Unmade

“Wait,” said Holly. “Wait, I’m sorry, there’s something I want to say.”

Angie stilled.

Holly felt sick, in the same way she had when she was a kid so desperate to get out of school that she convinced herself she was terribly ill and then could not make the pain stop. She had to wrench the words out of herself, because she could not put it off any more, because this could be her very last chance.

“I know you think I was just feeling sorry for you, but that wasn’t it at all,” Holly said. She saw Angela flinch but did not let herself stop. “When we were first getting to know each other, I thought you were so great, and I wanted to be with you all the time, and I didn’t know what those feelings meant. It took me a long time to understand, and to catch up with you, and once I did, I still didn’t know what to do. I know that the whole offering-you-a-massage thing was weird and borderline creepy. I didn’t know how to do it, when it was with a girl, or when it felt important. I know I did it all wrong, and I’m sorry. If that’s wrecked any chance for us, I understand. I wish I could make up for it all. Or if too much has happened for that to be possible, I want, just once, to tell you the whole truth about myself and about what you mean to me. I’ve made so many mistakes and I’ve said so many dumb hurtful things, but I want you to know what it all meant. I want you to know that everything I’ve done lately, I’ve done because I wanted to be with you.”

“You mean it?” Angela asked. “You r-really do?”

Her voice wobbled, and Holly stood stricken with a painful mingling of hope and fear.

“I mean it,” she said. “I don’t always know what to say, like you and Kami. I don’t know how else to tell you that I mean it, but if things work out and if you were willing—I could keep thinking of how to prove it to you. I could keep trying different ways to tell you, until you believe me. That is, if you want to hear it.”

“I do,” said Angie, and the words tumbled out eagerly, in a way Holly had never heard her speak. “I do, I do.”

“Yeah?” Holly asked. She heard her own voice come out shy, and thrilled. It was a little embarrassing, but it was how she felt. She wanted Angie to know.

She stepped up, one foot on the fence, so Angie was only a tiny bit taller than she was. She remembered how Angie had leaned in once before, and how Holly had shoved her back, how easy it had been to repel her in a moment of shock. Nothing was easy now, but it was so sweet.

It was strange, to taste someone else’s lipstick. Angela’s was slightly dry, with an edge of dark chocolate, mingled with the slick bubble-gum slide of Holly’s own lip gloss. Angie had never been kissed before, which Holly had known but now really knew, because of the slight hesitation that Angie would never have betrayed if she could’ve hidden it, the hovering of Angie’s hands like butterflies not daring to land on Holly’s hair. Holly was surprised by the rush of protectiveness and satisfaction that washed over her: she had kissed and been kissed a lot, if never quite like this. She slid her hands from Angela’s narrow back to Angela’s small waist, drew her in so close against her body that their h*ps pressed together in a tiny jolt of contact, and deepened the kiss. Angie had always been one of the quickest studies in school. The kiss transformed into something world-changing, warming the air, slowing time. The sun shimmered behind Holly’s closed eyelids, and above their heads the wind whispered promises to the leaves.

“Angela, are you ever going to pick a hor—Oh,” said Jon Glass.

Holly looked over at him, in sudden guilty terror. Her fingers closed on Angie’s hand, clutching too tight. Her heart was pounding. She didn’t want to be separated.

For a moment, she could not see him clearly through her blur of panic, and then she could.

“Well, I must say this is a great relief to me,” Jon said, with wicked eyes and infinite tenderness. “I was starting to think that nobody would ever be willing to take on Angela, homely as she is.”

Holly giggled, the sound surprised out of her, like a hiccup of happiness. “Mr. Glass!”

“Oh, I know other people say she’s all right looking, but I just don’t see it,” Jon continued. “Also, bad tempered as a camel in a shipwreck. You might have noticed that. But she has a good heart, and I think of her as a grouchy, overly tall daughter.”

He reached out and touched, with absent affection, the ends of Angela’s long dark hair, streaming in the warm breeze. For a moment, the wind whipped a few locks around his wrist, curling around like a bracelet, like a caress. Holly would have thought it was magic if either of them had been a sorcerer. Instead it was a happy accident of nature, and the simple fact of love: love tucked in the small upward curve of Angela’s mouth, love in the gleam in Jon Glass’s eyes.

Jon wheeled his horse away, handling the reins with casual expertise.

“He’s kind of hot, for a dad,” Holly said thoughtfully, and squeaked when Angela poked her in the ribs with her manicured fingernails.

“So it’s like that, is it?”

“Yes,” said Holly, and glanced at Angie through her eyelashes. “But that doesn’t mean—I don’t want you to think … I can find a lot of people hot, and I know how it might seem, but I don’t want to be with anybody but you.”

“I don’t think anything,” Angela said. “It doesn’t seem any way. Hot though I am, I’d be waiting a long time before I found someone who thought I was the only hot person in the universe. If I did find someone who thought that, it’d seem like a lot of pressure.” Her voice softened, brightened, like sun hitting water and turning it from something cold to something made of living, dancing brightness. “And I believe you. I believe everything you tell me.”

