Kai’s voice is just ahead, through the roses. It’s so quiet out here that it feels as if his voice is the only sound in the world. I freeze, my fingertips resting on the rose.
The quiet, low tones, like he uses when he’s on the phone with me late at night and doesn’t want Grandma Dalia to know. I swallow, try to ignore something stabbing in my chest, and walk forward. Another step, another. The snow absorbs my footsteps as I weave through the briars along the path, squinting to see him. Every breath feels spiky in my lungs, and my lips are chapping—
It’s her hair I see first. Frosted blonde and sparkling, tossing around in the wind. She’s sitting on his right—where I sit. In my place. She’s sitting there, talking, her voice soft and light and sweet. I can’t understand her words, but Kai nods, heaving his shoulders as if he’s sighing. And then her slender hand rises, and she reaches forward, letting her fingers dance across the side of his face. He turns his head toward her and smiles. Something rises within me; I think I might be sick. It’s like I’m in one of those dreams where you can’t run, can’t scream, can’t cry.
“We aren’t that different,” she says; this time her words make it to me, though only just. She’s looking at him intensely, and her fingers caress his cheek as she talks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we both understand that life isn’t fair,” she says, voice slinky and soft. “I lost everything, more than once. But we can use loss, Kai. We can become greater than we ever were before. Come with me. Leave this place before it kills you.”
Her words have changed—they’re hypnotic now. I can’t look away; I feel as if I’m falling into something the color of her eyes. It reminds me of the way I felt a long time ago, but it takes me ages to place the sensation—the man. The man in the grocery store parking lot, the one with the eyes that glimmered, the one Grandma Dalia warned me about. I swallow, trying to shake off the comparison, but it sticks in my stomach.
Kai turns his head, and I can see his thick lashes, snowflakes clinging to them. He leans forward, and then, before I can comprehend what’s about to happen, his lips touch hers. She presses back against him hungrily, wantonly, and he buckles under her pressure, his head dropping back against the bench as she sits up, swings one leg over him—
“Kai?”
The name doesn’t sound right in my throat; it’s coming from a little girl’s mouth instead of mine. Mora’s pale blue eyes lift and find me. They’re unapologetic—she looks like an animal, leaned over her prey. My lips remain parted, unable to close again to form a second word.
Kai shifts underneath her, turns around, and looks at me. There’s a hardness around his jawbones, around his eyelids, something I don’t recognize. He lifts an eyebrow at me.
“Ginny? What are you doing?”
“I… Kai…” I don’t know what I’m saying; I can’t find words because they’re falling into the deep pit that’s replaced my stomach. I know what I want to say, though: We belong together. We’ve always belonged together.
And you’ve known her for less than a week.
“That’s creepy,” Kai says, and there’s no joke, no softness in his voice. He rises, causing Mora to sit back. She looks pleased as he takes two steps toward me, bars of thorns and briars still blocking the space between us. “What do you want? Do you need something?” he asks.
I feel anger rising in me, but it’s blocked by the thick ball of confusion and sadness that’s inflating inside my chest. I shake my head and finally say, “What are you doing?”
“I was talking to Mora about New York,” he says.
“You were kissing her.”
Kai presses his tongue to his teeth. He looks as if he’s considering lying, but finally nods. “Yes.”
I stare. There must be more. There must be more to say than “yes.”
Kai exhales. “Ginny… you’re… you’re crushing me. It’s like every time I turn around, you’re there. In my house, at the window, on the roof. I need a second to breathe, but you never give me one.”
“I didn’t know you needed that. You never told me.” Finally, my voice has some strength, some protest.
“That’s just it. I shouldn’t have to tell you. I don’t want to call you obsessed or anything, but…”
Mora snickers a little, but tries to hide it in a cough.
“You’ve got to get your own life, is what I’m saying,” Kai says, glancing at Mora knowingly. “I’m going to New York with Mora, and I think in the meantime, you should figure out something to do besides follow me around. Trust me, you’ll be happier if you get a hobby or something.”
