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There were a few other places first. Summer homes of retired admirals who wore velveteen robes around all day and drank endless gin martinis from their crystal servitors and wanted deeply, deeply, said with a hand on Mom’s bare thigh, to pay their respects to the dearly departed Captain Kirk. At least, that’s how Sam told it. She herself had been a baby, though, “A bug-eyed baby, Janny. Like an Arcadian. You probably saw more than me,” Sam said once with a shiver down her spine as though remembering all there was to be seen.
It’s weird—it’s worth investigating—how Jan can’t really remember the before places, by oceans, hot as dog breath, but can remember their first day at Uncle Frank’s. Knowing there was a before but not knowing its shape. Like an amnesiac in a holo-opera, swooning around with the back of her hand placed to her forehead. Five-years-old and empty of pictures of elsewhere but with some other unknown place gnawing at her gut, yelling at her to run.
She called him “Uncle” but knew he wasn’t. Had never been a part of any family tree of his. He was a large man and she ducked his kiss to the top of her head and made her way up his winding staircase, all the way into the attic, creaking and grunting as she went, gold glittery polyurethane suitcase in hand. “Janny!” Sam called after her, but she didn’t turn around.
Up here was a window like a half a pie, and it looked out onto—nothing. Dust and flat. Ticking the seconds off in her head, she waited for a jackelope or something else good to run by, but three-hundred and forty-five seconds and she was tired of having to squint into the sun, and she set her suitcase down.
It wasn’t a storage kind of attic. It wasn’t a living-in kind of attic either. It had no boxes or old mannequins or a bed or a chair or anything good to look into except a big framed painting of a girl in a too-frilly dress. It was just a big room at the top of this big house. But it let her watch and know if anyone was coming, so she emptied her suitcase and laid her clothes across the floor to make a quilt. On each edge, she placed a stuffed animal, and they all looked out, her sentinels. “Janice Scribonia Kirk lives here,” she whispered into the quilt’s middle.
Now Mom and Sam would have to help her carry a bed all the way up here. Laying claim to things wasn’t something you could just undo. She stood and wiped her hands together as loud as she could and thought about how big a bed she wanted and if maybe they could hang a tire swing from one of the rafters. In the corner, the painting of the girl fell over, which was better, even if she did initially jump straight in the air at the sound. It’d been staring at her anyway, and she was the one, in all interpersonal relationships, that did the staring.
Initially, when Mom left, it was exciting. She thought she and Sam would receive letters with all the details of other places and poetry in alien languages, with the dirt of other terrains sprinkled inside. In a row on the attic windowsill, she kept jars full of different kinds of dirt, but they were really just from the different bits of Riverside, not much variation between them. “I want pink sand,” she’d whispered to Sam the night before Mom left, as they shared the attic bed even though it was a twin and a narrow twin and she normally loved to sleep all in a sprawl.
“God, ask for something cool, like an exotic knife,” Sam hissed back.
Moonlight entangled itself in the mostly empty jars.
“Pink sand is completely cool,” she said, six and uncertain of herself and it showing in her voice.
“You’re taking a place and putting it in a different place.”
Sam snorted and rolled over, leaving even less space in which to stretch out. She was nine, and nothing was cool enough for her anymore. Not playing chess or giving names to the wildlife or the secret magic of picking up the earth and carrying it into your bedroom up in the sky. It was a surprise she’d even agreed to sleep here, to assuage her sister’s unspoken nerves around losing the last parent they had left. The expected response had been—
“Stop being so lame, Janny,” Sam said into the pillow. “I don’t want to have to protect you at school all the time if you’re gonna be like this.”
She was starting at Riverside Elementary in two weeks and had been doing nothing but reading everything she could make half a head or tail of to prepare. The best part was knowing Sam would be there, that she could see her in the hallways and at lunch and in the yard. Sam said that stuff more and more lately, about needing to protect her. From what, she didn’t say, but of course it was a lie any time she said she wouldn’t. Sam was her older sister, and had a lot of friends, and had once broken a kid down the road’s nose because he wouldn’t stop touching her.
She pressed closer into Sam, and ignored the shoulder Sam shrugged at her in annoyance.
When she awoke, it was still dark except the swathe of anchovy-silver light napping in the middle of the floor, and the house was making its Old House Settling noises everyone was always telling her to ignore. She wasn’t full awake, not really, like her eyelashes were caught together by an invisible film, but she thought she heard Sam saying, “I love you, Janny,” in a sleep-notched voice.
