Eternity

Crow could feel the vision coming as he pulled out of Em’s driveway. Maybe, if he drove fast enough, he could get home before it hit. He was getting used to the seeping sensation in his brain, the tingling, then the sharp, pricking pain as strange images took over. The visions had only been getting worse, more painful. Now he felt like his head was trapped in a vise. The road swam and blurred.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He pulled over about a mile from Em’s house. It was a moonless night, and the woods loomed like black walls outside the windows. Tightening his hands around the pickup’s steering wheel, Crow breathed deeply. Pain exploded in his head. Starbursts. Colors.

It was coming. Soon, soon . . .

Drea was dead. He still couldn’t believe it. She’d died in a fire Crow had somehow
known
was going to happen. Just like he’d known that something bad was going to happen to school pariah Sasha Bowlder . . . and that something even worse was bubbling beneath the surface here in Ascension.

Em was in trouble—he’d told her as much, just a few minutes ago, in her bedroom. Crow tried to push aside the memory of how shell-shocked Em had looked, how pale and thin, and how badly he’d wanted to reach out and hold her. Instead, he’d repeated what Drea had told him:
You’re becoming one of them.

Em had to know. Drea had been trying to save Emily Winters from turning into a Fury. Instead, she had burned to death in the Ascension High School gym.

The smell of ash seemed to be following him everywhere. Crow felt constricted, constrained suddenly, his lungs tight—he needed to be outside. He swung open the driver’s-side door, its rusty whine echoing through the forest.

Gravel crunched below his boots as he stepped onto the road, and his headache redoubled, sending him stumbling backward until his hands were braced against the bed of the pickup. He closed his eyes and leaned back, succumbing to the dizziness.

Mirrors. There are mirrors in front of him, behind him, all around him. But it’s not his own reflection he sees. It’s Em. Beautiful, clear-eyed Em swirls in the glass. She is dancing with herself, but not herself.
Another girl—she has lithe limbs, brown-black hair, eyelashes like tiny feathers. But she’s not Em. They are almost identical, but something is off.

Crow felt his knees contract, then turn to liquid and give way. He was on all fours, panting for breath as small, sharp pebbles dug into his palms. Smoke. He smelled smoke. He was choking on it.

The glass shatters with one high-pitched scream. Smoke is everywhere, choking him. Emerging from the shards are three blackbirds, their wings flapping noiselessly as they disappear into the night.

Crow gasped, the vision leaving him in a final flood of heat. As he stood shakily, brushing the gravel off his hands, one crystal thought emerged from the smoke and chaos in his head:
I must protect her.

SLEEPLESSNESS, OR THE SCARS

It happened so quickly. The socket sent out a small shower of sparks. JD jerked his hand away but not fast enough; pain surged in his fingers, and he could feel heat-induced goose bumps ripple down his arm.
Damn it.
He blew on his fingers, shaking them in front of his chest.
That’s gonna leave a mark.

JD stared down into the space between the hood and the headlight, noting the way he’d have to twist his hand in order to place the new bulb exactly right—without burning off his fingerprints, ideally. These lights were delicate; you didn’t want to handle them too much before they went into their sockets, otherwise they’d flame out in a matter of days. It was hard for him to be careful lately—he felt like he would squeeze and crack anything he touched.

This morning was especially bad. He’d been leaning over the old Mustang for an hour, fiddling under the hood with this knob and that piece of wire . . . but in reality he’d just been enjoying the metallic silence. His arms were bare against the damp spring morning and his jeans were covered in black smears of oil and dirt. He’d have to go inside and change soon; he knew that. You couldn’t show up to a funeral covered in grease. But he was putting it off as long as he could.

“JD? JD, honey, don’t you think it’s time to come in?” His mother’s voice—gentle, tentative—floated out to the driveway. He looked down and realized that he’d had a death-grip on the screwdriver for who knows how long. He threw it forcefully into the metal toolbox, where it landed with a clang. As he flexed and unflexed his hand, he headed toward the house. Apparently he couldn’t put it off any longer.

For the first time maybe ever, JD regretted his clothes: too many colors, too many patterns. Not one nice button-down, not one tie that didn’t feature sunglasses or turtles or something funny. Did he really own
nothing
he could wear to Drea Feiffer’s memorial service?

He’d have to swipe something from his dad’s closet. His dad was a lot bigger, and JD would look like a kid playing dress-up, but he
already
felt like he was playing dress-up—trying on someone else’s life, maybe. At least sometimes he wished he was. At any second he expected he might wake up and find that the
past week, since Spring Fling and the fire that had consumed Ascension High School’s gym and Drea’s death, had just been some awful hallucination.

One week. One week of floating, bad dreams, and sickening guilt. A week since he’d rescued Em from the smoke and flames—and in doing so, left Drea behind. A shudder of guilt ran along his spine. He flung open his dad’s closet door and tried to focus on the silk ties, all variations of blacks, blues, browns, and grays.