“A hobby?” I ask, voice breaking. I shake my head, offended. Angry.
Mora reaches forward and slides her hand into Kai’s. I want him to jerk away, to shift, to look wary, but he doesn’t budge, as if he’s used to her hand finding his. “Come on, Ginny. Don’t get in his way now that his grandmother has stepped out of it.”
“I’m not in his way,” I snap at her. “We’re together. We always have been. What are you doing to him?”
“Don’t talk to her that way,” Kai says, and it stuns me to silence. “You’re acting like some jealous little kid.”
“I’m not jealous,” I say. “I’m angry. Think about this, Kai. Think about what you’re saying. This is me you’re talking to.”
“I am totally aware of who I’m talking to,” he says. “I’m talking to a lonely girl who follows me around like some lost puppy. I thought you’d eventually figure yourself out but… look at you! What would you be without me, Ginny?”
My chest is collapsing in on itself, as if I’m being punched over and over again. Mora looks at me, shakes her head, and answers Kai’s question under her breath.
“Nothing.”
“Leave,” I say, voice shaking. I’m staring at Mora, afraid to blink, afraid to move. “I need to talk to Kai. Leave.”
“Seriously?” Kai throws his arms up in frustration. “What is your deal with Mora? You hardly even know her.”
“Neither do you!” I yell, and tears slip down my cheeks. “You don’t even know her and you brought her up here, to our…”
“Our what? We found this. It’s not like you and I built this ourselves. It’s not a church or a temple; it’s just a shittily maintained rose garden,” Kai says, gesturing around as if shocked I don’t agree. He reaches down, grabs a pair of clippers, and opens the end. He places them at the base of the nearest rosebush and, before I realize he’s serious, slams the handles shut. The blade slices through the plant easily, and it hangs there, held up by its brambles but separated from its roots. “There,” Kai says. “Now it’s not our place anymore; it’s just a dead plant. Better?”
“Kai, I can’t.” I stop and inhale raggedly. “I can’t do this without you.”
“Do what?”
“This,” I say, motioning to nothing and everything, because both are true.
Kai shakes his head at me, almost pityingly, and thrusts the clippers to another rosebush and kills it instantly, as if it’s nothing. Another, and another; he moves around Mora as if he’s orbiting her. The sound of the clippers on the plants, the sliding of the metal against itself—they become louder as Kai snaps the blades with more and more intensity. In the fray, I find Mora again. She’s still and beautiful, while I am a mess of hair and tears clinging to my face. She looks happy.
I turn and run for the door.
CHAPTER SIX
When we were small, Kai and I didn’t know all the tricks of the rose garden.
The thorns snagged our clothes; the uneven floor tripped us. Once we accidentally locked ourselves up there. We were able to signal to Ms. Snyder, who was coming home with her groceries, and she agreed not to tell Grandma Dalia if we’d take out her garbage and change the cat box for six weeks. We made the deal. It was worth it.
We cleaned up the garden as best we could, though, not knowing anything about gardening. Mostly that meant we hid Capri Suns in an old toolbox, swept off
the bench, and cleared a path through the overgrown bushes. It took the better part of three weeks, but we treated it like a job, going up there immediately after school and not coming down until Kai had to go to dinner. There was an unspoken rule that neither of us ever went up there alone.
We didn’t know the trick to the door. It’s big, heavy, and metal, and it has one of those mechanisms that makes it automatically shut. One day, I opened the door on the way to get my beanbag chair from downstairs so we had something new to sit on. My fingers were curved around the door frame when I saw it—a bird’s nest, wedged under an awning. Inside were three tiny, perfect blue eggs; I stared. There was something so beautiful about them, nestled together, safe from the wind. I turned my head to Kai, who was just walking up behind me, and opened my mouth to tell him about the nest. I didn’t see the door swinging back. I didn’t realize my fingers were still in the jam.
Kai shoved me, hard—I almost fell down the stairs, and he tumbled after me. I looked up just in time to see the door slam against his ankle with a resounding crunch.