“I love you too, Sam,” she said, and looked over at her sister, who had her back to her. Her side was rising and falling, rising and falling in the slowest rhythm. “Sam?” she asked, and Sam snored in response, and the house creaked, once, twice, thrice, four times in a row before, she supposed, finally settling into sleep itself.
By about the seventh time Winona left them with Frank, all the excitement had been shed. She was ten now, and Sam was thirteen, with all her adult teeth firm in her gums and gnashing.
At no time had there been letters full of pink sand, or even dust from alien moons, or even an I love you in a P.S. But still she went to school and got straight As despite the disorder of her backpack and wore her hair in two banana-bright braids and moved always through the house like a cat burglar lest Frank need someone to pick on much much smaller than himself.
Sam, though, moved brashly, left Frank threatening notes written in her menstrual blood and smoked in secret with girls from the high school. Sam almost never talked to her, and there were no more nights in the bed in the attic, keeping each other safe as the house made its sighing around them. Sam wore her hair all buzzed off.
And then Sam was gone too. And then Jan was going. And she was wishing she hadn’t even used the car keys, had instead slashed open the interior with the pocket knife Sam gave her and kissed together the wires to make the engine go with a bang. Something as bright and loud as the sun in her eyes and the wind screaming around her and her own screaming now that Frank’s voice was gone from the comm.
No matter how fast and far she drove, it wouldn’t make Sam come back. It wouldn’t make Winona come back. It wouldn’t make her dad come back. But Jan didn’t have to make Jan come back either. Jan aimed the car at the cliff and knew the best way to prove that she was a Kirk was to teach herself to fly.
And then Jan found herself thrown from the car, in a neat swooping arc she couldn’t remember orchestrating. There was an opportunity to grab hold of the cliff side as she went, and. She’d already flown and she’d been disappointing at it, hadn’t gone very far at all. She dug her nails—even the index nail covered in Wite-Out—into the dirt.
It could have been days that she hung there, the little muscles in her arms straining and the sound of the car’s last breaths echoing up around her volcanically. The last days of being who she was. The last days of being afraid because of reasons beyond her making. A crow cawed. A whole murder of crows. Her muscles shivered. The police officer lumbered its way toward her hands, and she pulled herself up with the strain of all ten years she’d been alive and cowering, boots kicking up in the air behind her.
“My name is Janice Scribonia Kirk,” she said, and if you asked her about it later, she’d say her voice didn’t shake at all.
For her thirteenth birthday, Jan decided to become a myth. Someone whose hair turned to snakes or whose wings melted in the hot sun. Monstrous transformation was the key, and being alone in it, and being alone was something Jan had a lot of experience with. It was almost three years now since she’d last seen her sister, two years since anyone at school hadn’t been afraid for her pencil case to touch theirs, a year and a half since Winona had been home at all and a year since she’d made even a postcard’s worth of contact.
Jan was gonna burn the stars into her own skin.
Already her hands were a pattern of places where she'd missed trying to light her cigarettes, and clamped them down in the flatiron trying to perfect the angle of her bangs, and grabbed hot dogs too soon off the griddle hurrying out the door before Frank could wake up and find her existing. But those were just fuckups. Nothing poetic or powerful in them at all.
Today, she was taking a break from school, and from fuckups, and from being a member of the public. She had a bottle of moonshine she'd bought off Sam's old friend Clarissa, a box of matches from her favorite automat, the cool bright quiet of her attic bedroom at ten a.m., and a kicking, rumbling new sense of living in her body.
Before sleep, she’d prayed on the cracks in the ceiling for that sense of self-possession to be there when she woke up, and before even her eyes had opened, she’d felt it the way she’d felt her first period or how one day the trigonometry she’d been teaching herself at lunch all slid together in her brain. It was a solid weight. It was hers to throw around wherever she pleased.
She sat lotus-style on the floor, by the biggest window, with her jars of dirt that were still the same as they had been seven years earlier--no new places for Jan Kirk. All she had was closing her eyes in the old places, trying to make them be anywhere but here--in an old black tank top and ratty jeans, her hair starting to grow out and whisper at the back of her neck. The moonshine was to her left, the matches to her right, and she had to squint into the sun.
Bright as her dad’s death.
