Then she stayed up an hour or two more, writing.
It felt good to be writing in her own room, in her own bed. To get lost in the World of Mages and stay lost. To not hear any voices in her head but Simon’s and Baz’s. Not even her own. This was why Cath wrote fic. For these hours when their world supplanted the real world. When she could just ride their feelings for each other like a wave, like something falling downhill.
By Sunday night, the whole house was covered in onionskin sketch paper and burrito foil. Cath started another load of drinking glasses and gathered up all the delicious-smelling trash.
She was supposed to meet her ride out in West Omaha. Her dad was waiting by the door to take her, rattling his car keys against his leg.
Cath tried to take a mental picture of him to reassure herself with later. He had light brown hair, just Cath and Wren’s color. Just their texture, too—thick and straight. A round nose, just wider and longer than theirs. Every/no-color eyes, just like theirs. It was like he’d had them by himself all along. Like the three of them had just split their DNA evenly.
It would be a much more reassuring picture if he didn’t look so sad. His keys were hitting his leg too hard.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Cath…” The way he said it made her heart sink. “Sit down, okay? There’s something I need to tell you real quick.”
“Why do I have to sit down? I don’t want to have to sit down.”
“Just”—he motioned toward the dining room table—“please.”
Cath sat at the table, trying not to lean on his papers or breathe them into disorder.
“I didn’t mean to save this…,” he said.
“Just say it,” Cath said. “You’re making me nervous.” Worse than nervous; her stomach was twisted up to her trachea.
“I’ve been talking to your mom.”
“What?” Cath would have been less shocked if he told her he’d been talking to a ghost. Or a yeti. “Why? What?”
“Not for me,” he said quickly, like he knew that the two of them getting back together was a horrifying prospect. “About you.”
“Me?”
“You and Wren.”
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t talk to her about us.”
“Cath … she’s your mother.”
“There is no evidence to support that.”
“Just listen, Cath, you don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
Cath was starting to cry. “I don’t care what you’re going to say.”
Her dad decided to just keep talking. “She’d like to see you. She’d like to know you a little better.”
“No.”
“Honey, she’s been through a lot.”
“No,” Cath said. “She’s been through nothing.” It was true. You name it, Cath’s mom wasn’t there for it. “Why are we talking about her?”
Cath could hear her dad’s keys banging against his leg again, hitting the bottom of the table. They needed Wren here now. Wren didn’t twitch. Or cry. Wren wouldn’t let him keep talking about this.
“She’s your mother,” he said. “And I think you should give her a chance.”
“We did. When we were born. I’m done talking about this.” Cath stood up too quickly, and a pile of papers fluttered off the table.
“Maybe we can talk about it more at Thanksgiving,” he said.
“Maybe we can not talk about it at Thanksgiving, so that we don’t ruin Thanksgiving—are you going to tell Wren?”
“I already did. I sent her an e-mail.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much. She said she’d think about it.”
“Well, I’m not thinking about it,” Cath said. “I can’t even think about this.”
She got up from the table and started gathering her things; she needed something to hang on to. He shouldn’t have talked to them about this separately. He shouldn’t have talked to them about it at all.
* * *
The drive to West Omaha with her dad was miserable. And the drive back to Lincoln without him was worse.
Nothing was going right.
They’d been attacked by a venomous crested woodfoul.
And then they’d hidden in the cave with the spiders and the whatever-that-thing-was that had bitten Simon’s tennis shoe, possibly a rat.
And then Baz had taken Simon’s hand. Or maybe Simon had taken Baz’s hand.… Anyway, it was totally forgivable because woodfoul and spiders and rats.
And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.
They’d walked back to the fortress like that, hand in hand. And it would have been okay—it would have been mostly okay—if one of them had just let go.
If they hadn’t stood there on the edge of the Great Lawn, holding this little bit of each other, long after the danger had passed.
TEN
Professor Piper wasn’t done grading their unreliable-narrator scenes (which made Nick crabby and paranoid), but the professor wanted them all to get started on their final project, a ten-thousand-word short story. “Don’t save it till the night before,” she said, sitting on her desk and swinging her legs. “It will read like you wrote it the night before. I’m not interested in stream of consciousness.”
Cath wasn’t sure how she was going to keep everything straight in her head. The final project, the weekly writing assignments—on top of all her other classwork, for every other class. All the reading, all the writing. The essays, the justifications, the reports. Plus Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays writing with Nick. Plus Carry On. Plus e-mail and notes and comments …
Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.
“Do you ever feel,” she asked Nick Tuesday night, “like you’re a black hole—a reverse black hole.…”
“Something that blows instead of sucks?”
“Something that sucks out,” she tried to explain. She was sitting at their table in the stacks with her head resting on her backpack. She could feel the indoor wind on her neck. “A reverse black hole of words.”
“So the world is sucking you dry,” he said, “of language.”
“Not dry. Not yet. But the words are flying out of me so fast, I don’t know where they’re coming from.”
“And maybe you’ve run through your surplus,” he said gravely, “and now they’re made of bone and blood.”
“Now they’re made of breath,” she said.
Nick looked down at her, his eyebrows pulled together in one thick stripe. His eyes were that color you can’t see in the rainbow. Indigo.
“Nope,” he said. “I never feel like that.”
She laughed and shook her head.
“The words come out of me like Spider-Man’s webbing.” Nick held out his hands and touched his middle fingers to his palms. “Fffffssh.”
Cath tried to laugh, but yawned instead.
“Come on,” he said, “it’s midnight.”
