“I’m—” I cough. “Um.” I stop when I’m six feet away. I’m close enough to notice the way he looks at me like I’m some kind of a stranger to him now. Like we didn’t spend our childhood collecting coins for the ice cream truck, eating our Choco Tacos and strawberry shortcakes in the big alder tree behind his mama’s old house. Like I didn’t call him every time Johnny made me feel likeshit, knowing that just Carter’s voice would make me feel better about my life, about the fuckup I’d become.
I’mnotclose enough to him for dangerous things. Like to smell his cologne—Polo Green by Ralph Lauren, with its notes of citrus and leather. I’m not close enough to make out the sugar-sweet pink of his full lips. I’m not close enough to remember how they felt around my nipple through my bra—warm and wet andeverything.
He frowns at me even more deeply. “Sage and Tenn aren’t here today. They’re working in the field.”
“Carter,” I say, and my voice breaks and I hate it, I hate it, Ihateit. Thunder rumbles way too close. I’m running out of time. I always feel like I’m running out of time when it comes to Carter these days.
This time, his eyebrows rise in worry. “Teal, what’s wrong? Is it Nadia? Is it—”
“No. Nothing like that.” I shake my head firmly and inhale. One-two-three-four in, and out to the count of eight.Just say it, I will myself. And I do, in one whole breath, so fast even I can barely understand myself. “Do you wanna go with me to Nate’s wedding on Saturday?”
I’m not the asshole, I swear I’m not the asshole. Carter and I might’ve kissed—once—but if it meant something to me? I wouldn’t have gone off with Nate just two days later. And if it meant something to him? He wouldn’t have slept with every woman under the age of forty-five in Cranberry in the last year.
I just want my childhood best friend back. That’s it.
But with the way Carter’s jaw tightens, and his eyes narrow—it looks like that’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. “Weren’t you going with Andre Castle?”
“No.” Yes. I was, till Andre got sick of my bullshit anddumped me just yesterday. “Anyway, I just thought we could, you know, go, as friends. And—”
“I already have a date, Teal.” Carter’s voice is as sharp as the art I saw at the gallery downtown a couple of weeks back, full of glass blown in veins of edges and blades. “And now I have to work.”
He dismisses me by angling the wheelbarrow away and marching down the hill toward the garden beds.
For eight years straight, mysister Sage didn’t cry, because when she did, my other sister, Sky, who we thought was dead, would appear to her as a ghost. Now that Sky is back, alive and well (as well as she could be, considering), Sage is making up for it. It seems like all she does is cry these days. She and Tenn move in together? Weeping-willow-turned-human. She and Tenn get engaged? La Llorona, showing off her artisan-carved engagement ring, with green-gold mushrooms swirling around one giant ivy-hued sapphire.
Sage and I used to have that in common, because I try really hard to not cry, in general. But it’s not because the tears call a ghost my way. It’s because—
A heavy splatter of cold hits my head.
Another hits my shoulder.
“Dammit,” I mutter, glaring up at the sky, where the endless gray clouds have finally caught up with me. I wipe at my eyes violently, willing the salty wet to stayin, for the sake of old gods.
I run to my car, followed by a sheet of sleet. It’s the end of March and we’re supposed to be in the middle of a warm spring.
Thisis why I don’t like to cry.
I lean my head against the driver’s door and do the breathwork the therapist taught me, the one who I saw exactly twice after I watched my baby sister fall eighty feet, screaming and screaming and screaming.
In, one-two-three-four. Out to the count of eight.
I thought Mama had taken my gift with her when she pinched that spot of lightning from my palm, but it showed up again, years later, about six months before my first period. But something wasoffwith it. Even Nadia, who’s seen some shit, didn’t know what was all wrong with me.
In all of our known lineage—and I’m talking back and back to Texas, before Texas was even Texas—I am the first Flores woman who can’t control my gift.
Sage basically winks at plants and they bloom. Into irises the color of strawberry frozen yogurt, into roses as blue as a cloudless summer sky set over the sea. Sky, her gift is criaturas—animals. She can coax a family of black bears into her lap for a nap. She spends her weekends braiding mountain daisies into her hair, and when she takes a walk, fucking pumpkin-winged house sparrows follow her all over the place, like a flaca, brown Snow White.
If things went right with the development of my gift, I’d be more like my sisters. I’d be able to snap my fingers for a light, warm rain. I’d be able to stop the snow of a blizzard, all with my thoughts and my will.
But what happens, instead, is this: sleet when I cry, rain when I’m depressed, gray storm clouds as dark as night when I’m nervous, endless flashes of lightning when I’m angry, and all kinds of variations between. I thought, for the longest time, that if I pushed down the turbulent emotions, I’d be cured, but that hasn’t worked out, either. If I feel nothing—like I did when I was still with Johnny—the sky becomes this flat, overcast gray that’s about as cheery as a pile of cinder blocks.
I was happy for about two seconds when Sky came back, before I started worrying about her again. The actual sky burst into rows and rows of rainbows, glimmering into each other like a psychedelic mirage, like somehow a giant, faceted diamond had inexplicably grown around Cranberry. It’s the kind of weather event that would’ve made the news, but only one person got a photo before it disappeared, and as far as I know, they’ve just been accused of bad Photoshop skills.
There’s only one way that I can stop sadness and disappointment and grief, at least for a little while, and I don’t even hesitate right now, as I try to push Carter’s rejection to the furthest, swampiest part of my brain. I pop in my AirPods, click on my phone’s playlist, and turn around and run as fast as I can, toward the dirt road leading away from Cranberry Rose Company.
I run down the hill, where it turns into a paved road, and pass bluish-green fields of tobacco and barley. Every once in a while, a home whizzes by—little distant red farmhouses with white trim and picket fences covered in the hollowed vines of last year’s morning glories, which will soon climb up again, dotting the perimeter of the land with blue, violet, and pink-trumpet flowers. The horizon is a curved line of soft hills, the ones Sage has called “mountains” since she was a little kid.
Soon I reach the woods and I veer right at the first trailhead I see. I hop around startled tourists, maps in their hands, jumping over fallen trees and baby boulders. The entire world becomes green, with the first flush of spring leaves surrounding me in electric lime. The wind feels cold against my sweaty skin. I can hardly breathe, but I don’t slow, I don’t trip, I don’t stop.
