TWENTY
It was high tide when the party began. When beers were pounded and shots guzzled into warm bellies, when the music started at a medium volume and conversations were had without the occasional hiccup. But as the tide recedes, so does the party. People stumble over the bonfire, melting the rubber from the bottom of their shoes; girls spill their drinks between their cleavage; boys vomit in the beach grass down near the dock. And Olivia grins from her place at the entrance to the greenhouse, like a queen overseeing a gala held in her honor.
And as it nears ten o’clock, only two hours until midnight, decisions will have to be made. Sacrifices allotted. Like Cinderella, at the stroke of midnight all magic will be revoked. And these bodies we inhabit will have to be given back. Or maybe, if my plan works, I’ll keep this one for eternity. It’s never been done before. We’ve never attempted to stay in a body indefinitely—I’ll be the first to try. When the clock ticks past midnight, I won’t wade out into the sea; I will resist the urge, the beckoning call of the ocean. I will endure whatever pain rips through me; I will fight the transition. I will stay in this body.
And I will watch the sunrise as Penny Talbot.
Rose and Heath reappeared a few minutes after checking on Gigi. Now they stand next to Bo and me near the bonfire, Rose’s eyes always flashing across the island to the path that leads to Old Fisherman’s Cottage. She’s anxious, her fingers tapping against her thigh, afraid someone is going to find Gigi. And like the rest of us, she wishes everyone would just leave the island and go home.
But the party wears on. Boys are enticed down to the water’s edge by the girls, dared to enter the harbor one last time before midnight. At the Swan party several weeks earlier, it was the girls who were braving the waters, risking being stolen by a Swan sister. Now it’s the boys being persuaded to wade out into the sea, where they risk being drowned by a Swan sister looking for a final kill. It’s a game to them.
But I can feel the sway of the sea, the changing tide, the magnetic draw of the harbor. It wants me back; it wants all three of us back. I know my sisters feel it too. I press my fingers against my temples, trying to silence it, keep it at bay. But at times it pulls against me so fiercely I feel dizzy.
“It’s getting late,” Rose says beside me, worry lines cutting deep into the space between her eyes. The countdown to the end drawing near.
Gigi will need to be let out of the cottage by midnight if she’s going to sneak back into the sea. I will need to do it without Bo seeing, without anyone seeing.
And I will need to slip away, find somewhere to be alone, to fight the rising force of Penny, who will start to take back her body come midnight. I can’t go to the main house because Penny’s mom will hear my screams of pain. I had thought I could hide among the orchard rows, or perhaps the far rocky shore of the island where the crashing waves would conceal my cries. I will need to decide soon.
I turn to Bo.
Earlier, I promised him we would decide what to do with Gigi before midnight. Now there’s only an hour left, and I need to tell him something, some reason why he can’t take her life. Because taking a life comes with consequences.
But when I shift my gaze, Bo is no longer standing beside me. I scan the crowd of faces, searching for him. But he’s nowhere within the ring of firelight. He’s gone.
“Fuck,” I say out loud. How long has he been gone? How did I not notice when he slipped away?
“What’s wrong?” Rose asks, dropping her hand where she had been chewing on a fingernail.
“I—I think Bo went back to his cottage. I’m going to go check,” I lie. I don’t want her to know where he really is, what I realize in a sudden flash that he’s gone to do: kill Gigi. He couldn’t wait any longer, he couldn’t let me talk him out of it, so he snuck away.
It might already be too late.
“I’ll come with you,” Rose offers quickly.
“No. You guys stay here, keep an eye on everyone.”
Heath nods, but Rose doesn’t look so sure.
I spin around, about to cut through the mob of people gathered around the bonfire, when I’m hit with both relief and horror. Gigi isn’t dead, at least not yet, because she’s strutting up the pathway, heading straight for the bonfire and the party. She got out.
My lungs cease to draw in air. My heart ratchets up so that it’s beating against the back of my throat.
“Holy shit,” I hear Heath say behind me.
And then Rose asks, “What is she doing?”
She’s come for revenge.
* * *
Gigi escaped the cottage.
She must have broken through a window or forced her way past the barricaded door. She was tired of waiting for me to come release her. She’s already feeling the pull of the tide, just like me. The sea in our blood, in our minds, begging us to sink into the darkness and be purged from these bodies. It will only get harder to resist.
But now Gigi’s free. She’s out. And she’s surely really pissed off.
But where’s Bo? Maybe he didn’t go to kill her after all. Maybe I was wrong.
Gigi strides into the group, hair falling out of her ponytail, plain blue T-shirt and white drawstring pants one size too big because they’re clothes that Rose brought for her to wear. Most people don’t notice her as she pushes past them; they’re already too drunk. But as she winds her way through the dwindling crowd, I can tell she’s looking for something: someone.