She was born amongst the stars, a triplet to chaos and pain. With a galaxy of scars along her arms, she could rain new wildfire destruction down upon this house. She could never have to be anything other than white-hot whirling searing ever again.
Her first swig of the moonshine, she spat so hard it slid down the window like rain. Fresh Iowa corn and poison. The second, she held her nose and forced it down and then coughed until she thought she was dying.
When her head started feeling like a trunk of sweaters and mothballs, she put the bottle down, misjudging the angle, so it tipped and spilled the rest of the alcohol across the floor. “Gosh darn it,” she whispered from somewhere years back.
The sun was higher and harder. Dust particles swam thickly in it in the way she used to think meant magic was real. Because one time, Sam told her they were fallen bits of the galaxy, and you could wish on them, and then Janny did wish, for a hot air balloon, and then Sam laughed, but not quite mean enough to mean it had to have been a lie.
She struck the first match and brought it to her forearm.
A wind blew through the attic and put out the flame.
Second match, third match: second wind, third wind. Each time, she was close enough to imagine she could feel her skin wax-softening, and each time the wind was bitter and cold. And it was January in midwest North America, yes. And the attic had never been well-insulated, yes. But the fourth time Jan took a match to her skin, the fourth time a wind blew the flame out, someone somewhere groaned.
Jan whirled around with a fifth match in her hand, and a girl’s low voice asked her, “Can’t you just accept divine intervention for what it is?”
There was no one there. When she called out, “Who’s there?” she felt stupid about it.
“Oh, no one,” the girl’s voice said again. “Just the reason you’re not in a hospital. At best.” At that, the match was actually plucked from her hand, along with the matchbox, and the two floated over to the painting that had been face down in the corner for years.
Maybe Jan had believed in magic once, in wishes and good things and the universe looking out for her if she asked it desperate enough. Maybe she had even believed in something like a god. But never had she believed in voices, or things floating, or anything looking out for her without her asking first, and considering the room was spinning a little anyway, “You’re just a figment of my drunkigination,” she told the matchbox and the matches.
There was a small laugh, and the painting righted itself. And it was. Not the same as the last time Jan had seen it, about eight years ago now. The frilly dress was the same, white and tiered as the kind of birthday cake Jan could never dream of having. Still, the eyes stared piercingly. But the girl was taller, her face more angular, and her hair now tied up in a bun instead of bobbed loosely about her chin.
“I wish,” the girl said, but the lips didn’t move. There was a voice and there was a face and they were both the girl’s but the two still had nothing to do with each other.
“So, what, you’re an angel?”
“Don’t be sacrilegious.” The matches bobbed in the air, and then one struck itself against the box and lit up. “I’m a ghost.”
As Jan stood, her legs wobbled, and the flame of the match blurred out into something like the sun. She wavered her way over to the painting, and the match blew out before she could get it in her grasp. “Well, ghost girl, you scared me right down to my bones.” She traced the firm set of the girl’s mouth. A layer of dust clung to the canvas.
“Yeah, well, some of us haven’t got any bones.” At that, the matches settled back down into her palm, a gentle touch. Like being handed a secret.
Her name was Lenore and she had some age she wasn’t telling and her voice was sharp and clouding as one of the many short scratches marring the attic’s big window. And she had been watching Jan for what Jan called a long time and Lenore called, “Just a handful,” as she ruffled Jan’s hair in a cool, swift gasp. When she was alive, she’d had a squared jaw and small, mean eyes--sparkling, iguana-green--and, how had she died? For once in her life, Jan had decided to practice tact.
The late morning turned into a grey afternoon of Jan lying on her back on the floor as Lenore picked up various objects and swung them through the air as if to convince herself of her own presence in this moment. It turned into night the blue of Starfleet-born light pollution and a sharp, painful sobering.
By the time Jan’s head was rattling all dry and hard, they’d wound their way around to her childhood, and she was telling how, “And then I was thrown from the car, Bones,” and Lenore began to say for the fourth time that day, “Stop calling me that; it’s nonsensical,” but she cut herself off and there was silence.
“Bones?”
“You ever stop to think that someone actually threw you?”
Studying the ceiling’s patina of grime, she remembered how her expulsion from the car had come unbeckoned. How by all rights she should have careened off that cliff to her death, bloodied up her yellow head, cracked in half her dumb buck teeth that were still a little too jutting. Been no picture for an open casket.
“You weren’t in the car.”
