Mary had both my hands in both her hands, and she was smiling for the first time in days, in weeks, in who could tell how long in this timeless, broken summer. I looked down at the floor; her feet were hovering an inch or two above the wooden planks of the tugboat. “Happy birthday,” she said.
And then Prue screamed.
And the world around Mary and me came unpaused and leapt into motion.
I turned around.
And Peter had a gun, an old and tarnished pistol that heheld like a thing he did not know how to hold, gripped in two hands so tightly that his arms shook with the effort, the almost-imperceptible quivers that radiated up to his elbows, his shoulders, his chest. His lips had turned white. He looked almost as scared of the gun as we were.
“Peter, what are you doing?” I asked.
He tightened his grip. I imagined Peter sneaking into his parents’ room, taking this gun from his father’s nightstand, trying to figure out if it was loaded.
I wondered why Peter thought he might need a gun.
I wondered if he guessed I would find out eventually.
Behind me I heard Vira whisper, “Evil man.”
“Just put it down, Peter. Don’t be like this,” I said.
“No way. I don’t know what you two are capable of,” he said, almost frantically, gesturing between Mary and me like we were bombs instead of girls.
“Surely no more than whatyouwere capable of,” I said.
“If you just let me go, if you just... I’ll go home, and I won’t even tell anyone what she did. I won’t even tell anybody,” Peter said.
“WhatIdid?” Mary repeated. “I didn’t do anything, Peter. All I did was sayno.”
“You make yourself sound so innocent,” he snapped. “Did you tell them howyouwere the one who wanted to go to the barn in the first place? Howyouwere the one to start it all?”
“And how you threw Annabella against the beam whenI wouldn’t go further? And about how I started screaming, and how you put your hands over my mouth so I’d shut up, and about how you climbed on top of me? How you told me what you would do to me if I told anyone...”
Mary covered her face with her hands.
I imagined my sister, broken and violated, slipping Annabella’s eggs into her pocket so Peter wouldn’t hurt them. I imagined my sister saying the wordno. I imagined my sister shrinking, shrinking...
Peter held the gun in his sweating, shaking hands.
Could guns fire after they’d been soaked in floodwater?
“Peter, just put the gun down,” I said.
“No. No way,” Peter said, and he tightened his grip.
For the first time in my life I felt the power of the Fernweh women, ready and waiting at my fingertips.
Exactly like my mother had said: a burning, tight feeling in my gut.
Next to me, my sister shrank. And shrank.
Prue and Vira and Harrison were completely silent and motionless behind me.
I had never really given much thought about what my eighteenth birthday might look like. There’d be cake, sure. There’d be a colorful banner strung across the dining room:Happy Birthday!There’d be Mary and my mother and a quiet dinner. A bonfire in the backyard maybe, a small pile of presents wrapped in brown paper and twine.
I’d never considered the possibility of that summerleading me here: standing on a boat, a gun aimed at my chest and my sister sprouting feathers next to me, long shiny feathers that erupted out of her skin at an alarming rate.
I made myself not look at her.
