That fairy godmother feeling carried Sophie all the way to the trees. Her feet barely touched grass; the film of tears and burnt eyelash through which she peered hazed the moonlight, fashioning a gossamer bubble around her. For those few moments—for maybe the first time in her entire life, or lives—Sophie felt magical: a gliding, glowing thing that winked in and out of being, grazing lips with kisses, breaking hearts. Tearing open a throat or two when she had to before vanishing again.
Then—as though her body were a magic carpet she’d been riding, but the magic had gone—gravity yanked her Earthward, and she dropped back into herself with a thud. Her left leg spasmed again along the old suture scar at the top of her thigh. She had to grab it as she tumbled over, crimping the skin like the rim of a piecrust. A wet crust at that, with all the inside Sophie-filling sloshing around and seeping through. At least it wasn’t pumping, that would have been a disaster. Her foot swung too far sideways, as though fleeing her, and she had to yank as she fell, hold her leg to her leg and topple into the leaves and shadows just to stay whole.
Get back here, foot.
More pain. Lots of it, on both sides of her ripped-open wound. Pain was good, right? A sign that her nerve ends and tendons were still talking to each other, even if they were no longer touching. Again.
Goddamn Jess and Rebecca both. What was left of them. Which probably wasn’t much, by now.
Was Sophie sad? Did she have any fucking reason to be sad?
Pushing to a sitting position, she dragged her leg straight and stared down into it. What fascinating insides you have, Soph, she thought. A white pillar of bone among the rubble of muscle and tangly reddish bits, like the last standing column from a tipped-over temple. As she watched, her tendons stirred, stretched toward one another. They reminded Sophie of the figures in those paintings of Dante’s hell, forever reaching out of the canvas toward the world they’d left.
The same way I keep reaching out for Jess’s trailer, Sophie thought. Except unlike the dudes in those paintings, Sophie had never actually lived in Jess’s trailer. Had only kind of been welcomed there, and the worst part was, that had felt so good, at the time. What a sniveling, stupid-grateful little girl she’d been. Oh, how lucky I am to be given leave to visit your double-wide Paradise, Jess and Natalie. Sometimes I can even sleep over! Just as long as I understand that in the end, I belong elsewhere.
The only time she’d actually lived in Jess’s house was in that creepy attic in New Hampshire in the weeks before the Whistler came, after Natalie was already dead. And the worst part was, she’d let herself feel grateful for that, too. At times, she’d almost loved that attic. Mostly, she’d loved being left alone in Jess’s house, in her own room with the door closed.
Almost like a real daughter.
Whose daughter was she now? Not her dead, drugged mother’s. Not Jess’s. And certainly not that thing’s. God help that thing’s daughter.
But … what a thing! Not just a monster like the Whistler and his horrible Mother but something more. On her fingers—to distract herself from staring into her yawning thigh—Sophie started counting personifications of Death she’d seen in books and art: the sickle guy in that movie who sucked at chess; the gothy girl in that graphic novel who’d reminded her a little of Natalie, though Sophie would never have dared say that to Natalie; some wanker on a pale horse, unless in that one Death was the horse.
Amateurs. All of them.
But if I live long enough, Sophie thought. If I work hard enough at becoming … me … could I become that?
The thrill she felt then flashed so hard, it left phosphenes streaking in her eyes. Not once, ever, in her whole life, had Sophie had real power. Not over school, which she’d sucked at. Not over her home, because she was never sure where that was. Not over her junkie mother, or her brilliant best friend, or her best friend’s mother. Not even over her own son while she’d had him, because who was she to mother anyone?
Until this exact second, she’d simply accepted all that. She’d believed it all the way down to her bones. She was Smiling Sophie, born to lose, and she always would be.
Unless she was finally becoming—had always been becoming—something else. Until tonight, she hadn’t even known there were more monsters out there, more creatures like the Whistler, like her. But now that she thought about it, that was ridiculous. There had to be.
