watching one of those flipbooks that had so enchanted us all as children. Put enough still images together and you can see them move! Wow! In a world of monsters and magic, somehow that had been the most incredible thing of all.
Half of them passed so quickly that I couldn’t really see them, and that was all right; these weren’t my memories to enjoy. I wasn’t even sure Artie knew he was showing them to me, for all that he was the one holding onto my head, keeping me from tumbling down into the pit of my own splintered self. The other half lingered.
Me in the dress I’d worn to Antimony’s junior prom, both of us giggling behind our hands. She’d worn a suit, tie striped in her school colors and left hanging suggestively open, makeup Adam Ant extreme, the cheerleader playing with New Romantic ideals and absolutely killing it. I’d worn a dress in cornflower blue, dusky and soft and supported by a dozen layers of taffeta, so that the whole thing seemed to float with every step I took.
I remembered Artie pinning the flowers in my hair, strangely quiet, meticulously careful not to let his fingers touch my skin. At the time, I’d thought it was because he wanted to avoid the glitter highlighter Annie had smeared liberally over every exposed inch of me. Watching it though his eyes, I half-wondered whether there might have been another reason.
Me on the first day of fifth grade, coloring at the kitchen table when Kevin brought Artie and Annie home from school. Annie had been icing her knuckles, jaw set in the stubborn thrust that meant she had looked at the world, considered her options, and decided everyone else was in the wrong. Her left eye had already been starting to swell. Artie had clearly been crying and was just as clearly trying to hide it. He and I had spent the rest of the afternoon playing video games and pretending not to hear Annie arguing with her parents over the times when it was acceptable to fight at school.
Me the day I’d come to Oregon for the first time, pale and scared of these new family members, excited to see the cousins I’d met on the day of my adoption and not since. My hair had been pulled over my shoulders in thick pigtail braids, and I’d looked substantially younger than my ten years. Artie had been in the living room when Evie led me into the compound. He’d looked up, and seen me, and smiled, and I’d known instantly that we were going to be best friends forever. He’d had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched.
He still did. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and opened my eyes, looking at his face, only inches from my own. Relief radiated from him, so loud that it felt like even the non-telepaths in the room should have been able to pick up on it. Relief and—
“Really?” I blurted.
Artie went pale, thoughts turning alarmed. He pulled his hands away from my face, taking a stumbling step backward.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and fled from the room.
I tried to twist and run after him. Elsie kept hold of my shoulders.
“Believe me, we’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time, and no one wants it to happen more than I do, but there’s a gigantic gash in your forehead, and you need to tell the rest of us what just happened,” she said. “He’ll be lurking around for you to have uncomfortable conversations with when we’re done.”
“Sorry, honey, but she’s right,” said Evie. “I’ve never seen anything like that. I have to call Mom and tell her about it, and that means I need to understand it.”
I stared at her. She shook her head, walking around the bed to take my hands and tug me toward a seat. The connection brought her thoughts into sharper focus, which didn’t help, not really; she was worried about me, she was concerned about Artie, she was already making plans for mobilization of the family if there was further cuckoo activity in the area. Evie had been practicing her whole life for moments like this one. She wasn’t going to lose her focus now.
I temporarily put all thoughts of Artie from my mind and grudgingly allowed her to push me into the room’s one open chair. Annie and Sam were still on the couch. They had been joined by James, forming