I even have fun at breakfast, with everyone laughing and chattering. We don’t have maple syrup, so people sprinkle sugar and smear jam on their pancakes—“Like they do in France!” Lisle announces, scattering sugar everywhere.
When the meal is over, I start carrying stacks of plates into the kitchen. Everyone’s in there, bumping, jostling, and pushing, but it’s a friendly sort of crowding. Jack is over by the sink, running hot water, wrist-deep in soap suds. “Oh, no you don’t,” she says, taking the plates from me with a soapy hand. “You shouldn’t have to clean. You cooked, you set the table, you didn’t even have a mimosa….”
“You cooked, too,” I point out. ”And I already have a hangover.”
“This will be the best thing for you, then,” she says, picking up a glass filled with champagne and orange juice. “Besides—you have somewhere else you should be. Don’t you?”
She’s looking out toward the deck, through the big glass doors. Noah is out there, sitting on the wooden railing, staring out toward the lake. I look back at Jack, who is smiling.
“Go on,” she says, handing me the glass, which I take without thinking. “We can wash up without you.”
I mouth “thanks” at her, and go. The air out on the porch is cold and sharp as an ice sliver. Noah has his feet braced against the lower railings and is looking at me warily, as if I might be about to throw my drink in his face. His hair is messy, his eyes bright hazel behind his glasses. “Look,” he says, before I can open my mouth, “if you came out here to ask me why I’m still here, it’s because Ben wanted to stay for breakfast. But we’re leaving right after.”
“That’s not why I came out here.” I stare down at my drink, which is the pale orange color I associate with Tang and orange candies. “I want to know why you wrote those letters. In the first place. Did Ben ask you to?”
Noah glanced up toward the sky, the heavy clouds overhead. “He didn’t ask me to. I wrote them for a class project. Write in the voice of a literary character. I left them out on my desk and Ben must have found them. It wasn’t until a while later that I found out he was using them online—with you.”
“How did you find out?”
“He told me. Ben’s never ashamed of anything he does. It’s just his way.” Noah shrugged. “He thought I’d think it was funny.”
“And did you?” Something cold hits my cheek and slides down my neck; it’s starting to rain. “Think it was funny?”
“No,” Noah says shortly. “He showed me all the e-mails between him and you, and trust me, I didn’t think what he was doing was funny. But I did really like your letters, Jane. I liked the way you wrote. I liked the things you wrote.” He still isn’t looking at me. “I know. Stupid. But I started looking forward to your letters. Ben would forward them to me and I’d write the responses. And because you were responding to my letters, I felt sort of like you were writing to me. That was why I wanted you to walk down to the lake with me. Because I felt like I knew you.”
My head is spinning. “So you never were Mr. Kool-Aid?”
He shrugs. “Ben gave me an account on the Game eventually. I just wanted it so I could read your journal entries. I picked Mr. Kool-Aid because I figured I’d never actually have to do anything. No one wants to interact with Mr. Kool-Aid, trust me.”
I know I should be mad, but I’m not. I feel strangely relieved. It all makes sense now—why Ben’s letters didn’t sound anything like his instant messages. Why when I met him, I felt absolutely nothing, no connection at all, but when I met Noah—
“You should have told me,” I say.
Rain is pattering down on the deck, turning the wood dark brown. Noah’s hair is stuck to his cheeks and forehead in black swipes. “Why? It wasn’t me you came here to see. It was Ben.”
“That’s not true.” I take a step forward. “The person I wanted to meet was the one who wrote those letters. That was all I ever cared about.”
I’m vaguely aware that there are faces pressed to the glass doors behind me, watching us, but I realize I don’t care. Noah is shivering inside his wet jacket, rain running down his face. He looks at me like he doesn’t believe me.
I look down at the glass in my hand. Rain is mixing with the alcohol, diluting the orange color. “I never,” I say, very carefully, “yelled at someone because they told me something I didn’t want to hear, even though it was the truth.”
I lift the glass and take a drink out of it. Rainwater and oranges and champagne. When I lower the glass, Noah is staring at me.
