“So let’s name it,” she mumbled.
“Stone … Crescent?”
She flopped on her back and looked up at the smattering of yellow stars stuck to Mosey’s ceiling. “That’s awful. It sounds like a housing development or a breakfast roll. How about Gracie’s Archipelago?”
“It’s not an archipelago.”
“Then something good. Something about Idgy Pidgy. Dragon Scale Cove, or the Serpentine.”
“It’s not shaped like a serpent.”
“Beast Mouth Cove,” she said.
“Beast Mouth? Are you trying to keep people away?”
“Of course. Always. Silverback Beach.”
“Silverbacks are gorillas.”
“Silver Scales … Something that starts with an s.”
“Shoal,” he said.
“Perfect.”
“But it’s not a shoal.”
“We can call it Eli’s Last Stand when I drown you there. You’re making this impossible.” She flipped back on her stomach and looked up at him. He was propped on his elbows, the book open before him. She’d had another suggestion on her lips, but it vanished like a fish slipping free of the line.
Mosey and Lila were talking in low murmurs, tinny music coming out of Lila’s phone. Eli’s T-shirt was stretched taut across his shoulders, and the light from the lamp by Mosey’s bed had caught around his hair in a halo. She could smell the storm on him, like the lightning had followed him home, like he was made of the same dense rain clouds. His skin didn’t look damp. It seemed to gleam. He had one finger on the page, holding his place, and Gracie had the urge to slide her fingers over his knuckles, his wrist, the fine blond hair on his forearm. She reared back slightly, trying to shake the thought from her head.
Eli was looking at her expectantly.
“The name should be accurate,” he said, his face serious and determined as always. It was a lovely face, all of that thoughtfulness pushing his jaw forward, making that stern divot between his brows.
Gracie said the first thing that came into her head. “Let’s call the cove Chuck.”
“Because…?”
“Because you throw things into it.” Was she making any sense at all?
He nodded, considering, then broke into a ridiculous, light-filled, hideously beautiful smile. “Perfect.”
The ride home was like a kind of punishment—cool air rushing through the windows, the radio turned down low, this strange, unwanted feeling beating a new rhythm in her chest. The dark road spooled out in front of them. She wished she were home. She wished they would never stop driving.
* * *
Eli’s transformation was a betrayal, a bait and switch. Eli Cuddy was supposed to be safe, and now he felt dangerous. She cast around for someone else to want. She’d had a crush on Mason Lee in the ninth grade, and she made Lila take her up to Okhena Beach, where he was lifeguarding, in the hope that seeing him might jolt some sense into her. Unfortunately, the only amazing thing about Mason was the way he looked with his shirt off. He was like a golden retriever. She understood the appeal, but that didn’t mean she wanted to take him home.
Mornings when she knew she was going to see Eli felt suddenly breathless and full of possibility. She bought a new shirt in lush, just-dusk purple, picked out slender silver earrings in the shape of feathers, bought apple blossom lip gloss because it looked like something magical in its pink and gold tin, and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it felt like an incantation. See me. See me the way I see you.
Gracie knew she was being stupid. If Eli liked her as more than a friend, he’d never given her any clue. He might even have a girlfriend in the city who he wrote long letters to and made out with between classes. He’d never said he did, but she’d never asked him. It had never mattered before. She didn’t want it to matter now.
The summer took on a different shape—a desperate, jagged shape, the rise and fall of a dragon’s back. The world felt full of hazards. Every song on every album bristled with portent. She found herself trying to communicate through the records she chose, and interpreting the ones that he chose as code. She forced herself to spend more time with Mosey and Lila, and at Youvenirs, cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned, battling her new greed for Eli’s company. But was it new? From the first, her hours with Eli had been warm sand islands, the refuge that had made the murky swim through the rest of the year bearable.
