The curtains are drawn over Aiden’s doors. I can’t see inside. There’s a silence after my knock, but now that I know he’s here, I don’t intend to leave until I can talk to him. I try again, louder. This time I can vaguely make out a movement behind the fabric.
“I’m busy, Kent.” Aiden’s low voice is rougher around the edges than normal.
“Aiden, it’s me.”
There’s another silence, and then the door is pushed aside. Aiden is still in his pajamas, too. My heart twists painfully as I realize that his eyelashes are wet, his eyes lighter in color than usual. Not the frosty blue they became last night; they’re almost celadon, like a worn piece of sea glass. A natural lighter color, like how mine turn hazel when I - oh, god. When I cry. He runs the back of his hand under his nose and steps outside, closing the door behind himself.
“Sorry, I - wasn’t expecting you,” he says, folding his arms over his chest tightly.
“I know.” Shit. I can’t explain that I rushed off to go see Kasey. She specifically asked me not to. What do I even say?
“Jamie, honestly, it’s okay.” Aiden casts his gaze down at the floor of his little porch. “I understand. You don’t have to-”
I fling my arms around his neck and hug him tightly. I can’t help it. I’ve never seen this sad of a look on his face before, and I could almost cry, myself. He jumps when I crash up against him, and then stiffens in my arms.
“No, listen,” I mumble into his neck. It’s strangely easier to talk like this, without his disarming blue gaze on my face. “I’m so fucking sorry I took off like that. I just needed to - um, process everything. That wasn’t cool of me at all. I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I don’t believe you. I do believe you. I know you haven’t told anyone about all that before, and I’m really grateful that you decided to tell me. Even if I completely fucked everything up. It was just a lot of information. It kind of took me and shook me. But it wasn’t your fault, it was all mine. I’m so sorry.”
He still hasn’t hugged me back - his hands are hovering on either side of me - so I release my grip on him and step away, prepared to take my sorry ass home so that I can cry. But he reaches out and catches me by the elbow.
“You believe me?” His expression is still closed, serious. The hope that was fleeing me reasserts its hold and roots me to the spot.
“The evidence is on your side. And also I trust you. So do you, um - need help catching that ghost?”
He stares at me for another moment, and then his expression melts into a brilliant, bright smile that sends my heart zipping around my chest like a bumper car. The tension in his shoulders releases, and he drops his hold on me. I let out a little relieved laugh. I can’t help myself.
“Can I give you another hug?” I ask. “I feel so fucking bad.”
Aiden smiles again, throws one firm arm around my shoulders, and crushes me against his side. I gasp as all of the air is squeezed out of my lungs and slap at his stomach, trying to get him to let me go. The effort is futile: my hand smacks into a hard knot of muscle, and somehow my knuckles are the losers in the situation.
“Ouch! Okay, you know what, I changed my mind, no hug. Get off of me, you giant! Are you Bigfoot, on top of everything else?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Aiden releases me and ruffles my hair. The feeling of his fingernails tracing gently over my skull sends little shivers down my back, and I can’t force my face to look properly indignant. I end up sort of smile-glaring at him, which makes him laugh, which makes it even harder for me to frown.
“Do you mean it?” he asks, rubbing his elbow. “You really want to help me? You’re not just saying that because you dipped on me and you feel bad?”
“No, honestly. Let’s find William Clarke.”
Aiden chews his lip, still smiling, and turns to open the sliding glass door again.
“Come on. I’ll get you caught up.”
My phone buzzes as I follow him inside. I pull it out of my pocket and glance down at the screen, expecting it to be my mom reminding me about dinner next weekend or something.
Roger🧯 2:35 pm
hey keane-bean 😊 been missing u, thinking about our summer ☀️
Oh, Jesus.
“You okay?” Aiden asks, unfolding the map. “Something come up?”
I clear the notification and tuck my phone into my pocket.
“Are you kidding me? I’ve been dying to know the deal with this map ever since it went camera shy on me. Thanks for the tip about restarting my phone, by the way. You buttface.”
“Cut me some slack. I didn’t even know the map could do that. I barely understand how it works, unfortunately.”
He lays the map out flat on the desk. Weights the corners with handfuls of the little colorful rocks.
“What are these rocks for?”
“We’ll get to that later. Okay.” Aiden leans his palms on the desk, and I scooch closer to him so I can see what he’s doing. “The map is supposed to be a sort of guide to the energies of the town. I can listen for the energy like I did with Gabby, but it’s really hard. There’s so much going on at any given time. Each person has their own energy. You can also hear a little bit of what’s past, and a little bit of what’s coming. The map provides a way to cross-reference and narrow things down. Find what you’re looking for more easily.”
