Chapter 28
There was nothing Miles could do for Edmund, so he ended up leaving the Hawthorne estate not long after Gabriel came to fetch him from the wardrobe.
He invited Gabriel to come back to his place, but he refused to leave either of his brothers.
Miles offered to stay, but Gabriel insisted there was no point, that he needed time to think.
It felt wrong to leave him when Felicity’s words had so visibly shaken him, when they hadn’t done anything to help Edmund, but what else could Miles do?
Charlee drove him home, forced him into bed where he somehow managed to fall back asleep for a few fitful hours, then shoved him into the scalding shower when he woke up anxious and disoriented.
Desperate to keep busy, he reorganized his desk, helped his sisters put up new posters in their bedroom—they were going through an intense K-pop phase —and pestered his mom until she let him clean the supply shelves in the office.
In an amazing display of self-control, she didn’t ask him a single question about last night, and limited herself to a brief, “Is there anything we can do to help?” when he told her Gabriel’s brother had fallen into a coma.
He checked his phone obsessively for updates from Gabriel. There weren’t any.
“Give me something to do,” he told Charlee, wandering into her room. She was curled up in her thrifted purple chair, reading one of her cutesy rom-coms.
“Relax.”
He plopped onto her bed. “Something realistic.”
She sighed and lowered her book. “The realistic thing is realizing nothing I tell you to do is going to stop you from wallowing.”
He kicked at her halfheartedly, too far away to make contact. “Don’t be a jerk, Edmund might be dying. And we weren’t—”
“Weren’t what?” she prompted.
“Weren’t supposed to be dealing with this.
” Miles knew exactly how it made him sound, but it was unfair.
His biggest worry today was supposed to be figuring out how to tell his dad he was gay before his mom slipped up.
Planning what he was going to wear to homecoming.
Begging Charlee to let him borrow her car again.
Things that now seemed so… unimportant. Edmund was dying and Miles couldn’t do anything but keep his hands moving and his mind searching for a solution he didn’t have.
“Last night was so nice. I guess I wasn’t ready to come back to reality yet. ”
Charlee gave him a knowing, sympathetic look. “That’s the curse of playing pretend. At some point, you’re going to face a rude awakening.”
“We weren’t playing pretend.” Miles picked at a hangnail, a bead of blood welling up. He loathed the implication that anything about his time with Gabriel might’ve been fake.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Her apologetic tone only made him feel worse. “I’m sorry you two didn’t get a bit longer. And about Edmund. If he’s half as stubborn as Gabriel, he’ll pull through.”
“Yeah.” Miles wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t shake the sight of Edmund in that bed, how close he’d looked to death. He crossed his arms, digging his fingers into his sweater until he could feel his ribs. “I feel helpless.”
Ironic that he’d been working to stop death this whole time, and now that he was faced with someone actually dying, he was frozen.
“You’re not helpless,” Charlee said fiercely. “There’s always something we can do. We just need to figure out what.”
A door thudded downstairs. “Miles!” his mom called. “You have a visitor.”
A visitor? Gabriel wouldn’t come over without texting first, and who else—
Nadia. Shit.
“Okay, don’t kill me.”
Charlee set her book aside menacingly. “Who is it?”
“I meant to tell you, I really did, it just slipped my mind.” Miles inched towards the door. “In my defense, it’s been a wild twenty-four hours.”
“Who. Is. It?”
“Nadia. They’re here to help with the tunnel. They said they needed to see it in person and—”
She shrieked and flew off her chair to shove Miles out of her room, slamming the door behind him.
“What was that?” Miles’s mom questioned when he came downstairs, peering up at the ceiling in concern.
“Charlee. Don’t ask.”
Nadia was helping themself to a mug of tea in the kitchen, dunking the bag enthusiastically.
They looked hilariously out of place in their black leather pants, shredded blue sweater held together by rows of safety pins, and spiked combat boots against the backdrop of pottery dishware and crazy plants in colorfully painted pots.
They greeted Miles with a jaunty wave. “Hey, sick place. Your mom let me in, hope that’s okay.”
“Totally. Sorry, there’s been… a lot happening, or I would’ve checked in this morning.”
They leaned against the counter and crossed their ankles. “What’s going on?”
