chapter seventeen

Even with their faces scrunched up in between coughs, their tongues sticking out in disgust, I recognize Jules’s short swoopy hair and Kiko’s glasses. Not to mention their THE ROSE MAID LIVES T-shirts. They’re definitely not ghosts.

“What are you doing here?” Lemon asks, her voice thick.

“Us?” Kiko says between a few phlegmy hacks. “What are you doing here?”

Jules just shakes their head, then does this sneeze-cough combination that’s so loud it rattles the windows. “Ugh, I think some got in my eyes.” They rub at their face and sneeze again.

I wince, embarrassment now mixing with my panic. Kiko’s phone is tucked under her armpit, the light angled toward the wall and making all our faces look deathly pale. I tuck the sanitizer back into my Safety Pack and grab my sister’s hand.

“Look, let’s just get out of here, okay?” I head for the stairs before anyone can argue, yanking once on Lemon’s arm as I go. I figure Kiko and Jules will follow if we all flee the antibacterial fumes, but honestly, I can’t decide if I’m raging mad that they were the ones lighting up the rooms and scaring us half to death, or relieved that it’s them and not someone—or something—worse.

Peach and I make our way down the staircase, Lemon’s and Kiko’s and Jules’s footsteps behind us. I head back through the vestibule, and the kitchen, and spill out onto the moonlit back porch.

When I get there, I pretty much collapse on the wooden floor and pull Peach into my lap. Lemon and Kiko and Jules aren’t far behind, spilling out onto the porch and crashing onto the floor as well, all three of them breathing heavy like they’d been running.

My heart is still pounding, fear still pumping adrenaline through my veins. I need a minute. Or fifteen. I squeeze my sister to me and hold her hands. And I smooth over her little nails. And I feel how warm her skin is. How warm and safe and alive.

I press my eyes closed as tight as they’ll go. So tight, color explodes behind my lids, fireworks in my brain. Peach is fine, she’s with me, and Kiko and Jules aren’t dangerous, so all that panic from before is fading away, but another kind is taking its place. The kind that’s always with me, part of me, waiting to rear up like a wild animal ever since Mum’s and my accident.

Beyond us, the ocean crashes onto the shore. Sand from the porch sticks to my bare legs, works its way under my T-shirt, and finds my back, scratching at my skin. I concentrate on that sand, every little grain.

I’m not on a boat.

I’m not holding my dead mother’s hand.

My face isn’t rock-cut and bleeding, my eyes aren’t crying, my throat isn’t screaming so raggedly the paramedics don’t know how to treat me without scaring me even more.

Peach curls into my side, and my breathing finally starts to slow.

I’m here. In Maine. My sister is fine. I’m fine.

I sit up, pulling Peach with me, and check her out—her hair’s a mess but she seems okay. I’m about to ask her what in the heck she was thinking—running away from Lemon and me like that, going into an empty house by herself, scaring me half to death—when Lemon sits up and my mouth drops open.

Her hair is everywhere. I mean, everywhere. It looks like she stuck her finger into an electrical socket just long enough to get a good shock and make her already-wild waves fluff out like a lion’s mane. Her face is smeared with blood and snot. There are even some splotches of red up by her forehead, like she brushed her hair from her face with bloody fingers. Her nose, which has stopped bleeding now, is huge, swelling up even as I stare at her, purpling underneath her eyes even more.

“Oh my god,” Kiko says, also sitting up now and staring at Lemon.

“What?” Lemon asks. She sniffs and then stares out at us with innocent, totally-unaware-of-how-wild-she-looks baby-deer eyes.

Peach reaches out and pats Lemon on the arm. I pull her hand back in case some blood found its way down there, too.

“Um,” Jules says. They’re still on their back with their arms and legs splayed to the sides like a starfish, hiccuping every five seconds. Their head is tilted so they can see Lemon. “Yeah, wow.”

“What?” Lemon says again when no one says anything. “Do I have something on my face?”

That’s when it happens.

A tickling in my stomach, rolling up my esophagus and into my throat. A shifting of all my facial muscles, pulling my lips upward. And then it spills out.

Laughter.

Hard, belly-aching laughter. It echoes around us, but then I realize that Kiko is laughing too, covering her face with her hands like she’s trying to stop but can’t. Jules curls their legs up and hiccup-laughs at the sky. Then Kiko grabs her phone and taps on the camera, turning it around to selfie mode before holding it up for Lemon to see.

Lemon’s eyes go wide, her mouth drops open, and then it happens to her, too.

