“Seriously?” she said, and a large shadow rose up from behind the pile of rocks. Then the shadow split into three parts—Alice, Cara, and Leslie.
Bel wasn’t sure whether the heat in her face came from anger or embarrassment. Might have been a little bit of both.
“So you’re too good for people who aren’t from Journey’s End, but you’ll take a couple of tourists witch hunting,” Alice said, her face smug in the dim light. “Classic.”
Then she looked over at Leslie. “I told you she was weird about us being friends.”
Leslie was fidgeting, pulling at the ends of her hair, and like always, she wouldn’t look at Bel. It made Bel wonder if she did that so she could pretend none of this was happening, that she wasn’t just standing there while Alice was being a jerk.
“I wasn’t,” Bel said. “I just didn’t want her to get her feelings hurt, and—”
“And,” Nolie broke in, “we were doing something important. We’re trying to keep your stupid village from being eaten, and you are wasting our time.”
Alice stared at Nolie for a second, blinking, and then she laughed. A big laugh, loud and mean.
“Being eaten? By what, another monster?” Alice looked around, her brown hair swinging over her shoulders. “Where’s your friend with his hat? Shouldn’t he be the one warning us about monsters?”
Bel realized that Al was nowhere around, and while that was not great, for now, she just wanted to get Nolie away from Alice.
“If this place does get eaten by killer fog, I hope it gets you first,” Nolie said, and Alice rolled her eyes.
“Okay, sure, killer fog. Got it. Did you read that in one of your books?”
“I read it in your face,” Nolie muttered back, and while that was maybe the worst comeback in the history of ever, Bel still appreciated the attempt.
“Come on,” she said, taking Nolie’s arm and steering her back the way they’d come. “Let’s go home.”
They walked away in the darkness, and Bel was glad for the moonlight that kept them from tripping over rocks.
“We would’ve gotten something from her,” Nolie said as they carefully made their way down the hill. There was a dark shape moving in front of them that Bel was pretty sure was Al, so they hurried to catch up.
“She recognized Albert,” Nolie went on. “Or seemed to. But now she thinks we’re jerk kids who are mean to old ladies, so we’ll never get to talk to her. Ugh.”
Ugh was right.
By the time they caught up with Al, Bel’s teeth were chattering a little. The wind coming off the ocean was colder than usual for June, it seemed like, and Al had his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders up to his ears.
“Hey!” Nolie called as they caught up. “Why did you hurry off?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable. “Didn’t expect her to recognize me,” he said. “It felt funny.”
Bel nearly tripped over a loose stone, and Nolie caught her shoulder, keeping her from face planting.
“Did you recognize her?” she asked Al, and he shook his head.
“No,” he said, and then walked on.
The girls watched him go, and then, after a moment, Nolie said, “I think he’s lying.”
Bel sighed. “Me too.”
CHAPTER 18
“DOES THIS MAKE MY HEAD LOOK BIG?” NOLIE ASKED THE next day, plopping a plastic Viking helmet on her head.
Bel had been sitting at the counter, staring out the window, but now she glanced over and laughed, just like Nolie had been hoping she would.
“Aye, a wee bit,” she said, but then her smile faded and she went back to staring.
Sighing, Nolie took off the helmet and put it back on the display. It was quiet in the shop now, but they were waiting for the boat to come back. Just fifteen minutes ago, the shop had been so crowded, Nolie had finally decided to hide in the storage space behind the restrooms. She’d gotten spoiled, having the shop and Bel to herself so often, but this had been a busy week in Journey’s End. News of the fog inching closer had gotten out, and either people wanted to see it before the Institute shut down tourism, or they had some kind of morbid desire to get close to something dangerous. “Maybe a hairy coo hat would be better?” she mused, picking up the hat in question. It was made to look like the big, woolly cattle people raised up in this part of Scotland, complete with shaggy orange fur and long horns. Nolie put it on and it slipped down, blocking her vision.
