You are just you, Kezzer. That’s the most important thing of all to understand, but nobody besides me ever realized it. It isn’t just that you’re not a girl and not a boy, though that’s obviously part of it. It’s bigger than that. You’re also not a tree and not a horse and not a doorway. You are not anything that ever existed before you, because when you were born it created a totally new phenomenon. The past snapped off and fell away in crumbs. I knew it the first time I saw you, like you were a fundamental shift in what was even possible, and with you I’d be able to walk straight up the walls, and my footprints would scorch the paint.
Okay, so maybe sometimes other people sensed how new you are. They got it a tiny bit, in their half-assed way, but only enough to want to hurt you. And I’m worried that maybe that’s what you don’t see: that never would have stopped. I told you someone would murder me because I didn’t want to scare you. But in reality it would have been you, someone would have killed you, back where we were before. You don’t do it on purpose, but just by existing you make normal people obsolete. You screw with their whole reality. You make it so they don’t count anymore, and they can’t stand that.
This is all true. These are the true, the truer-than-true things I couldn’t say because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. You don’t know what you are either, Kezzer, is the problem? Like, they’ve all trained you to hate yourself so hard that you can’t see yourself any better than they can.
Or, okay, so you’re a person at the same time. A person, but also something not and something beyond and something that needs a whole new world to live in, just so it won’t die. And what do you know, I got you one. A new world. It’s a present, and it was seriously expensive, because another true thing is that they don’t just sell new, impossible worlds on the sale racks at Target.
I’m the only one who ever understood any of this, and that proves I’m the only person who could ever deserve you.
I had to get you out of there, Kezz. I had to. Like, if you’d heard everything Lexi told me, about how you might fall in love with someone new, maybe you would have thought I was just jealous. But it wasn’t like that at all. While Lexi was talking to me all the vague dread I’d been living with sucked into these hard, sharp lines, and I could see it. How vulnerable you would be once you left. How you would basically set yourself up to get murdered, by trusting the wrong people. Maybe even by duping yourself into thinking you loved them.
Everybody goes around saying they do what they have to do, but they seriously have no idea. Because our new world, that dazzling, crazy, magnificent world where we’re creating our future together? I’m still paying for it.
I know, I know, Kezz: you wouldn’t understand. Do you think it doesn’t hurt me, knowing how you’d look at me if you realized what work I’m doing for them?
The dizziness is starting. Not bad, not yet, but I still hurry and eat one of the berries Prince gave me. They hold off the world-sickness long enough that I can do my job here.
“Hey, Luke!” I call. At the edge of the park, and he’s just unlocking his bike to go home. Which is a miserable place to be going, and I know all about it from Derrick, and no little kid should ever have to deal with that kind of garbage, not ever again. “Luke, you remember me, right?” He looks up, red-haired and confused.
Okay, so their parents maybe don’t haul off and punch Luke and Derrick right in the face, and they don’t fling them into dungeons full of gibbering spiders, but no one ever hugs them or talks to them except to be cruel. Their dad’s entire vocabulary is literally Shut up and Stop whining and Nobody cares what you want, from what I’ve seen, so if you think about it, part of my mission is educational. Maybe he’ll learn how to say some new things, thanks to me.
“Josh?” Wide blue eyes. “But you were gone!”
“I’m back now, though. Want to come find Derrick with me? I’m on my way to meet him.”
Luke is seven, and this is what his whole life has been: waiting for someone to ask him to come too, instead of scowling at him for tagging along. “Derrick will get mad if I come. He always yells at me.”
“Oh, I know that, Luke. It’s horrible that he has to act that way. The thing is, this is such a sick world that the sickness burrows into people, and then they do crap like that. Like yell at the kids they should really be keeping as safe and happy as they possibly can.”
He gapes at me. There are a few people in the park, but none of them will notice me unless I want them to. It’s not actual invisibility, it’s just a way Prince showed me of choosing how I present myself. I can make myself seem here or not here, on a case-by-case basis, even if I’m pushing through a crowd.
“So—I don’t want him to yell! Even if he’s nicer in front of you, as soon as you leave, he’ll start!” He’s trying to keep it together, but his face is squirming from the tears that want to get out.
“Oh, Luke. You think I don’t understand, right? But I actually understand better than anybody in the whole world! Do you know why I came back? I mean, I completely despise this town. It’s cold and depressing and brutal, and almost nobody here knows how to love anyone. I would never set foot here again, for one second, if I didn’t have a serious reason!”
“But—what reason?”
“Because I couldn’t leave things the way they are. So I came back to make everything better.” I hold out a hand. “Are you coming?”
