She’d been right. Edie Ashlynn Whitelock wasright.
As Cosima ran her finger under the flap, Edie pressed her eyes shut hard enough to see colors behind her eyelids. She heard Cosima’s sharp inhale, the sound of paper sliding against paper, the unfolding rustle of something substantial. She had never wanted anything more than she wanted to be able to run up to herselfasherself, the kid version of herself, and tap her own arm and sayfreeze tag, stopping time.
Because what came after this kind of shimmering, incredible feeling was always bad.
“It’s a map,” Cosima said. “Oh, wow, Edie. It’s a map!”
It was the most joyous she’d ever heard Cosima be. The sound of it cracked open Edie’s eyes. Cosima had opened up a map, the kind on a big piece of paper, folded in half and then into rectangles. She held it cradled in her arms in order to see it all at once.
“What does it…” Edie almost didn’t want to know.
“There’s England. AndEurope. All of the countries are sketched in black and white pencil, except England, France, and Spain. Those are more detailed, and in color. They have illustrated frames around them and little details. Like a square around each of those countries with what to pay attention to. The details are tiny sketches”—Cosima turned the map to show Edie—“and could be puzzles. Or hints, maybe. At a glance, it’s not obvious what order one would go to these places, or exactly which places one would go.” Cosima shook her head, then turned the map around, smiling. “You found a genuine treasure map.”
The map was handmade, in watercolors, annotated in the same handwriting as on the notecards, but with more flourish, using a fancy pen.
France. Spain. A dotted red line indicating a trip over the English Channel. She touched the paper with the tips of her fingers.
“It will be such an amazing trip. A real adventure.” Edie did her best to smile at Cosima without letting her eyes burn with tears. Her shoulders were so tight, they made her arms ache right down to the elbows. “Now”—she pointed at Cosima to match her faux-stern voice—“you’ll have to write me a postcard at every stop you make along the way. Or help me unbrick my phone! Phoebe Frank would be so excited that you were doing this. You’ll have to tell Duncan all about it.” She took a stealth, quick breath, a trick she’d learned so she wouldn’t lose it in front of her brothers. “Epic. Truly.”
Confusion folded Cosima’s forehead. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t?” A tiny fire of anger lit in Edie’s heart. She was tired of not being understood. “Remember Fauxmage, and why I’m here, and why a big day is seeing a hedgehog, and my hideous borrowed coat? You live in a castle. In Beverly Hills. There’s a fountain with pink elephants, which I know because I saw pictures in a magazine at the twelve-dollar haircut place where I still go, sometimes with my mom. I used to play with an action figure ofyourmother.”
Edie pressed her hand to her sternum. She’d had no idea her heart could race this fast. She wasn’t being fair. She didn’t actually resent Cosima. She didn’t want Cosima’s life.
But she had never figured out how to get the life she wanted and keep it.
“I’m sorry. I am. It’s just that by the end of the month I’ll be standing in the test kitchen of A Presto! Pizza Crust Factory,the closest I’ll ever be to Italy, figuring out if I can get ten more grams of semolina flour out of the recipe in order to save the company half a million dollars a year. And that’s if I don’t get fired from this job, a job my mother is leveraging her own job to get me. It’s decent union money. She tells me if I’m careful it should be enough to get me a two-bedroom with a pool and a nice used SUV. Maybe when I’m forty, if the world hasn’t burned down yet, I’ll have enough saved to mortgage a ranch home with a bar top in the basement for my friends to hang out and watch the Packers.”
Cosima folded the map in half. “Stop it.”
“Stop what? Telling the truth? Look, this has been fun, but—”
“I saidstop.” Cosima was being rough with the map, folding it in the wrong directions, causing it to crumple.
Edie took another short, sharp breath. It didn’t help. “Cosima.”
“You don’t know what you really are.” She said this almost in a whisper, but she was angry. Not sad, not annoyed, not annoyed-plus. Furious.
Good. “You don’t know who I am either.” Edie worked to keep her voice even. “You’ve already told me who you think I am. You said on the first day we met when I recognized you, when I realized you were Cosima Frank, you said—”
“Not to you.” Cosima’s lips were white, her famous blue-gray eyes iridescent. “I said I wasn’t Cosima Frank toyou.”
“You’re not,” Edie said. “You were correct about that. Because Gregory Place is magic, right? For a little while, I can be friends with a princess. I can adventure across the countryside, across the world.” She crossed her arms, her breath getting shorter and shorter. “But then my time runs out with the last of my money, and Gregory Place turns out to be just a musty,leaking inn in a place everyone else in England has forgotten about. I’m guessing your mom didn’t stay long enough to figure that out.”
She unbuttoned her jacket and slid it off, her throat caught in a vise of self-recrimination and hopeless, unanswered anger that was too familiar.
Grandiosity. Her mother liked to say that Green Baywasn’t good enoughfor Edie, but this place was too good for her.
None of this—the stone carvings and tall women with pretty eyes and European treasure hunts—was for her. She was a cut-rate tourist on a self-pity vacation. She handed the jacket to Cosima. “I don’t want this. It’s too nice of a gift.”
“I don’t want it either.”
She folded the jacket and set it down on the floor. “I’m just going to walk back, okay?”
Edie didn’t wait to hear whatever Cosima might say. She stomped away in a fugue of unnecessary drama and unregulated feelings like one of the foxes she’d seen, its winter coat coming off in rags, its ears and tail low, trotting away as though a woman on a walk might attack it.
Or, truly, more like a startled frog escaping into a pond with a messy splash.
