Growing up, being stretched and stamped and squeezed through life like homemade noodles cranked through a pasta maker. As the music enfolds me, I miss dancing.
“What is this song?”
“It’s you,” Beau says. “But I haven’t finished it.”
I feel a rising up within my rib cage as I fall through time, and he stops playing. I open my eyes, and we’re on top of a hill under the moonlight, a herd of snoring buffalo below us. Beau stands up, and I follow his lead. “Where are we?”
“In the past, I think.”
“You brought us back here,” he says.
He turns in place, and I follow his eyes to a tree partway down the hill. He starts hiking toward it, and stops with a hand on the trunk. “I wanna try something,” he says, smiling crookedly. He holds his other hand out to me.
“Do you, Beau Wilkes?” I trek down to him. For some reason, here—or rather now—there’s no anxiety about Matt, about losing Beau’s world or finding Grandmother. Here, we exist outside of it all, and I feel calm as I rarely have in the last few years. There’s nothing to escape.
Beau pulls me against his side, his arm around my back. His lips move against my temple, and my heart speeds up. “Ready?”
“Mmhm.”
He closes his eyes and taps his fingers against my ribs like piano keys, and we start to move forward.
Through time, not space, like we did in my closet. The gentle sinking in my stomach, as if we’re being towed upward through warm water. The sun spinning up in the east, shooting down in the west. Clouds shifting overhead, changing color and shape and density, rain falling in curtains then evaporating and condensing above us once more. The grass growing taller and taller and taller until it licks our waists, the gnarled trunk under Beau’s hand moving with us.
Animals blur past us for full minutes as the sun, moon, and stars swirl around us. Sometimes people too, though we can’t see their features. Wagons and cars and big yellow Bobcats clear the earth, flattening it around us, passing right through us and our tree as if we aren’t there. Once the ground is solid mud, we see foundations laid, bricks stacked in the thousands, cement poured, and still the tree stays with us, completely invisible to the lives and objects moving around us like ghosts.
Suddenly I feel as if we’ve come up against a wall, and my mind recognizes this as the present, all its weight and all my fear. The spinning slows, and we see people moving around us in the band room, but too fast to notice us or our mammoth of a tree. When time finally spits us back out, we’re still standing next to the tulip poplar. I tip my head back to stare up at the ceiling, which the tree spears through to keep stretching hundreds of feet into the air.
The ceiling isn’t crumbling or shattered; rather, it looks like the room was built around it, the tree allowed to grow through it this whole time, pushing through tiny cracks and spreading out overhead, its massive roots digging through the industrial-grade blue carpet. I laugh and look up at Beau, whose serious face tilts back down toward me. “Reminds me of your story,” he says. “The girl who fell from the sky.”
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”
“You like that tree, Natalie Cleary?” he says. “It’s yours.”
“You’re amazing.”
He dips his chin toward his chest almost shyly. I’m looking at a new piece of him, another tiny fragment of Beau I get to have. I want to gather all of them up and spread them out, keep them forever. I cup the sides of his jaw and kiss his cheek. “You make me want to stay,” I whisper.
His hand drops from the trunk, and the tree slips away as though it was never there. The ceiling and floor are solid again, and we’re alone in the band room. “Then stay,” he says, hands gently circling my waist.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Stay,” he says again through a smile.
“Beau.”
“Natalie.”
To be yourself will cause you to be exiled by many, Grandmother used to say. To comply with others’ wants, though, will cause you to be exiled from yourself. The tension is painful, but there is no choice to make, Natalie.
That’s how I feel with Beau. Like I can’t be with him. Like I need to be with him. Like there’s no choice to make and the answer should be clear, but it’s not.
I untangle myself from his arms. “We should keep working.”
“I’ll wait if that’s what you want,” he says.
I think of life without Beau, and Beau with someone else. Both are unbearable thoughts, but I swallow a knot and grit my teeth. “It’s not,” I lie. “Don’t wait.”
23
“Oh my God!” Coco shouts, bursting into my room. “Look at this. It’s all over the news.”
I jolt upright in bed, heart pounding. A second ago, I’d been lost in nightmares, sure my lungs were filling up with blood, and now I can’t help gulping down oxygen as Coco shoves her phone at me.
I feel my face flush, expecting to see pictures of the school speared through with a five-centuries-old tree or, worse, more bad news about Matt. Instead, a woman’s portrait stares up at me with too-far-apart eyes framed by a brassy pixie cut. “Dr. Langdon?”
“Her house burned down,” Coco squeals, yanking her phone back. “She left the oven on.”
“Is she okay?” I ask, swallowing a lump in my throat.
“She’s alive, but barely. Apparently she woke up in the middle of the night and she didn’t even smell the fire, but something was telling her to check the stove, and when she went into the kitchen the flames were all the way up to the ceiling. They got her and her cat out through an upstairs window! She’s covered in second- and third-degree burns.”
“But she’s going to make it,” I say. “Right?”
Coco shrugs without taking her eyes off the screen. “I can’t believe your counselor’s house burned down the same week your boyfriend got into a—” She drops off abruptly and claps a hand over her mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“It’s okay,” I lie. And Matt’s not my boyfriend, I add silently because it feels too cruel to say aloud.
“It’s so crazy,” Coco repeats, typing rapidly on her phone. Her crystalline eyes flutter up to me. “Why does it seem like you don’t think this is that crazy?”