There’s a pause, and Leilani says, “I just meant, before. You and Sage haveambition. You, with the candles, and Sage with her jewelry. You both are like me. We are manifesting our realities.The whole universe is in motion, and we just don’t have time for negativity. There’s nothing but love in our lives, right?”
I pinch my mouth shut because Sky is currently holding in a laugh so hard, her eyes are tearing up. As her shoulders shake, I let out a reluctant smile. “Right, Lani. You know what’s up.”
We hang up after our goodbyes, which includes Leilani wishing meBlessed beall weirdly breathless, and as soon as the phone clicks off, Sky’s laughter explodes out of her in sputters. “What iswrongwith her?” she asks after she’s caught her breath. “Is she always high? How does she turn every conversation into something about manifesting the universe in motion?”
I shake my head. Usually I can brush off Leilani’s idiosyncrasies, but that phone call really annoyed me. She has some nerve, implying that Carter is some kind of loser, like he hasn’t been working his ass off since he was fifteen years old, supporting his family any way he could.
“You’re mad,” Sky says, taking a seat next to me. She has to pull the chair out a lot, to fit her long legs under the table. “Is it because she was a big snob, acting like she was better than Carter and Sage and Tennessee?”
Instead of answering, I work my jaw until I feel a tension headache starting.
Sky tucks the squirrel on her shoulder, where it curls up like a damn cat and falls asleep instantly. “Sage doesn’t like her.”
“I know,” I snap. “But you know what? Lani was the only one who didn’t abandon me when—” I stop myself.
Sky smiles sadly. “When I fell off the cliff and became suspended in animation for eight years? Was that the end of your sentence?”
It’s as wild as it sounds. Sky fell eighty feet to what should have been her death. They looked for her body for days and days.Ilooked for her body for weeks. Months. Even years after, I would take a walk at the bottom of that cliff, my eyes combing the brush for any sign of her—a shoe, ragged and half gnawed-on. A ring, with a sliver of silver shining through a deep black patina. A bone, white, porous, licked clean by some starved scavenger.
I would’ve settled for a strand of her caramel brown hair curled around blooming dandelions, but I found nothing. And the reason for that is because in the fifteen minutes it took for me to rush down to where she had fallen, Sky was taken. She was taken by these basically unexplainable, immortal beings Nadia calls the “old gods” to a giant, old tree less than a mile away. She was kept inside it in a supernaturally induced coma foreight years. Believe me, I know how bananas that explanation is to anyone outside the family. To anyone who wasn’t raised to know that the wild earth is autonomous and sometimes chooses startlingly miraculous fates for us.
It’s really too bad everyone in town has instead come to the conclusion that we’re all freaks, Sky most of all.
When we thought she was gone for real,everyoneretreated. At the time, Carter’s grandfather was in and out of the hospital, and between that and all the jobs he always seems to have, he and I could only chat here and there. I didn’t blame him. He tried the best he could, but in the end, I needed more support than what he could offer.
Nadia, my great-aunt, was a wreck. All she did was cry for what felt like decades, so much that I was the one checking in on her several times a day, and never the other way around, ever. But that’s Nadia. Her emotions and needs always came before ours.
My grandmother Sonya threw herself into re-renovating her giant, colonial-style, beachside mansion, and pretended like she never even had a third granddaughter to start with.
And Sage? Sage took off and lived in her old red van before finding a job teaching jewelry design in Philly. She chose a van made in 1989 with stained, threadbare upholstery and not one buttwocracked windows over me.
Is Leilani perfect? No. Is she sometimes really annoying? Yes. But she was there. She wasthere.
I close my eyes and do my counting breath. “Yes,” I say on the long exhale. “Sky, I’m sorry. Lani just pissed me off, and I’m nervous about Carter.”
Sky raises an eyebrow. “Right. The man you don’t have feelings for even though his kiss was so lethal, you ended up dumping Nate Bowen because you couldn’t stop thinking about it.” She nuzzles the squirrel, who lets out an eerily humanlike sigh of contentment. “The man we told you to not ask to the wedding, because he’s so desperately in love with you.” Her smile can only be described as that of an evil villain. “Thatman, you mean?”
Now I’m grinding my teeth. At this rate, I’ll have a migraine before dinner. “Subject change,” I finally grit out. “I need to distract my brain right now. Please.”
“Hmm.” Sky puts a finger on her chin, tapping. “Oh! Have you ever had your ass eaten?”
It’s too bad I’m sipping a cup of tea when she asks. I onlyjustavoid spraying the table.
“What,” I say, coughing, “the hell, Sky?”
“I’mcurious. I read about it in one of Nadia’s romances and I thought it sounded bewitching.”
I snort so loud I can’t help but dissolve into giggles. “Bewitching?” I belt out. “Ass-eating sounds bewitching, huh?”
She’s laughing, too. “Are you distracted yet?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Good.” Sky checks her phone. “Oh, don’t forget. Springequinox tomorrow.” She stands, the squirrel still perfectly balanced on her shoulder. “And Leilani Rodriguez isnotinvited.”
“But I already invited her!” I say. “She always comes!”
Sky just tilts her head up and gazes down at me, like she’s royalty or something. “She can’t come until she apologizes to Carter. And I lost years of my life, Teal, so I can call the shots for my first spring equinox in almost a decade. Got it?” Before I can respond, she’s already on her way up the stairs, her squirrel friend still knocked out on her shoulder.