“This morning you didn’t think I was in this attic. You find a worm in your backyard, doesn’t mean it can’t crawl into your handbag as well.”
Cool ghost hands had pulled her up into living. But then--had Bones been forced back to the Kirk family home when the car sailed doomward? For she hadn’t placed Jan down carefully at all, hadn’t kept her from almost sliding to perdition along with it. No, she’d had to pull her own self up and onward. And the year in juvie. She’d been just one Jan Kirk then.
She rolled over and banged her cheekbone into the floorboard, wishing for a bruise. Come morning, her wish had Pinocchioed into pea-green reality. Hovering above her sore skull: still Bones, still there, still had been a long while.
Halloween and she was fifteen and as small as thirteen but for the budding muscle in her biceps from hauling bales of hay on the Barnabys’ horse farm where spoiled brats learned to look down on her from atop their big-teethed looming hellbeasts. When she looked up at Bones now, she could look up at Bones. Not an object Bones held aloft but a body, or the thought of a body. It couldn’t be the memory of a body, she reminded herself whenever having a ghost friend started to feel too much like having the ghost of a friend, because she looked Jan’s age now and had never been that old when she was flesh and blood and muscles and nerves, and yeah, haha, very funny, Janice, stop calling me that for Pete’s sake.
“Unless time is a nonlinear rotating--no, not an orb, come on, maybe a tongue kind of shape, with blue veins, and the world that remembers us and makes us spectral sees it all before it’s gonna happen and can remember the lady you weren’t ever gonna be,” Jan slurred from where she was curled up under the blankets, a cowboy hat smashed between her head and the pillow.
“Some of us have always been ladies, Janice,” said the memory of Bones’ future, square jaw and big hands on thin wrists. Or the evolution of Bones’ memory. Or just the girl who lived in Jan’s bedroom and was a little translucent and had saved her life when she was ten.
She whispered over to the bed and lifted up the cowboy hat to peer into Jan’s eyes. Her own eyes were the color of the kind of living things that didn’t grow in Riverside, Iowa. It was all wheat and corn here. Dust and tumbleweeds.
“Death looks alive and life looks dead, Bones” Jan explained, and jammed the hat back down, curled up tighter around her jug of moonshine so it dug against her stomach like an externalized fetus.
All night, Bones had been trying to convince her to go out trick-or-treating, since she had the hat on anyway, since she looked like a kindergartener anyway, to which Jan had taken offense, downing too much liquor in one go purely as an act of spite, and she coughed earthquakes for eons. No point in trick or treating when the whole town thinks you’re the devil in disguise, not disguised as the devil.
Halloween had always been Sam’s favorite holiday. She’d said it was about transformation, and the vast innumerability of the darkness. It was about being a Kirk.
Jan ensconced herself deep in the darkness of her hat and blankets and imagined herself a luna moth in waiting.
Downstairs, Frank was handing out candy with the begrudging squint of a man always scrambling to keep himself within the borders of their neighbors’ respect. But Bones had snuck behind him and stolen a fistful of chocolates and now lowered them onto the rise of Jan’s shoulder. “If you’re gonna ever eat so much sugar your teeth fall out through your eyes and you run in circles all night howling at the moon, make it when I’m expecting it.” Bones flicked from her dress’ many frills a piece of lint that could never ever exist.
The foil was frigid with Midwest autumn evening, and the candy itself fought her bite with satisfying slickness. With each piece, she drew a little further from her cocoon. When she was almost emerged and her mouth was peak-full, she said, “Thanks, Lenny,” and Bones rolled the memory-thought of her eyes.
It was wrong, how she made no indent in the bed when she lowered herself beside Jan’s arched spine. It was fine, the shiver that went through Jan’s body when Bones placed a not-a-hand on her back and said, “Yeah, you’re welcome.”
There was no moon tonight, only dead stars spit across the sky. Outside, she heard a child screaming her trick or treat. Jan moved closer to Bones’ touch, and so through it, with the chocolate still thick on her tongue.
She had never asked. Years, the question had been wadded up in her cheek, sticky and amorphous and obstructive. But it had seemed--not tactless, yes, tactless, but when had Jan Kirk cared about tactless except with that one thing--but scary. And big. Like chopping off a finger. Or getting a new finger in the chopped one’s stead.
She had never asked, "Bones, can you talk to other dead people?" but she wanted to. She wanted strong as a storm.
She was seventeen and Frank was dying. Fuck him. She had scars.
