This summer I’d been spending a lot of time on other people’s deaths. Harley’s. Lisette’s. But somehow it had helped me feel alive. Because they weren’t my deaths. The ones that were my own were too hard to face.
People love a spectacle, an event. Give them something to watch and you will make them happy. “So much of life is in the smallness of moments,” my mother said. “But they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant.
You don’t know me,” she says. “Yes, I do,” I say.
All the studies show that the best age to die is eighty. It’s long enough that we can have a complete life experience, but not so long that we feel useless.
I watched Leo and I realized that he also knew how it felt to be different. To want big things in a very small town. To get made fun of. He wasn’t as different as I was. But he also wasn’t one of those lucky people who fit in all the time. And I thought of the first time I worked with him, what I’d seen. He did like the world – that was the thing about him that I liked the best – but the world didn’t always like him back.
I want a good way to remember, I wanted to say to Meg. I want to stop crying. I want everything in the world to stop breaking my heart.
The words go together. Some things are created to be together.
Ky and I have been marking, too, with flags on the Hill. With the poetry of others and with words of our own.
I love you,” she whispers. “I love you,” I say back. I choose her again, and again, and again.
If you could fly anywhere, where would you go?” Indie asks. “I think you know the answer to that,” I tell her. I slip the paper into my pocket. “Central, then,” Indie says. “You’d fly to Central.” “Wherever Cassia is.
Back then, I was home in Oria, trying to make Cassia fall in love with me.
I think he might have meant to say something more, but when our lips touch, there is no need, for once, for any words at all.
But he knew I wouldn’t do that. He knew I wouldn’t ask Mom for anything I didn’t really, really need. We both tried to be good for her and she tried to be patient with us. Sometimes I thought of the three of us as pencils with the erasers scrubbed down to the end, and the next swipe across the paper would tear through the page and make a scree sound across the desk.
Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, his eyes wide and deep like the oceans in other tales or like the sky in his own.
The pictures were beautiful both because of the way they looked while they existed and because they could never last.
You think there’s nothing here because we’re not putting up a fight. But there are words in our heads that no one else knows.
And that is how it’s always been with Ky, I realize now, looking back. We have always seen him swimming along the surface. Only that first day did we see him dive deep.
When I came up choking I could tell that she saw the differences in me. Her eyes rested on the scrape on my face from the Outer Provinces. But it was as though she was a little like me. She noticed the differences and then she decided what mattered and what didn’t. She laughed with me then, and I loved the way the laugh reached her green eyes and crinkled the skin around them.
Ky wants someone to see him. He wants me to see him.
I don’t know what Miles thought about while we walked home but I thought about Leo. I guess I was wrong about him fitting in with his family. And I should have realized that he would fit in because that’s one thing I do know for sure. That it is possible to be different and still belong to your family. For them to love you like crazy.
I close my eyes. I love KY. But I don’t understand him. He won’t let me reach him. I have made mistakes, too, I know it, but I am tired of chasing him through canyons and out onto plains and stretching out my hand only to have him take it some times and not others.