“Hi, Georgina,” she replied. She patted her hand on thebench beside her. I guess benches were now my favorite pieces of furniture, taking the place of beds and rocking chairs. I sat.
“I haven’t seen you around much. There aren’t many places to hide on By-the-Sea; you’re talented,” I said.
Oh wait.
Was that creepy or cute? I couldn’t immediately tell.
Prue laughed a little and put the fries on the bench between us. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library,” she said.
“The library? In summer? Why?”
“I like books,” Prue said. “And we had to pack light, so I couldn’t bring any. And the library dude is really strict; he won’t let me check anything out because I’m ‘not a By-the-Seathian, and therefore ineligible to acquire a library card.’” She paused, considered. “Do you guys really call yourselves that? By-the-Seathians?”
“Oh, absolutely not. Stevie is the only one. And he’s a stickler for those book rules.” Stevie Carmichael, the librarian, acted like he wasn’t guarding books, but lives.
“Good. I mean, it’s actually a little cute. This whole island is a little cute, you know?” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“Like... the one inn, the one diner, the one ice cream parlor, the whole town-green situation. An actual gazebo. A beach called the Beach. A mysterious ladybird whose absence so far has made my brother very anxious.”
“When you put it that way...”
“It’s like a different world here. A very quaint, sort of creepy world.”
“Creepy?”
“No offense,” she said quickly. “I’ll shut up now.”
“No, please, don’t shut up.” Never shut up, never leave my sight, let’s move into the graveyard together, some of the mausoleums could actually be pretty homey with the right amount of sprucing. It was just so easy to talk to Prue, like she was a complete open book. And she was funny, and interesting, and her smile was like a small revelation. Like she had invented smiling.
“I didn’t mean creepy in a bad way,” Prue insisted. “I just meant... it’s like a storybook. Sort of dark, sort of cute, a little too perfect. Take this graveyard, for instance.”
“What about it?” I asked.
“Well, I mean... it’sfall,” Prue said. “It is literally fall in this graveyard. Brisk air and fallen leaves, and thatsmell. Does that make any sense?”
“I’m sure it’s just a geographical anomaly,” I said. “You know, how like some cities are always gray and rainy? I’m sure it’s just in some weird position on the island. And so it makes it seem...” I paused. I didn’t know if eternally autumn graveyards were strange or normal or not. “I’ve never been anywhere else,” I admitted, in way of an answer: I don’t know any better.
“Really? You’ve never been off the island?”
“Nope,” I said. “I mean—I’ll be leaving in two months, for college. So that will be my first time.”
“Wow,” Prue said, taking a bite of fry and chewing it thoughtfully.
“I know. It’s weird, right?”
“I don’t want to say it’sweird,” Prue said carefully. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and laughed nervously. “All right, it’s a little weird, yes. But I’ve done weird things too! I traveled across the ocean to help my brother chase after a bird. So we’ve both done weird things.”
I thought of the weird things I’d done over the course of my life.
When I was eight I’d had to untangle my sister’s hair from the branches of the tree she’d floated into.
When I was ten I’d helped my mother mix a tincture that would make the roses that vined up the side of the inn bloom overnight.
When I was twelve, the year my grandmother died, I sat by her deathbed as she spun hay into gold and told me to put it toward my college fund.
When I was seventeen, I met a girl who’d traveled the world and had the kind of hair you wanted to just touch, just see what it felt like, and who when she talked to you stared so intently into your face that you felt just the tiniest bit like you were going to catch on fire.