Even though she looks like she’s dressed up for Halloween or something, even though her nose must be sore, she laughs, full-on cackling with her head thrown back, and it all makes me laugh even harder. I hear it, the way my voice sounds when wrapped in a laugh—light and free and relieved—and it’s like I’m expelling something dark and heavy with each roll of sheer joy from my stomach, getting rid of little bits of Sadness.

“Oh my god,” Lemon says, holding up the phone to her face and inspecting herself more, laughing even while she talks. “I look like I’m in a horror movie.”

Her consonants are still a little thick, but she seems okay. Her nose isn’t bent weirdly or anything, so I don’t think it’s broken. Relief filters in between my laughter, and it makes this happy feeling in my chest that much more open and free. I feel like I could breathe in all the air in the world.

Space.

Wide-open space.

Our laughter finally calms down into little hiccups and sighs. I push up to my knees and take a pair of latex gloves from my Safety Pack, slipping them onto my hands. Then I find the travel package of Wet Wipes, remove one clean towelette, and sit back down in front of Lemon. I tip her chin up with a finger and start gently wiping her face.

“See?” I say, cleaning off her cheeks and forehead first. “This Safety Pack is mega-helpful.”

“I’ve always wondered what you keep in that thing,” Jules says.

“Gloves?” Kiko asks, a slight edge to her voice.

I shrug. “Blood-borne pathogens.”

“I don’t have any pathogens!” Lemon says, but then her eyes go soft, settling on mine in a light smile. I smile back, carefully daubing around her nose now. Some of the blood has grown crusty and my stomach twists just a little, remembering when the paramedics cleaned all the blood off my own face, revealing the gashes underneath that would require stitches, leaving scars that would never fully go away. But I push the feeling down and focus on Lemon.

On right now.

Peach helps out, handing me fresh wipes when one gets dingy with blood. Soon, Lemon’s got a clean face, but she’s also got two black eyes and a nose that’s about twice its normal size.

“Thanks,” she says when I’m done. I ball the dirty wipes into my palm and flip them into my gloves as I slip them off, forming a little bag that I tie up and put next to me to throw away.

“No problem,” I say. “Figured it was the least I could do, since my head did the damage.”

“What?” Kiko asks.

“I slammed into Lemon when we were trying to escape you,” I say.

“We thought you were a ghost!” Peach says.

“Or a mass murderer,” I say.

“We thought you were a ghost or a mass murderer,” Jules says, leaning forward and smiling at Peach.

“What are those?” Peach asks. She points to a bunch of bracelets on Jules’s arm. They’re cloth and wrap over and around each other in four different colors—black, purple, white, and yellow.

Jules’s shoulders stiffen a little. They pick at the bracelets, glance at Kiko and then at Lemon. Both girls smile at Jules. “They’re nonbinary bracelets,” Jules tells Peach.

She scrunches up her little nose. “Oh. What’s nonbidary?”

“Nonbinary, Peach,” I correct softly, meeting Jules’s eyes and smiling.

“Nonbinary,” Peach echoes.

“Yeah, um,” Jules says, swallowing hard. “It means I don’t really feel like a boy or a girl all the time. Sometimes I feel like one or the other, but other times I feel like both or neither. And I like people to use they and them when they talk about me.”

Peach blinks, eyes searching Jules’s face as she thinks on this. Finally, she says, “Okay, cool.”

We all wait for her to say something else, spout more questions, but she doesn’t. She just sits there with her head against my chest, smiling at all of us.

“Oh, to be young,” Jules says, pressing a hand to their chest and gazing adoringly at Peach.

We all laugh, but I can see how pleased Jules is by Peach’s peaceful acceptance. Jules’s cheeks are a gentle pink and their eyes are bright, relief softening their shoulders.

“What’s your name?” Jules asks my sister.

“Penelope Foster Bly,” Peach says, “but you can call me Peach.”

Jules laughs. “You can call me Jules. And that’s Kiko.”

“Hey… Peach and Lemon,” Kiko says. “Fruit friends!”

“You’re all made for each other,” I say, rolling my eyes, but then I see how Lemon and Kiko and Jules grin and exchange pleased looks, years of knowledge and experience connecting them like silk ribbons. Something in my chest aches, and then it aches even more when I realize they all lost Immy. They all have a bit of the Sadness, and that connects them too.

“Hey, are you okay?” Jules asks. It takes me a second to realize they’re talking to me.

“What?”

“Your head? Where it hit Lemon?”

I wait for Jules to laugh, because compared to Lemon’s mess of a face, my head is probably fine, but then I realize they’re watching me seriously, waiting for me to answer. They look right into my eyes, gaze never straying to my scars. Jules’s hair swoops over their forehead, sticking up in a few places that I don’t think they intended, but with our mad adventure in the Lancaster House, I guess that’s to be expected. Something about the way they tilt their head at me, smile a little crooked on their mouth, makes a word wing through my head like a hummingbird.