I mean, of course he is. Something else true: anyone who’s been hurt enough knows, or at least suspects pretty hard, that the regular world is a scam, a fake, and that there just has to be a better, realer, more vital one: a world that blazes and jumps, a world that’s hard to see because it’s so brilliant that it’s like it burns your eyes, at least until you get used to it. So when you finally get an invitation, there’s no way you’re going to turn it down.
Okay, Lexi ran out on us. And obviously Lexi is amazing and I don’t mean that she’s shallow, but maybe she’s such a positive person that it’s made her delusional? She’s been protected all her life and it’s almost like she’s never had to learn what it means to really feel anything. Like, she used to say she loved Xand, but that meant something utterly different from what I mean when I say I love Kezzer. We could be speaking completely separate languages.
“Okay,” Luke says. Then, “Do you have a bike?”
“That’s not how we get there,” I tell him. “See, if you want everything to be new and different, then it’s up to you to make it change. You have to try doing ordinary things in new ways.”
Another stare. “Like how?”
“Oh, you know.” I’m smiling so wide it hurts, because I’m really so happy for him. He’s getting out so much younger than I did—though then I guess I never would have found Kezzer. “Magic. But the way we have to go is also really close. Um, you can just leave your bike locked up here.”
There’s a new way through, because Prince is always opening doors and then after a while they drift closed again, and how fast depends on what they’re made of. This one is gorgeous to look at but it obviously won’t last for more than a few minutes. It’s the reflection of the sunset in the Bagel-Fragel’s plate-glass window, right across the street. It’s hard to describe, but you kind of slide in between the reflection and the glass, and then bam, you’re across.
Derrick might be sad, maybe even their parents will be sad. And I’m sorry, up to a point, but honestly I’m a whole lot more not-sorry overall. Luke’s family grieving is actually a good thing, because they’re all people who need a major lesson in giving a damn.
Luke’s replacement will be along soon to hop on that bike and ride home—totally instinctively, like a salmon, because most of those decoy things aren’t all that bright. It’ll get sick in a day or two, then die, and Luke’s family will never imagine that he has a new life a million times better than the one they gave him. And even if they grieve so hard they explode, that would be better than how they live now.
When people are closed, sealed up, then sometimes the only way to break them open is to break their hearts. I’ll be teaching them what it means to care, even if it’s going to be too late for them to fix anything.
That’s another thing I can’t stand about this world, the one that Kezz and I ditched. You can go up to people on the street, and ask them the time. Or you can check your phone’s clock, and see the numbers. But there’s only truly one answer, here, to What time is it?
Too late. It’s just too late.
And Lexi seriously thinks she gets to judge me, for rescuing the person I love from that?
We step through into music. Unselle is singing in her metallic, buzzing voice—like a swarm of cicadas, kind of, but still horribly beautiful. She’s right in front of us, shining in her cloud of white lace, her arms outstretched toward Luke.
“Home it is now, dearling, prettyling. What are you, poppling, but the child in my song?”
He gawks, staggers. I know she’s putting on her act extra hard for his benefit, the way she does with kids. Her mink purrs on her chest, and Unselle reaches in her sleeve and pulls out a peach for him. Fat, humming like a bee—the fruit itself, I mean. The smell is so luscious you can hear it.
He takes the peach, because that’s how it goes. None of them resist Unselle for more than ten seconds, ever. There’s a flowering tree like another cloud of lace behind her, and she sits against the trunk and pulls Luke onto her lap while he eats. That’s it for him being scared, or lonely, or worrying about his horrible family. Just like a flip in the air, like his memories do a somersault, and then whap, he’s done.
It’s not like it was with me and Kezzer, or even Lexi; we’re old and complex and ornery enough that for us the whole process is a lot more complicated. Little kids are really simple and straightforward, and they don’t know how to keep the magic out at all. See why I don’t feel bad, even if Kezzer might not approve?
You can’t just sit around and wait for every single person to agree with you, before you do anything.
I feel it too, actually. The song and the smell of that peach, like they set off sparks in my brain. A glittering web, pulling me back in. Unselle notices it and smiles at me over the top of Luke’s head.
Which—nobody has to remind me, okay? But I can’t watch Luke eating the peach without remembering about Kezzer, and how she must have said something that freaked Lexi out so badly that she ran off and wouldn’t stay for dinner with us. I don’t like thinking negative things about Kezz, but there’s no other explanation. Imagine if you gave someone the most incredible present anyone had ever seen, a brand-new planet where even the trees are covered in infinite glittering possibilities, and then they just tried to smash it? I have to be very, very conscious so I don’t start resenting Kezzer for that.
So many people tried to destroy Kezz that the destruction is still in her body, like the way you can carry around an electric charge, and then it shocks the next person you touch. Except infinitely worse than that, obviously. It’s not her fault. None of it has ever been her fault.
I just worry that Prince might not see it that way.