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She got skinny, bee-thin, skinnier, and nobody knew from her getting quieter because quiet was always what she was. She and Jimmy didn’t show up to school no more. Nobody missed it; it was like a whisper going out. And then one day they were gone, and Darren only heard it third-hand ’cause he wasn’t there no more either. He’d gone down to the city to get away from his own shit (and he snapped the word, bit it off so it didn’t have an edge to cut him).

(So he was bad to her? I asked, even and cool, trying not to spoil his talking mood. Maybe this was the one, the one I’d made ready for; the one who did her hurt. I dunno, he said, stared down into the toilet. I wasn’t much looking.)

He didn’t see them again for years.

When he did it was in line for a show, midwinter. They were bee-thin, both of them, bee-thin and meaner in the creases formed ’bout Jimmy’s eyes. Darren had stolen a coat the week past, and the deep too-big hood on it covered him to the nose-tip. They didn’t see his face, shuffling along behind them in a crowd full of kids. But he saw them together and the bruise on her wrist, and the place where the hand went to hold it.

So when she came to Beatrice’s the summer following, dirty-boned and desperate with a hard cast to her chin, he knew what’d gone down. There weren’t no histories on the street — no asking, no telling, no Tales — but they had history already, even if it was across a crowded classroom or in a long bar line, passing by.

She kept getting jobs and losing ’em. She never brought nothing home. And she stayed inside the apartment, quiet, making no trouble, and kept shut the blinds.

He came home early one afternoon from six hours of shoveling other people’s snow and there were bowls dirty in the sink, dirty clothes spattered everywhere, and his temper snapped in two.

He’d seen her with Jimmy, he told her, pointed-like. He saw her with a place to sleep, and it wasn’t no good pretending she didn’t have friends and somewhere to go when other people worked daytime and night to keep them all in food and safety. If she wasn’t gonna put in, if she wouldn’t help, he would go right over there and tell Jimmy to take her back.

That’s when the wings came pushing down.

(It was like nothing I ever seen, he said, big-eyed and saying he’d punch me out if I called him crazy or Freak or stupid. I wrapped my hand ’round my matches and he leaned right back against the bathtub tiles.)

It was like nothing he’d ever seen, girl growing wings, going small and diving red murder for his face. He ducked around and couldn’t hide from her, tried to get on the other side of the door, and then he got mad, got pissed. He wasn’t gonna hide from no goddamned bug, not when there were rolled-up papers and dirty shoes and weapons all around.

He’d got a shoe ready when Bea came in.

We never talk about this again, Bea warned him after the window was open and she was gone, gone, gone, and because she had that crazy look in her eye that made nobody on the whole street fuck with her ’less they were drunk as a skunk or high, he didn’t talk about it to nobody.

When Ari didn’t come back for a whole week, he found out where Jimmy was living. Stood outside to see if she was there; coming, or going.

(And did you go in? I asked, leaning in, people-noise stirring on the other side of the door. Did you go in and make sure she was safe?

Nah, he said. Turned his face away. Wasn’t none of my business.

Jack says hate’s a poison. I feel that true now. I feel it sour up my heart.

Tell me how to get there, I say. The red is thicker now, burning, setting matches to my eyes. I wonder if this is how Atticus always felt angry. If the glow of hating burned him ’til he couldn’t bear no light.

He tells me.)

I’m thinking ’bout bus tokens when I stalk out of the bathroom into a crowd of staring people pressed to the door, pressed to every whispered word that worms through wood and rock and cracked walls. Doctor Marybeth gave me three tokens, one for going and two for coming, and I’ll need another to get us both back safe. I’ll need one more for my Ariel.

They stare at me and it’s with fear, and shock, and questions.

I leave without saying nothing —

—
None of my business
, Darren said —

— I got nothing to say to them.

It’s morning bright outside, stupid teasing bright, and I flinch under the ache of it but keep myself going down the path to the street, to find Jimmy and teach him right back the making of vulnerable. My hands go to my matches again. I pry ’em right off. You can’t make wheels run with fire.

Stop, Matthew. Think.