“I never,” I say again, “made a totally stupid mistake about who it was I really liked, and only realized it when it was too late.”
I drink again. I feel a little dizzy, but it isn’t from the mimosa. The rain has diluted the alcohol so I hardly taste it. He’s sitting completely still, just watching me. I can feel my heart pounding, wondering if I have the nerve to say it, the last thing I want to say to him.
I do. “And I never,” I say, “wanted you to kiss me, right now.”
I lift the glass and drink the rest of it, fast. A second later Noah jumps down off the railing, his boots splashing up water from the deck. He comes over and puts his hands on my shoulders. I can see Lisle behind the glass doors, giving me the V for victory sign with her fingers. Ben is standing beside her, scowling.
“You mean it?” Noah says, water running off his eyelashes. “You want me to kiss you?”
“Cathy never says anything she doesn’t mean,” I tell him. “And neither do I.”
His kiss tastes like rain. When he lets me go, he’s grinning. “I’d tell you I’ve never kissed anyone like that before,” he says, “but I think we’re out of drinks.”
He tightens his arms around me as I laugh. Someone behind the glass door whistles—I think it’s Jack—and I know they’re laughing and cheering for us, and I don’t even mind that I just met all these people and don’t even know their real names. It’s nice. I know they’re cheering because it just feels right—however strange it might seem—Catherine Earnshaw and Mr. Kool-Aid, kissing in the rain.
Cassandra Clare is the New York Times bestselling author of City of Bones, City of Ashes, and City of Glass.City of Bones was a 2007 Locus Award finalist for Best First Novel. She is also the author of the upcoming YA fantasy trilogy The Infernal Devices. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her boyfriend and two cats. She is also the author of the extremely geeky online Lord of the Rings parody The Very Secret Diaries.
Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Hope Larson.
THE KING OF PELINESSE
by m. t. anderson
It was not until the final moon had risen over Brondevoult, lighting the carnage with its spectral dweomer, that Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, saw that the battle was won, the anthrophidians defeated, so he could at last lower his incarnadined blade and cease his work of destruction. The enemy was vanquished; Caelwin and his hired barbarian swords might at long last storm the basalt citadel. They rushed through the obsidian gates, shrieking with beserker rage, the white knights of Pelinesse behind them, bearing up the oriflamme of the swan and scythe, and the bus reached Portland, and Caelwin stormed up the stone steps and found the Princess of Yabtúb chained beside a cauldron, prepared for some fell thaumaturgic distortion, and he said, “I am Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, and I have been sent by the King of Pelinesse to bear you hence,” and she regarded him with astonishment, and I got off the bus and went into the station in the dark of the night to wait until the 6 AM up Route 1.
I lay down on one of the benches with my bag under my head and Tales of Marvel open on my stomach. I closed my eyes hard and tried to doze. I knew my mom was looking for me, and I felt real bad, but I couldn’t call her until I reached Boothbay Harbor. If I called too soon, the police at home could call the operators and trace the call back up the coast and then next thing I knew, they would be showing up to have a little talk with me, you know, saying, “Jim? You must be Jim. Jim, why don’t you come with me. Your parents are real worried about you, Jim,” saying stuff like that, but walking toward me with their hands out. So I couldn’t call my parents. I tried not to think about it. I just curled up right there on the bench and rolled up the magazine in both hands and held onto it and I wondered what thaumaturgic meant and I guess I finally fell asleep.
Just after six I caught the first bus of the day to Boothbay Harbor and I sat with my knees up against the back of the seat in front of me, and an eldritch beast, a-glitter with the ichor of Acheronian pits, strayed into the ceremonial chamber, the Princess meeped in her wyvern-wing corset, and Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, unsheathed again his mighty broadsword, so fatal to foes, and hacked at the monster’s serpentine coils while the goring tail whipped around him, spiked like caltrops. The pines went by the windows, and I looked out, and my face haunted the woods. There were purple salt marshes and lots of mist.
