just want you to trust me."
* * *
I looked at her for a long time. Sari, with her purple streak and her chipped nail polish and her terrible car. Sari, who'd dressed me and fed me and taught me how to use a phone and held me while I cried about Gary Pell. Sari, who had never once asked.
"Do you have a cut?" I said. "Anywhere?"
She blinked. "What?"
"A cut. A scrape. Anything," I said.
"I—" She looked down at her hands. Turned them over. "Paper cut. On my thumb. From the receipt roll," she said.
"Give it to me," I said.
Slowly, she held out her hand.
I took it in both of mine. The paper cut was tiny, a thin red line along the pad of her thumb, a little swollen at the edges. Barely anything. I could feel its small, stinging shape the way you'd feel a grain of sand in your shoe.
Feel where it wants to be whole.
Warmth went out of my palms. Gentle. Golden. I didn't hide it this time. I let her see the faint glow spread between our fingers, like holding a candle inside cupped hands.
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Sari stopped breathing.
We both watched the little red line fade. Pink. Then nothing. Then just a thumb, ordinary and whole. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
I let go.
Sari stared at her thumb. She turned it over. She pressed on the place where the cut had been. Then she looked up at me, and her eyes were enormous.
"Okay," she said, in a very small voice. "Okay. So that's real."
"That's real," I said.
"Okay." She nodded rapidly. "Okay okay okay. Cool. Cool cool cool." She grabbed my pillow, pressed her face into it, and screamed into it for about five full seconds.
Then she lifted her head, hair wild, and said, "Tell me everything."
* * *
So I did.
All of it. The Hall of Mending and the Writ and the Veil. Ithra and the sparrow. Six hundred years of watching people hurt and only being allowed to help the ones whose names were written. The beige hospital room and the young man with gray-green eyes, and his mother's scream. The Threshold, and Aurelle running toward me, and the moment I let go. The fall. The fire. The alley, and Clay's jacket.
Gary Pell. Ray Tolliver. The woman in the minivan and the woman with the geraniums.
The promise I'd made on the fire escape. The promise I'd broken in the street.
Kade.
It took a long time. The candy disappeared. The soda went flat. The streetlight outside crept across the ceiling. Sari didn't interrupt once, which for Sari was a feat roughly equivalent to holding her breath for an hour. She just listened, with her knees pulled up to her chest and her eyes getting wider and wider, and sometimes they filled up with tears, and sometimes she covered her mouth with her hand.
When I finally stopped, she didn't say anything at all for a long moment.
Then she leaned forward, and put her arms around me, and held on tight.
"Those people," she said into my hair. "Gary. That Ray guy. That's not your fault."
"It is, though," I said.
"It's not. You didn't make Gary look at his radio. You didn't make Ray hurt anybody. You just—" She pulled back and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "You just did what you were supposed to do. You saw people hurting and you helped. That's what a nurse does. That's what my mom does. She doesn't get to know if the guy she saves is gonna go home and beat his wife. She just saves him. That's the job."
"It's not that simple," I said.
"I know." She sniffed. "I know it's not. But it's not your fault, either."
I didn't know if I believed her. But it helped to hear someone say it.
* * *
"Okay," Sari said, after another long silence. She took a deep, shaky breath and let it out. She sat up straighter. And then, all at once, her face lit up like a Christmas tree. "Okay. I have questions."
"Sari—" I said.
"So many questions. Is God real? Is there a God? Did you ever meet God? What does God look like? Is it like an old guy with a beard or like a big light or—"
"I—"
"What's heaven like? Is it clouds? Do people sit on clouds? Are there harps? Please tell me there are harps," Sari said.
"There aren't really harps," I said.
"Damn it." She grabbed my arm. "What about my grandma? Is my grandma there? Grandma Rose? She died when I was eleven. She made the best cinnamon rolls in the state."
My throat went tight. "I don't know. I didn't know all the souls. There are so many. But if she was kind—"
"She was a nightmare," Sari said fondly. "But she was kind." She wiped her eyes again. "Okay. Okay. Lighter questions. Can you fly?" Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
"Not anymore," I said.
"Could you before?" Sari asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Oh my God. What was it like?" Sari asked.
I thought about it. About the wind under my wings, and the light, and the whole world spread out below me like a map.
"It was like being the sky," I said.
Sari pressed both hands over her heart. "I'm gonna cry again. Okay. Next. Do angels eat?"
"No. We didn't need to," I said.
"Do angels pee?" Sari asked.
"No," I said.
"Do you pee? Now?" Sari asked.
I put my face in my hands. "Yes."
Sari howled. She laughed so hard she fell off the bed. She lay on the floor of my room holding her stomach and laughing until she was wheezing, and after a minute I started laughing too, helplessly, until my face ached and my eyes ran. And somewhere in the middle of it, I realized that for the first time since I'd fallen, there was someone on this earth who knew exactly what I was.
And she was still here. On the floor of my room. Laughing.
* * *
It was almost two in the morning when she finally got up to go. At the door, she stopped and turned around.
"Hey. Bell," Sari said.
"Yeah?" I asked.
"The mechanic." She raised an eyebrow. "You gonna tell him?"
I looked down at the guest check on my windowsill, next to the cactus in its little cat pot. Whatever you are, thank you.
"He asked," I said. "He asked me what I did. I told him I couldn't. Not yet."
"Well, yeah, because you're a chicken." Sari leaned against the doorframe. "Babe. I'm gonna say this with love. That man had a truck hit him and then found out from a random EMT that he's basically a walking miracle, and his first move was to come over here and say thank you. He's not gonna run screaming." She shrugged. "Text him."
"Now? It's two in the morning," I said.
"So text him tomorrow. But text him," Sari said.
She blew me a kiss and was gone. I heard her clatter down the stairs and out the back, and a minute later, through the window, I heard her Civic start on the first try.
I picked up my cracked phone. I picked up the guest check. I typed his number in very slowly, one digit at a time.
I wrote a message. Deleted it. Wrote another. Deleted that one too.
Finally I typed: This is Eva. Can I come by tomorrow? After you close.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I hit send, and threw the phone face-down onto the quilt like it had burned me, and pulled the pillow over my head.
It buzzed almost immediately. I peeked. I'll be here.