The last two times she’d met other monsters, she’d … well … Won wasn’t quite the word. She’d devoured the Whistler. She’d driven the Night Sky down the stairs and given Jess and the remains of her pitiful Jess-crew a chance. Okay, not a chance exactly, that was ridiculous. But she’d gifted them a few more seconds to be themselves, and the luxury of ending their lives fighting, imagining they were still the people they’d always been.
Sophie had given them that. Not that they would thank her for it, even in the unlikely event that they got the chance.
But somehow, until tonight, Sophie had still imagined herself more like them. And that was simply another version of the same stupid, self-negating notion she’d clung to her whole life. Right now, the idea that she was like Jess or Rebecca or Natalie seemed the most ridiculous and harmful misconception of all.
Digging her fingers hard into the ground, she began dragging forward yet again through yet another woods. This time proved more painful than the last, at least physically, because she had her legs with her instead of laid out neatly in Jess’s car, which meant they could let her know in a thousand different ways how much they weren’t enjoying themselves.
Even so, this movement—the clutch-and-drag, the monkey-like swinging except across forest floor rather than through branches—came back so fast, and so easily. Like riding a bike, or returning to an earlier, more natural version of herself. NeanderSophie. SlothSophie, only fast. So fast. So much faster than she’d been that night with Jess in Concerto Woods, where they’d buried her best friend and her son.
George William. Little Roo.
It was his absence, she realized now, that haunted her every single waking second and most dreaming ones. Somehow, from habit or as a protective measure, she’d convinced herself it was Natalie’s. How could she ever have thought that? Certainly, if their roles had been reversed—as, in some pathetic way, Sophie had always secretly believed they should have been—and Sophie had wound up in the ground holding Natalie’s son, and Natalie had been left out here to roam, Natalie would never have spared her a thought. Would have thought only of Eddie.
That would only have been right. Yet Sophie had practically resurrected Natalie. Cut her voice out of mounds of cassette tape and freed it to babble forever in the ether. Convinced herself Natalie would have done the same. She’d let herself imagine, again, that people she herself assumed were smarter, classier, had better musical taste, more style, more knowledge, more soul, more humanity than she did, would have use for a Sophie. Or love.
Take Jess, for example, who had shot the same glances at Sophie since she’d been small enough to bounce, with Natalie, on a trailer pull-down bed without breaking it. Who had secretly—or not at all secretly—believed Sophie to be the corrupting element in her brooding, precious daughter’s life. Where did Sophie keep getting the idea that Jess would ever be happy to see her face?
Or the Little Drummer, Rebecca, whose life Sophie had saved or at least prolonged—twice, now. As a thank-you, Rebecca had given her shovel smashes to the face, tire chains yanked through thighs. How had Sophie ever come to believe that declaring someone a friend actually made them one?
What a sucker she was.
Her right leg was still capable of movement, and was already working its monster-Sophie magic: self-stitching the wound, autocauterizing. Stat. At the edge of the woods, on the lip of the long, wide-open sea of grass she would still have to cross, Sophie managed to wedge her back against the trunk of a tree and push herself upright.
She took just a moment to survey the night. The fog looked thin, transparent, more a ripple in the air than a curtain, and the stars sparkled on the Strait like a thousand million eyes. The blue rye stems trembled in the night breeze, reminding Sophie of those little garden eels she’d seen once in an aquarium somewhere, that planted themselves in sand and waited for passing minimorsels. A lawn of mouths.
There was nothing for it, Sophie knew. She was going to have to hop or crawl out there and cross along the exposed edge of the cliffs. And there was no time to lose or waste, either, not with the Night Sky raging back at Jess’s stockade, doing whatever it was the Night Sky did.
Off Sophie went.