“Um… okay…” I lean over it. It truly looks like a map you could buy at any gas station in Ketterbridge, the gloss worn down around the lines where it folds up, the edges starting to fray. Aiden’s scribbled marks appear to be done with ordinary Sharpie.
“This is so weird,” Aiden murmurs. “I’ve never talked about this stuff to anyone before. It’s strange to even hear it out loud.”
“You’re doing great,” I tell him brightly, and he rolls his eyes, but smiles.
“So, here’s the problem. I don’t know how to read the map. I’ve examined it every way I can think of, but it just looks like a normal map of Ketterbridge. When I write things down on it, they disappear after a week or so. I keep having to draw these lines back on.”
“Didn’t you say your mom gave you the map?” I ask, leaning over it. “She didn’t tell you anything about how to read it?”
Aiden looks pained for a moment, his mouth twitching at the corner.
“No. Only told me what it was. She barely showed me how to do anything, unfortunately. She left me the map, the glasses, the plants, and the stones. I remember, when I was really little... her looking at the map with the glasses.” Some cloud moves behind his blue gaze, a shifting memory. “So I have to assume that the glasses are the key to reading it.”
“But you have like - twenty-thousand-billion different pairs of reading glasses in your trash can right now. Which ones are the pair she gave you?”
“I broke them,” Aiden groans, pressing his fingers to his eyes. “Trying to make them work. I told you, I’m bad at this. Nineteen years of having those fucking glasses in my possession. Not even a scratch on the lenses. And then the first time I ever tried to use them-” He winces at me. “Not gonna lie. I straight up cried.”
“God.”
“Yeah. But I got to thinking - the map, the glasses, they’re ordinary objects that are imbued with special energies. Which means I could potentially recreate the glasses. I just need to figure out the right way to do it.” He glances at the bin next to his desk. Like the one in the bathroom, it’s full to the top with broken reading glasses. “It’s… been a learning curve. I still haven’t gotten it down.”
I take a pair of glasses out of the trash and examine them. The lenses are shattered and - for some reason - turned pink. Another pair has only powder remaining. On the next, the lenses are fractured but whole, crisscrossed with cracks.
“You mean these are all from you trying to figure out how to make them work?”
“Yes.”
“You’re like a reading glasses serial killer.”
“I’m aware.”
“When you say you’ve been trying to make them work, what do you mean? How do you do it?”
“I’m trying to ask them to understand the map, but I’m using too much energy, and I can’t figure out how to use less. Here, watch.”
Aiden opens one of the drawers in the desk. It’s filled with intact reading glasses. He withdraws a pair and shuts the drawer again.
“I’ve been buying them wholesale,” he explains. “There’s a supplier somewhere who thinks I represent a very busy LensCrafters location.”
I turn and watch as he slides the curtain shut over the sliding glass door, dimming the room. He folds up the map and sets it aside, then takes up two handfuls of the little colorful rocks. He carefully sets them out in a large round pattern on the desk’s surface. Then he lines the outside of the circle with the dried plants and sets the glasses in the middle.
“Back up,” he tells me, and I comply immediately, falling a few feet away from the desk. Aiden joins me and takes a deep breath. He raises both of his hands, his elbows gently bent, his palms facing down. “Ready?”
“Ready.” I mean, I’m not, but if I waited around to be ready for everything, I wouldn’t be here with Aiden right now. My heart is pounding from pure excitement. I have no idea what to expect. Sparks? Lightning?
A long silence settles over us. Eventually I glance at Aiden, who has his eyes closed and his eyebrows furrowed. I don’t want to break his concentration, so I glance between him and the glasses, wondering if something happened without my noticing -
“Fuck.” Aiden releases a long breath. “Sorry. I haven’t done this in front of anybody before. I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be nervous on my account. I’ve never seen real-life magic before, so anything would be impressive. Even if you can barely do it.”
“Wow, thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to insult your wizarding capabilities.”
“I’m not a wizard.”
“Yeah, apparently not.”
His low, huffing laugh finds me through the dimness of the room.
“You are such a bastard.” He closes his eyes and lifts his hands again.
“Whatever, you love me,” I say, and the glasses explode.