I got no more tokens to break her out, make her Safe. I reach into my pocket to put the matches lower, and feel twenty-five dollars bent and tired under my crisp-moving fingers. Pull them out. They flutter, faded and special and forbidden, in the wind that’s already heating for another bright hard day.

My Ariel is in trouble.

This is an emergency.

There’s a little shop at the corner that has a sign with tokens, photographed bigger than in real life, posted in among the cluttered windows. I go spend two-seventy-five on one more, hand it to a man who looks like my papa might’ve if he’d not died so much younger. He watches me with flat eyes full of much too much attention. I want to stare back until he takes his curious and shoves it down his own throat for dinner.

The token’s warm in my hand. I tuck it close in my tightest pocket, jam it down. Losing it now would be worse than anything.

And as if that breaks something, I spend three dollars more on a big thick muffin and a paper cup of tea, pushed from a nozzle of a squat machine that I stare at, head thick and empty, before the shop man shows me how to use it. More of Mack’s rules: On enemy ground you stay rested, you stay fed, you stay sharp. I’m not Passing now, not in the slightest, but I’m too full of mad to care; implacable hot mad like a storm waiting.

Corner’s kind of mad
, I think to myself, and drown the thought in nasty tea.

There are two buses to Jimmy’s apartment. Instead of going through the city like the ones to Doctor Marybeth’s did, they go down tree-lined streets that get narrow and narrower, old houses and older stores that look like they might crumble for touching. I sip my too-hot tea and feel every burn it lays down on my tongue, feel it make me hot and sharp down low in my belly where Doctor Marybeth keeps her sworn oaths and I keep my rage.

It’s early enough morning that nobody much’s on the bus. Just one skinny man with wires coming down from his ears, and when he looks at me a second too long, I hold the look like I wanted to in the store and he looks right away.

That’s right
, I think, toothy, and the words of it are red.

The building’s colder and littler and meaner than Beatrice’s, just like it should be in my head, just like in a Tale. It’s squat brown and small-windowed, and there’s no garden on each side to hide the place where the dumpsters are. They rise up, fat and metal, and the birds flutter ’bout the edges like roaches runabout. I pace ’round the building three times looking for escape runs before I come up to the door.

Blinds twitch when I do, somewhere above, in a blank window scummed down with dirt. I snap my head up, searching for her, but it’s not. I can’t tell if it’s not. It might be just the wind.

They’re watching. Pass.

So I keep walking slow and careful, heel-toe, like I belong here, up to the door. I take myself into the entryway — dim-lit and cramped — and run a finger down the list of names, close as loving. Close as touching.

It’s not two minutes before someone steps out and I slip inside.

I climb five flights of peeling-tile stairs and pad over rucked-up carpets, hunting dark as my papa, to the door that Darren told me. Five-one-three. Five-one-three stands before me and I stare like it’s toothed, hinge-jawed and waiting, a dead hand placed in the sewer run for me to trip over at night.

Dead things
, I think, and the hand in my mind is Ariel’s. Her small white hand.

I knock.

The first knock is quiet. It’s a knock like someone who’s little, who don’t belong. Who’s Freak.
Her dead hand and that’s all you can do?

The quiet laughs like teasing.
Freakfreakfreak.

Bang bang bang
I knock the second time, the echo jumping my heart as it finds every corner of the empty hall.
I am coming
, this echo says, big as a Beast in the dark.
I am here.

It ain’t him who opens the door.

My fists go loose without me telling, and for a minute I can’t see, can’t see nothing for the bright of her eyes.

“Matthew,” she shapes, not even talking, and her face is sour white. Her cheek is sickly purple, bruise rising like a stain, and it wasn’t before. She’s red and purple and red even through normal eyes, through eyes that aren’t stained like Atticus’s with rage. Her mouth opens in a surprised little O:
You came back.
And something else. Something broken-backed and scared.

“I’m taking you home,” is all I tell her, and then I hear moving somewhere behind.