He tried to pretend it didn’t hurt, but eventually, he gave in and cried. It swelled up as if there was a golf ball lodged under his skin, and the spot turned dark purple and green. I helped him limp downstairs to my apartment, where we sat in my room with a bag of frozen peas pressed against his ankle for an hour.
I asked him why he didn’t just yell at me, or pull me toward him, or let me smash my own stupid fingers. He said it was because he didn’t think about it. He just did it.
“And besides,” he said, wincing as I removed the peas to inspect the damage. “It would have broken your fingers.”
“I think it broke your ankle,” I pointed out.
“One ankle. Four fingers. It was the better choice,” he joked, though his face was tense from pain.
He didn’t go to the hospital, and he forced himself to walk on the foot rather than limp in front of his grandmother. If she had found out what happened, she’d take the garden away. She’d put a new lock on the door. She might even tear down our rosebushes. The break eventually healed, though his left foot is still turned a little funny, if you look at it closely.
He said it was worth it.
I feel as if someone has pulled out an organ. One of those that doesn’t seem essential, to the layman—not my heart or my lungs, but rather my pancreas, or my spleen, or my gallbladder. Something that doesn’t seem as if it should matter so much, until it’s gone and your body can’t figure out how to operate and your heart won’t stop beating and just give up already. I sit on my bed, trying to figure out what’s just happened. Trying to figure out how he went from loving me to killing the roses.
I don’t turn on the lights as the sun begins to set. I want to be asleep, because surely, surely when I wake up Kai will be the Kai I love again. And we’ll be together, the way we’re supposed to be, and I won’t be so confused and lost.
“Is this yours?” my mom’s voice calls from the living room. I jump and realize I’m shivering from the cold—how long have I been sitting here? I rise, open my bedroom door, and see her peering down at Grandma Dalia’s cookbook.
“No,” I say. “It’s Kai’s.”
My mom looks up at me and her eyes widen, as if she’s seen something frightening. “God, Ginny, what’s going on?”
“I’m fine,” I say swiftly. I walk over and collect Grandma Dalia’s book. My mom is staring, unsure how to proceed. I head back to my room, eager to get back into the dark cold—
“Are you all right?” my mom asks. I turn in my door frame, a little startled that we’re still talking. “You don’t look all right.”
“Kai and I got into a fight,” I say, shrugging. “It’s fine.” I’m lying.
“Oh,” my mom says. “Well… maybe it’s not the worst thing for the two of you to spend a little time apart—oh, don’t look at me that way, Ginny; I don’t mean it like that. I’m just saying, I married my first boyfriend, and look where it got me—”
“That’s not it,” I say, glowering. I don’t mean to slam my door, but I’m not sorry when I do.
My mouth is in a firm line and my hands are stiff as I open Grandma Dalia’s cookbook on my bed so roughly that I tear the first page a little. I picture her disapproving glare as I begin to flip through the middle section, through her spells, her charms, her beasts. Was that your final plan, Grandma Dalia? Die just as Mora arrives, so Kai ends up with her instead of me? I want to scream at her, even though I know it’s mostly because I can’t scream at Kai.
I pull the stack of recipes bookmarking the Snow Queen page out and toss them aside, far more careless than I’ve ever been with the cookbook. When I do, the end of the paperclip sticks under my nail, far enough to sting. I yank my hand back, wincing, and watch as a drop of blood swells, spreading out in a perfect crescent shape just beneath the white part of my nail.
I cuss loud enough that I hear my mom make a disapproving noise from the next room, but I don’t care. The paperclip is rusted, old—I should probably get a tetanus shot. I tear the clip off the recipes and toss it onto my desk angrily, as if I’m banishing it. When I do, the clippings slip from my fingers and slide apart as they fall onto the open snow beast page. A recipe for cherries jubilee is on top, but underneath it is something strange—something skin colored. I brush the recipe aside to reveal a picture of a cheekbone, glossy and torn from a magazine. Beside it, a ripped-out picture of a nose.
It’s when I see two ice-blue eyes that I understand.
