“Our birthday is two months away.”
“Thank you, Mary, I remembered.”
“And you still haven’t shown any signs of—”
“Grandma Berry was seventeen years and three hundred and sixty-four days old before she showed any signs of—”
“Lower your voice! Do you want to wake a birdhead?”
“Grandma Berry,” I repeated, hissing, “did not show any signs of magic until the day before her eighteenth birthday.”
“And I betshewas nervous,” Mary said thoughtfully. Iwanted to grab the nearest hairbrush and beat her over the head with it, but I settled for brushing my teeth so hard my gums turned bright red.
When I finished, Mary was staring intently at me, her forehead knitted up in lines.
“But what about the twin thing?” she asked quietly.
“What twin thing?” I asked, although I knew exactly what she was talking about, of course I did.
“The first Georgina. She never got powers, but her sister Annabella did. Her twin. There haven’t been twins in our family since.”
“Our great-great-aunt’s daughter never got powers either, and she was an only child. It’s not like I’lldie, Mary, I’ll just go on living like every other person in the history of the world who isn’t in our family. Being able to float three inches off the ground isn’t the fucking miracle you make it out to be.”
Mary’s shoulders lowered a fraction of an inch, the only sign to indicate that I’d struck a nerve.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up again.”
“Look, it’s okay. Of course I keep thinking about it. Of course I’m nervous, or... not nervous, really, but just... curious. But I do mean that; it’s not the end of the world if I’m not a...”
We didn’t say the word out loud—that little word assigned to the women in our family—there was rarely aneed. Mary reached her hand out and squeezed my fingers, squeezed every knuckle.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“A long day of annoying me, I don’t blame you,” I said, but softly, so she’d know I was joking. She got up and hugged me quickly, then slipped out of the bathroom. I shut the door and took her place on the toilet, next to the open window. And fuck, although I didn’t want to, although I really didn’t want to, I started crying.
Outside, a massive crack of thunder and the unmistakable patter of rain.
Like a sign from the heavens. We feel you, girl. We got your back. We’ll like you no matter if you get your powers or not. We could really care less.
Me too, Sky. I could care less too.
Days Late
Annabella didn’t show up the next day or the day after that. I was busy at the inn, my mother constantly had me shuffling between housekeeping duties, cooking duties, concierge duties (those were the best, our four non-birdhead guests asked easy questions and had seemed to accept that their weeklong summer vacation was being shared with a bunch of weirdo bird enthusiasts).
Wherever Annabella was, she was making the birdheads antsy, even though her absence wasn’t that unheard of. Yeah, sheusuallyshowed up promptly on the day after the summer solstice, but she was also just a bird. You couldn’t count on birds.
“The record lateness is one week,” Lucille Arden said at breakfast, three days since the solstice. Lucille was the youngest birdhead—besides Harrison now—and celebrating her tenth summer on the island. She accepted a muffinfrom Aggie, who was walking around with a tray of them. “So three days isn’t anything to panic about. You can’t give a bird a datebook.”
I thoughtYou Can’t Give a Bird a Datebookwould be a good name for a really boring romantic comedy. I liked Lucille—she was about as normal as a birdhead could be, and talking to her helped alleviate some of my own anxieties about where Annabella was. I remembered the year she was a week late; Mary and I had been thirteen and the entire island had dissolved into near-hysteria levels of panic. I had never thoughtthatmuch about Annabella before, and so I surprised even myself when her lateness affected me to such a degree: I had insomnia, nightmares when Ididmanage to sleep, and I felt anxious all the time.
My mother had crept into my bedroom in the middle of the fifth or sixth night of waiting and sat down on my bed with her jasmine-and-lavender sleeping draft.
“I could practically hear you tossing and turning from the first floor,” she’d said, sitting on the edge of my bed and handing me the mug.
“Why do I care so much that Annabella is late?” I’d asked, pulling myself up to a sitting position and sipping the drink.
“She’s a part of our history, whether we like it or not,” my mother had said. “The Fernweh women are all related. What happens to one of us happens to all of us.”
