After the End

“I shouldn’t have said ‘told.’ I should have said ‘showed.’”

“Because that makes a difference?”

I just sit there for a moment, steaming from Miles’s sarcasm and regretting having followed Frankie’s advice and telling Miles the truth. But the moment passes when he says, “And thirdly, who is Whit?”

I have to tell him. Oracles are never wrong—only our interpretations of their prophecies, I remember Whit saying.

“Whittier Graves is my mentor. And I know that he is after me with these thugs, or whatever they are, because Whit sent me a note tied to Poe’s leg, and I”—how to explain it?—“tapped into Poe’s memory to see what he saw. But this is not Narnia. No talking animals. Poe isn’t sitting back there listening to everything we say and mulling it over in his little raven brain. However, if he flies back to Whit, which he might do if Whit calls him, Whit could use the same technique I did to see where we are.”

Miles is quiet for a whole three minutes, pressing his lips tightly together and tapping nervously on the steering wheel. “Okay, I get a few things out of what you just told me,” he says finally. “The least troubling of which is that the bird stays with us.”

“Until we’re farther away from Whit,” I reassure him.

“Not that that’s not troubling,” Miles corrects himself. “It’s just the least troubling. Because the next item on my list of concerns is that you claim this Whit guy, who was once your mentor but is now chasing you, can control where the bird goes.”

I nod. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Miles says. “So the raven’s like one of those homing pigeons? I assume it’s Whit’s trained messenger and not some wild bird he snatched out of the woods.”

“Actually, Whit—”

Miles holds up his hand to stop me. “But the most troubling thing you said was that you tapped into the memory of the bird to see something. Now, I was not raised in a hippie commune in backwoods Alaska. But most people I know would have a hard time believing that you weren’t . . . I don’t know . . . crazy.”

He presses his index finger to his temple and opens his eyes wide. Now I’ve done it, I think. He’s scared. “Or on drugs,” he continues. “Wait, no . . . I have another theory. You were brainwashed by your hippie cult into thinking you have magical powers. In your head you’re like a cross between . . . I don’t know . . . Superpower-Flower-Child and Harry Potter.” That’s it. I’m not sure what he’s talking about exactly, but it’s clear he has shifted into sarcasm overdrive.

I won’t let this boy get to me. Why do I care what he thinks? “So I’m crazy, a druggie, or a cult member?” I ask as we crest a hill to see a sparkling city spread like a starry blanket beneath us in the broad valley below. “Well, you’re free to just drop me off here in Yakima.”

This shakes Miles out of his rant. He’s silent as we drive into the city center. I have obviously made my point. I’ve reminded him that he needs me as much as I need him, like Crazy Frankie said. But I still have no idea why.

26

MILES

I HAVE TO GET TO A PHONE. TO CALL MY DAD. Have him take her off my hands. I can’t stand this much longer. I’m in way over my head. It’s one thing playing driver for a schizo teen who thinks she’s being chased by dangerous people. It’s a whole other thing when said dangerous people are actually chasing said teen and, by proxy, me.

But I can’t get away from her. She had me pull up to a woman pushing a baby carriage so she could ask where a supermarket was. (She called it a “food shop,” but whatever.) And once we had walked into Walmart Supercenter, she insisted that I accompany her every step of the way while she crammed a cart with food: ca

She went all out on the flashlights, buying three jumbo ones along with a mountain of batteries. “I saw batteries in Seattle,” she whispered to me as if they were a state secret. I wonder what they would have thought of her pack of size-D Duracells back in hippie camp.

It looked like she was preparing for a monthlong wilderness survival trip from all the staples she was stocking up on. But that was just the begi

She transformed from a middle-aged nature mom into an eight-year-old girl with a serious sugar deficiency in the time it took to fill the rest of the cart with Pop-Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, and cheese puffs. This was followed by a meltdown in the chocolate aisle. The hippies obviously didn’t grow their own cocoa beans back in Alaska, because I’ve never seen anyone load up on so many candy bars in my life.

At the checkout, Juneau digs in her bag and pulls out a leather pouch with money in it. Seriously—a leather pouch tied together with a cord. Like Grizzly Adams, but with major cash. I’m talking a fat wad of bills. She pulls it out and starts counting really slowly in front of the checkout lady, turning each bill over a couple of times and squinting at them like they’re Japanese yen.

The clerk stares at the money kind of scared, like she’s afraid Juneau’s ru

“What’s wrong with you?” I hiss as soon as we’re outside. “You freaked that woman out so much she might call the manager.”

“What are you talking about?” Juneau asks, as i

“Flashing all that money around. Where’d you get it anyway?”

“That’s none of your business,” she says, frowning.

“Can’t you just try to act normal?” I ask.

“What is your definition of normal?” she asks cautiously.

I’m about to say, Well, it wouldn’t be pulling a fat wad of cash out of a leather pouch at Walmart and then staring with your freaky contact lens at the bills as if you’re hoping the green’s not going to rub off, but I opt for, “Nothing,” and beeline to the car. I pile the bags into the trunk and return the shopping cart to its corral. By the time I get back, Juneau’s feeding the birdseed to the raven, who’s eating it out of her hand like they’ve been best buds for their entire lives.

I get ready to start the car and then pause. “You have to take out that weird-ass contact lens. Not only did it freak out the checkout lady, but the woman in the breakfast place said that your mentor and his thugs are using it to hunt you down.”

She sits there looking like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Then, putting her finger under her right eye, she says, “You mean my starburst?”

“If that’s what you call it, then yes.”

“I can’t take it out,” she says simply.

“What do you mean?”

Blank stare.

“You’re not telling me you have a gold iris shaped like a star . . . naturally?” I don’t bother to downplay my sarcasm.

“Yes, actually,” she replies. “All the children in my village do. It comes from being close to the Yara.” I nod, unwilling to bite if she’s luring me into asking what the hell she’s talking about.

“So you can’t take it out?”

She shakes her head and the sun glints off the gold flecks in her mutant eye, and for a second it strikes me that it’s actually not that weird-looking once you’re used to it, maybe because her other eye is kind of a nice honey color and doesn’t contrast too much.

“Can you wink with that eye?” I ask. She winks. “Can you hold it shut whenever we’re in public?” I prod, and she looks at me strangely, and then her eyes narrow and her face closes down like it does when she’s mad at me, which seems to be more and more often since she found the raven and realized her mentor is playing for the Dark Side of the Force. Like it’s my fault she trusted him.