Not just the lenses. The frames, too. There’s a sound like a bomb going off, and a burst of white light from the desk. Shimmering powder and bits of plastic rain down on us, and I throw my arms over my head instinctively. When I look up again, there’s a plume of smoke rising from Aiden’s desk, and a thin layer of debris in a six-foot circle around us. I didn’t even know something as small as a pair of glasses could produce so much material, but then again, I didn’t imagine they could be broken down into components as tiny as this.
Aiden is also crouched, shielding his head. We both straighten up and stare at each other. He looks about as surprised as I am.
“Jesus. That was a special one,” he mutters. “Jamie? Are you okay? I’m sorry, it hasn’t happened quite like that before-”
“Holy. Shit. Aiden.” I move slowly up to the desk. Where the glasses were, there’s nothing but a smoking scorch mark. I turn to look at him; he’s nervously rubbing his elbow.
“I know, it’s weird,” he begins, and then looks surprised as I burst into laughter. “What-?”
“That. Was. Amazing!” I grab two handfuls of my hair, flabbergasted. “That was incredible! You did that?”
“Well - yeah.”
“Do you not realize how dope that is? Jesus Christ! I wish I could blow things up with my brain!” I stride back over and grab him by the arms. “That was so fucking cool! Do it again, do it again!”
“Jamie,” he laughs, “The point is actually to not make the glasses explode.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry, I got excited.”
Aiden is smiling so widely, his cheeks fully rounded out like they get. I wish I could take his face in my hands and run my thumbs over them. I think - no, I know that this is my favorite facial expression on him.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says.
I need to start talking if I’m not going to cave and kiss him and ruin everything, so I quickly ask:
“Won’t Kent have heard that?”
“Pretty good soundproofing up here, actually. But I am starting to get concerned that someone will start asking questions. You may have already figured out that Ellen has caught me.”
“Ah, I see. So that’s why you’re a witch?”
“Just want to reiterate one more time that I am not a witch.” He crosses his arms, shakes his head. “That little goon promised me she wouldn’t say anything to anyone.”
“Yeah, well, promises from nine-year-olds.”
“True.”
“Well - if we need a place to do this unnoticed…” A thought has just occurred to me. “My dad has a little house by the waterfront. It’s pretty isolated, and he almost never uses it since he gave up on trying to learn how to fish. There was a hook in his foot by the end of it. It was ugly.”
“Shit, man.”
“There’s no hooks there now, though. He hasn’t used it in a long time. It’s more like a shack than anything, but it’s private, and we won’t explode anything important by accident there. Except maybe ourselves, but that’s a risk anywhere.”
Aiden stares at me.
“Really? You think Marcus wouldn’t mind?”
“I’ll just tell him I’m trying to learn how to fish or whatever.”
“Okay, well, he’s met you, so I don’t think he’ll believe that. The last time you and I went to the grocery store you held your breath the whole time we were in the seafood section.”
“Then we’ll tell him that you fish. He likes you, he’ll be fine with that. I’ll text him right now.”
“Wow. Thanks, Jamie. That would be super helpful.” Aiden pops me one on the shoulder and crosses to open the curtains. I pull my phone out of my pocket and open up my messages.
The one from Roger is pulled up. I nibble my lip and glance at Aiden, who is busy letting the sunlight back into the room. I hesitate, then delete Roger’s text and start typing one to my dad.
“Hey,” Aiden says, turning to face me. “You know what? I think we should officially start the ghost hunt tomorrow. I think we deserve a little break.”
“A break? We just started.”
“I appreciate the enthusiasm,” Aiden says, a smile pulling at his lips, “But you do realize that in the last twenty-four hours, we had dinner with your parents, then a mad dash through the rain, then a dip in the river to get Gabby, then a hike back, then what felt like a staff meeting this morning, and then I told you about all this stuff-”
“God, you’re right.” I stare at him. “Why do I have even a modicum of energy right now?”
“I don’t know. You’re like an energizer bunny.” Aiden’s gentle voice is bass, jazz, dim lights. Especially when it’s tired like this. “Come on, we’ll set up headquarters tomorrow. Let’s take a break. Just hang out with me for a bit.”
I’m a mess, looking at him right now. There’s a dusting of plastic powder on his honey-brown hair, glittering like a snowfall. I want to tell him how fucking annoyingly cute he looks, that my heart is way too small of a place for him to live, that he’s going to make it explode. Instead, I come out with:
“Yeah. Whatever. Let’s do it.”
And he thinks he’s bad at explaining things.
Comments (38)
See all