When she pushed it back up, Bel wasn’t even looking at her, and Nolie bit back another sigh.
“So . . . I can keep trying on silly hats, or you can just tell me what you’re thinking,” she said, and Bel gave a sigh of her own, tucking her hair behind her ears.
“Yesterday,” she said, letting that word be the only explanation, and Nolie suddenly understood, nodding.
“Right. When your friends were jerks.”
“They’re not my friends,” Bel said quickly, and then propped her elbows on the glass counter, her chin in her hands. “Well, not all of ’em. Leslie was, though. We were best friends, really, proper mates.”
Nolie managed to keep her face serious, which was pretty impressive seeing as how “mates” sounded funny to her. “So that Alice girl moved here, and that’s when everything went wrong?”
Glumly, Bel nodded. “Aye. Her dad moved from Wythe to open an arcade here, and maybe Leslie thinks hanging out with someone whose family owns a place like that is cooler than hanging out with a girl whose family owns a shop.”
She sounded so sad that Nolie suddenly really wanted to kick Alice. Even yesterday’s prank hadn’t bothered her so much. It had been a jerk move and everything, but hey, creeping around the manor house at sunset had been fun, and nothing bad had happened. Besides, people couldn’t laugh at you if you were laughing first.
“Well, I don’t know what kind of arcade Alice’s family runs,” Nolie said, taking a few of the stuffed sheep from their display and lining them up on the counter. “But it could never be as cool as a place that sells these bad boys. So Alice and her video games are bums. And I mean that in the butt sense.”
Bel let out a spluttering laugh, covering her mouth with one hand. But then she lowered it and grinned at Nolie. “Such bums.” But after a moment, her smile faded. “It wasn’t just them, though. The bums.” She made a frustrated sound and once again propped her chin in her hand. “I thought Maggie might have actually told us something. All of this seems so mad, and there’s Al and the Boundary, and all of it, and it just seemed like someone was finally handing us an important piece of the puzzle, you know?”
Nolie was still wearing the cow hat, and she fiddled with the horns as she thought that over. For her, this whole thing had just been fun. Scary at times, sure, and there was no doubt that Albert was the weirdest thing to ever happen in her life, but nothing about it made her sad. It almost felt like being in a story, like something that was happening to other people.
But this was Bel’s town, where she lived and her family worked, and maybe the idea of the fog creeping up was freaking her out a lot more than she’d let on. And honestly, maybe it would be Nolie’s town, too? Not all the time, of course—she’d still be heading back to Georgia in August. But it definitely seemed like her dad had plans to put down roots here, and that would make this an important place to Nolie, too.
Tugging the hat off, Nolie said, “So the Maggie thing went bust. Maybe someone else knows what’s going on. Or maybe Albert’s wrong, and the fog isn’t going to do that whole ‘town-eating’ thing. It’s moving closer, but not by, like, a lot? Maybe what’s happening this time is different.”
Bel nodded, but Nolie didn’t think she really believed her.
“And my mum caught me coming back in,” Bel added on a sigh. “So she was mad at me. Or disappointed, I guess, which is worse.”
Now that was something Nolie understood
perfectly. “You could tell her it was my fault,” she suggested. “Blame it on my terrible American influence.”
Bel snorted, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. “I think she would’ve called your dad, but with everything that happened at the Institute, it would probably be too awkward.”
Putting the hat back on its rack, Nolie pulled out her phone, checking the time.
“Albert was supposed to meet us here at noon,” she said. “And it’s almost twelve twenty.”
“Does he even have a watch?” Bel asked, sitting up on the stool behind the counter. It was sunny for once, and a shaft of sunlight fell across the glass display of spoons, flashing in Nolie’s eyes.
“Yeah, I gave him mine since I could use my phone. It’s bright purple plastic, but he didn’t seem to mind.”
“Maybe he’s just running late?” Bel asked, but Nolie chewed her lower lip, looking out the window and hoping to see Albert jogging up the street.
