Page 88 of Within These County Lines

The sight of someone popping like a water balloon is something I will never get used to.

“This boy,” Dara wails, clutching her chest. “Who is he?”

The receptionist lifts Dara to her feet. “Are you talking about the boy who just came in?” she asks. “He’s a new client. I can ask him to leave if you’d like.”

Xander re-forms beside me. He shakes it off like a dog after a bath.

“She can see me,” he says coolly. “She’s one of us.”

Dara’s breath stutters. She looks up at me, eyes wide and unblinking.

I wave.

“Two boys can see me!” she yells, then throws her head back. Her knees buckle and she nearly crumbles to the floor again. Her limbs go slack in the receptionist’s arms like a rag doll.

I lower my hand, wincing.

“Oh, for the love of Christ,” the receptionist moans. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

After several panicked minutes, Dara finally comes to terms with the fact that we can see her.

Two boys can see her for the first time in years.

Her breath evens, and her tears dry up. She waves the receptionist away and asks for privacy. The woman agrees, with reluctance, questioning Dara’s lucidness on the way out as she repeatedly tries to convince her there’s only one boy in the center of this room. When the office door clicks closed, Dara lunges at us.

She wraps her arms tightly around our necks, knocking our heads together. I stumble, catching a whiff of musty couch fabric in her hair.

She pulls back, giving me a clear sight of her hollow eyes, with the type of half-closed eyelids that make her look tired even in shock. Her clothes are all black, her skin pale like mine, and her face frozen in time. It’s identical to the pictures I saw online, unchanged after so many years, stuck in its early twenties.

“I can’t believe this,” she says, wiping dried tears from her cheeks. Her voice is raspy, unfitting of someone this young. “How did you find me? How can you see me? I have so many questions. All these years . . . boys, men . . . they haven’t been able to see me. I thought I’d lost my mind.” Her head falls into her hands.

“You haven’t,” Xander says. “I know exactly how you feel. Everyone lost their ability to see me in 2015. I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was dead.”

“You poor thing.” Her voice breaks. She pulls Xander into another tight hug. Their bodies deflate, sharing an exhaustion only they can understand. “I was a college student in 2017 when it happened. Everyone says your late twenties are better than your early twenties. Well, I’m stuck at twenty-one years old and feel like I might as well be in hell.”

She turns to me. “How long has it been for you?”

My throat tightens. All those years of confusion for them. They’ve been stuck like this for so long. My few short weeks of being invisible to Murray are laughable in comparison.

I swallow. “Since last month,” I say.

She blinks.

“That’s what started this whole thing,” Xander says. “He found me at Pinehurst Swim Club. He was the first person to see me since I disappeared. We think we’ve been cursed by an old pair of Penango witches!”

The color drains from her face. “So, because we’ve all been cursed, we can see each other? The rules don’t apply to us like they do for everyone else?”

I nod. “We think it works like that.”

“We’re in this weird limbo that freezes us in time,” Xander continues. “It’s like a secret club.”

“The worst kind of club ever.” She wavers on her feet. “Hold on . . . you boys are from Penango?” Her body sways.

I reach for her before she collapses for a third time.

She raises a shaky hand. “Wait . . . wait.” She walks across the room along creaky floorboards. “I need to sit down for this conversation. I haven’t talked about that forsaken place in a long while.” She perches herself on a windowsill and slides open the glass. Hot pavement air curls through the open window.

My thoughts whizz by as fast as I run the one-hundred-meter dash. Where do I start with my questioning? The pool. The tree. The boys. We came all this way. What do I want to learn?