Lily’s gaze stayed glued to her hands. “Is that what I did to my brother?”
“Yes. I’m guessing you’ve been feeling hints of the power recently, right?” Lily nodded, and Katherine continued, “It was starting to form in you, and then you had a moment of strong emotion and it came out. Unfortunately, those snaps usually happen in the worst possible way.”
“How long is it going to take me to learn how to control it?”
“A year or two.”
A year or two. Lily thought of all that would change in that time. Her friends would forget about her. She’d fall hopelessly behind in class, lose her positions in all her clubs. A year or two? She might as well disappear for good.
She wrapped the beads tighter as she tried not to cry in front of this stranger. “Can’t you take it out?”
“I’m sorry,” Katherine said softly. “I wish I could.”
Katherine pulled into the garage of an apartment complex, shutting off the car before turning to look at Lily.
“I promise you, this is all going to be okay. This isn’t the end of your life. Think of it as a new beginning.”
“I don’t want a new beginning.”
Katherine rubbed her hand over Lily’s back. “Neither did I.”
Lily gathered herself, sucking in a breath and forcing it all down. And then she got out of the car, letting the door fall shut behind her.
A loud meow greeted them as Katherine opened her apartment door.
“Sorry,” Katherine said. “I should have asked earlier—are you okay with cats?”
Lily nodded. She hadn’t spoken since they left the car, but she’d at least stopped looking like she was fighting back tears, which Katherine took as a win for now. The beads were still wrapped around her fingers. Katherine and Fiona had made the mismatched chain a few months earlier, when Katherine had been having a particularly bad night that Fiona decided could only be cured by a spontaneous drunken craft extravaganza. That, Katherine reminded herself, was what Lily could have now. A life. A chance.
Katherine walked inside, her legs immediately getting attacked by an orange ball of fluff.
“I know, Cheezy. I’m late for dinner. I’m the worst mom in the history of existence.” Cheez-It meowed loudly again, not denying her claim.
“This is Cheez-It,” Katherine said to Lily. “Quite possibly the most dramatic cat in all of catdom.” As if trying to prove her right, Cheez-It did a wide twirl, then sat down right on top of Lily’s feet. “Who has apparently decided to hold you hostage until I feed him. Give me a sec.”
Katherine walked to the side of her living room that passed as a kitchen. She had a full fridge, but no oven or stove, which was fine for her—as long as she had a microwave to zap her takeout, she was set. She reached into the mostly bare cabinet and pulled out a can of wet food. Cheez-It freed Lily, running to his bowl as she dumped it out. She gave him a pat on his head, then headed to the couch. Lily sat down beside her.
“Is he a magical cat?” Lily asked.
Katherine chuckled. “He wishes. No, he’s just a regular, needy little monster who decided to pop up and give me something to live for when I first got to LA.”
“When you were unsettled.”
Katherine took a deep breath. She looked at the girl sitting next to her and tried not to see herself. In person, Lily didn’t look as identical to the real Katherine as she’d thought. Her nose was smaller, her chin pointier. But did it matter, when her eyes were clouded by the same fear Katherine’s had been? She’d been this girl once, desperate for answers, ready to burst at the seams, considering ending it all rather than living another moment with a power she couldn’t explain, let alone control.
No matter how many times she told this story, it never got easier. She was still an open wound, as much as she wanted to pretend she was healed. But Lily had to hear this and know that one day, she could move on too.
No matter how much it still hurt.
“I was born in Colorado,” Katherine started. “I had ordinary parents, and like you, I didn’t think magic was real. But when I was sixteen, I started to have these moments where I felt strange. There were just a few at first, but then they started to get more and more frequent. Until one day, when I was at school.”
Cheez-It walked away from his dinner and flopped down on Katherine’s lap. She dug her hand into his fur. “This guy was being a dick to me. Brandon Rhimes. He was always like that—he’d pick a girl to single out for a few weeks, follow her around calling her a slut and telling her how much everyone hated her. I’d managed to tune him out, but that day… it just got to me. And I started to get mad at him, and he knew he was getting to me. So he started saying things that were even worse, and then I got madder, and madder, and then all of a sudden, something came out of me. Something I couldn’t stop.”
She remembered the terror in Brandon’s eyes as the lockers around them crunched in on themselves, as the floor split, as the ceiling shook. She remembered the other students in the hallway, some running, some stuck in place as they tried to figure out what was going on. Remembered the screams, the helplessness as she felt her body overtakenby something that she couldn’t even begin to fathom. It was like she was drowning in a sea of lava, lava that she knew was burning down everything around her, but all she could focus on was finding a way to get herself up to the surface. Her senses were overwhelmed, her ears ringing with the screech of metal collapsing in on itself, the crash of the ceiling tiles falling, the feeling that she had to protect herself, the power building a safe space around her as its destruction kept coming, and coming, and coming…
“Anyway,” she said. “I snapped. Collapsed a full wing of the school.”
Twenty-six kids had been hurt. Three had died. Their names were tattooed on Katherine’s mind, popping into her head at random. Whenever she thought she found a moment of peace, there they were again: Tommy Higgins. Lorelei Buxton. Finn McCormack.