She was seventeen and when she was eighteen she would inherit the house and all its ghosts and losses with it. It had always been hers to take anyway. Hers to spectacularly destroy. She, the spectacle, destroyed. Eighteen years old. Its hard vowels blocked up her throat whenever she said it aloud.
“For my eighteenth birthday I’m gonna buy a horse.” Her voice the way it always was now--half-there and wet. Lying supine in the backyard, one hand shielding her eyes from the summer sun. “And just ride it around Riverside, banging on a pot. That’s the way to go out.”
Bones harumphed, and slid her image into a simulacrum of lying on the hard ground too.
These days, Bones was looking sharper. Cleaner around the edges, darker at the eyebrows, full of vim and vigor, Bones would say if she could see herself.
“You look full of vim and vigor today,” Jan supplied, sparing her a quick glance interrupted by sun.
“What do you mean by going out?”
“What?”
“‘The way to go out.’ You said it a moment ago, Jan.You should listen when you talk.”
“You think I’m not leaving Riverside?”
“That’s not what you meant.”
“Because I’d be an idiot not to leave this piece of shit--”
“You meant you were going to die, Jan.”
She could only lie out in the yard on days with no wind, or the dirt like coffee-stained teeth would whirl its way into her mouth and eyes and nose until she was nothing but a mummy lying there, an artifact of someone else’s greatness in the backyard of a ramshackle tower in fucking Riverside, Iowa.
“I say a lot of things, Bones.” No wind, no reprieve from the heat. Her skin was cooking in her crop top and shorts. Bones: still all frills, forever a ball of pearly fluff.
“I saved your life once, Janice.” The implied threat was repetition, for what was a ghost but a circle. But what was a Bones but a circle that had grown fourteen inches and a way out of itself.
She knew she had to ask.
Pushing up on her elbows, “Can you talk to other dead people?”
In answer, she got more sun in her eyes, a dead girl’s pursed lips, a silence. She’d thought about it a lot, how if Bones had always been there, she must know about the wistful prayers, about the Ouija board when she was eleven, about the shrine when she was seven, before Sam stole one of the holo-images of their father laughing with crinkle-eyed ease on his wedding day. There was no way Bones hadn’t known this question was coming. And yet, she misunderstood.
“What, you think you’re going to be a ghost too? Do you think we’re gonna have ghost tea parties in the underworld with every turtle you ever brought home? This isn’t a game, Jan.” End of speech, back to pursed lips. It made Jan laugh. That made Bones purse harder.
“My dad,” was all she could say to explain, and instantly, Bones’ expression butter-melted into sympathy.
“No. It’s just me.” She brushed a translucent strand of hair behind her ear. “Before you, it was no one but me.”
Together, they laid back down on the dirt, but a small wind was kicking up; in no time, Jan was spitting out the dust of her worthless family estate, and they had to relocate to her bedroom.
Piled by her bed was a small assortment of post-high-school-educational-opportunity mailings Bones had been gathering for her over the past year. Cornflower blue curtains hung from the windows, made painstakingly by hand after Bones had taught her to use a needle and thread. “Homey,” was a word that could be used to describe the space.
The words Jan chose, however, were, “I don’t want to die, Bones.” She meant it. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to be cold to the touch, or untouchable, or so blue. She didn’t want to see the end of it all and its bright burning light like her dad had.
But she knew that if she stayed here, she would. A glassy-eyed corpse with her lungs full of golden-brown dust, smothered to death by the Kirk inheritance: a wide spread of land, flat as day-old cola, where nothing had grown in almost eighteen years.
She was left with one problem: how to get Bones out too.
With only a single aberration--inexplicable, unrepeatable--Bones seemed firmly tied to this location. They’d tested together, occasionally, if Bones could follow Jan down the road to buy a bag of chips, or if she could nestle in the basket of Jan’s bike and ride with her to school. Each time, when they got past the property line, Jan heard a whistling and a pop and there was no more Bones by her side.
“Maybe it’s because I don’t own the house yet,” she suggested over breakfast, eating cornflakes out of the box with a mixing spoon as Bones hovered over the center of the table and looked disapproving. “Maybe you could get in the car because it belonged to my dad and the house did too.”
“I didn’t stay in the car for long, though, Jan.”
Jan munched thoughtfully. “Maybe we need a priest.”
Jan went to see a priest.
