He had hidden this body and face and voice from her.
But he hadn’t hidden himself. He hadn’t hidden hissoul.
And apparently, souls were a real thing. Alotof things were real. They were real, and cool, and now she could find out about every single one of them. Or at least relearn a lot of things about them. Because she was starting to suspect that she’d known a lot more about these things as a kid than she’d ever let herself think about. She’d crushed it down. But it was all there, waiting to be confirmed. “I totally wouldn’t. Tell me every single one. Starting at the beginning.”
“Man, it almost sounds like you’re giddy about this.”
“Because Iam. All the weirdness I feared and hid from and pushed away turned out to be real, instead of something that made me worry I’m not right somehow. Like the human things you didn’t know but should have, like the closet, the lights, the creature I thought I saw on the road. The feelings I’ve been having.” She closed her eyes. Shook her head as her understanding expanded. “God, the feelings I’ve always had. It’s the feelings I’ve always had, right. When I was a kid, it was all… it was all something, wasn’t it, before I squashed it down.I’msomething. Oh wow, I must be something. I must be, that’s the way it works; that’s how you see supernatural things.”
“It is. And you are.”
“Do you know what I am?”
“I do. But honestly, so do you,” he said, and she went to shake her head. But the moment she did, everything seemed to slow, and then stop. Time rolled backward in her mind’s eye, and there it all was. She could see everything, like it was okay to now. It was safe to look at herself, as she had been.
At age seven, racing around the garden while wearing a pointy hat and striped pantyhose and a fluttery black dress, a broomstick always in one hand, until her parents took it away. Reading books about girls who could do incredible things, and feeling it resonate like nothing else. Feeling like those words were her guides, her parents, her community, in a way reality just wasn’t.
Then more things, weirder, all that she’d tried to deny.
How she had scribbled stories just like the ones she’d loved, and then suddenly found that they were spilling off the pages. First just the letters, marching and spiraling over the margins. But then something else, something more, the ideas that hid behind the words.
Until finally, she tried to do it on purpose.
She had thought of some girl in a fantasy world with a talking animal for a friend. Then held her breath, and wrote down the wordslet me hear you, while at the bottom of her garden, amongst the frogs and mice and other tiny things.
And she knew now that she had.
It hadn’t been her imagination.
She did not deserve the punishment she’d gotten for saying what she’d heard woodland creatures say.Hello, friend, they had said to her, no matter what her dad had done when she’d told him so. And it had been the same for the chair she’d turned into a toadstool, the TV she’d made play even after he’d taken the cord away, the vegetables she’d turned into cakes after they’d sent her to that place.
Though that last one hadn’t been in ink.
They’d taken her paper by then. They’d taken her pens.
Her weapons, Jack had called them. The only weapons she had. And he’d been right. Because she remembered now what it was like to be without them for the first time. That fresh feeling of being stripped of them, of being so scared, of being in that place with nothing to protect her.
From real threats, too.
Those monsters she’d always imagined coming out of the shadows, the words she’d written down to protect herself, the closet—it had all happened. It had still happened in that hospital. She remembered feeling so trapped between doctors who wanted to force her magic out of her, and monsters she needed to use magic against.
Screaming for help from any of the things she’d ever conjured up, that she’d ever called with her stories, and being sure they couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Only they had. Oh god, something had.
That had been true, too. Not a fantasy of someone saving her.
A savior that she had made or brought to her somehow.
My god, I’m more than Dorothy getting back to Oz, she thought.
“Oh my goodness,” she said as it sank in, slow and good. “I’m awitch.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It took her a good few minutes to really process everything that had just happened. So many minutes, in fact, that she could tell Jack was starting to get a little uncomfortable. It was kind of funny to see, if she was being honest—that he was this incredible creature, this almost comic book–looking beast man filling the whole left side of the car, yet he still seemed to get a cramp in his lower leg.
Quietly, so as not to disturb her coming to terms with all this.