She was torn between the need to say something, to speak this thing inside her before summer ended, and the conviction that she had to avoid that disastrous course of action at all costs. For the first time, she found herself counting down the days until September. If she could just make it to Labor Day without letting her heart spill out of her lips, she’d have the whole school year to get over this wretched, ridiculous thing that had taken her over.
On the Saturday before Labor Day, Gracie and Eli watched the closing fireworks above Greater Spindle. They sat next to each other on the edge of the truck, knees almost touching, shoulders brushing.
“I wish you had a phone,” she said, without meaning to.
“Me too. Sort of.”
“Only sort of?”
“I like saving up all of the things I want to tell you.”
That has to be enough, Gracie told herself, as blue and silver light washed over the sharp gleam of his features. That should be better than enough.
* * *
It got easier. She missed summer. She missed Eli, but it was a relief to be free of the prospect of seeing him. She went to junior prom with Ned Minnery, who was funny and played trumpet. He loved puns. He wore suspenders and striped pants, and did magic tricks. He was the anti-Eli. There was nothing serious about him. It was a fun night, but Gracie wondered if maybe she wasn’t any good at fun. She drank enough peach schnapps to talk herself into kissing Ned, and then got sick by the side of the road.
When Memorial Day came around, she felt ready to see Eli, but she didn’t let herself go to the Dairy Queen. She couldn’t have that kind of summer again. She wouldn’t. She went to Okhena Beach instead, planted herself next to Mosey and Lila on the sand, and stayed there as the sun sank low and the opening weekend bonfire began. When someone brought out a guitar, she found a spot atop a picnic table a little way off, bare feet on the bench, shivering in her sweatshirt. I’m fine, she thought, telling herself she’d rejoin the others by the flames in just a minute. I’m good. But when she saw Eli walking toward her with those long, loping strides, his hair bright in the firelight, face eager, carrying that stupid backpack, all those months of hard work vanished. How had he even gotten to Greater Spindle? Were his parents letting him use the car now? Longing unfurled inside of her, as if it had just been waiting for the warm weather to be aired out.
He sat down beside her and said, “You’re not going to believe what I found today. The Hall of Records has a whole collection of spoken-word albums behind the Christmas section. It’s amazing.”
Gracie made herself laugh. “Can’t wait.” Did you miss me? Did you kiss anyone? I did, and it was terrible.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t spend another summer this way. It would drive her insane. She would make up some excuse—emergency hours at Youvenirs, a cholera outbreak. Whatever it took. She pulled the pot of apple lip balm from her pocket. It was nearly empty, but she hadn’t bothered to buy more. It was too embarrassing to remember the things she’d let herself think when she’d paid for it.
Eli snatched it from her palm and hurled it into the darkness, into the lake.
“Hey!” Gracie protested. “Why would you do that?”
He took a deep breath. His shoulders lifted, fell. “Because I’ve spent nine months thinking of apples.”
Silence dropped around them like a curtain. In the distance, Gracie could hear people talking, the lazy strum of guitar chords, but it was all another country, another planet. Eli Cuddy was looking at her with all of his focus, his blue eyes nearly black in the firelight. That hopeless thin
g in her chest fluttered, became something else, dared to bloom.
Eli’s long fingers cupped her face, traced the nape of her neck, kept her still, as if he needed to give her every bit of his attention, as if he could learn her like a language, plot her like a course. Eli kissed Gracie like she was a song and he was determined to hear every note. He kissed her the way he did everything else—seriously.
* * *
Now summer was round and full, fruit ready to burst, a sun emerging fat, yellow, and happy from the sea. They kissed behind Youvenirs, in the red velvet seats of the Spotlight, on the floor of the record room—the sound of static filling the headphones around their necks as some song or other reached its end.
“We could go to your house,” she suggested.
“We could go to yours.”
They stayed where they were.
On afternoons, when they left the DQ, Eli’s lips were cold and tasted like cherry. On balmy evenings, when they lay on the banks of the cove named Chuck, his hands were warm and restless. Gracie floated in her sandals. She felt covered in jewels. Her bicycle was a winged horse.
