And then—through some trick of time, a slow bleeding of hours—it was the day before I was supposed to leave.
I woke up and poured myself a cup of coffee and brought it up to Mary’s room.
Vira was already there.
Vira, too, was getting ready to leave By-the-Sea for her own rumspringa. She was going to a big city on the opposite coast, the western coast, a city full of sun and palm trees and surfer boys and long-haired girls she could care two shits about. When I pictured Vira in a midnight-blackbikini standing with her feet in sand almost too hot to bear, I wanted to cry tears of absolute joy. Like Vira in a candy-striped apron scooping ice cream the color of rusted nails, like Vira at the wheel of a tugboat in a yellow raincoat, like Vira, my best friend, whose house was covered in roadkill taxidermy—it just made so much sense.
I suspected that Vira, of the vampire name and the no-fucks-given attitude, had it all figured out in a way I could only one day hope to.
I sat on my sister’s bed and threw my arms around Vira’s shoulders. She put her hands on my forearms and said, “I’m going to miss you so much. But you can be from my school to your school in five hours. Flying through the air! What will they think of next?”
We stayed like that for a while, me hugging her, her patting my arms, the eggs out of their cubby hole, resting on the floor of Mary’s closet.
After a few minutes I realized that Vira was humming. And then her humming turned into words: a familiar eerie tune that filled the room with its simple, somber melody.
On By-the-Sea, you and me will go sailing by
On waves of green, softly singing too.
On By-the-Sea, you and me will be forever young
And live together on waves of blue.
I thought I saw the eggs twitch, but when I looked closer, they were still.
“We’re leaving tomorrow too,” Prue told me that evening.
There was one ferry off the island per day (ever since it had miraculously recovered from its mysterious ailment) and the very idea of getting onto it with Prue by my side made things seem suddenly a million times more bearable.
But still.
When I tried to actually picture myself leaving By-the-Sea, I couldn’t.
All the signs pointed to me leaving.
The packed steamer trunks.
The envelope of money my mother had tucked into my hands that morning, for me to open my very own bank account once I reached the mainland. (“The By-the-Sea Bank doesn’t count for much off these shores,”she’d said.)
The week’s worth of food Aggie had packed carefully into a wicker picnic basket. (“For the journey,”she’d said, although there was more than enough food for one ferry ride and one train ride.)
My ferry ticket.
My train ticket.
The response from my roommate, Hattie M. Hipperson, who somehow managed to seem much more sincere every time she wrote the wordexcitedin her letter back to me. (Which was seventeen times in four neatly printed pages.)
The thick black knitted hat Julia Montgomery had made for me and delivered that afternoon, with matching gloves and scarf for good measure. (“The winters get socoldin that city, Georgina,”she’d said, and hugged me for so long that it began to feel less like a hug and more like an extended apology.)
The feather I found on my pillow that night, the beautiful pale-brown feather placed perfectly where I would later lay my head.
The magical nest in my sister’s room that somehow, between watches of its diligent guardians, had gone empty. Not a piece of egg nor fluff of feather left to be found.
I put the nest in Mary’s nightstand drawer.
I didn’t worry about the eggs; I knew they were in good hands.
I woke up that night to my sister hovering over me.