My fingers race across the book, assembling pieces. There are several noses, several eyes, and it takes me a dozen tries before I finally, finally assemble the clippings in the right order. In the right face. Mora’s.
The clippings weren’t a bookmark. They were the Snow Queen page. No text, no details, just Mora’s face.
I rise and back up. No, no, this is crazy. Crazy—Mora is just a girl. Just a girl who stopped to give us a ride. She may be beautiful, but she’s not the queen of the beasts. It’s a stupid idea, you’re just emotional, you’re just angry with Kai. She’s just a girl.
Don’t go with the girl.
Grandma Dalia’s last words are screaming in my brain, the magazine-clipping eyes staring at me. I shut my own eyes, try to ignore the rising panic. You’re looking too far into it, I tell myself. Besides—she pointed at me. Right at me. I remember the way her eyes narrowed, the crook of her finger, the way her hand shook—
I swallow.
I remember where Mora was standing, outside her parked car. Directly behind me.
I run for the apartment door, cutting my mother off when it slams behind me. I pound down the steps and through the courtyard—the cold is worse, the wind is worse. In the back of my head is a voice telling me this is silly. But then I think of Mora, of her slick words and icy eyes, of the costume man in the parking lot she reminds me of. Of the beasts in Grandma Dalia’s stories.
I reach Kai’s door, grit my teeth, and rap on it.
Silence.
I knock again, my breathing slow, controlled, as if I’ll be able to stop myself from panicking if he opens the door and she’s standing over his shoulder.
Silence.
“Kai?” I call softly, almost inaudibly. Still nothing. I knock again, louder this time, then again, and I finally hear movement—from the apartment across the hall. I wheel around to see Mr. Underwood, wearing a painfully see-through white shirt and chewing on a thick cigar. His hair is so white it makes the hall look especially dingy.
“You’re interrupting my news stories,” Mr. Underwood says crossly.
“Sorry,” I say. “I was looking for—”
“Kai, obviously. He’s gone. So you can stop knocking.”
“Gone?” I ask, voice catching.
“Hours and hours ago, with some pretty girl. Good for him, if you ask me. Better than sitting around moping over Dalia.”
“Where did they go?”
“Hell if I know—point is he isn’t here, so
stop the commotion,” Mr. Underwood says, waving a hand at me before he shuts the door.
For coffee. To a movie—are the theaters open in all this snow? Maybe for dinner. I feel sick hoping that they’re just on some sort of date, but it’s better than the alternative—I’m sure of that, even without fully knowing what the alternative is. Still, all I can think of is what I heard on the roof, Mora’s voice all hypnotic and smooth. Come away with me.
He can’t have left. Not without me. Not with another girl.
I fumble with my key chain till I find the spare Kai gave me and slide it into the lock. The door creaks open; the apartment is pitch-black. Even though I know he isn’t here, I call his name again before reaching over and flicking on the kitchen lights.
The kitchen looks like it always does. There are dishes by the sink, and a loaf of bread sits on the counter. I see one of Grandma Dalia’s sweaters is still on the back of the armchair, and Mora’s thick fur coat is laid across the couch. Everything looks right here… I’m overreacting. I close the front door behind me and move through the house. Shoes in the hall. Toothbrush by the bathroom sink. They haven’t left yet; there’s still time to understand what’s going on, to get Kai away from Mora and whatever… spell she has on him. I round the corner to his bedroom just in case and grope for the light switch. It springs on, revealing his bed—unmade, like normal—and a pile of dirty laundry on the floor, including a shirt I recognize from Grandma Dalia’s funeral.
And then my eyes fall on the spot.
The spot where his violin is supposed to be. The spot where his violin always is. It’s a void, an empty space on the otherwise cluttered carpet. I stare at it, unsure what to think, what to feel, what to do, because I know that this means he’s gone. With her.
I call the police. It’s the only thing I know to do.
“So wait, the violin is worth how much?”
“Thousands,” I explain, brandishing Mora’s fur coat at him, as if it’s evidence. “But it’s not that. If it’s gone, he’s gone.”
“Is it insured?” he asks, ignoring the coat.