But sometime around the end of July, Gracie heard the drone of the insects turn sorrowful. Despite the heat and the sunburned backs of her thighs and the neon still lit on the main road, she felt summer begin to go.
At night she’d hear her mom and Eric laughing in the living room, the television like gray music, and she’d curl up on her side, that narrow panic settling in. With Eli she could forget she was seventeen. She could forget Little Spindle and what came next. A page out of her mother’s life, if she was lucky. A car loan so she could go to community college. Watching the kids from her school leave for other places, better places. She wished Eli had a phone. She wished she could reach out to him in the dark. We could write letters. I could take the train to New York on the weekends. At night, she thought these things, but by the next afternoon, Eli was bright as a coin in the sunlight and all she wanted was to kiss his studious mouth.
Days and nights dissolved, and it wasn’t until the Saturday before Labor Day that Gracie said, “Mosey’s talking about applying to NYU.”
Eli leaned back on his elbows. They were lying on a blanket at the cove named Chuck, the sun making jagged stars through the branches of the oaks and birches. “Will she?” he asked.
“Probably. She’s smart enough to get in.” Eli said nothing, and Gracie added, “It might be fun to work in the city.”
The furrow appeared between Eli’s brows. “Sure,” he said. “That’s a big change, though.”
Don’t say anything, she told herself. Leave it be. But the knife was right there. She had to walk into it. “Do you not want me there?”
Eli shifted forward and tossed a pebble into the lake. “You should go wherever you want.”
The hurt that bloomed in her chest was a living thing, a plant out of a science fiction movie, all waving tendrils and stinging nettles.
“Sure,” she said lightly.
There was nothing wrong with what he’d said. This was a summer thing. Besides, he was right. She should go where she wanted. She didn’t need Eli waiting for her to move to the city. She could crash on Mosey’s couch until she found a job. Did dorm rooms have couches?
“Gracie—” Eli said, reaching for her hand.
She hopped up. “I’ve got to go meet Mosey and Lila.”
He stood then. Sunlight clung to his hair, his skin. He was almost too bright to look at.
“Let’s meet early tomorrow,” he said. “I only have one more day to—”
“Yup.”
She had her bag on her shoulders and she was on her bike, determined to get away from him before he could see her pride go rolling down her face in big fat tears. She pedaled hard, afraid he’d come after her. Hoping so hard that he would.
She didn’t go to work the next day. It wasn’t a decision. She just let the minutes drain away. Eli wouldn’t come to her house. He’d never seen her room or watched TV on their sofa, just hovered outside in the driveway with his bike while Gracie went to grab a sweater or change her shoes. She’d never even met his parents. Because that was real life and they were something else.
You’re being stupid, she told herself. He’ll be gone in two days. Enjoy it while it lasts. Let it be fun. But Gracie wasn’t good at fun, not the kind of fun that other people had. The person she liked best didn’t like her enough to want more of her, and she didn’t want to pretend that wasn’t awful. She was cherry dip cones, all those old paperbacks, records stacked on dusty shelves—something to hold Eli’s interest, maybe even something he really liked, but a summer thing, not quite real when the weather turned.
She read. She watched TV. Then the weekend was gone, and she knew Eli was gone with it. That was okay. Next summer she wouldn’t be waiting at the Dairy Queen or working at Youvenirs. She’d graduate, and she’d go to New York or Canada or wherever. But she wouldn’t be in Little Spindle.
TAIL
A week after school started, Gracie went to see Annalee. She hadn’t known that she meant to, but she ended up in the fluorescent lights of the Dairy Queen just the same.
She didn’t order. She wasn’t hungry. She slid into the booth and said, “How do I get better? How do I make this stop hurting?”
Annalee set down her crossword. “You should say good-bye.”
“It’s too late. He’s gone.”
“Sometimes it helps to say it anyway.”
“Can you tell me … Did he ever feel the way I did?”
