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Something rose inside me then. Something brave. I don't really know why. I guess it was just that there were certain things I wasn't in the mood for anymore.

And the time to be polite and well behaved felt like it had gone. So I put the breakfast tray down on the bed, and I sat down myself, quite close to her.

“Get off my bed this instant!” she whined.

I told her that I had something to say, and then without waiting for her permission, I said it:

“First of all, Cordelia, I never want to hear you talk about Maggie McGuire like that again.”

“Oh, really? And what will you do about it?”

I'm not a million percent proud of the way I behaved after she said that, but she was being pretty provocative.

I toppled the tray over, and the bacon smeared greasy stains on her frilly white bed and egg dripped in yellow plops and the teapot crashed to the floor. Cordelia started ringing this stupid little bell and shouting, “Help, help!”

I took the bell away from her and told her to shut up.

“Do you know that there are kids not much older than you all over this country, working every day until their knuckles bleed? Do you know that one Maggie McGuire is worth, like, about five million Cordelia Corporamores?”

Cordelia was quiet for ages then and she looked out
the window, and I explained how even when people acted politely to her, it was only because they felt they had to. It wasn't actually because they wanted to or anything. And I asked her how she thought she would feel if people behaved toward her the way she behaved toward everyone else. I'm not sure how long my lecture went on for. All I know is that once I started, I found it more or less impossible to stop.

She said she was going to have me kicked out of Blackbrick, and I was all like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.”

And then I asked her why she was always so mean. She said it was none of my business but that if I must know, she'd had a rotten time in her short life. She said that everyone basically ignored her. That she had had a brother who'd died.

So then it struck me that it might be quite lousy to be her, too, which was another big first for me in the realization stakes.

“Cordelia, you need to know something: there comes a time when you've got to stop using your past as a license to do whatever you want. There comes a time when you have to get over things like that and get on with being the best person you can be. If you let the past determine your future, you're probably screwed.”

You don't always know how true something is until you say it out loud to someone else.

I was beginning to feel a bit bad about the mess I'd made in her room. I started cleaning up. And then, quite surprisingly,
Cordelia got out of her bed and began to help me.

“Am I really so very dreadful?”

The way she said it was kind of trembly and unsure, and her voice sounded little and shocked, the way someone's voice is when they've just realized something about themselves that they'd prefer not to have known.

“Yes, you are. Dreadful. That's pretty much the word, but the good thing is, you see, that now that you know, you have your whole life ahead of you to do something about it.”

And that was when Cordelia Corporamore, the spoiledest brat I'd ever met, said something to me that I'd definitely never heard her say before. She said she was sorry. She went even further than that. She said that she didn't know how Kevin and Maggie and me had put up with her for all these months. She said that her horrible behavior was like a prison that she couldn't get out of. I told her she should consider herself lucky, because if she thought about it for a second, it was the kind of prison that she could easily walk away from whenever she wanted.

“Look at me,” I said to her. “I'm stuck here. This is a real prison for me. I used to have a key to get out of it, but your father took it off me one night last winter and now I think I'm pretty much here for good, and I want to go home, but I don't think there's anything I can do.”

“I am a dreadful person and I'm bitter, and I was jealous of the three of you,” she said as if she hadn't been listening.

“Jealous of us?”

“Yes,” she said. “You were always having such a tremendous time, and I felt left out. I wanted to spoil your fun. That's what Blackbrick does to people. It makes people hard and cruel, and I think that everyone should try to stay away from here as much as they possibly can.”

“Thanks, Cordelia. Thanks for the advice. I have to go now.” She looked very small and actually a little bit pretty. “I hope you have a nice life,” I said.

“I hope you do too,” she said back, and I walked away, closing the door quite gently behind me.

Chapter 19

WHEN YOU'VE decided to leave a place, you get a new energy and it swirls around you like a force field and affects everything. But I didn't know if there was anything I could do to get out. I went down to the south gates and I shook them just as I had done before. A strange, faint smell of something urgent and hopeless lurked in the air. And I really did think that I was always going to be the ghost of the future, stuck in an endless routine in Blackbrick.

But sometimes you get a gift just when you need it most, and the person who brings it is often the person you least expect it to be.

