But his personality had edges, too, like a jewel, or a blade. When he liked things, hereallyliked them; when he hated things, he was funny about it, but deadly earnest. He claimed to loathe children (“Why?” he said simply, usually when a toddler was screaming nearby), the song “Don’t Cry Out Loud” (“theworstsong in the world”), restrictions on his freedom, and anything that smacked of “romance,” which he claimed was a construct designed to makeeveryonefeel inadequate and to divest idiot men of their money. He’d had nothing but good-natured scorn when she’d told him about her fantasy of slow dancing on Devil’s Leap to what she thought of as her namesake song, Roxy Music’s “Avalon.”
“Oh, Avalon. That’s just ridiculous. No one actually does that kind of thing in real life.”
She wasn’t offended. She was amused. Nor was she swayed. She was no fragile flower. And she’d always sensed that at his core was unequivocal regard for her, no matter what she said or did.
Things he loved: his Ritchey P-29 mountain bike, freedom, Devil’s Leap, and, she’d thought, her.
He’d never said that last one out loud, though.
And Mac Coltrane had cratered her heart when she was seventeen.
So maybe “magic” was just another way of saying innocence. And innocence was another way of saying “pain.”
And so in the end she supposed the death of magic was a mercy visited upon adults, because she never wanted to feel that kind of pain again.
She supposed she had herself to blame, though maybe that was a mercy, too: an unworthy curiosity had led to her being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be when Mac had uttered words that, much like the meteor that had supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs, changed her entire world.
As for Mac, well, his whole life had cratered rather spectacularly—and publicly—just a few years after that.
Google had never been forthcoming about what had become of him—he didn’t even have a Facebook page. Though that could be for privacy reasons, given that he was Dixon Coltrane’s son. If he Googledhertoday, he’d find the SilliPutty photo of her perched on a desk dangling an orange pump from her toe, her devoted boyfriend beaming over her shoulder, the very personification of modern love and success.
So she supposed that meant that she’d won in the end. She’d showedhim.
Why then did her entire life feel so... haphazard?
She lay musing, one cheek under her hand, and mulled. She’d had dreams. How was it that she wasn’t living any of them? She craved, suddenly, to do somethingdeliberately. From the very beginning to the very end. Like her brother Jude, who had planned to be a doctor and was now a doctor, or like her friend Rachel, who was now looking for property to expand her burgeoning leadership training empire.
Avalon levered her torso slowly up from the bed like a mummy rising from a sarcophagus.
She sat like that, in the dark, her elbows on her knees. Animated not by a curse... but by an idea.
She leaned over the side of the bed and yanked her laptop from its case. She cradled it in her lap for an instant. As if giving herself an opportunity to change her mind.
Tentatively, she powered it on.
Then typed a few words in the search engine window.
Her palms were already damp.
When she hit Enter, the bright rectangle of the screen in the dark of her little room was a window onto her past.
And maybe a window onto her future.
Once she knew what she needed to know, she exhaled the breath she didn’t know she was holding. And then powered the laptop off and clapped the lid closed.
The old digital alarm clock next to her bed read two thirty a.m.; she set it for seven.
And when she lowered herself back to the bed, her heart was pounding exactly the way it had the first time she’d taken that jump off Devil’s Leap.
