They looked like my family, spoke in familiar ways, but my blood refused to recognize them. Each visiting Morton moved as if their skin belonged to someone else. Us, transformed into not-us.
Bellamy visited me several times a day, always avoiding them. She made me anxious too, though in an opposite way. We were connected, as if my heart was outside my body, fragile and exposed. Another car crash waiting to happen.
“Your cousins remind me of slongers,” Bellamy said one day, having come in to steal a flower from my nightstand.
“Slongers aren’t real.”
“Exactly.” She took the flower—brilliant purple wolfsbane—and went away.
A search on my new phone found a condition called Capgras syndrome, in which the patient believes that a close relative (friend, pet) has been replaced by an impostor, a perfect copy.
I saw how we didn’t fit in among the nurses, the doctors, the other patients. Even the two members of Gertie’s pod who came to visit (bearing a Get Well card that read, “Alas, no flowers, but one couldn’t find the right shade”) seemed normal compared to my cousins, aunts, and uncles.
But my family weren’t impostors. They—we—were the same as always. It was my eyes that had changed.
A day beforeI left the hospital, Thomas came to visit.
When he appeared in my doorway, I expected to see an elder behind him. But Tom was seventeen now—he’d done his first wrack, and would be at Helshire in a month. He’d driven himself.
He dragged a chair to my bedside and unpacked a picnic. Early harvest apples—Gravensteins and Cox’s Orange Pippins. Bacon sandwiches, on sourdough bread from a Civil War–era starter kept in the darkness of the Great House’s wine cellar. Sweet, raw milk from Beatrice’s cows.
“What classes should I take?” he asked before his first bite. “And don’t say Accounting.”
I put my knitting aside. “Accounting.”
He rolled his sharp blue eyes. “Because we all want to work in art galleries.”
“You can launder money anywhere. That’s the beauty of math—it works the same throughout the universe.” The milk tasted of grass and sunlight. “Are you asking for the best combat course?”
“No.” He took another bite, chewed it thoughtfully. “History.”
This was new. Tom loved driving fast cars, hunting turkeys, and washing down the killing floor with a pressure hose.
“The history of what?”
“The Late Bronze Age,” he said. “The Uffington people, when the Romans invaded. How we survived.”
I remembered little Thomas on his first nightwalk, worried that we’drun into a coven of urban witches in Central Park. “Since when do you like druids?”
“They weren’t druids. They were us.”
That’s when I noticed—Tom didn’t look like the rest of my family. His eyes were right-side up. His skin was his own. Maybe my head was clearing.
Or maybe Tom was different.
“You should study ordinary history first,” I said. “That’s what Hendrik Wolvaardt told me, freshman year. I scoffed then, but now I think he was right.”
Thomas’s eyes drifted up to my shorn hair, like this was my injury talking.
“The world is ordinary,” I said.
“That’s why everyone takes No Drama.”
“That class isbullshit.” The word came out with an unexpected intensity. “In New York, I kept saying the wrong things. There was so much I didn’t know.”
He sighed. “So I have to take some class about World War Two?”
“Thomas, your Great-granduncle Mark was killed in the Blitz. Ordinary history is our history.”