There were plenty of people out and about today, but none of them were a slender dark-haired boy in ill-fitting clothes.
“You don’t think . . .” Nolie started, but she didn’t want to finish the sentence. Didn’t want to think it, even. Albert had been really quiet on their walk back from Maggie’s the night before, clearly thinking something over. What if he had decided to take matters into his own hands, to row the Selkie back out to the Boundary himself to light the light?
When she looked over at Bel, she could tell her friend was thinking the same thing, and without saying a word, Bel hopped off the stool, opened the door to the shop, and turned the sign to CLOSED.
Nolie followed behind her, realizing that Bel was heading toward the beach.
Dang it, Albert, Nolie thought, stuffing her hands in her pockets. Please don’t be as stupid as I think you might have been.
They were both almost running now, passing the truck that sold fish and chips, the little bookshop, the weird candle place that always smelled like smoke. Just off to the right, there was the arcade Bel had mentioned, and Nolie glanced at it, noticing Beattie’s Game Stop written on a sign in big green letters. There was a giant window at the front of the arcade, and Nolie could see all the lights from the games inside.
And then she saw something else.
Stopping in her tracks, she grabbed Bel’s jacket, pulling the other girl up short.
“Holy. Hairy. Coo.”
CHAPTER 19
BEL HAD ACCEPTED THAT LIFE IN JOURNEY’S END WAS getting weirder by the second, but that still hadn’t prepared her for the sight of Albert MacLeish—Al, the dark-eyed dead boy at the back of her family’s shop—jumping around on a brightly lit machine called Dance Your Pants Off USA.
And yet when she walked into the arcade, Nolie just behind her, there he was, in her brother Simon’s sweatpants and Midlothian Hearts jersey, following the movements on the screen, his feet landing on circles of colored lights.
Beside her, Nolie burst into giggles, covering the lower half of her face with her hands. “Oh, this is excellent,” she all but squealed. “Look at him!”
Bel couldn’t really not look at him. Everyone in the arcade was, because Al was—to use a Nolie-ism—“killing it.” His hair was slicked back with sweat, the jersey sticking to his back, but he was grinning, and when Bel looked over to the side of the machine, she saw Leslie and Alice watching him and smiling, too.
All right, bad enough that Al had apparently forgotten all about lying low, but the way Alice and Leslie were looking at him?
That was beyond not okay. They were the ones who found Al, after all, not Alice and Leslie.
“We have to stop him,” she hissed to Nolie, who, still beaming with delight, didn’t take her eyes off Al.
“No way,” Nolie said. “I’m imprinting this on my brain forever. Our very own 1918 boy, showing us how it’s done. Besides, we can’t stop him now. He’s about to beat the high score!”
Sure enough, the lighted numbers on the display were showing that Al was close to scoring 30,000 points, the highest being 33,000.
“The machine came with that score,” Bel told her, tugging Nolie forward. “No one here ever uses it, because it’s so embarrassing.”
“Those dance machines are kind of old news,” Nolie agreed, but Bel shook her head.
“No, it’s not that, it’s . . . it’s the name.”
“Dance Your Pants Off USA?” Nolie asked, raising her eyebrows. In the weird lighting of the arcade, her hair looked purple, and her freckles stood out even more.
“Exactly,” Bel said, and Nolie laughed, but let herself be pulled toward the group of kids—both local and tourists—who were now watching Al thrust his arms out to the side before taking a few quicks steps back, then forward.
“I don’t think anyone is going to actually dance their pants off, Bel,” Nolie said. “So the people of Journey’s End shouldn’t be that scandalized by it.”
Bel realized what the problem was.
“No, over here, pants doesn’t mean those,” she said, nodding at Nolie’s jeans. “Those are trousers. Here, pants mean—”
Dropping her voice, she leaned closer and said, “It means underwear.”
When the machine had first gone up in the arcade, there had been about a million jokes about it in school, and no one would dare to dance on it for fear of a million more jokes being made.