Davis and Lon are standing just inside the doors of the greenhouse, hovering where the cases of beer and a nearly empty keg have been placed. Gigi spots them, mouth leveled into a sharp, determined line. She cuts swiftly up to the greenhouse. Davis sees her first, then Lon catches sight of her and actually takes a step back. He’s wearing one of his loudest, most obnoxious shirts tonight: pink and teal with rainbow-colored peacocks and hula girls. It’s actually hard to look directly at it.
Davis and Lon are the only ones in the greenhouse, and they could make a run for it, sprint out through the door on the far side of the glassed-in building. But they seem frozen, stupefied into inaction, which is exactly how I feel.
Rose and Heath, still standing near me, stare at Gigi with their mouths slightly agape.
Gigi slides in between Davis and Lon, fluttering her eyelashes up at Lon and tilting her head to the side. She grazes a finger around the rim of his cup, smiling, licking her lips. Still, the rest of the party has no clue what’s happening: that Gigi Kline has suddenly reemerged. A few drunk girls on the other side of the fire pit giggle loudly then stumble backward, arms looped together. Another guy who is standing the closest to the greenhouse has a cigarette between his lips and is taking long drags as if he were actually smoking, but the cigarette isn’t even lit. He’s too trashed to notice anything around him.
I can see Gigi’s lips moving, but she’s whispering so softly, I can’t make out the words. Her voice is slipping into Lon’s ears; she wants to take him with her, one last kill before she retreats into the sea for the winter. She wants her revenge for what he and Davis did to her. Then her gaze snaps to Davis, biting her bottom lip. She wants them both.
But before she’s able to brush her fingers across his cheek, he grabs her wrist and bends it away. “You fucking witch,” I hear Davis bark. Lon already looks entranced, staring at her meekly, like a dog waiting to be told what to do. But Davis has stopped her before she’s infiltrated the cracks in his mind. “I knew you were one of them,” he says, loud enough that we can hear. He towers over her, broad meaty shoulders, holding her arm locked at her side. But she doesn’t seem afraid. She smiles from the left side of her lips, amused. Her gaze penetrates his, and with his hand around her wrist, it’s enough to seduce him into falling desperately in love with her. I watch as his expression melts, turns sappy at the edges until his thick, bushy eyebrows fold downward, and he releases his hold on her. She runs her fingers up his jaw then lifts onto her tiptoes. She brushes her lips against his ear, whispering things that will make him hers.
And when she’s done, she threads her fingers through both Davis’s and Lon’s hands and begins leading them from the greenhouse. As she meanders past us, around the bonfire, her eyes glide over mine, but I don’t move.
Rose looks baffled. She doesn’t fully understand what’s happening. “Gigi?” she says when Gigi and Davis and Lon stride past. “What are you doing?”
“Thanks for saving me,” Gigi says to Rose, her tone guileful and distant. She’s already thinking about the sea, about leaving Gigi’s body and becoming part of the Pacific. “But they were right about me. . . .” She nods to Davis and Lon, standing obediently behind her. “See you next summer.”
“Gigi, don’t do this,” I hiss, and her eyes snap to mine. Our real eyes meet, beneath these human exteriors. And there is a warning in hers, a threat that I can read in my sister’s expression: If I try to stop her, if I do anything to prevent her from taking Davis and Lon, she will reveal who I really am. Right here. Right now. In front of everyone.
She tugs against Davis’s and Lon’s hands, pulling them toward the dock. But then a voice bellows from behind me. “It’s Gigi!” I look over my shoulder, and Rose has taken several steps away from the firelight, pointing down the path to where Gigi has stopped, Davis and Lon standing obediently on either side of her.
The crowd encircling the fire stalls their conversations in almost perfect unison. They stop laughing and slurping beers and swaying dangerously close to the flames. And instead, they all turn to look at Rose, following her outstretched arm down to Gigi.
There is a pause, a delayed moment while everyone processes what’s happening, their brains chugging forward at half speed. And then a girl shouts, “She has Davis and Lon!”
As if choreographed, several guys standing around the bonfire drop their beers into the flames then break into a sprint after Gigi. They know what she is—at least they think they do. And seeing her leading Davis and Lon down toward the water, on the last night of the summer solstice, after she’s been missing for weeks, is proof enough that they’ve been right all along.
Gigi waits a half beat; her gaze sweeps over the crowd then back to me as she registers what’s happening, and then her hands release their hold on Davis and Lon. She won’t be able to take them with her. She has to run now. And she does.
Her blond hair shivers against the moonlight as she veers down the path to the dock. The boys shout after her, darting past Davis and Lon, both numbed to the commotion. And when the small mob reaches the dock, there is more shouting, and what sounds like people clamoring into boats and engines rumbling to life. Gigi must have dove straight into the water. It was her only escape.
