They said things like that,individual units of the species.
They also said things like,You should probably at least call it Annabella’s Flicker, to which my great-great-whatever-grandmother was like,You should probably let me name this rare bird anything I damn well want because she’s on my property and, if you piss me off, I’ll build a very tall fence.
And just like every summer, the Fernweh Inn would open tomorrow, and the birdheads would flock to the island in droves. Oh, By-the-Sea, island of salt and sand and rain and magic and one single solitary bird that made our tiny little chunk of rock—which would have been otherwise entirely overlooked by the rest of the world—absolutely famous (at least in certain ornithological circles).
I was rather fond of Annabella.
Not everybody had their own personal island mascot, and she was ours.
And she was a Fernweh, to boot. We Fernwehs had to stick together.
Even those of us without any powers.
Like me.
It was a well-established thing in Fernweh history: that all Fernweh women found their particular gifts by their eighteenth birthday. I had a great-great-aunt who had discovered her powers of teleportation (she could zap herself to anywhere on the island, but she couldn’t zap her clothes, so it ended up being a very risqué gift) at the age of four, and she proceeded to use them gleefully, scaring her siblings and parents half to death by popping up in the strangest places. I had yet another great-great-aunt who hadn’t discovered her powers of telepathy until she was seventeen and a half.
There seemed to be no rhyme or reason.
Mary and I would be turning eighteen at the end of the summer, and here I was: still resolutely unmagical while Mary had been floating since birth.
I slid my sandals off and walked down toward the water.
I found Vira ankle-deep in ocean, holding her long skirt up around her knees.
“Hi,” I said, joining her.
“You smell like cinnamon.”
I handed her the flask. At this rate, it would be gone before the midnight rush. (The midnight rush was all who had a mind to take off their clothes and run screaming into the water. I did not have a mind to. Mary was unpredictable; she could go either way.)
Vira took a sip of the flask and smacked her lipsexaggeratedly. She handed the flask back to me and I took the long, last sip.
Vira like Elvira. My best friend, of the non-twin variety. Shoulder-length hair the color of coal and slate-gray eyes. If you actually called her Elvira, she was known to mix crushed-up sleeping pills into your milkshake at Ice Cream Parlor, where she worked. When you woke up, you had Sharpied penises on your cheeks.
“We missed you today,” Vira said.
Book club. Consisting of me, Vira, Eloise, Shelby, and Abigail. We met in the back corner of Used Books, which was owned by Eloise’s mother.
“Wuthering Heightsis a terrible book,” I said.
“You got to pick the last one.”
“Right, and who doesn’t love a goodBell Jar?”
“You have to stop picking Sylvia Plath. It’s making everyone cry.”
“It wasn’t allWuthering Heights, anyway. I had to help my mom get the inn ready,” I explained.
“Ah, the massive influx. All booked?”
“All booked. Check-in’s at twelve tomorrow. You’re welcome to come and help, Mom said the more the merrier.”
“I have to be at the parlor,” Vira said. “You know how those birdheads like their ice cream.”
Ah, did I know a thing or two about those birdheads.
Behind us a bunch of our drunken peers fell gently into song. It was a sort of island staple, a dark and moody tune that had been around forever. Nobody knew its origins, but everybody knew it. It was what you hummed to yourself on the walk home from school, in the shower, right before you fell asleep. It was one of those songs that entered your brain and never let you forget it.
