Page 26 of Imaginary Numbers

Meaning could I come over there before Artie hurt himself trying to move. Right. It was a good idea. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure whether or not I could. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get my feet under myself. Everything was rippling around the edges, the same way it had—

Oh, no. The same way it had rippled when I’d hurt myself. Pushing my telepathy too far had consequences, and while I wasn’t going to pretend to be sorry I’d made it possible for Artie to wake up, I’d only just come back from five years lost in my own head. I didn’t want to go back there.

I closed my eyes. One, I thought desperately. Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen . . .

Prime numbers are some of the most soothing things in the universe. They’re always the same, perfect, calming constants that don’t change, don’t vary, no matter how much everything else gets twisted in on itself. I could feel Elsie’s hands on my shoulders, keeping me from falling over. She had them positioned so that she wasn’t touching my skin. That showed good sense on her part, even if it stung a little. I wasn’t rude enough to surge in and take over her mind just because she touched me.

Then again, there had been times when I wouldn’t have been able to help it. Maybe she was being even more sensible than I’d thought.

Hands grasped my upper arms. “Sarah, you need to hang on,” said Artie, distressingly close and even more distressingly urgent. Uncle Kevin said something in the background. I couldn’t understand him. I hoped whatever it was wasn’t important enough to be a problem.

Artie tightened his grip. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” he said. “You just came back. You can’t go away again. I won’t let you.”

Nice how you think your opinion matters, I thought.

He barked sudden, unsteady laughter. “Yeah, well, your stalker trashed my car, so I think I get to give a couple of orders. Hang on. Just, whatever you have to do, hang on.”

I wanted to laugh. There wasn’t enough air in the room. I don’t think I can.

“I know you can,” said Artie, and took his hands off my arms, and pressed them to either side of my face.

Thoughts and feelings flooded my mind, all flavored with that unmistakable emotional stamp that shouted “Artie.” I laughed unsteadily, and the thoughts melted into memories. Artie, looking at a computer screen, waiting for the alert to pop up that would tell him I was online. Artie at the comic book store, picking up the contents of my subscription box to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything. Artie, phone in his hand, wondering whether he had the nerve to call me again when he knew I probably wouldn’t pick up, because I never picked up anymore.

I gasped a little, almost taking a step backward, out of his grasp. He tightened his hold, keeping me exactly where I was.

“No,” he said. “You don’t get to leave again.”

This wasn’t—the last time I’d been hurt, Mom had done her best to keep anyone from touching me, so I could have the space I needed to heal. She’d isolated me, and maybe she’d been doing the right thing at the time and maybe she hadn’t, because it wasn’t like there was a manual for this stuff. Even the cryptid doctors I’d met didn’t necessarily know how to treat injuries in cuckoos. They normally didn’t get the opportunity. This wasn’t what we’d done last time. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

I wasn’t sure my family could handle losing me for another five years.

“Your name is Sarah Zellaby,” said Artie firmly. “You’re a part of this family. You’re my best friend. You’re a cuckoo, and I know you don’t like that about yourself, I know you’d be human if you could, but I’m so glad you’re not, Sarah, I’m so glad, because you wouldn’t be the same person if you were something else, and I lo—I like the person you are.”

“Even now, he can’t say it?” Elsie sounded more like a little annoyed. “Congrats, Artie. You’ve found the most unquestionably stupid telepath in the entire world. There should be some sort of an award. Oh, wait, maybe there is. She puts up with you.”

“Stop it,” he snapped.

“No, you stop. I’ve been listening to you whine for five years. I’m tired of it.”

The memories I was pulling through Artie’s hands were getting more fragmentary, moving backward through time to when we’d been much younger, still innocently convinced that by the time we were adults, the world would somehow mysteriously have changed for the better. We’d believed we would be the first generation of cryptids to walk in the open, moving among the humans like we belonged there. Like this was our planet, too.

The memories flickered faster and faster, like I was watching one of those flipbooks that had so enchanted us all as children. Put enough still images together and you can see them move! Wow! In a world of monsters and magic, somehow that had been the most incredible thing of all.

Half of them passed so quickly that I couldn’t really see them, and that was all right; these weren’t my memories to enjoy. I wasn’t even sure Artie knew he was showing them to me, for all that he was the one holding onto my head, keeping me from tumbling down into the pit of my own splintered self. The other half lingered.

Me in the dress I’d worn to Antimony’s junior prom, both of us giggling behind our hands. She’d worn a suit, tie striped in her school colors and left hanging suggestively open, makeup Adam Ant extreme, the cheerleader playing with New Romantic ideals and absolutely killing it. I’d worn a dress in cornflower blue, dusky and soft and supported by a dozen layers of taffeta, so that the whole thing seemed to float with every step I took.

I remembered Artie pinning the flowers in my hair, strangely quiet, meticulously careful not to let his fingers touch my skin. At the time, I’d thought it was because he wanted to avoid the glitter highlighter Annie had smeared liberally over every exposed inch of me. Watching it though his eyes, I half-wondered whether there might have been another reason.

Me on the first day of fifth grade, coloring at the kitchen table when Kevin brought Artie and Annie home from school. Annie had been icing her knuckles, jaw set in the stubborn thrust that meant she had looked at the world, considered her options, and decided everyone else was in the wrong. Her left eye had already been starting to swell. Artie had clearly been crying and was just as clearly trying to hide it. He and I had spent the rest of the afternoon playing video games and pretending not to hear Annie arguing with her parents over the times when it was acceptable to fight at school.

Me the day I’d come to Oregon for the first time, pale and scared of these new family members, excited to see the cousins I’d met on the day of my adoption and not since. My hair had been pulled over my shoulders in thick pigtail braids, and I’d looked substantially younger than my ten years. Artie had been in the living room when Evie led me into the compound. He’d looked up, and seen me, and smiled, and I’d known instantly that we were going to be best friends forever. He’d had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched.

He still did. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and opened my eyes, looking at his face, only inches from my own. Relief radiated from him, so loud that it felt like even the non-telepaths in the room should have been able to pick up on it. Relief and—

“Really?” I blurted.

Artie went pale, thoughts turning alarmed. He pulled his hands away from my face, taking a stumbling step backward.