Holly leaned forward and stole one more kiss before Angela climbed over the fence and walked toward the horse that was glowing gold in the sunlight, which took a few nervous prancing steps back but calmed when Angie put a hand on its arched neck.

She swung herself onto the horse’s bare back, light and easy as a dandelion seed caught in the breeze, and followed Jon’s lead as he opened the gate and trotted his horse through. Soon the bright horse was chasing the dark horse, across the fields, over streams and hedges, so fast it looked as if they were flying, toward the town.

“Just you and me, girl,” Holly whispered to her bike, and kicked it into purring life. She was still scared, scared to die or to hurt anyone else, but the sun was shining and she had said all she had wanted to say. She had been as brave as she knew how, and was loved in return. She was as ready as she would ever be.

They went through the woods walking softly. Even the ringing of the bells seemed muffled by the leaves, becoming a steady sound as soft as their footsteps.

The Crying Pools were two silver coins laid out at their feet.

Ash was pale. Kami could feel his fear, so different from her own it was not like the same emotion. His was tangled with panic, with self-doubt, with desperate fear he would let them all down.

I’m not worried, said Kami.

I’ve let you down before.

You’ve changed, said Kami. I know you better than anyone by now. I know you never will again.

She felt his love pouring through her. She felt his faith, as she had once felt Jared’s belief in her, and it helped her believe in herself.

“I want to go in the sinister pool,” Jared said. Ash and he looked at each other.

Lillian had said the Crying Pool on the left was deeper and colder.

“Come on,” Ash said. “No. Kami and I are the ones who are linked—”

“I’m the one who went in the pools last time.”

“And that went so well,” Ash sneered.

“We don’t have time to fight!” Kami cried.

She could imagine her brothers hidden away at the Water Rising, with the sound of the bells shaking the windows.

“Come on,” Jared said. “Let me do this. Am I your big brother or not?”

“I don’t think so,” said Ash, and managed a pale imitation of his usual sunny smile. “Actually, I think of you as my brother who’s just a shade shorter than me.”

Ash looked at Kami now, the faint glitter of almost-lost sunlight in his hair. Kami remembered her first sight of him, in the safety of her newsroom at school, when she had thought they would all be safe forever, when she had taken safety so perfectly for granted. All she had known about him was that he was beautiful, that he wanted to take beautiful pictures, and that he was at his most beautiful when he smiled at her. The first negative thing she had ever learned about him was that he did not like the boy he thought was his cousin.

You go get him first, Ash told her. Promise me.

Kami said, I promise.

Ash took a step into the lake, and then another, and another. He did it slowly, wincing at the cold, making things worse for himself by hesitating, but Kami thought he was all the braver for doing it when he was so afraid. She felt how cold he was, and how afraid.

He did not even think of turning back.

Soon all Kami could see of him was his golden head in the gray waters, shining like a helm. He seemed like a knight emerging from a lake instead of a sword.

Then he was gone.

Kami looked over at Jared. He was already sitting on the edge of the sinister pool, one hand in water up to the wrist.

“I know there isn’t much time,” he said. “But I wanted to say something first.”

Kami went and sat opposite him on the other side of the sinister pool, on the crumbling edge of the earth. There was a shimmering circle of water between them, and Ash’s fear as he fell, still with her.

There was always something between them.

“My entire life, all I ever wanted was for you to be real. Then I came here, and I found out that you were. That first day I found out you were real, the first time I saw your face and heard your voice, it was all I could have ever asked for. Everything else after that has been a gift I could never dream of deserving, would never have even thought of asking you. Learning to know you, for real, being with you every day … I want you to know that I never thought I could be so happy. Being with you is the only definition of happiness I have.”

Kami nodded, silently. She understood what he meant: that if he died, he wanted her to remember that he had been happy.

“I want you to know something else. I would have died for this, but I have other things to live for: Ash, my aunt Lillian, Martha Wright, my home, my town. I’m going to try to live.”

He was facing his own worst nightmare, and he was taking the time to give her a gift to go down into the dark with. Sunlight was escaping from the clouds and being sifted through the leaves. It was almost as if it was raining, little sparkling drops of light rather than water. She had always thought of him—he had always thought of himself—as standing in the shadow, but now at the last he was touched with a hundred points of light.

“I want you to know something,” said Kami. “I don’t love Ash.”

“No?” asked Jared, and smiled his small, crooked twist of a smile. “I do.”

“You said that death means people are changed but not lost,” Kami said. “Here’s something that won’t change. You will always be my favorite person in the world.”

Jared looked at her. He stood up, and Kami thought he was going to come to her, but he did not. Even now, he did not. He dived into the pool, his body one long strong arch, scything through the air and plunging into the water. The surface of the water changed from gray to green, with a ring of rippling gold where he had been. They were both lost to her sight.

Lillian had taken Kami aside and told her everything she knew about the ceremony.

“They go down to the pools, as deep as they can go, and then deeper,” Lillian had said. “They bring power up. You go into each pool, you claim it for your own. You have to claim both pools. You have to claim them both. You have to summon them from the deep.”