CHAPTER FOUR #2
“I’m sorry, but no,” Del repeated before ushering me toward a fudge cart across the lane.
“What was that about?” I asked, glancing back at the stricken-looking soap lady.
Del waved a hand. “Oh, that was nothing. You need to try the peanut butter–marshmallow fudge. I know we just had cookies, but it’s mind-blowing.”
I didn’t know Del beyond her love of beaded bracelets and misleading oatmeal cookies. But as someone painfully familiar with pushing aside discomfort, I knew better than to press.
Instead, I lifted the sleeve of my white tee and switched to something she seemed more than eager to talk about. “So, that legend you mentioned. Could it affect items?” I angled the watch toward Del.
“Ooh, fancy,” she said.
“Very. But that stuff you said about the cascara triangle and Sacred being full of traces of . . . something. Since I got here, this has been acting strangely. It might be broken, and I can’t set the time. I was wondering if you’d ever heard of anything weird happening to objects?”
“You mean like—wait,” she said, leaning closer. “It doesn’t look like this thing is totally broken. The hand is moving.”
Before I could stop her, Del had reached out and was winding the little crown.
All of Cedar Street and the bounds of my consciousness dissolved as the ghost boy appeared a few yards away from Del and me. Penn was right there, circling his gaze around the bustling scene.
I yanked my hand back, the pulse of shock ten times more potent than it had been after I’d left the antique shop. “It’s okay. I’ll play with it later.”
But it wasn’t okay. Penn was here. The watch had summoned a ghost in the middle of the street.
How long had the second hand been ticking under my sleeve? The whole time we ate cookies and strolled through the market? Del, on the other hand, seemed more concerned about me than the boy who’d just appeared out of thin air.
She never turned or trained her focus away from my face.
If she did see Penn, she didn’t single him out amidst the crowd of shoppers and packs of kids running and flying around on skateboards.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to find out—at least not now.
Not here. My original idea to see if Del could give any insight to the golden mystery around my wrist shifted into white-hot fear.
“Sylvie, what’s wrong?”
Penn had moved forward, finding me in the crowd, eyes glued onto my form.
“Nothing,” I rushed out. “I just remembered I have to go.” I backed up two paces.
“But—”
“Thanks for the cookies! I’ll see you around,” I called as I furtively motioned toward Penn to follow. Could he follow? I didn’t think that part out long enough before I was racing away from Del, a double shot of adrenaline trailing me like a comet tail.
I blew past the farmers market and ducked into a deserted alley between Shipley Foods and an insurance office. I turned, and Penn was three feet away.
I could’ve said hello, but my tongue hung useless in the center of my mouth. Both temples throbbed with grinding pain.
“Sylvie,” he said, my name peeled back at one corner as if he might’ve gotten it wrong.
“Yeah,” I managed. One, two, set, I tried once, and again. “Penn. That’s you, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t. Still Penn.”
He was wearing the same outfit—jeans and a blue-check flannel. His dark hair was tousled, the top swoop of waves somehow fluttering in the breeze. The same layer of light scruff pricked his jawline.
He risked a step forward and glanced at the gold timepiece in my hand. “The watch started ticking again?”
I could only nod.
“And you turned the crown?”
“Not me, but yes. Do you . . . Do you remember anything else this time?”
Penn shook his head. “I only remember you.”
The alley we were in suddenly felt too small.
“This is so weird—” I mused at the same time Penn said, “There has to be a reason—”
We both stopped, our unfinished thoughts left hanging.
“Sylvie, listen,” Penn started again, closing the space between us even more.
“There has to be a reason this watch keeps bringing me to you. It’s connected to me somehow—to us.
I want to know who I am and what all of this means.
Why I’m still here. How I can . . . how I can move on. Will you help me?”
I lifted my head, found the piercing blue of his eyes. He was right there inside my orbit, impossibly but undeniably. Still . . . help him? It hadn’t even been two hours since I’d accepted the fact that I wasn’t hallucinating.
This felt like a relapse. Being in Penn’s presence, standing in the shadow of his existence felt like the jumbled post-concussion days between Halloween and Christmas where I couldn’t concentrate, or organize my thoughts, or even look at my phone without getting nauseous.
I pinched my eyes shut. “This is just a lot for me.”
A sensation hit me with a glimmer of warmth. I gasped, my eyes shooting open in time to catch him easing away. What was that? Did he touch me?
I didn’t ask—couldn’t. And Penn didn’t say. His request lodged in the troubled space between us.
The threat of PCS had already robbed me of the summer I’d wanted. Shock and stress caused by a watch and an impossible boy could send my health into a precarious spot that would affect my future. Despite the mayhem of the last three days, my Perfect Triangle plan remained. And I had to stick to it.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help you,” I told him. “My head’s a mess. And I’m not sure I can . . .”
“Is that a no?” So quiet. Impossibly steady.
But his face shifted, his features molded into an expression I couldn’t translate. And before I could look at him straight on and answer firmly, with my whole chest, I lost my chance.
The second hand stopped, and Penn was gone.