She gathered up her books. Nick always took the notebook. It was his notebook after all, and he worked on the story between library dates. (Or meetings or whatever these were.)
When they got outside, it was much colder than Cath was expecting. “See you tomorrow,” Nick said as he walked away. “Maybe Piper’ll have our papers done.”
Cath nodded and got out her phone to call her room.
“Hey,” someone said softly.
She jumped back. It was just Levi—leaning against the lamppost like the archetypical “man leaning against lamppost.”
“You’re always done at midnight.” He smiled. “I thought I’d beat you to the punch. Too cold out here to stand around waiting.”
“Thanks,” she said, walking past him toward the dorms.
Levi was uncharacteristically quiet. “So that’s your study partner?” he asked once they were halfway back to Pound.
“Yeah,” Cath said into her scarf. She felt her breath, wet and freezing in the wool. “Do you know him?”
“Seen him around.”
Cath was quiet. It was too cold to talk, and she was more tired than usual.
“He ever offer to walk you home?”
“I’ve never asked,” Cath said quickly. “I’ve never asked you either.”
“That’s true,” Levi said.
More quiet. More cold.
The air stung Cath’s throat when she finally spoke again. “So maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Levi said. “That wasn’t my point.”
* * *
The first time she saw Wren that week, at lunch with Courtney, all Cath could think was, So this is what you look like when you’re keeping a giant secret from me—exactly the same as usual.
Cath wondered if Wren was ever planning to talk to her about … what their dad had brought up. She wondered how many other important things Wren wasn’t telling her. And when had this started? When had Wren started filtering what she told Cath?
I can do that, too, Cath thought, I can keep secrets. But Cath didn’t have any secrets, and she didn’t want to keep anything from Wren. Not when it felt so good, so easy, to know that when she was with Wren, she didn’t have to worry about a filter.
She kept waiting for a chance to talk to Wren without Courtney, but Courtney was always around. (And always talking about the most inane things possible. Like her life was an audition for an MTV reality show.)
Finally, after a few days, Cath decided to walk to class with Wren after lunch, even though it might make her late.
“What’s up?” Wren asked as soon as Courtney was on her merry way to Economics. It had started snowing—a wet snow.
“You know I went home last weekend…,” Cath said.
“Yeah. How’s Dad?”
“Fine … good, actually. He’s pitching Gravioli.”
“Gravioli? That’s huge.”
“I know. And he seemed into it. And there was nothing else—I mean, everything seemed fine.”
“I told you he didn’t need us,” Wren said.
Cath snorted. “He obviously needs us. If he had a cat, the man would be one bad day away from Grey Gardens. I think he eats all of his meals at QuikTrip, and he’s sleeping on the couch.”
“I thought you said he was doing good.”
“Well. For Dad. You should come home with me next time.”
“Next time is Thanksgiving. I think I’ll be there.”
Cath stopped. They were almost to Wren’s next class, and Cath hadn’t even gotten to the hard part yet. “Dad told me … that he’d already told you…”
Wren exhaled like she knew what was coming. “Yeah.”
“He said you were thinking about it.”
“I am.”
“Why?” Cath tried really hard to say it without whining.
“Because.” Wren hitched up her backpack. “Because she’s our mom. And I’m thinking about it.”
“But…” It wasn’t that Cath couldn’t think of an argument. It was that there were so many. The arguments in her brain were like a swarm of people running from a burning building and getting stuck in the door. “But she’ll just mess everything up.”
“She already messed everything up,” Wren said. “It’s not like she can leave us again.”
“Yes. She can.”
Wren shook her head. “I’m just thinking about it.”
“Will you tell me if you decide anything?”
Wren frowned. “Not if it’s going to make you this upset.”
“I have a right to get upset about upsetting things.”
“I just don’t like it,” Wren said, looking away from Cath, up at the door. “I’m gonna be late.”
So was Cath.
“We’re already roommates,” Baz argued. “I shouldn’t have to be his lab partner, as well. You’re asking me to bear far more than my fair share of apple-cheeked protagonism.”
Every girl in the laboratory sat on the edge of her stool, ready to take Baz’s place.
“That’s enough about my cheeks,” Snow muttered, blushing heroically.
“Honestly, Professor,” Baz said, waving his wand toward Snow in a just look at him gesture. Snow caught the end of the wand and pointed it at the floor.
Professor Chilblains was unmoved. “Sit down, Mr. Pitch. You’re wasting precious lab time.”
Baz slammed his books down at Snow’s station. Snow put his safety goggles on and adjusted them; it did nothing to dim his blue eyes or blunt his glare.
“For the record,” Snow grumbled. “I don’t want to spend any more time with you either.”
Stupid boy … Baz sighed to himself, taking in Snow’s tense shoulders, the flush of anger in his neck, and the thick fall of bronze hair partially trapped in his goggles.… What do you know about want?
ELEVEN
The hallway was perfectly quiet. Everyone who lived in Pound Hall was somewhere else, having fun.
Cath stared at her computer screen and heard Professor Piper’s voice again in her head. She kept forcing herself to remember the entire conversation, playing it back and playing it back, all the way through, forcing a finger down her memory’s throat.
Today, at the beginning of class, Professor Piper had passed their unreliable-narrator scenes back. Everybody’s but Cath’s. “We’ll talk after class, okay?” the professor said to Cath with that gentle, righteous smile she had.
Cath had thought this exception must be a good thing—that Professor Piper must have really liked her story. She really liked Cath, you could tell; Cath got more of those soft smiles than just about anybody else in the class. More than Nick, by far.