There was only one Catholic church in Riverside, St. Agatha’s, and she’d never before set foot inside. She wasn’t sure what the Kirk family was, if they had been anything, and all denominations were a gnarled tangle in her brain, except for this one thing: Catholics were the ones who, in all the old horror holo-vids, knew how to cast out spirits, to box them up and take them on the road.
Technicolor light sliced its way across the pews when she entered at three o’clock on a Saturday, within the hours St. Agatha’s listed for confession. Hushed and hallowed were the words circling her head, and in the presence of so much luxor, she was overly aware of the dirt beneath her fingernails. Deep wine-colored pew cushions, a cross the size of her times three.
She more stumbled than stepped into the confessional. A shadow was waiting on the other side. She cleared her throat, said, “Bless me,” and stopped. Couldn’t take it any further. The shadow cleared its throat gently. Again: “Bless me, um, father,” and there was no face to the shadow that could prove her father wasn’t really right there. “I’m kind of in love with a ghost so I’m afraid to lose her.”
This time, the cough was more forceful. “Excuse me, my child?”
“Bless me, father, for I need to take my ghost girlfriend on the road.”
“And it’s been. How many days since your last--”
“Oh, right.” She looked up at the ceiling and saw only more shadow. “Six-thousand five-hundred and eight. Father.” Almost in the shadows she could see the blue eyes, the heft of his jaw. “I need to take a ghost and put her in my backpack.”
“Do you have any sins?”
“Many. Uh, do we need to expunge them first? When I was ten, I stole a car for the first time. The last time I stole a car was three months ago. Do you want a list of petty thieveries as well? I can produce a resume.”
He swallowed audibly. “Perhaps this is not the place you are looking for.”
“Does the Catholic church not handle hauntings anymore?”
“The Catholic church’s stance is that this haunting you keep referencing is all in your imagination. But I can give you the address of a very nice magic shop just outside of town.”
Magic sounded finicky. Magic sounded like dust in sunlight and other insubstantial stuff, not like a large wooden cross that a part of her wanted to climb up onto so she could feel its solidity against her spine. But magic was what Bones was, if Jan thought about it hard enough. And maybe magic could save her life again.
“I’ll take that address. Father.”
Jasmine and sandalwood fogged up around her when she opened the door, and above her head, the dream-sound of chimes. It was dimly lit. Stuffy. Little packets of herbs and bowls of crystal shards stacked haphazard on tables of varying size. Alone and staring at her from across the shop, a woman stood with her hands crossed so each held the opposite wrist, both of which hung heavy with beaded bracelets.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Jan asked her when she realized she’d been staring too long.
The woman said, “I believe we are not alone.”
“Well, yeah. Kind of a whole panoply of galaxies swirling around out there.” As she talked, she ran a hand along the nearest shelf, full of candles with embedded screens listing their mystical properties. “Thousands of variations on intelligent life, many of them frequently converging not too far from here to get gung ho about Starfleet and everything.”
She turned to the woman, who was now smiling indulgently. “I was speaking of greater forces around us.”
“Well, my force is named Lenore,” Jan said. “And the problem is not having her around, you know what I’m saying?.”
“Oh, lesbianism,” said the woman.
“Oh, um.” Jan was now holding a blue candle with “patience” scrolling across its screen.
Three days before her eighteenth birthday, Frank finally died. The ambulance took his body away. They wore white gloves. They covered him in white sheets. No eye holes. No mouth. No drunken fist. And it didn’t patch her up the way she thought it would. And for a very long moment she feared his ghost. And all of this was gurgling spitting burning in her stomach and she had to do something to push it up and out.
It was unusual, these days, for her to not at least try to take Bones with her when she left. Every time: desperate, clawing hope. Every time: the whistle, pop, and gone. But Bones had forced herself invisible for the sake of the paramedics, and Jan was too aware of how alone she looked to them as they left, a stupid tiny girl whose mascara was starting to run with tears that weren’t even for the man they were floating away, but for Sam, for her father, for herself.
Stupid and tiny and what if she died in this house too.
Bones said, “Jan,” disembodied, consoling, so interested, always in Jan’s well-being, but Jan was already getting on her bike and going.
Birthday plan: horse.
Birthday reality: three days was a very long time to go on living like this.
The woman at the magic shop had said, “Good energy begets good energy, dear,” and placed a sharp crystal in her palm. When she’d brought it home and shown Bones, Bones had called it snake oil, and Jan had known she was right, and so buried it in the yard.