But Nolie just threw her head back and laughed again, a big laugh this time. “Okay, okay,” she said when she could finally catch her breath. “As soon as Albert gets off that thing, we have got to tell him. He’ll die. I mean. Again, I guess.”
Rolling her eyes, Bel moved closer to the machine and Al. There were about a dozen kids around him, most of whom she recognized from school. When she accidentally nudged Brian Fitzroy, he glanced over at her.
“This lad is brilliant,” he enthused, and Bel nodded weakly. Brian’s family owned the chippie truck that was usually parked just outside Gifts from the End of the World. Like Bel, Brian helped his family out from time to time, and he’d been in Bel’s shop loads of times. What if he’d looked closely at the pictures? What if any second now, he recognized this “brilliant lad”?
But Nolie was right. Believing such a thing seemed so weird that even if someone had noticed the resemblance, they probably wouldn’t piece it together.
The bright red numbers ticked past 33,000, and the little crowd around Al cheered. Finally, the song came to an end, and he stopped, resting his hands on the bars on either side of the platform, hanging his head down and taking deep breaths.
Bel was suddenly afraid he’d overdone it. He might look like a regular thirteen-year-old kid, but he was actually a hundred and eleven years old.
What if his heart was bad or something? Or he had arthritis?
But when Al lifted his head again, he was still smiling, and it was such a good smile that Bel felt herself grinning back.
There was a piercing whistle just behind her, and she turned to see Nolie with her index fingers stuck in her mouth. Al smiled even broader at that, and as he hopped down, he saw Bel.
“Yer not mad, are ye?” he asked, out of breath, and Bel glanced around at the kids near them. They were already moving on to other things now that the show was over, but Alice and Leslie were still watching pretty closely, Alice propping her hands on her hips.
“Kind of?” she told him. “Mostly because we told you not to draw attention to yourself, and then you danced for a crowd of people.”
Al rolled his shoulders. “I felt cooped up in the attic,” he told her. “And I had a bit of extra time before I needed to meet you and Nolie, so I thought I’d have a wander, and then I saw this place.”
He looked around with wide eyes, his hands open at his sides, like he could hardly take in the glory that was Beattie’s Game Spot. “How d’ye keep from spending every moment of yer day
in here?”
Bel’s eyes fell on the grimy old video game machines, the basketball hoop with part of its net hanging off, the grubby carpet underneath her feet.
But then she tried to see it from Al’s point of view. “What did you even do for fun back in your time?”
“Chase sheep?” Nolie guessed, and Al shot her a look before glancing down at the carpet, shrugging.
“Possible we did that a time or two,” he confessed. “But if you could catch one, then Frances May would—” He stopped there, his face going red, and Nolie widened her eyes.
“Wait, would some girl kiss you for catching sheep?”
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Al mumbled, and Bel shook her head, needing to get this conversation back on track.
“Where did you even get money for this place?” she asked Al now.
“Oh,” Nolie said, edging forward. “Um. That might be my bad? But my dad gives me way too much ‘daily spending money,’ and I thought Albert might not want to have to depend on us every time he wants to get ice cream from the truck.”
“Which is all the time,” Al added with a nod. “That ice cream is super ace rad.”
Despite herself, Bel laughed. “Okay, for the last time, that is not something people say. Now let’s get you out of here before someone recognizes—”
“Bel?”
Bel turned to see Leslie standing there, fiddling with the end of her long, dark braid. “Hi,” was all she said, and Bel felt that squirmy feeling start up in her stomach again.
“Hi.”
The lighting that had made Nolie look extra freckled made Leslie look really pale, and Bel almost felt sorry for her. She seemed so uncomfortable standing there without Alice or Cara behind her, facing Nolie and Al.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out suddenly, and Bel was so surprised that all she could say was, “Oh.”
“About yesterday,” Leslie went on. She was shifting her weight, her fingers playing along the edges of her sleeves. “It was mean, and stupid, and I don’t know why we did it.”