Sixty or so headstones poked up through the grass, arranged in ranks that climbed a small hill. I led her to a grave in the second row, third from the right, the inscription worn from seventy years of rain.
“Holy shit,” she said. “It’s you.”
5
“My namesake, yes.”
Faraday crouched before the gravestone, touching the letters. “Oh, that’s sad—this Jessica only made it to age nine.”
“That’s why. When Mortons die young, we use the name again. Like being reincarnated.”
“So sweet. Or maybe creepy?” Faraday looked up at me. “How do you feel about it?”
I decided to be honest. “I love her.”
“Youloveher? A dead kid.”
I nodded, feeling my old connection with the weathered stone. All those conversations when I was little: a space for my fears, my uncertainties. All the things I couldn’t say to the living.
“She never told on me.”
“Makes sense,” Faraday said. “Wait—this reincarnation thing is why you have those names!”
I looked at her. “Those names?”
“Next year I’m housemates with a Hopper, a Salinger, a Dutton, and an India.”
“And you’re a Faraday.”
“Exactly! While you legacy kids are all: Sebastian, Jessica, Xavier, Leopold. Like, who calls their kidOrrin?”
I gestured. “There’s an Orrin in the last row. The 1910s.”
“Of course there is.” Faraday said this with a smile, but shivered alittle as she turned away. She walked down the row of headstones, reading out more names, like an incantation.
She’d need a proper drink when we got back to our rooms. But when the chill of the hidden graveyard faded, Faraday would recall how my family stretched into the past. There was solidity in this field of stones.
“Wait a second,” she said. “Nobody’s older than ten!”
“Yes.” The Little Graveyard was reserved for failures.
That Jessica was born under the old tradition, when children were culled if they couldn’t complete their mors curae.
Spare the rabbit, slay the child. No second chances back then.
Or rather,Iwas her second chance—the third, in fact. There was another Jessica farther up the hill, where the forest brush wasn’t cleared away, the end of the nineteenth century.
Being a Morton has never been easy.
I knelt before the grave, pulling a small weight from my pocket. The last of the stones I’d placed on the ledge of the Physics Lounge window, the one I hadn’t needed to throw.
When I’d gone back to check if the police had dusted the lounge for fingerprints—they hadn’t—it was still there.
I placed the stone above Jessica’s name.
“We made it.”
The other Jessicas would never feel what I felt now—this sense of completion. They’d lost their way.
