As Wunder finished putting away his books, he tried not to hear Faye’s words playing over and over in his mind. The verse. The bird. The witch.
He wished he had never talked to her. He slammed his locker shut and picked up his backpack. The Miraculous was still inside, still weighing him down.
Outside, Tomás and Davy were waiting in their usual spot by the stairs.
“Hey, Wunder,” Tomás said. “Ready to go?” Davy hovered by his elbow, smiling hopefully. “Come on. I want to try to get the high score.”
Wunder didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t go play video games right now. It was like Tomás didn’t remember what had happened. Or didn’t care. He started to back away from his friends.
“Wait, Wunder.” Davy spoke for the first time. His voice was a nervous squeak. “We haven’t—I haven’t seen you in—in forever. And I wanted to talk to you about—”
“Sorry, Davy,” Wunder said. “I need—I have some things I have to—sorry.”
He practically ran down the school steps. As he hurried away, he saw Faye at the bike rack. He thought again about what she had said. He opened his mouth to yell her name.
Then he closed it again. He walked faster, hands in his pockets.
He needed to be alone. He needed to get rid of The Miraculous. Now.
The sky was clear and the afternoon sun was so bright that the world looked washed out and unfamiliar as Wunder stumbled down the sidewalk, away from school. The voices of kids at the bike rack and by the buses faded behind him. He wasn’t headed toward home. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was going.
In town, things were quiet, and there was hardly any traffic. Everyone was still inside, finishing the afternoon’s work.
Wunder passed the town hall, a brick building with a fountain and a few saplings out front. Then he hurried past Safe and Sound Insurance, where his mother worked, and the Snack Shack, where Tomás and Davy were probably already shooting aliens.
He passed the library and the pharmacy and stores he had never been in. There were trash cans here and there on street corners, and he thought about tossing The Miraculous into one, but he didn’t. None of them seemed like the right place.
He went through the downtown, through the residential section—and then he was in the woods.
In the woods, Wunder finally slowed down. He knew no one would be there. No one ever was. The leaves hadn’t begun to change yet, and the light that filtered through them patchworked a green-tinted pattern on the path. A soft breeze made the Spanish moss sway and the oak leaves wave.
The woods, he thought, might be a good place to leave the book. He searched for the perfect spot as he walked. But he still couldn’t find one.
Coming from this direction, he reached the cemetery gates before the DoorWay House. He held on to the iron bars and peered in. Gravestones dotted the fields like crooked teeth in a massive, yawning jaw, like dominoes set up and ready to fall. So many graves. Mostly, he thought, the graves of older people, people who had lived long lives, but maybe there were some like his sister’s.
Graves of the unknown or the barely known, graves of the lost.
He pulled on the gate and found that it wasn’t locked. He wasn’t sure if there were rules about visiting cemeteries. It felt wrong to go in, but he went in anyway.
He stopped at the first grave he came to. There was a simple headstone there. The words glinted gold, a metallic wink, a signal, a beacon shining out from the black background.
Vita mutatur, non tollitur, read the words at the top of the stone. Beneath that was a name—Dalia Ramos—and dates.
Wunder didn’t know what the words meant, but he could read the dates. Dalia was eighty-two when she died.
Eighty-two seemed like a good number of years to live.
He thought of his sister’s gravestone. It hadn’t been made yet, but he knew what it would look like. His father had shown him. The dates were carved in polished white marble, and if anyone bothered to calculate how long she had lived, they would come up with eight. Eight days.
Eighty-two years. Eight days.
The wind blew, and the shadow of a cloud fell across the golden words. Wunder could barely read them anymore.
He straightened up and walked farther into the cemetery, pausing here and there to look at grave markers, to read dates. Micah Shunem, who had been thirty years old when he died and a beloved son and brother. Avery Lazar, whose headstone didn’t have any dates, just a statue of a white bird, wings spread in flight. A gray stone monument with the name Kobayashi across the top and black script and the outlines of little flowers beneath.
The treeless hill rose up ahead of him, grass green and empty. Wunder considered going to the base of the hill, to his sister’s grave. He wouldn’t say a prayer for her, but maybe he could sit next to her grave here the way he had sat next to her in the hospital.
But the longer he stayed in the cemetery, the less he wanted to be there.
When Wunder used to write in The Miraculous, he would sometimes feel like he was doing a miracle of his own. He would feel like there was something special about bringing all those stories from all those people together. Like he was connecting the dots of each soul he wrote about—connecting them to himself and to one another and to everything that gave him the heart-bird feeling.
The cemetery, he thought as he drew closer and closer to the hill, was the exact opposite of The Miraculous. Each grave was its own entry, its own story. But instead of making the world seem wonderful, instead of making Wunder feel connected and loved and happy, these stories made him feel separate and lonely and angry.
Then it occurred to him that this was where he should leave The Miraculous. In the most unmiraculous place of all.
He should leave it here, and then never come back.
He knelt and pulled the black leather volume from his backpack.
Caw! Caw! Caw!
Wunder jumped as the sound echoed off the headstones. The Miraculous fell from his hands.
“It’s just a bird,” he said out loud, but his voice shook and the feeling that he was somewhere he should not be returned.
He leaped to his feet, grabbed his backpack, and ran to the gates.
The bird cawed again. Closer this time.
Wunder kept running. He was in the woods now, and it was dark, so dark after the brightness of the cemetery that it was hard to see.
And then he was passing the toweringly tall live oak, and the bird was cawing again, cawing as it swooped down the dirt trail. He knew he shouldn’t look, he didn’t want to look, but he did—
And there she was. Rocking in that spiral-wood rocking chair. Newspaper spread open over her knees. The pages fluttering in the wind. Like wings, like the wings of a bird.
The witch of the DoorWay House.
And just like last time, she was watching him.
Just like last time, she met his eye. She smiled.
And she waved.