Chapter Fourteen #2
Unsettling, she thought. But at the same time, so strangely lovely—most likely because she could still see the emotion beneath. It stirred beneath the surface. It spoke just to her. Concern, she thought she could make out, and then a little ruefulness.
“To be fair, I’ve had almost ten years,” he said, and when he did she thought of how weird he’d been back when he had first appeared and she had started to see him around town. How strangely he’d reacted to simple things. How gradually he’d gotten better…
But that just made her even more sad than she already felt.
“Don’t say that like ten years makes you hopeless.”
“Well, I mean, doesn’t it? That’s a long time to not grasp the basics.”
“Dude, that long time you’re talking about isn’t even enough for ninety percent of kids who are actually born human.
Have you seen teenagers when it comes to anything remotely to do with romance or sex?
” she asked. Then she sat right back on her heels, and waited for that to sink in for him.
She even gave him a very pointed eyebrow raise and a look over the top of her glasses to make sure of it.
And he squirmed.
He tried to say something in protest.
But eventually he sagged. He sighed.
“You wouldn’t believe the number of things humans just take as a given,” he said, in such a weird Jack sort of voice that it made her gleeful. Because, yeah, he looked very different right now. True, he sounded very different. But somehow he was completely the same, at the same time.
He had hidden this body and face and voice from her.
But he hadn’t hidden himself. He hadn’t hidden his soul .
And apparently, souls were a real thing.
A lot of things were real. They were real, and cool, and now she could find out about every single one of them.
Or at least relearn a lot of things about them.
Because she was starting to suspect that she’d known a lot more about these things as a kid than she’d ever let herself think about.
She’d crushed it down. But it was all there, waiting to be confirmed.
“I totally wouldn’t. Tell me every single one. Starting at the beginning.”
“Man, it almost sounds like you’re giddy about this.”
“Because I am . All the weirdness I feared and hid from and pushed away turned out to be real, instead of something that made me worry I’m not right somehow.
Like the human things you didn’t know but should have, like the closet, the lights, the creature I thought I saw on the road.
The feelings I’ve been having.” She closed her eyes.
Shook her head as her understanding expanded.
“ God , the feelings I’ve always had. It’s the feelings I’ve always had, right.
When I was a kid, it was all… it was all something, wasn’t it, before I squashed it down.
I’m something. Oh wow, I must be something.
I must be, that’s the way it works; that’s how you see supernatural things. ”
“It is. And you are.”
“Do you know what I am?”
“I do. But honestly, so do you,” he said, and she went to shake her head.
But the moment she did, everything seemed to slow, and then stop.
Time rolled backward in her mind’s eye, and there it all was.
She could see everything, like it was okay to now.
It was safe to look at herself, as she had been.
At age seven, racing around the garden while wearing a pointy hat and striped pantyhose and a fluttery black dress, a broomstick always in one hand, until her parents took it away.
Reading books about girls who could do incredible things, and feeling it resonate like nothing else.
Feeling like those words were her guides, her parents, her community, in a way reality just wasn’t.
Then more things, weirder, all that she’d tried to deny.
How she had scribbled stories just like the ones she’d loved, and then suddenly found that they were spilling off the pages. First just the letters, marching and spiraling over the margins. But then something else, something more, the ideas that hid behind the words.
Until finally, she tried to do it on purpose.
She had thought of some girl in a fantasy world with a talking animal for a friend. Then held her breath, and wrote down the words let me hear you , while at the bottom of her garden, amongst the frogs and mice and other tiny things.
And she knew now that she had.
It hadn’t been her imagination.
She did not deserve the punishment she’d gotten for saying what she’d heard woodland creatures say.
Hello, friend , they had said to her, no matter what her dad had done when she’d told him so.
And it had been the same for the chair she’d turned into a toadstool, the TV she’d made play even after he’d taken the cord away, the vegetables she’d turned into cakes after they’d sent her to that place.
Though that last one hadn’t been in ink.
They’d taken her paper by then. They’d taken her pens.
Her weapons, Jack had called them. The only weapons she had. And he’d been right. Because she remembered now what it was like to be without them for the first time. That fresh feeling of being stripped of them, of being so scared, of being in that place with nothing to protect her.
From real threats, too.
Those monsters she’d always imagined coming out of the shadows, the words she’d written down to protect herself, the closet—it had all happened.
It had still happened in that hospital. She remembered feeling so trapped between doctors who wanted to force her magic out of her, and monsters she needed to use magic against.
Screaming for help from any of the things she’d ever conjured up, that she’d ever called with her stories, and being sure they couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Only they had. Oh god, something had.
That had been true, too. Not a fantasy of someone saving her.
A savior that she had made or brought to her somehow.
My god, I’m more than Dorothy getting back to Oz , she thought.
“Oh my goodness,” she said as it sank in, slow and good. “I’m a witch .”