“The Baron’s Ambuscade,” Tales of Marvel, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1937). “The Weird of Caelwin, Skull-Reaver,” TalesofMarvel, vol. 4, no. 2 (February 1938). Both uncollected. “Gloom Comes to Parrusfunt,” TalesofMarvel, vol. 4, no. 8 (August 1938), the first Caelwin yarn with all the mythology worked out, the gods of Ur-Earth, etc. SongoftheSkull-Reaver by R. P. Flint, 1945, collecting all the stories that appeared in TalesofMarvel and Utter Tales from 1938 to 1944, with an alternative version of “Lords of Pain” (originally from UtterTales #6), in which the gem doesn’t fall into the chasm and the Visigoths have a stronger German accent.
“The Serpent-Men of Brondevoult,” Tales of Marvel, vol. 15, no. 10 (October 1949). The latest in the saga. “You are a brute,” murmured the Princess, putting her small hand upon his oiled arm, “but yet you are strangely to my taste.” Caelwin, called the Skull-Reaver, pulled her to him, and drew aside her velvet loincloth to reveal, as it said, the gem of her womanhood, and she yielded to him, melting in his clay-red arms. I was half-asleep and it was like I could see her, and she looked real good, with her wyvern corset ripped open and “the pale parentheses pressed into soft br**sts by the iron brassiere, now cast aside” (and there were dark ni**les—she groans and beckons—the clank of mail), and the bus stopped and I looked up and saw Wiscasset out the window but I realized I couldn’t shift my knees off the back of the seat in front of me because one leg had gotten embarrassing. I hoped we wouldn’t reach Boothbay Harbor very soon.
“Kid? Can you get your knees out of my back?”
No. No, I couldn’t.
“They’re trash,” said my mother, and she dumped them into the garbage. She said, “You know who reads these things? Soldiers. And prisoners in the state pen.”
I shouted at her to stop and I couldn’t believe she was just wrecking them, and I wanted to grab her hand to stop her but I knew she’d smack me. She was pouring bacon grease all over my collection. I told her no but she just kept going.
“Do you see this grease? I don’t want to hear anything else about R. P. Flint or his god-damned barbarian.”
I told her it was ten dollars’ worth. I said, “I been collecting those all over!”
“I’m telling you, Jimbo. Prisoners in the state pen. You know why they’re in there? Robbing little bakeries and groping the Campfire Girls.”
I kept on yelling at her and she stood there with her stupid arms folded and said, “That’s the kind of company you’re keeping.”
I got off the bus in Boothbay Harbor. I looked around the bluffs and out toward the sea. It was a little town with old captains’ houses and lobster fishermen. I put my hands in my pockets and went to find breakfast. I was real hungry. I read two more pages of the R. P. Flint story while I ate toast and eggs. I spread the pages real neatly so I didn’t get jelly on them.
I realized there was no way my mom and pop could stop me now, so I found a phone and told the operator my town and my number, and they connected me, with all the clicks going down the coast. My mom answered and she’d been crying, I could tell, and I felt kind of sorry, but I thought I shouldn’t feel sorry, and she asked me, “Are you all right? Where are you? Are you all right, sugar?” I said I was okay, and I told her I was in Boothbay Harbor. I thought that would really get her.
She didn’t understand at first. She just said, “Where?”
So I said, “In Boothbay Harbor,” again, and “Maine,” and then she figured out what I was talking about and realized what I was doing and started to say I was being stupid, and not to make a fool out of—so I hung up and walked out.
I had looked up the address on a map, and I had drawn a little version of it on a piece of school paper. It didn’t look like it was far. I walked out of the town center, and along a road that led past ridges of some kind of needly tree, like pines or firs or spruce. I don’t know the difference between them. A couple of years ago, I tried to find out the differences from a book, but all the pictures looked exactly the same. The seagulls were crying out over the islands.
It took me forty-five minutes to walk to the house. It wasn’t near the ocean. It was in an ugly, uneven field, and the bushes around it had grown up with elbows. It wasn’t a very big house, but the name on the mailbox was Flint, painted in yellow, so I went up on the porch and knocked. There was no sound for a while, and I thought maybe no one was home, which would be stupid, but then someone moved. Whoever it was only moved a little. Then they said, “Who is it?” and I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t answer.