Fast. Faster than she expected. She thought about dropping back to her haunches, scuttling like a shrew so that less of her lay open and vulnerable to the air. But during those years of half-functioning lower limbs, she’d gotten remarkably good at hopping. So she hopped instead, hurling herself forward, and the twinkling mist fled before her. In her head, she hummed. Not a Natalie song, but a Jess one, from ages and ages ago. It wasn’t even a song, really, but her personalized version of a nursery-rhyme chant. Jess had murmured this over Sophie and Natalie in that pull-down bed in her trailer when they were very young.
Little Rabbit Sophie, hopping through the forest. Scooping up the whole world and bopping it on the head.
World … I gave you threeeeeeeeeeee chances …
She got in such a rhythm, hopping and chanting, that she almost danced right past the path that switched down the cliff face to the cave. Dropping to her hands and knees, wincing as her left leg buckled in one too many places and threatened to split again along its extra seam, she dragged herself to the edge of the rocks and peered down. Briefly, she wondered what she’d do if they’d gone. If that new walking willow of a girl or the Sock Puppeteer decided they’d had enough orcas and Sophies and just set off back for the Stockade or some other refuge of their own.
Would Sophie go after them, in that case? And if so, to do what?
Fun to think about, but irrelevant, because there was Eddie, tidepooling away, sticking his hands or face in crevices, calling or reaching out to everything living. Somehow still believing everything living would listen, if it had a choice.
And there was the Walking Willow—Ju—swaying at the mouth of the cave with the Sock Puppeteer at her feet, seemingly just sitting there. Quieter than Sophie had ever seen her.
Hilariously—bizarrely—Sophie felt herself crouch lower, actually go still for a second. As if—even one-legged—she needed any sort of plan to deal with this lot, no matter what she decided deal with meant. And yet, caution felt advisable, possibly even necessary.
But caution was not how she rolled.
Grunting in pain, she pushed to her feet, let the wind catch in her skin and fill her. She felt herself unfurling into the night, as though she’d had a secret dinosaur crest hidden between her shoulders all these years. Her first instinct was to swoop down there, grab Eddie—for whom she could imagine several uses over the next few hours or maybe years—and vanish with him. But her leg wasn’t going to allow much swooping for at least another few days, yet. And anyway, she didn’t need to swoop. She just needed him to look up.
He did. And the second he did, she had him.
She grinned her Cheshire cat grin, her Secret Aunt Sophie grin. Down on the rocks, Eddie shuddered, leaned in place on his sneakered feet (which were already three times the size of her little Roo’s feet), eyes wide. His head seemed to stretch on its pale neck, as though it might float off his shoulders and up to her like a balloon.
An unpopped balloon-head. As opposed to her Roo’s, which had burst against the piling of a pier at the edge of a whole other ocean. Because that’s what her “friends” had allowed to happen. That’s what the world had decided Roos and Sophies deserved, long before either of them had even been born.
Slowly, still smiling, Sophie lifted a finger to her lips, formed her lips into a kiss against it, and made a silent shushing sound. She hopped to the cliff edge, then a couple steps down the path. Even hopping, she kept so quiet, her toes barely grazing the ground. Not fairy godmother, but Ferry Godmother once more. And so she was surprised to glance sidelong and find Ju staring right back up at her.
Not swaying. Not caught. Just watching.
With those eyes, Sophie thought. And then, Wait! Am I caught?
And then, finally, she had it. She understood. The truth had been staring her in the face all along, from right behind those glowy green eyes, which weren’t flat or expressionless and never had been.
They were screaming. All the time.
And the reason Sophie hadn’t realized … hadn’t seen … was because looking at Ju was a little too much like looking in a mirror.
A million questions bubbled up in Sophie’s brain. None of them mattered. Raising her finger once more, Sophie gestured at the Sock Puppeteer. That one at least still looked appropriately dazed and oblivious, staring out over the Strait at nothing.
Then she pressed the finger to her lips again, made her kissing-shushing silent motion.
Slowly, as though miming her, Ju lifted her own pale finger to her lips and kiss-shushed back.