I pull at my soaked clothes. “Sure. Say goodbye to your seats.”
“They’ll survive.”
The truck door opens with a whine of metal. Jesse arranges me on the leather seat, buckling me in as I begin to shiver in earnest. I’m still holding my coat balled up in my lap.
As soon as he hops into the driver’s seat, he twists a dial on the dashboard. Hot air coughs out of the vent. The engine turns, and my back hits the seat as Jesse peels out of the parking lot.
The rhythmicfwip-fwipof the windshield wipers joins the pattering rain. Trees blur past the window. Ward lies empty and silent around us.
“You’ve given up.”
I go still at Jesse’s softly uttered accusation. He stares at the rivers of water sluicing down the windshield.
“I’ve had to listen to you rehearsing your graduation speech thirty times. Suddenly you don’t care? And your bonehead shacks up with someone else and it rolls right off you.”
“Diane is sweet.”
“Admit it. You don’t think you’re gonna make it.”
“What if I just don’t want Alex anymore?” The words fall free before I can stop them. “What if I want someone else?”
If I had several years of my life to spare, Jesse’s silence would have shaved them right off. His face smooths into a terrifying blankness.
“Don’t mess with me, Mansour. I’m not some puppy you can lead around by the nose if you bat your eyes and promise them a dance at the ball.”
My jaw hangs open. “I’m not—I wouldn’t—I’m not messing with you. I haven’t thought about Alex since … you know. Since the train.”
Jesse doesn’t respond. Why did I expect anything else? He cares about me—okay, great. But acting on his feelings? Bridging the gap between longing and having?
There’s a reason I lived next to Jesse for four years without knowing a thing about him. A reason everyone at school trades rumors and theories about the Talbots like daily horoscope readings.
We’ve been trying to pull Jesse into our world, but Jesse Talbot has always existed in the shadows. The way I feel—the way I could swear he feels, in those moments when his gaze settles on me and lingers—demands light.
And Jesse refuses. He’s just passing through, after all. A relationship, anattachment, would just be a chain around his boot.
“Forget Alex,” Jesse says. “Do you believe you’ll survive this curse?”
Ah, there it is. The real question at last, yanked bloody from the heart of Jesse Talbot.
The least I can do is reach into my own and extract the same. The horrid truth, as terrible to his ears as it is bitter to mine.
“I’m sorry, Jesse.”
Jesse twists the steering wheel. The truck skids to the left, missing the turn onto our street. We speed onto the one-way lane leading into the forest around Ward’s border. In a single move, the truck fishtails off the road and onto an empty dirt trail. I grab the car handle above me as I swing from side to side.
As soon as the tires stop, I unbuckle my seat belt and slam out of the truck. “What the hell was that?” I holler.
“My bad, I thought you weren’t scared of dying anymore!” Jesse rounds the truck, heedless of the mud soaking into his boots.
My flinch gets to him, wiping the sneer off his face. “So that’s it? All this progress we’ve made, all the work we put in, and you’re ready to let the curse win?”
I laugh, wild abandon careening through me. “What progress? You saw my mom’s journal. Nobody has been able to break the curse! Not my mother’s family, not the other families she was tracking. This curse is ancient.”
The rest comes pouring out of me. “Besides, how would it be fair if I survived while the children they sacrificed didn’t? How is it fair that my mother can wreck an entire community and expect not to answer for it?” I spread my arms. “I’m the consequence, Jesse. I’m fate finally catching up to what they’ve done.”
The clouds writhe, streaks of white promising a storm to shake every window in Ward. The forest unravels in every direction around us. Long shadows shiver under the roiling clouds, shifting beneath the howling gale. If the storm grows, we’ll have a bona fide Ward Wailer on our hands.
Jesse seems to realize the danger at the same time. “Get in the truck. We’ll talk about this at my place.”
