trying to protect her. His own smile was a weapon against a gentler and more insidious form of racism, the kind that made people follow him through retail stores before realizing who he was or assume he had grown up in a rough neighborhood instead of on the Upper East Side or fixated on Sloane and Albie saving the world as if Matt, Esther, and Ines had nothing to do with it. It was in silence and hesitation, in careless jokes and fumbling.
There were harsher, more violent forms of it too, but smiles weren’t weapons against them.
He walked over to the crowd pressed up against the barrier, many of the people there holding photos of him, magazine articles, books. He took a black marker from his pocket and signed each of them with his quick MW, one letter an inversion of the other. Sloane watched him from a distance, distracted from the chaos for a moment. He leaned in for a picture with a middle-aged redhead who didn’t know how to work her phone; he took it from her to show her how to switch to the front camera. Everywhere he went, people gave him pieces of themselves, sometimes in the form of gratitude, sometimes in stories of people they had lost to the Dark One. He bore them all.
After a few minutes, Sloane walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Matt, but we should go.”
People were reaching for her, too, of course, waving copies of the Trilby article with her face plastered on one side of the magazine and Rick Lane’s sexist assholery on the other. Some of them shouted her name, and she ignored them, like she always did. Matt’s weapons were generosity, kindness, social grace. Sloane’s were detachment, a tall stature, and a relentlessly flat affect.
Matt looked down the line at a group of black teenagers in school uniforms. One of the girls wore her hair in tiny braids with beads at the ends. They clattered together as she bounced on her toes, excited. She had a clipboard in her hand; it looked like another petition.
“One second,” Matt said to Sloane, and he walked over to the group in the uniforms. She chafed a little at the brushoff, but the feeling disappeared when she saw the subtle shift in his posture, his shoulders relaxing.
“Hey,” he said to the girl with the braids, grinning.
Sloane felt a small ache in her chest. There were parts of him she would just never access, a language she would never hear him speak, because when she was present, the words were gone.
She decided to go on without him. It didn’t really matter if he got to the ceremony on time. Everyone would wait.
She walked down the narrow aisle the police had whittled into the crowd. She climbed the steps to the stage, which faced the metal box of the monument—about the size of an average bedroom, standing in the middle of nothing.
“Slo!” Esther stood on the stage in five-inch heels and black leather pants, waving. Her white blouse was just loose enough to be elegant, and from afar, her face looked almost the same as it had when they’d defeated the Dark One—but the closer Sloane got, the more she could see that the poreless glow was achieved by foundation and highlighter and bronzer and setting powder and God knew what else.
It was a relief to see her. Things hadn’t been the same for the five of them since she’d moved back home to take care of her mom. Sloane walked up the steps to the stage, shaking her head at the security guard who offered her an arm to help her up, and pulled Esther into a hug.
“Nice dress!” Esther said to her once they separated. “Did Matt pick it out?”
“I am capable of choosing my own clothes,” Sloane said. “How—”
She was about to ask how Esther’s mother was, but Esther was already taking out her cell phone and holding it out for a selfie.
“No,” Sloane said.
“Slo . . . come on, I want a picture of us!”
“No, you want to show a picture of us to a million other people on Insta!, and that’s much different.”
“I’m gonna get one whether you smile for it or not, so you might as well not fuel the rumors that you’re a turbo-bitch,” Esther pointed out.
Sloane rolled her eyes, bent a little at the knee, and leaned in for a picture. She even managed something like a smile.