Miles caught them up, including all the grisly details. They listened, sipping their tea pensively and fidgeting with their necklace.
“Fuck,” they muttered when he’d finished.
Yeah, that about summed it up.
Tipping their head back, they gulped down the rest of their tea and set the empty mug in the sink. “Alright, so the tunnel is off the table today. I’ve got a trunk full of books on all kinds of magical shit. Maybe there’ll be an answer to Edmund’s mystery ailment.”
“Worth a shot.” Miles was so relieved to have a task, he could cry.
He helped load up books from the trunk of Nadia’s car—a cherry-red Mini, its bumper plastered in stickers— and led them upstairs. His mom watched curiously from the office, but didn’t pry.
“Any chance Charlee’s planning on joining us?” Nadia probed as they climbed.
“Let’s find out.” He stopped outside her door and shifted his stack of books to one arm so he could knock. “Charlee? Nadia’s here if you wanna help us—”
Her door flew open. “Of course I’ll help,” she said, as if she hadn’t shoved Miles out of her room a few minutes before. She’d put her hair up in a ponytail and changed into a green shirt that made her eyes extra bright.
Her room was clean too, Miles noted as he filed in. From the way the closet doors were bulging, he could guess where everything had gone.
“This is cute.” Nadia spun in a slow circle to take it all in. They touched an embroidered luna moth hanging on the wall. “Did you make this? It’s sick.”
“Yeah, it was easy,” Charlee lied. The bloodstains on the back from where she’d stabbed herself with the needle a dozen times said otherwise.
Nadia claimed the purple chair, unzipping the bag hanging from their shoulder. “Before I forget, I brought you something. I heard you like sweet treats, and my grandma Dima makes the best ghraybeh in the world.”
They handed Charlee a Ziploc filled with small pale cookies dusted in powdered sugar. Atop each one was a single pistachio. She dug one out immediately, taking a bite with a groan of appreciation. Miles could practically see the cartoon hearts floating over her head.
Nadia gave him a conspiratorial wink.
They dug into the books—Charlee joining Miles on the bed, flipping pages between cookie bites—but he glanced up more than once to find them staring at each other instead of reading. Whatever exactly this thing going on between them was, Miles really didn’t like sitting in the middle of it.
His phone buzzed, making him jump out of his skin, but it was only Emily.
Any chance my tall muscular bestie wants to
come help set up homecoming? A bunch of
people dipped and Alexis is scaring me
You can make sure its nice and pretty for Gabriel
“Gabriel?” Charlee asked.
“Emily. She’s getting the gym ready for homecoming and wants help.” He hesitated—he wasn’t going to the dance and really couldn’t care less about the decorations, but he was starting to feel like a third wheel. “I should stay, this is more important.”
“We’ve got this.” Nadia tossed their book to the side and grabbed another from the stack. “We’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Charlee nodded enthusiastically.
“What if Gabriel calls?”
“Then you tell them something came up and you peace out.”
It must be so nice to live without social anxiety.
“Fine.” Miles rolled off the bed and stretched—he wasn’t making much progress anyway. He’d been staring at one page for the last fifteen minutes straight. “But seriously, tell me the moment you find something.”
“We will,” Charlee promised. “Keys are on the counter downstairs. And put gas in my car while you’re out.”
“I’m broke.”
“I guess you’d better start walking, then.”
“You’re ruthless,” he grumbled. “I’ll see what I can scrape together.” He might have a few bucks tucked away in his change jar.
Charlee popped another cookie in her mouth. “That’s what I thought.”
* * *
After stopping to put a grand total of four dollars’ worth of gas in Charlee’s car, Miles made it to the school gym to find Emily waiting for him with desperation in her eyes.
She deflated when he explained that his homecoming plans for the night were canceled, pulled him into a rib-creaking hug, then promised to keep him so busy that he wouldn’t have a spare minute to worry.
She wasn’t exaggerating—the dance was scheduled to start in a few hours, and it didn’t look even half set up.
Alexis looked so happy to see him, he expected her to burst into tears.
Instead, she went on a five-minute rant about no-shows and lack of integrity, then freaked out about wasting five minutes before putting him to work hanging clouds, stars, and streamers from the ceiling.
According to her, it made sense to give him the jobs that required the ladder since he “didn’t need to climb up as high as everyone else. ”