She will have to swim; she will have to hide. Or maybe she will dip safely beneath the surface of the harbor, quickly relinquishing the body she’s stolen to spend another winter in the cold and dark.
By morning, the real Gigi will wake as if from a hangover, floating in the harbor perhaps, forced to swim ashore and pull herself onto land. Only foggy images will surface in her mind from the last few weeks, when she was no longer Gigi Kline but was Aurora Swan. But we will all know the truth.
And that’s assuming the crowd chasing after her doesn’t catch her first.
Rose shakes her head in disbelief, staring down the path where Gigi has fled, where the rest of the party has descended to climb into boats and assist in the search for Aurora Swan.
I feel a wave of sympathy for Rose. She thought she was doing the right thing by rescuing Gigi. She thought she could see what was right in front of her—the truth—but she can’t. She’s blind, just like everyone else in this town.
She doesn’t even know what I am.
Her best friend has been turned into something else. And for a sliver of a split second, I consider telling her the truth. Getting it over with. One night to shatter her entire world—to tear apart her reality.
But then I remember Bo.
He wasn’t with Gigi in the cottage. He didn’t go to kill her after all.
And then I realize . . . Olivia is nowhere in the crowd. She wasn’t even here when Gigi appeared.
They’re both missing.
* * *
“Where are you going?” Rose asks. She and Heath and I are the last remaining people standing beside the bonfire. Everyone else has gone in pursuit of Gigi.
“To find Bo,” I tell her. “You guys should go back to town.”
A slight rain has begun to fall, and a wall of bruise-black clouds pushes beneath the stars and blocks out the moon.
I walk to Rose. I hope this isn’t the last time I’ll see her, but just in case, I say, “You did the right thing helping Gigi. You didn’t know what she really was.” I want her to understand that even though she was wrong about Gigi, she shouldn’t doubt herself. She wanted to protect Gigi, keep her safe, and I admire her for it.
“But I should have known,” she says, her eyes turning glassy with tears, her cheeks flushed. And in this instant, I know I can’t tell her what I really am. It will destroy her. And after tonight, if I’m still Penny Talbot, I will continue pretending to be her best friend. I will let her believe I am the same person she grew up with. Even if the real Penny Talbot will be gone—lost in the trenches of a body and mind that I have stolen.
“Please,” I say to her and Heath. “Go back to town. There’s nothing more you can do tonight. Gigi’s gone.”
Heath reaches forward and touches Rose’s hand. He knows it’s time to go.
“Call me tomorrow?” she asks. I hug her, smelling the sweet cinnamon-and-nutmeg scent that lingers in her wavy hair from her mother’s shop.
“Of course.” No matter what, if I’m still Penny tomorrow, I’ll call her. If I’m not, I’m certain the real Penny will call her anyway. And Rose will hopefully never know the difference.
Heath pulls her away, back to the dock, and my chest aches watching them leave.
A deluge of rain begins falling from the dark, funeral-black sky, making the bonfire pop and sizzle.
I pick my way through the sharp beach grass and large boulders, the rain blowing steadily now. I will check Bo’s cottage first and then the orchard. But I don’t even make it that far when I notice something atop the lighthouse. Two silhouettes block the beam of light as it sweeps clockwise around the lantern room.
Bo and Olivia. It has to be them. They’re in the lighthouse.
* * *
The metal door into the lighthouse has been left open by whoever was the last to enter, and it taps lightly against the wall behind it, the gusting wind blowing rain onto the stone floor.
Otis and Olga are standing just inside, mewing softly up at me, eyes watery and wide. What are they doing out here? I pause beside the stairwell, listening for voices. But the storm beating against the outer walls is louder than anything else. Bo must be inside. Otis and Olga have been attached to him since he arrived, following him around the island, sleeping in his cottage most nights. I think they’ve known I’m not really Penny since the start; they sensed the moment I took up residence inside her body. And they prefer Bo over me.
“Go back to the house,” I urge them, but the two orange tabbies blink away from me, staring out into the gloomy night, uninterested in leaving the lighthouse.
I take the stairs two at a time, my breathing ragged. I use the railing to propel myself up the interior of the lighthouse. My legs are on fire. Sweat ripples down my temples. But I keep going. My heart feels like it’s burning a hole through my chest. But I reach the top in record speed, pulling myself up over the last step and sucking in deep, quick breaths.
I inch along the stone wall, trying to steady my crazed heartbeat, then peek around the corner into the lantern room. Bo and Olivia are no longer inside. But I can see them through the glass. They are standing outside on the narrow walkway that encircles the lighthouse. Bo has something in his hand. It glints as he moves closer to Olivia.
It’s a knife.