my shaking voice. “I’m out of your league. Whatever happened this afternoon was just you slumming it while you’re stuck with me. Right? But you got a few things wrong. I’m not scared of you and I’m not trying to enjoy it while it lasts. I know there’s nothing between us”—I lift our two linked hands—“except this.
“And don’t think you’re shattering any of my illusions here.” I hold my stupid dead phone up between us. “I’ve had your number for a while now.” And then I play his message while repeating his horrible words verbatim. I even get his mixture of hurt and angry and so fucking deeply sad exactly dead on.
“It’s Smith. I just wanted to call and say, to call you and tell you, that you should know, in case you don’t already . . . It shoulda been you, Cash. Not Dyl, but you. She didn’t deserve to go that way. She—” I let myself take the pause where he sounds close to tears. I could get an Academy Award for this performance. I finish it the same way he did. “Fuck.”
“I was drunk!” Grabbing the phone from my hand, Smith throws it across the room as if this will get rid of the message. “Stupid, blasted, out of my mind drunk.”
“So what?” I sneer. “That’s an excuse? Are you gonna tell me next that you don’t even remember calling me?”
He shakes his head and sighs. Several long moments pass before he finally answers me in a much lower voice than before. “No, I remember. I just thought . . . I didn’t think you’d care. Stupid, I know. But . . . after Dyl . . . I’d see you around and you looked like you were made out of stone. Like none of it could even touch you. You became friends with Larry and I saw you laughing about something at lunch one day.”
“What?” I interject, still loud and angry. “So I’m not allowed to have friends? Or I’m not allowed to laugh?”
“Both. Neither. I don’t know. It, it—it pissed me off. Okay? I’m mean, it’s not okay. I get that. But then I was really drunk and I was mad and I was gonna say something to you the next day about how I didn’t mean it and stuff, but then I saw you and I thought you’d probably already forgotten it.” He sighs, glances toward me and then back up to the ceiling once more. “I didn’t know you’d save the message. Or remember it like that. You always seem like you don’t give a shit.”
I snort. “That’s funny coming from you, the original Mister Cool.”
“Well, maybe we have that in common. But that’s about the only thing.” Smith suddenly takes his focus away from above and back down to me. He spins, turning his whole body so that we are directly facing each other and neither of us can look away. “You wanna talk about slumming it? About who between the two of us has the power? Think for two seconds before you open your mouth, Lennie. You brought my sister back from the dead. You made Zinkowski into a really messed-up monster and gave another kid wings. You literally grant wishes. I’m the one who’s scared. Of you. I’m scared as hell. But I’m also . . .”
Somewhere in the house someone howls, “Michaelaaaaaaa!” Smith ignores this, his laserlike focus never wavering from me.
“I’m also enjoying it while it lasts. The way I see it, you’re stuck with me, not the other way around.”
I think my mouth falls open.
While I sit stupefied, Smith faces forward again and goes back to studying Michaela’s ceiling as if he didn’t just say something monumental and so heavy that it felt like my whole world tilted sideways. Suddenly, I am looking at things from a whole new angle.
I’d been thinking of the whole wish-granting thing as a colossal mistake and the world’s biggest screw-up. And yeah, it’s still that. But it’s also fierce and powerful. No. I am fierce and powerful.
That thought reverberates through my head like a new math concept I can’t quite grasp. Yet.
I look at Smith with new eyes too. He said he was afraid. Of me.
But unlike Todd Wilkins, he isn’t running away. Okay, yes, he doesn’t really have a choice there. Except when we were here earlier this morning, he could’ve left me behind. And since then he’s done his best to protect me.
“Smith.” I say his name and as