School was closed for two days after the accident; even when it reopened, Em did not return.
She’s going to take the week and see how she feels,
JD heard Em’s mom, Susan Winters, say to his parents one night. Theories ran rampant at school: Em’s lungs were permanently scarred due to smoke inhalation. She was horribly burned in the fire, doomed to be disfigured forever. The doctors had cut off all of Em’s long, beautiful dark hair in order to address the blisters on her scalp and neck.

JD knew none of that was true. Em’s trauma was mental—she’d been struck by the deaths, in quick succession, of Sasha Bowlder and Chase Singer late last year. And now . . . Drea and Em had only recently become close, but JD sensed that both girls had bonded quickly—that Drea had become really important to Em. Which, frankly, surprised JD. Just this past Christmas, Em was still cracking jokes about Drea’s uniform when they went to the movies.

But something had obviously changed in Em since then. Something had changed in Ascension.

He hadn’t spoken with Em in a week. He’d seen her only once, just out of his periphery: the wisp of a figure flitting past the window in her room, which directly faced his. She’d looked like a ghost; he might not have even noticed if it wasn’t for her long brown hair. But he knew he’d probably see her at the church today, honoring their friend Drea: Drea of the half-shaved head and black nail polish and clove cigarette smell and dripping sarcasm.

His throat tightened up. Jesus. He was going to miss her.

He needed to talk to Em today, and know that she was okay. He couldn’t bear to lose her, too.

JD selected a navy-blue tie to go with the gray suit he’d unearthed from the back of his dad’s closet. It was vintage—pinstripe—but not over the top. Fumbling with the knot as he faced his parents’ mirror, JD gave himself a once-over. He hardly recognized himself in his father’s clothing. It might have been a stranger in the mirror: hair slicked back, fifties-style glasses, polished black shoes. Like one of those ad guys on
Mad Men
. JD wondered momentarily whether Em watched that show—whether she’d think he looked okay in a suit—and then hated himself for being so shallow.

He took a deep breath, then headed downstairs—going as slowly as possible, as if he could delay the inevitable.

“Poor Walt,” JD’s mom said as they piled into the family station wagon. “First his wife . . . now Drea . . . ”

“He’s going to fall apart,” his dad said matter-of-factly as usual. “He’s barely been holding it together these past few years.” Mr. Fount and Mr. Feiffer knew each other from work—JD’s dad bought fish for his restaurant from Walt Feiffer’s seafood warehouse down on the waterfront in Portland. Over the years, Mr. Fount had made little comments here and there, about how Drea’s dad smelled like booze early in the morning, or how he once saw him crying over a bucket of clams.

“It’s a terrible coincidence. . . . ” His mom trailed off, fiddling with her seat belt.

“What is?” Melissa piped up from the backseat.

“Well, it’s just that . . . he caused an accident a few years ago. It was a fire—and Drea was almost hurt. He was drinking then, too. But now . . . ”

“Let’s just leave it at that, Mom,” JD said.

In the backseat on the way to the memorial service, he watched the thawing landscape whirring past the car window.
Everything is changing.

Truth was, any one of them could have died in the gym. It could have been
his
funeral today, and the only thing he’d have to show for his barely seventeen years on Earth would be a pile of stellar report cards, a few credits in school-play programs for lighting gigs, and years of romantic regrets. Well, just one regret, really.

Em. He’d known her his whole life and yet, weirdly, he seemed to understand her less and less. He was sure that he’d seen her making out with another guy that night at the Behemoth, the night of the bonfire, the night he heard her laughing at him. And not just any guy. This guy, Crow, was up for Asshole of the Year.

Em had gone from one jerk (Zach) to another (Crow), and just when JD had started to believe he might have a chance. It was infuriating and humiliating, and yet . . .

He had to get past all that, somehow. Because there was simply no way around it: JD loved Em. Always had.
Always.

No matter what happened.

They’d grown up next door to each other; their parents had been close since their college days in Orono. From vacationing to carpooling to potlucking, the families did everything together, and JD and Emily had been inseparable as children. But not like brother and sister.

Maybe that was because he already
had
a sister.

He glanced over at thirteen-year-old Melissa, who sat next to him in the backseat, texting. Her face bore that signature expression of preternatural, blissed-out focus, the look that meant she was probably going to still be texting—or chatting or IMing or whatever—for the rest of the night. His younger sister had, without question, gotten 100 percent of the Fount sociability genes.

Mel didn’t even know Drea, not really, except for running
into her the few times she’d come over to study. But JD had insisted that his whole family come to the funeral, and his parents agreed this was best. They had a way of sensing when someone needed them, and they’d always seemed to have that sense around Drea, probably because they felt bad for her—they knew her mother had died ages ago and her father was pretty much mentally MIA. The times Drea had been at the Fount household, his parents had gone out of their way to make her comfortable.

Or maybe that was because they’d assumed she and JD were dating.

Either way, here they all were, coming to the funeral, sharing in the agonizing discomfort of it. And JD was grateful for that.

He knew he was lucky to have them.

Still, the only person he really wanted to see right now was Em.