Cute.

“Oh, um.” I laugh a little and touch the back of my head, where there is a tiny sore knot. It doesn’t hurt too bad, though. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

Jules nods. “Cool.”

They smile at me and I smile back and then Kiko clears her throat.

“What was that, anyway?” she asks.

“What was what?” I ask.

“Whatever you sprayed at us?” Kiko says.

Lemon and I lock eyes and I feel that same light, carbonated feeling rise up in my throat again. It’s not funny. Not really. Hand sanitizer definitely does not belong on people’s faces. But the simple fact of it—that Kiko and Jules were traipsing through an empty museum-house by themselves, that we thought they were ghosts, that I almost broke Lemon’s nose and then tried to spray Kiko and Jules with a cleaner—feels suddenly so ridiculous and hilarious, two things nothing in my life has been for a long time, that I start laughing again.

“Hand sanitizer,” I say through my laughter.

“That’s what it is,” Jules says, rubbing their face before smelling their fingers. “Purell.”

“You sprayed us with Purell?” Kiko says. Her eyebrows are pushed together, but the corners of her mouth tip up just a little.

Lemon is laughing too and points to my Safety Pack. “Hey, she could’ve thrown a Clorox wipe at you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, breathing deeply to try to control my laughter. This is serious. “I know it’s not funny, but I really didn’t know it was you. I thought we were in danger.”

“What else do you keep in that fanny pack?” Jules asks, angling their head to see.

“Safety Pack,” Lemon corrects, holding up one finger like some know-it-all, and that does it. We both bust up laughing again and this time it’s so intense, tears stream from my eyes. Both Jules’s and Kiko’s mouths work to stay flat, but finally they give in, laughing and shaking their heads at the same time. Peach giggles right along with us, her hair tickling my chin as she bobs with laughter.

Finally, Lemon takes a deep breath and rubs her forehead. “Why didn’t you guys tell me you were coming to the house?”

Jules sighs and picks at a thread on their jeans. “We didn’t know if you wanted to go or not. The past couple of years, you don’t seem like a big fan of your birthday.”

“We’re sorry,” Kiko adds.

Lemon nods. “No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. I know I’m a little… grumpy when my birthday rolls around.”

“Understandable,” Jules says. “We just wanted to remember Immy. Do something we always did with her again.”

“Again?” Lemon asks. “Wait, have you come to the Lancaster House every year?”

Kiko and Jules both nod.

“Didn’t seem right not to,” Kiko says.

A flash of hurt flares on Lemon’s face but fizzles out quickly. “What do you do in there?” she asks.

“Just… what we used to. Walk around, listen for ghosts,” Jules says, and smiles at Lemon. “Tell stories about the Rose Maid.”

“But who do you tell them to?”

“Us,” Kiko says, her voice so quiet I barely hear her. “Immy. I talk to her sometimes, you know? Not just tonight.”

“Me too,” Jules says. “I talk to her about my drawings. Ask her what she thinks. Is that dumb?”

Lemon shakes her head, wipes at her eyes. “No, it’s not dumb. She loved your drawings.”

I watch Jules smile—a sad kind of smile, but still a smile. For one mad flash, all I can think about is how I want to see their drawings, tell them about how Mum was an artist too. But then Lemon lets out a long breath and pulls her knees up to her chest. The moment is quiet, that flash thankfully gone.

In fact, everyone goes quiet. I watch Lemon’s shoulders rise up and down, up and down in that way I know she’s quiet-crying. It’s her birthday. A big one, too. Thirteen. I won’t be thirteen until the fall, but I’ve thought long and hard about what it’ll feel like when the clock hits 7:44 on the evening of October fourteenth, turning me into a teenager. I’ve wondered if I’ll feel different. If I’ll be different. If I’ll even care, since Mum won’t be there to celebrate with me.

If I’ll keep feeling guilty for getting older and older, just like Lemon does.

Peach snuggles even tighter against my chest and I breathe in her Peach-y smell. The Sadness flows all around us like the wind, all kinds of missing, all kinds of loss. I think about Mum’s paintings in Mama’s trunk and how much I want to see them. How I know they’ll make me sad, sure, but how I know they’ll make my heart beat a little steadier, a little calmer, too.

I look through the slats in the porch railing, down onto the silvery sand, the moon-glazed water rushing up to meet the earth, then skittering away again. Over and over. I imagine Rosemary under the waves, in the dark, lonely, filled up with the Sadness too.

Or maybe she’s not.