Crystals were snake oil. Priests were false fathers. The girl she loved was spectral and could never hold her hand. The only real thing was the burning in her legs as she spun them furiously around and around, bowed down over the handlebars, and she whispered, “go out,” like a match in the path of Bones.
She hadn’t know where she was going when she left, and even now, having lost all sense of time and space such that she narrowly avoided ramming her bike into several different cars, she wasn’t sure. As fast and determined as she was going, it was still as though it came to her, a Goliath shuffling toward David, with a yawn like a galaxy. She turned her bike sideways and skidded, just short of the edge of the cliffside where she had once been saved.
Her hair was a sweaty tangle, but her face and hands were numb with the force of the freezing air battering against them for miles. She stood, legs still bracketing the bike, trying to find some sense in her breathing and instead getting bowled over in its path. All she had on was a t-shirt and jeans and she would surely die out here if she stayed too long. The thought occurred to her, that this had been enough and she could turn around now and get back to a house that should be warmer now that it held no demons, no slow death.
But she had never looked.
She let the bike fall toward her and then flat with a soft thunk as she clambered off of it to the side farthest from the cliff’s edge. Hugging her shivering arms to her chest, she stepped around it and hesitated, a foot from the plunge, the depth unimaginable. She shuffled closer. Closer. Closer. The scuffed-up toes of her boots perfectly met the place where the land ceased to be. She stretched her arms out winglike at her sides. And she looked down.
There was no car carcass spewing its rotten mechanical guts and robotic maggots all over the landscape. There was no wormhole waiting to suck her into another life. There were no words of wisdom etched into the ground, or words of pseudo-wisdom like, “Good energy begets good energy, dear.”
Beneath her, so near and real it felt like a fifth limb, was the ground. And it was empty as the ground around the Kirk property.
She sat down. Her legs dangled above nothing worth anything good.
It was hard to say how long she sat there, contemplating nothing, before she realized she was being watched. It wasn’t any noise that had alerted her, just a creeping sensation that something was different, though the moment the girl started moving in Jan’s peripheral vision, she did so clumsily, with heavy steps, and banged into a bike tire, almost tripping, and yelled, “Jiminy cricket, Jan, pick up after yourself.”
Jan turned.
The hem of Bones’ fluffy dress was flecked black with bike grease, and her nose was cartoonishly red. She was white-knuckling a sweater, and blinking too often, and her feet touched the ground. Both of them. All the way.
“Hi, Bones.”
Bones handed her the sweater with her lips tucked pointedly between her teeth. Jan pulled it on over her head.
After a while of them watching each other, Bones came and sat down next to her, though a little further from the precipice, and with her legs criss-crossed for stability. She put an arm around Jan, and the skin-to-skin contact was warming.
The more time Jan spent examining the drop below, the less it seemed like magic. The less it seemed that she had once been fated to plummet toward mortality but in the end only barely managed to scrabble her way back to life. Afterward, her year in juvie, she’d made up all kinds of fairy tales, in which good witches cast spells to make her immortal, or in which evil witches cast spells to make her immortal, depending on the overall mood of the day.
What happened was the girl beside her had selfishly wanted, and Jan wanted, wanted, wanted, and laid her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder.
Bones pressed her mouth into Jan’s hair. She said, “This is how I died.”
At least a mile of vertical space. A long time to spend in terror’s mouth. And a long time had passed, and if there ever had been any kind of memorial, it had been swept away by the wind.
“I want to leave you flowers,” Jan whispered.
“Flowers die, Janice. That’s no kind of honor.”
When they went back home, it was walking, together, the bike walked beside them, though first Jan had offered Bones a ride on her handlebars.
The day she turned eighteen, Jan burned the whole damn house down.
Less than a year later, she and Bones joined Starfleet by each other’s sides.
“Hey,” Jan said to her when they were buckled into the transport shuttle and Bones was shaking all over and muttering about gravity’s thrall. “I still owe you, don’t I?” Bones looked at her. Her eyes had little blood vessels in the whites. “It looks like we’re gonna crash, I’ll pull you out.”
“That’s just words,” Bones muttered, clenching her fists.
But when Jan hooked her ankle behind Bones’, Bones pressed back against her, solid and real.
The only piece of luggage Jan had with her was a glass jar full of dirt from the part of Riverside, Iowa where they both were saved.