“For fuck’s sake!” Cosima looked around for a different approach, but there was nothing for it. She sighed heavily, sat down on the grass, and gave herself a shove.
It was terrible. The ground was saturated and surprisingly cold. The uncontrollable speed of her slide meant she would never be able to wear these trousers again. Edie had started laughing so hard she was tipped over, slipping down the hill curled up like an armadillo. Or a hedgehog.
Cosima came to a stop beside her, hip deep in a puddle, Edie still choking on laughter, every part of her wet. “Didn’t you hear me when I said we should find a way around?”
“I—I diiid,” Edie coughed out, holding her sides. “I totally did, but then I was ass over fucking teakettle.” She unfolded herself and starfished on the ground, looking up at the skyracing with fat, bright white clouds. “I lost my boot halfway down.”
“Naturally.” She injected the word with skepticism, but in truth, Cosima wanted to laugh. She got up and looked behind her, scanning the hillside for it. Once she spotted the boot, she looked around on the ground until she located a good stone. She closed one eye and got the boot lined up and then sharply flung the fist-shaped stone at the boot, knocking over its shaft and sending it skittering down toward them.
“Holy fuck, Cosima.” Edie hauled herself up as the boot came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. “I’m positive I’ve never seen anything sexier in all of my life than you hauling off with that giant goddamned rock.”
“I did shot put.” Cosima brushed her hands off and handed Edie the boot, locking down any thoughts that wanted to make themselves known along the lines ofIf you knew how to be sexy for Edie Whitelock, you wouldn’t stop.“At boarding school,” she said, needlessly.
“Of course you fucking did.” Edie yanked on her boot, her smile guileless. She batted her eyelashes. “Be in my zombie shelter?”
Cosima snorted, appallingly flattered. “Let’s look at this stile.”
They walked up to the crumbling wall of huge, blond stones. There were narrow stone steps built into it, allowing someone to climb up and over the barrier easily. Judging from the graffiti carved into it, the wall had long been a destination for local kids.
“Oh, look! There’s one of those interpretative signs.” Edie stood by a small wooden post with a green sign, and Cosima joined her to look at it. “That is a truly enormous dong.” Ediepointed at the Sharpie vandalism over the prim letteringHERMIONE’S STILE.
“You needn’t have mentioned it. Ghastly thing.”
Edie snorted. “Seriously, though, I’m glad the English are so good at their signage. I love that wherever you go, everything is labeled with a little contextual information. ‘Hermione’s Stile was constructed of local sandstone at or around 1688.’ 1688!” She knocked her shoulder into Cosima again, and Cosima tried not to be pleased. “Unreal. How do they even know? ‘Its name most likely refers to Hermione Blackwood, notable for running the local livestock market, though she was a single woman.’—though she was a single woman?Now I wish I had a Sharpie.” Edie flicked the sign with her fingertip. “There are corrections to be made here.”
“What do you think we’re looking for?” Cosima studied the fifteen feet of crumbling wall with the slender double staircase, up one side and down the other. “There’s not much wall left here, but enough that it could take ages to find a clue if it’s small. Add to that the graffiti, and I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Edie had approached the wall and hunkered down to examine the penknife-carved defacements. “This one’s from 1803. V plus M. With a heart.” She traced the heart with her finger. Always hands-on, this woman. Tactile. Kinetic. “It reminds me of this time that Mike took us to Ohio. His sister lived there, in the Hocking Hills. It was so pretty. There’s a cave there called Old Man’s Cave with a waterfall, and there’s graffiti like this on the walls. I thought it was so amazing to think about how all these people from history were just regular people, you know?” Edie stood up and leaned against the wall.
“In Pompeii, there’s graffiti on what would’ve been the wall of a bar between two men fighting over a woman named Iris. It ends with something like ‘and you’re just jealous and also suck.’One third of Neanderthal graffiti boils down to, basically, ‘I fucked your mom.’”
“Cosima!” Edie screeched.
“What? Have youseena Roman vase? They drew phalluses on everything. There’s thirty-five-hundred-year-old graffiti from a Chinese teenager in Egypt complaining about his vacation to the pyramids. Most of the graffiti in medieval pubs in England is some variation on ‘the Pope puts stuff in his butt.’”
Edie clapped her hands, grinning madly. She did a little bounce from her tiptoes to her heels. “I could really listen to you talk about this all day.”
“People are just people,” Cosima said. “You’re completely right about that. A good reason not to listen to your brothers.”
“Ah.” Edie’s smile dimmed. “You’ve turned a discussion of dirty graffiti into a small lecture.”
Cosima mentally winced. She’d been thinking for days about the things Edie had said about how she grew up. “It’s only that it’s bothered me what you’ve said about… well, what they say.”
Edie adjusted her body against the wall with an unconscious fluidity that Cosima recognized as a sign she was thinking. She waited, looking around at the dips and rises of the landscape, irregular fields bordered by old stands of trees.
Lincolnshire really was beautiful.
“I was excited when my mom told me I was going to have a little brother or sister,” Edie finally said. “Soexcited. I was in the second grade. It wasn’t going well. Constant behavior interventions. I refused to learn to read. This girl Amber had smashed me in the mouth with a tetherball, and one of my front teeth turned gray.” Edie tapped on a tooth that was as white as the others now, then closed her mouth, and Cosima could see the old gesture, as clear as day, of a little girl trying to hide her tooth. “The bullying was intense, is what I’m saying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. All of that hangs around inside for a long time, it turns out. Maybe forever. So the idea of a little sibling, someone who would be born loving me and who I would love from the beginning? It was the most amazing thing I could imagine. And itwasamazing, for a while.”
“What happened?”
“My brother Ethan’s dad left. He was a nice enough guy, I guess, but I think even then he was having some trouble with gambling at the casino. Ethan was in Head Start, and, like me, a lot to deal with. By then, I’m in fifth grade, and it’s actually worse, because this is where the orthodontia starts to come into play, and the burgeoning figure you are enjoying today was somewhat less appreciated by the preteen set.”
Cosima touched the now-soft letter in her pocket, hoping the ink hadn’t run in her fall down the wet hill. Even before she was born or conceived, Phoebe had wanted her to know she was absolutely precious. Created from love. She’d named Cosima after all of existence—cosmos.
