You Must Not Miss by Katrina Leno

Author:Katrina Leno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2019-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN FOR A SECRET

Magpie slept like the dead, collapsing onto her bed with a belly full of Near-dinner and waking ravenous and weak in the early morning. She ate leftover pizza over the kitchen sink—had it really been only two days since she and Clare had stumbled into Near together?—and then took a hot shower, washing her hair and letting the water turn her skin red.

She sat with the yellow notebook and the Near-pen after her shower, letting her hair drip dry against the back of the couch, feeling the weight of the things in her hand as she wrote a new sentence on an empty page.

And they all lived happily ever after.

She placed the notebook in the bottom drawer of her bureau among the winter sweaters she wouldn’t wear for months and months, or maybe never—because Near would not have winter snowstorms. Or if it did, the snow would be warm. Like cotton. Or spun sugar.

Hither made a noise in the back of its throat.

Wasting all your energy on warm snow. The uselessness.

Magpie thought that was the point, that not everything had to be useful.

She felt better after the shower and the pizza. She packed a bag for Ann Marie, a change of clothes and a pair of socks and sneakers, then she started walking to the hospital. It was three miles away, but they would take a cab home together.

As she walked, Hither sometimes floated alongside her and sometimes fell behind and sometimes disappeared entirely and sometimes turned into a many-winged birdlike creature and flew above her, casting a wide shadow that shielded Magpie from the sun.

It did not escape Magpie that a thing casting a shadow must be a thing with some degree of realness to it.

It was a warm day, and Magpie was happy to have an excuse not to be in school. Even though there were only three weeks left until summer, those three weeks felt like their own eternity. It was inconceivable that they would ever pass. And yet here she was, forced to live through them, to slog through the endless minutes contained within each set of night and day.

At least she had her own place to return to now. Her own Near.

She wanted to go back to it—and she would, just as soon as she got Ann Marie home and into bed.

She wondered more about how time worked between Near and Farther. If she spent years and years in Near, would she return to sixteen when she decided to come out again?

Are you back on that silly fantasy stuff? You’re not a rubber band; you can’t snap back and forth.

But she could decide never to come back again. Once she had practiced enough, once she had built up her strength, she could sustain herself within Near for an entire lifetime. Everything would be just how she wanted it. A perfect life.

“But if I die in Near, what happens? Does my body just appear here again?”

You ask the most asinine questions.

But Hither didn’t say anything else, so Magpie thought maybe it didn’t know the answer.

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