Twenty-Four
Josie
Even though I’ve felt sick for the past half hour—waves of nausea rolling through me—somehow I make it home without puking in Axe’s fancy sports car. Honestly, it’s a miracle. I kept my window down and pretended I was all about the breeze, but really I was just trying to keep my lunch where it belonged.
Axe tried to chat the whole ride through Shelton’s winding streets—apparently, Honor told him about me running a booth at the Toygasm sex toy expo coming up:Are you looking forward to it? Tell me more about your nonna. What do you think of Theo?
I gave him micro answers (yes / she’s my best person / cool) without letting on that my stomach was twisting in agony. I’d rather him think I’m rude than sick.
As soon as I’m through my apartment door, I drop my bag and run to the bathroom. I barely make it in time. My body heaves, rejecting and ejecting everything inside. I grip the cool porcelain, my face drenched in sweat, my body trembling. My mind races through what I ate today to see what might have caused this reaction—is this an allergy?
Just thinking about food makes me gag. Lunch was the usual,so probably not the culprit: my mom’s homemade iced tea and leftover veggie lasagna she dropped off at the store as some kind of peace offering, Honor’s fudge brownies…and a few too many chocolate-covered pretzels at SynthoTech.
I tell myself it’s the stomach flu even though it feels so much worse. As weird as that dude at the store was, it’s a real leap to assume the cut on my finger has anything to do with it, though for some reason, that’s where my mind keeps going. I remember the way he watched me lick off my blood, and it leaves me with the faint prickle of unease that just won’t go away. Nah, Nonna just has me freaked out.
When I first started feeling off at SynthoTech, I brushed it off, thinking it would pass. Now, as I lean against the bathroom wall, I can’t ignore the growing fear. What if I’m too sick to go to the farmers market? Would Axe fire me?
I’ve been looking forward to our second “date.” Weirdly enough, I’m actually enjoying this new job. I want to get to know Axe as much as he and his developers want to get to know me. I’ve got a million random questions I’d love to throw at him and hope for more than a one-word answer: What was it like running through the misty moors of Scotland as a kid? Did he dream of something beyond his picture-perfect island? Has he ever taken a risk so wild it made his heart race, like jumping off a cliff into the sea? Gotten swept up in an adventure that spiraled out of control with unexpected consequences?
Has he ever been sick enough that he thought he might die?
I crawl into bed, my eyes locked on the unforgiving numbers of my alarm clock. My 9:00 a.m. date with Axe looms ahead, and every passing minute torches my chances of getting even a shred of sleep. By the time the sun rises, I’ve spent the night crouched over the toilet, my body racked with dry heaves. Exhaustionsettles into my achy bones, but I’ve spent too much of my life sick in bed. No way am I flaking on Axe.
Dragging myself to my dresser, I catch sight of my tarot deck. I close my eyes and pull: Strength. A lion and a woman face each other, exuding controlled yin-yang balance. I take a deep breath.
You can do it, Josie. Today you need JosieFightsOn energy big-time.
I take a long, hot shower, and afterward look at my haggard face in the mirror. I cover up my dark under-eye circles with concealer.
I chew three more Pepto-Bismol tablets. Then a fourth. I shake out my curls.
I let the cards give mestrength, just like always.
Twenty-Five
Axe
The island has grown smaller. Now that his height has shot up, Axe feels like he could stretch his arms and reach both the north and south sandy shores, his wingspan wider than a falcon’s. But he can’t reach. He lives in a literal castle on a hill, with rolling grounds and trees and a ballroom big enough to fit a thousand. Of course, the island hasn’t grown smaller, and his life hasn’t grown bigger.
Hamish says it’s normal for thirteen-year-old boys to want to run away, to dream of getting in a rowboat and leaving everything and everyone you know behind. Axe doesn’t feel like he’d be leaving much behind anyway. He doesn’t know many people—unless you count the revolving girls, and he doesn’t know them, not really—so it wouldn’t be too hard to say goodbye. But he doesn’t say that to Hamish.
He doesn’t want to break his big brother’s heart. If he still has one.
Axe has spent his whole life on Skara Brae, except a failed experiment at boarding school. His one chance at escape, and he was home within the year—with two black eyes, a broken rib, a bruise blooming across his back.
The administration said that maybe the school “wasn’t the right fit”—what they really meant was they didn’t know how to keep this sensitive soul safe from furious little boys playing at being men. Didn’t know what to do with a kid who had never watched telly or heard Eminem. Didn’t know how to teach a student who knew more about physics and astronomy and history than the faculty.
“Come on, little brother. Put away that book, and let’s go watch the girls change,” Hamish says on a Monday afternoon like every other—the Whales partying, Axe hiding away in the library. But Axe doesn’t want to watch the girls. They look through him like he’s a ghost, and he prefers it that way. He’d rather they ignore him than flinch, which is what they do when they see Hamish or Da. Or any other man.
Hamish has never seemed to mind living in the castle, or even his father, though he gets the cane as much as Axe. He admires their da’s power, wants to step into his shoes one day. Hamish will be king of the castle for real and not just in the games he used to play with Axe before Hamish outgrew them.
“Nah. Leave them alone. They get enough of that from everyone else,” Axe says, turning back to the book in his lap. He now spends all his time tucked away in a corner in a leather armchair facing the window, reading, or outside, identifying trees and plants and flowers to draw in his journal.
“Come on. It’s time you learned how to be a man,” Hamish says, and knocksRobinson Crusoe,Axe’s favorite novel, out of his hands with a hard swipe.It lands on the floor with a dusty thud, and though it’s obvious Hamish is trying to get a rise out of Axe, to make him get to his feet and throw punches, all Axe feels like doing is crying.
“I don’t want to do this, Hamish,” Axe says in a tone too weary for thirteen. Lately, he’s been learning all about Darwin and wonders if maybe he and his family are of different species or if they’ve adapted some survival gene that somehow bypassed him. He doesn’t want to touch the girls, not with their sad, hollowed eyes, and he doesn’t want to bloody Hamish’s lip the way Hamish so desperately seems to want to bloody his.
With the girls, the problem is he’s seen too much. He knows they swallow pills to stay up late and then more to sleep. Once, Axe walked into a bathroom to find two of them sitting on the edge of the tub, sticking needles in their arms. Once, he came down for breakfast to find a girl passed out in the dining hall in a puddle of her own vomit. Once, he saw the mangled body of a girl who’d thrown herself off the crenellated roof. He wonders what really happened to his own mother, who died when he was ten. How did she go? Was she carted away and buried at sea? No one says. Da never speaks of her. Hamish doesn’t know; different mothers, different silences. So Axe did the only thing he could think; he climbed the cliffs and drove a wooden cross into the earth. No name on it—just a way to remind himself not to wait for her return in this world.
