Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live by Sacha Lamb

Author:Sacha Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Smugglers Publishing
Published: 2017-03-31T13:41:17+00:00

He meets me on the front walk, so he can sneak me upstairs without me waking up his parents. Apparently, they are the problem. He takes my hand in the hallway and finds that it’s frozen, puts his hand on the back of my neck instead and decides that I am shivering. So we don’t go upstairs. He makes us tea. There are cookies.

“So is this like witch stuff?” I ask him. We’re sitting at the granite counter, on tall chairs, nursing our steaming mugs. He has given me a sweatshirt so I don’t have to sit in my soaking-wet clothes. Apparently even demons whose magic can open a cafe after midnight don’t have cars to give you a ride where you’re going.

“Huh?” he says. “What?” He blinks at me, owlish, behind the glasses he almost never wears. I have a strange urge to lean over, take them off him, and poke out his eyeballs so he can never look at me with that expression of baffled concern again. Or maybe take off his glasses and kiss him. But I know if I did that now, it would feel cruel.

“If your family is magic or whatever,” I say. “You always have food and tea and stuff. Is your mom, like, a witch? Like–does the witch even have a name, that witch, in the story?”

“Which one?”

“Like any of them.”

“Baba Yaga,” he suggests.

“No, the gingerbread one. Your mom is the gingerbread witch.”

“Neither of my moms are technically witches,” he says, primly. “We are just a highly intuitive family. With, uhh, an especially fine-tuned sense of impending doom.”

“Mine too,” I tell him. “It’s called being Jewish. Doesn’t make me magic.”

He smiles at me, soft. “But you are magic, though.”

“Wow, Ian. Gay.”

“You’re gay,” he says.

“Your mom.”

“I mean, yeah.”

I shake my head, scowling. He’s not allowed to make me laugh. We are still fighting. “Am I magic enough to not die? That’s what she said. Lilit. She said not to die. How’s it supposed to happen, anyway? Seeing as how you told everybody at school, you owe me the details. Even if they’re gross. Suicide? Is that why the jokes bother you so much?”

“They’d bother me anyway,” he says, as if it’s offensive that I think he’d need a reason. “It wasn’t, like, a narrative dream, Avi. It was just information.”

“What information?”

He shrugs. “Your name. Who you are. That you’re going to die.”

“Who I am? Did you know already, then, when you asked? You knew. I don’t get to have secrets, and you get to have this huge, like, impossible thing. How is that fair?”

“I guess it’s not.”

“Were you thinking you could kiss me and break the curse or whatever?” I ask him. “Were you thinking it’s a fairytale and you can fix everything just by being nice to me?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Fuck that,” I say. “It’s not me who has the problem, it’s all your douchehole friends who think it’s funny that I’m gonna die. You should go kiss all of them, see if you can turn them back into loathsome toads.

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