Something of a Kind - By Miranda Wheeler Page 0,23

the condition of responsible behavior. They parted ways in the stairwell.

If he's just going to barricade himself in the basement, I'm staying upstairs.

With Noah racing through her thoughts, it wasn’t long before she swore to distract herself. Overthinking was leading to over-analysis, enabling invasive doubts.

What is he thinking, feeling? What will we be? And what was Greg’s fit all about?

Her father averted the subject of Noah, but his resulting glare left her uninterested in hearing his opinion. She didn’t want to discuss anything with him.

My life here deserves to be separate.

If Greg thought Noah would be off-limits because Lee Lockwood was ‘business with an elder,’ the man would be disappointed. Rude looks were one thing, but intervention was a line she hoped he wouldn’t cross.

If he’s unobtrusive, I’ll stay out of this insane Ashland ‘researcher’ controversy.

Without words, her father was under her skin.

Normal girls would ache beneath a smile, drag a dozen outfits from their closets, gush to their friends and mother. Aly liked him, but was it like that? Did Noah think so? How would her mother feel about it?

She’d think I was trying to forget her, to escape in him. Oh God… am I?

Alerted by the strain in her back and the hair nervously twisted around her fingers, Aly forced herself out of bed. Her exhaustion was useless against a mind that wouldn’t shut off. Still dressed in the day’s clothes and sick with unease, she wasn’t prepared to sleep.

Aly needed to get her mind off things before it exploded. Her first instinct was to blast music and draw, but her materials were buried and Greg was probably sleeping, even if he was in the depths of the basement.

I need to do something. Assigning a task shouldn’t be this difficult.

If her window wasn’t fixed, she would’ve crawled onto the overhang above the back porch. Aunt Lauren's creaky Victorian had a set of twin balconies, one overlooking the lake, another exposed to the street. Between closing her eyes to a steady breeze and watching boats that left foam paths in their wake, she found peace there. There was an unaffected calm in the midst of the gnawing grief. Serenity offered a life after her mother. It promised a ceasefire.

Lakes were intimate, spared from the travel of whispers in the currents. They trusted the sky, not the jigsaw of bodies. They were whole in themselves, not intended to a direct part of something bigger.

After spending time in Ashland, it was impossible not to notice the ocean constantly in her peripheral. It was a muscle she could only turn her back to while it flexed in supremacy.

She forgot about it only when surrounded by trees, cloaked by the forest. The roar of the tide was raw. Aly left it in the distance. She hadn’t ventured onto the sands. She saw ash everywhere, glass and slivers beneath the paper dust. Normalcy had already been swept out to sea. There was no comfort in its presence; it constantly threatened to take the ground away.

From the Ashland house, she could hear the bay, but it wasn’t in her face, not like downtown. The window faced the backyard, embracing the sights of foliage along the edge of the property. Tall trees surrounded them, isolating the house. They went on for miles, looping around the homes in wide arcs, weaving into public trails or pressing against the edge of the coast.

Even as she imagined their empire, fused throughout the last frontier, she couldn’t watch them forever. Invisible maps curled beneath her skin, skewed across her skull, dripping along her inner eyelids. As much as she embraced the cage around her, the anxieties sprouted within, flooding her thoughts, spreading to her chest, her sternum.

It’s like drowning in silk, tossing it across the trees.

Noah’s blinding sunshine, Greg’s black glare, the crimson fears

– the lilac shades of absence, the umber burial, the imperfect ivory grief. A wrap of colors, stuffed in her airways. It was a plague of fear, overwhelming her nerves, swelling in her joints, burning in her lungs.

Turn it off.

She felt her aunt and uncle’s steely Victorian in her p ocket. Greg’s stare was across the room, his invasion breathing down her neck. Noah brushed her lips, his flesh in her fingertips. Her mother lay just beyond them, beyond reach, burning embers amongst the stars. All of them, standing over her shoulder, apparitions grabbing onto her throat. Bodies piled in her chest, clawing her convulsing lungs, pounding against her spine, shoving against ribs, rattling her sternum in