“Ah, tsigele.” Annalee tapped her pen gently on Gracie’s hand. “Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.”
Gracie sighed. Had she really expected Annalee could make her feel better? This town was full of sham monsters, fake witches, stories that were just stories. But anything was worth a try.
Though the weather was still warm, the main road was quiet, and as she turned onto the narrow dirt path that led to her cove, the woods seemed almost forlorn, as if they were keeping the last watch of summer. She felt guilty. This had been her cove, nameless and comforting before Eli. Where have you been? the pine needles whispered.
She leaned her bike against a tree at the clearing and walked down to the shore. It didn’t feel like sanctuary anymore. Hadn’t Mosey said the lake was haunted? The cove felt full of ghosts she wished she could banish. She had so many good memories with Eli. Did she have to lose all of those, too?
That was when Gracie heard it: a single, soft exhalation that might have been a breeze. Then another—a rasping breath. She peered past the shady banks. A body lay slumped in the shallows.
She didn’t remember moving, only that one moment she was standing, stunned on the shore, and the next she was on her knees in the water.
“Eli,” she cried.
“You came.”
“What happened? What is this?” He was so pale he was nearly blue, his veins too close to the surface of his skin.
“I shouldn’t have waited. I get three months. That’s the rule.”
“What rule?”
“I wanted to say good-bye.”
“Eli—”
“I was selfish. I didn’t want you to go to the city. I needed you to look forward to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Gracie. The winters get so long.”
“Eli, I have my phone. I can call—”
“I’m dying now, so I can tell you—”
“You’re not dying,” Gracie shouted. “You’re dehydrated, or you have hypothermia.” But even as she said it, she realized the water was warmer than it should be.
“It was me that day. You were skipping stones. You’d skinned your knee. I saw you just for a second. It was the last day of May.” His eyelids stuttered open, shut. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, but I wanted to for so long. It was better than ice cream. It was better than books.”
She was crying now. “Eli, please, let me—”
“It’s too late.”
“Who says? Who says?”
He gave the barest shrug. It became a shudder. “The lake. Three months to walk the land. But always I must return to her.”
Gracie’s mind flew back to that day at the cove, the creature in the water. It was impossible.
“There are no books, below,” he said. “No words or language.”
No Dairy Queen. No bicycles. No music. It couldn’t be.
Gracie blinked, and Eli’s form seemed to flicker, ghostly almost, part boy and part something else. She remembered Annalee tapping her hand with the pen. Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.
Gracie’s eyes scanned the beach, the tangle of brambles where the woods began. There, a dark little hump in the leaves. She’d never seen him without it—that ugly purple backpack—and in that moment, she knew.
She scrambled for it, fell, righted herself, grabbed it open, and split the zipper wide. It gaped like a mouth. It was full of junk. Skee ball tickets, mini golf score cards, a pink and gold lip gloss tin. But there, at the bottom, glinting like a hidden moon …
She pulled it from the bag, a long, papery cape of scales that seemed to go on and on, glittering and sharp beneath her fingers, surprising in its weight. She dragged it toward Eli, trailing it behind her, stumbling through the shallows. She pulled his body close and wrapped it around him.
“Here,” she sobbed. “Here.”
“Three months,” he said. “No more.”
“It was only a few days—”
“Leave Little Spindle, Gracie. Get free of this place.”
“No,” she shouted at the lake, at no one at all. “We can make a trade.”
Eli’s hand gripped her wrist. “Stop.”
“You can have me, too!”
“Gracie, don’t.”
The water lapped against her thighs with its own slow pulse, warm as blood, warm as a womb, and she knew what to do. She curled herself into the cloak of scales beside Eli, letting its edges slice into her arms, letting her own blood drip into the water.
“Take me too,” she whispered.
“Too late,” said Eli. His eyes closed. He smiled. “It was worth it.”
Then the hand around her wrist flexed tight, retracted. Gracie watched it stretch and lengthen—a talon, razor sharp.