Bea laughs. “You always overthink things, Henry.” She looks out over the fire escape. “I don’t know, I guess I just mean I’d want to be happy with myself. Satisfied. What about you?”
He thinks of lying, doesn’t. “I think I’d want to be loved.”
Bea looks at him, then, eyes swirling with frost, and even through the mist, she looks suddenly, immeasurably sad. “You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
Henry’s mouth goes dry.
She’s right. Of course she’s right.
And he’s an idiot, trapped in a world where nothing’s real.
Bea knocks her shoulder against his. “Come back in,” she says. “Find someone to kiss before midnight. It’s good luck.”
She rises, waiting, but Henry can’t bring himself to stand.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You go.”
And he knows it’s the deal he’s made, knows it’s what she sees and not what he is—but he’s still relieved when Bea sits back down, and leans against him, a best friend staying with him in the dark. And soon the music dims, and the voices rise, and Henry can hear the countdown at their back.
Ten, nine, eight.
Oh god.
Seven, six, five.
What has he done?
Four, three, two.
It’s going too fast.
One.
The air fills with whistles and cheers and wishes and Bea presses her lips against his, a moment of warmth against the cold. Just like that, the year is gone, the clocks reset, a three replaced by a four, and Henry knows that he has made a terrible mistake.
He has asked the wrong god for the wrong thing, and now he is enough because he is nothing. He is perfect, because he isn’t there.
“It’s going to be a good year,” says Bea. “I can feel it.” She sighs a plume of fog into the air between them. “Fuck, it’s freezing.” She stands, rubbing her hands. “Let’s go in.”
“You go ahead,” he says, “I’ll be there soon.”
And she believes him, her steps clanking as she crosses the fire escape and slips back through the window, leaving it open for him to follow.
Henry sits there, alone in the dark, until he cannot stand the cold.
XVIII
New York City
Winter 2014
Henry gives up.
Resigns himself to the prism of his deal, which he has come to think of as a curse. He tries—to be a better friend, a better brother, a better son, tries to forget the meaning of the fog in people’s eyes, tries to pretend that it is real, that he is real.
And then, one day, he meets a girl.
She walks into the store and steals a book, and when he catches her in the street, and she turns to look at him, there is no frost, no film, no wall of ice. Just clear brown eyes in a heart-shaped face, seven freckles scattered across her cheeks like stars.
And Henry thinks it must be a trick of the light, but she comes back the next day, and there it is again. The absence. Not just an absence, either, but something in its place.
A presence, a solid weight, the first steady pull he’s felt in months. The strength of someone else’s gravity.
Another orbit.
And when the girl looks at him, she doesn’t see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse.
She sees the truth, and he doesn’t know how, or why, only knows that he doesn’t want it to end.
Because for the first time in months, in years, in his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn’t feel cursed at all.
For the first time, he feels seen.
XIX
New York City
March 18, 2014
There is only one exhibit left.
As the light thins, Henry and Addie hand over their blue rubber bands and step into a space composed only of plexiglass. The clear walls rise in rows. They remind him of the stacks in a library, or at the store, but there are no books, only a sign mounted in the air overhead that reads:
YOU ARE THE ART
Bowls of neon paint sit out in every aisle, and sure enough the walls are covered in markings. Signatures and scribbles, handprints and patterns.
Some run the length of the wall, and others are nested, like secrets, inside the larger marks. Addie dips a finger in green paint, and brings it to the wall. She draws a spiral, a single expanding mark. But by the time she reaches the fourth loop, the first has already faded, dropping away like a pebble in deep water.
Impossible, erased.
Her face doesn’t falter, doesn’t fall, but he can see the sadness before it drops as well, sinking out of sight.
How do you hold on? he wants to ask. Instead, he dips his hand into the green paint, reaches past her, but he doesn’t draw anything. Instead, he waits, hovering above the glass.
“Put your hand over mine,” he says, and she hesitates only a moment before pressing her palm to the back of his hand, ghosting her fingers over his own. “There,” he says, “now we can draw.”
She folds her hand over his, guides his index finger to the glass, and leaves a single mark, a line of green. He can feel the air lodge in her chest, can feel the sudden stiffness in her limbs, as she waits for it to disappear.
But it doesn’t.
It stays, staring back at them in that fearless shade.
Something breaks inside her, then.
She makes a second mark, and a third, lets out a breathless laugh, and then, her hand on his, and his on the glass, Addie begins to draw. For the first time in three hundred years, she draws birds, and trees, draws a garden, draws a workshop, draws a city, draws a pair of eyes. The images spill out of her, and through him, and onto the wall with a clumsy, frenzied need. And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.
And then she dips his finger in the paint, and brings it to the pane of glass, and this time, she writes in halting cursive, one letter at a time.
Her name.
It sits, nested among the many drawings.
Addie LaRue
Ten letters, two words. It is no different, he thinks, from the hundred other marks they’ve made—but it is. He knows it is.
Her hand drops away from his, and she reaches out, runs her fingers through the letters, and for a moment, the name is ruined, streaks of green against the glass. But by the time her fingers fall away, it is back, unmarred, unchanged.
Something changes in her, then. It rolls over her, the way storms roll over him, but this is different, this is not dark, but dazzling, a sudden, piercing sharpness.
And then she is pulling him away. Away from the maze, away from the people stretched beneath the starless night, away from the carnival of art, and the island, and he realizes she is not pulling him away at all, but toward something.
Toward the ferry.
Toward the subway.
Toward Brooklyn.
Toward home.
The whole way, she holds tightly to Henry, their fingers intertwined, the green paint staining both their hands, as they climb the stairs, as he opens the door, and then, she lets go, surging past him, through the apartment. He finds her in the bedroom, pulling a blue notebook from the shelf, scrounging a pen from the table. She presses them both into his hands, and Henry sinks onto the edge of the bed, folds back the cover of the notebook, one of a dozen he’s never used, and she kneels, breathless, beside him.