It was right after that despairing session at the gates, and when I was walking back up the south driveway, kicking bits of gravel here and there, that I saw someone running toward me. I hoped it was Maggie, come to tell me all the things she wanted to say, like that she had heard that I was trying to leave and to beg me: “Cosmo, don't go, my life doesn't make sense without you, etc.” But as you know, the people who run toward you at Blackbrick are often not the people you want them to be, and this time it was Cordelia.

She was holding something. The thing she was holding was small and silver and bent and dented. She handed it to me. She was out of breath and she put her hands on her knees and panted there for a little while. “Listen,” she said, “just listen. This is the key—the one to the south gates that you need.” I obviously already knew that. She told me that she had stolen it from her father. If he ever found out, she was going to be in serious trouble.

“You can get out whenever you like now,” she said.

I guess I should have felt happy, but I didn't know what I felt anymore. Lots of things. Tired, mainly.

She said I shouldn't waste too much time. There wasn't much point in waiting around, especially now that I had everything I needed. She was sorry about the cruel things she'd thought about Maggie. She said that I should go and visit Maggie to say good-bye because it's important to say good-bye to your friends when you're leaving somewhere. So that's what I did.

“Hi, guys,” I said, smiling. I tried my best to be really cheerful, but Maggie must have sensed something in me, because immediately she asked me what was wrong.

“I'm leaving,” I said. She stood in front of me with baby Nora squashed up all warm and tight in her arms.

I brushed a couple of little strands of hair away from Maggie's face again then, and I tried to tuck some of it behind her ears, so that I was nearly holding her face with
both my hands and looking at her. I touched the bridge of Nora's very small nose. The baby sighed her own shuddery little sigh, but she didn't open her eyes or anything.

Gorgeous. That's what she was. That's what they both were.

I didn't tell them, even though I wanted to. I wanted to say, “Maggie, you are beautiful and you are strong and you are great, and you can do anything you want in your life.” There was a funny old camera in Mrs. Kelly's room with a zigzag accordion telescope instead of a zoom lens. I asked Maggie if it was okay if I took a photo of the two of them. Maggie stared straight into the camera all serious, not even trying to smile, with Nora's little velvet head snuggled up close. Taking the camera with me would have been stealing, so I put it back on the shelf, wishing that I could have done something a bit more effective to hang on to the moment. At the last minute I asked her if there was a chance she and Kevin and the baby would come with me.

“Cosmo,” she said, “I'd love to. It's just . . .” She looked down at the sleeping Nora, and I guess she didn't need to explain. The thing is that people who've recently had babies have different priorities than boys do. And it really doesn't matter whether they are boys from the past, boys from the present, or boys from the future.

The very last thing I ever said to Maggie was that I'd definitely see her again.

Which is lousy when you think about it.

Because I never did.

Kevin couldn't believe it was Cordelia who'd given me the key. I said I was definitely leaving, and he said he guessed he'd known that this day would come again sooner or later. I asked if he'd go with me to the gates. “Sure, of course I will,” he said, and we jogged down the driveway as if it was something we had done together every day for our whole lives. He said he was sorry about how cross he'd been with me about Maggie and the baby. He told me he knew none of it was my fault and that I had been a great help and that I'd never been in the way and that the only reason he'd said I had been was because he was angry. He said he didn't think Maggie was his girl anymore, and I said he should try not to worry about it too much.

He asked me what I was planning to do. We slowed down when we got to the end near the old south gate lodge.

“Who knows what the future holds?” I said, like I was some kind of walking cliché. I told him I was pretty confused, that everything felt completely random and I knew I needed to get out but I wasn't sure where I was going to go. I told him I was lost and there were a lot of things I hadn't a clue about.

I wanted to tell him about everything he meant to me, and I wanted him to put his arm around me and share his cleverness with me and make everything better. But he was still only a kid, and there are times when you want people to do things that they can't actually do.

I told him I had some advice for him, and I asked him to listen very carefully because I was only going to say it once. I said that he should keep exercising and do crosswords and keep reading books and have plenty of friends. Write everything down. And think about his past and all the important moments in his life and good things that he did and the exciting things that happened. And have a positive mental attitude and don't get distressed or anxious if he says something that other people don't understand or believe.