Maybe she found her family, or something at least, out there in the deep, something that turns all the Sadness into nothing but an achy memory. I could use an achy memory. So could Lemon, I bet. So could Kiko and Jules.

“So what else did you guys used to do with Immy?” I ask Lemon.

She lifts her head, eyes puffy and red. For a second, I think I’ve asked the wrong thing, that achy memories are really just jabs of painful, breath-stealing loss in disguise.

But then she smiles this little mischievous grin that can only mean she’s up to absolutely no good. She looks right at Kiko and Jules, who are smiling like Cheshire Cats too. Then the three of them chorus, “Cloudland Bluff!”

I already regret asking. Bluff is just a nice, cozy word for cliff. I listen as they talk about hiking through the wooded hill to get to the top, how they used to bring binoculars and spyglasses and scan the sea for flukes or flashes of pale hair in the water. Luckily, none of them mentions actually attempting to climb a cliff in the middle of the night.

“There is something we could do tonight that we used to do with Immy,” Kiko says. She tucks her legs against her chest and wraps her arms around her knees. “Birthday sleepover at your place, Lem.”

She looks at Lemon, whose expression has gone soft. Jules doesn’t say anything either. Everyone seems to be waiting for Lemon to make the first move, so I stay quiet too.

“Immy was really great at birthday sleepovers,” she finally says, picking at a thread on her shorts.

“She was,” Kiko says.

“The best,” Jules says.

Lemon nods, then takes a huge breath. “Okay, let’s do it.”

“Really?” Kiko says, and Lemon nods.

“Yes!” Jules says, shoving a fist into the air.

Kiko claps a bunch of times in a row. “I’ll bring all my extra blankets. And fairy lights. We have to have fairy lights.”

“Oh, for sure,” Jules says. “Lem, do you still have all those jar candles?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Lemon says. “And we should have stuff to make butterscotch chocolate chip cookies.”

“Yes, oh my god, I need,” Jules says, clutching their stomach.

I listen to them all chatter on and on about their plans, a little ache starting to spread through my chest. Finally, they all plan to meet back at Lemon’s house in half an hour and they stand up, brushing sand off their shorts and jeans, an excited air connecting them all.

Peach has gone heavy in my lap, not to mention quiet, so I’m almost positive she’s asleep. I try to get up, but it’s tricky. She’s not a baby anymore, that’s for sure. Lemon notices me struggling and helps me up.

“Thanks,” I say, adjusting Peach so her head flops safely onto my shoulder.

“You’re coming too, right?” Lemon asks.

“Oh.” I blink at her, at Kiko and Jules. “Um, well, I don’t know—”

“No way, little curmudgeon,” Jules says. “You’re with us.”

“Little curmudgeon?” I say.

They wave a hand. “It fits, accept it.”

I make a face, but for some reason, a smile tries to worm its way onto my mouth. “I don’t know,” I say, then nod at Peach. “She’s asleep and I need to go check on my mom and—”

“Please,” Lemon says.

“Come on, Hazel, it’ll be fun,” Jules says.

“Yeah,” Kiko says, even though the word comes out as a sigh, like she’s giving in to something. “We’ll torture Jules by talking nonstop in fantasy references.”

“Okay, I’m out,” Jules says, but they smile.

I smile too. Again. My face almost hurts with how much I’ve been laughing and smiling tonight. The last time I was this happy, I was—

On the sea.

With Mum. And then I lost it all. I lost me. Just like that.

I can’t do it again.

I can’t be happy like that again, not without Mum.

I can’t laugh like this again, feel all this space, only to have it fill right back up in a couple of months, the Sadness fresh and raw with all sorts of new losses.

My thoughts fast-forward to when Mama and Peach and I will leave Rose Harbor, all the goodbyes I’ll have to say. For the past two years, waiting until Mama finally takes us home, I’ve never said goodbye to anyone. I’ve liked it like that. Mama pulls us into these towns, these memoryless places I can walk into without knowing a soul and walk right out of three months later the same person. No goodbyes. No memories. No inside jokes or fluttery feelings when you lock eyes with someone you think is cute. Goodbyes mean losing someone who meant something to you. Goodbyes mean gone and missing and remembering faces that made you smile, inside jokes that only feel like a hole in your heart once that person has left you.

Goodbyes mean Sadness.

A sleepover tonight is nothing but a goodbye tomorrow.

“I’ve… I’ve got to get Peach to bed,” I say, backing up in earnest now. “I’ll… I’ll see you. Happy birthday, Lemon.”

And then I turn and start walking, fast, holding my sister tight against me, leaving them all behind before they have a chance to do the same to me.