She looks back over her shoulder, hair whipping to and fro, and for a second the red clears and it’s oh god bee’s-wings, candle flame, everything good and clean and sweet in the world touching gentle on my eyes and nose and lips. Then she looks back at me with red-lined eyes and a tight-lined face and it’s gone, that thing that lights without burning, that thing that makes me want to touch her cheek soft nighttimes. She lowers her chin even more than it’s tilted down. Hiding.

She opens her mouth, thin and careful, and I know she’s gonna say no.

“I’m taking you home,” I say again before she gets the chance, before the sick rattling ’round the door to my heart can find a seam and pry in. I reach out for her hand. She snatches it away and before I think I’m half through the door, ready for the shove, the slam, when the voice comes out from back behind her and says “Who you talkin’ to?”

“Nobody,” Ariel says, high and scared in a way that tells me
yes, fine, let’s go
, but it’s too damn late for that. Because the footsteps are coming, the steps are
bang bang
themselves;
in or out, Matthew
. She shrinks back into herself with the ridges of wings just peeking past her elbows. So in it is, into the tiny wreck-strewn apartment, face-to-face with a boy — a man — who’s taller and broader and thicker than me, and mad. Just starting ’round the edges to get mad.

“Who’s this?” he says, soft and biting, and the wings stretch and curl to surround her.

He doesn’t look at them. He looks right at me, as if he doesn’t see the sheen of translucence coming in to cover her, to keep her eyes from having to look at either of us. His chin’s tucked up tight. His arms are loose and swinging, but I can see the thumbs tucked and ready to make up fists.

The door closes with a click behind me. Uncarved. Unstoried. Blind.

“You Jimmy?” I ask, make it just as soft and just as biting, just as clean and sharp.

“I said
who’s this
?” he says, not answering, just staring straight at Ari and leaning close in so neither of us can get the space to breathe.

She’s still: dead sharks, dead bees. She doesn’t even quiver.

The world’s red like burning buildings and Atticus’s eyes.

I’m between them before I think. I slide between and nudge her back with an elbow, back so she stumbles into the door, and tilt my chin up to look at him in a way that’s just asking to get hit. “And I asked if you’re Jimmy,” I breathe, hard as Atticus, hard as if I had crab claws where my arms were supposed to be and feared nobody and nothing.

He looks down at me for a second or three or five. His eyes are blue, cold as wintertime Above. “And who the fuck are you?”

“I’m taking her home,” I get out, Atticus-snarl. Drawing up. Teeth bared.

No fear.

And he backs off. He backs down. He puts his hands in his dirty shorts pockets and steps back and says all mild, “I don’t know what the hell you’re on about.” But his eyes are still sharp as rusty curling nails and there’s not a mild thing in the world I can see inside them.

“You don’t know what I mean?” I ask, biting off every word, and she doesn’t move, doesn’t talk, and I wonder deep, deep down if Darren made the whole thing up; if he drew me away to change the locks, change the blinds, change everybody’s minds, and I’ve made a stupid and terrible mistake.

The wings shudder. Ariel’s sunshine head, her big wide eyes peek up and over the edges where they meet.

“It’s okay, Matthew,” she says, barely speaking, and I catch or imagine the tightening of his lips, the taking of a name.

I look back at him, leaned against a wall now and his face rearranged so it says concern and calm, like nothing sharp or cruel could ever walk across its bones. “This the one that hurt you?” I ask her, soft and snapping, and watch him, not her, for the answer.

The quiet stretches out. She stares at me and stares at him and don’t say a thing, and the quiet is as good as a picture.

Yes.

I walk right up to him. Close enough for breathing. “This him?”

Silence.

“This the one?”

“Hey —” he says, and puts a hand on my chest and I smack it aside, collide an open-handed slap with wrist, arm, bone. And still she don’t talk, still she hides behind her flown-out wings and won’t say a word ’gainst him, a word of truth.

“Tell me,” I go, pressing up close to him, getting in his face, pushing right back until he has to back off his wall and I can smell him, old sweat and sour shoving right up my nose. I’m gonna make him scared, gonna
teach
him scared, print every nightmare story of Safe on those bad blue eyes ’til they never again sleep for screaming. “Go on, tell me true. This the one that sent you down to Safe?”