He’s lovely. A bit of a sad mess. Dull and pale and rough round the edges. But still so lovely.
I close my eyes and pretend to fall asleep on his shoulder.
SIMON
We spend an hour in the queue at Immigration.
The American border agents are dead scary, but my wings stay gone, and my passport holds. Penny says she has more to worry about as a brown person than I do as a winged person. (She’s half Indian, half white. English on both sides.)
But we get through.
We’re in America. I’m in America. Across the ocean. Me. If the kids from the care homes could see me now …
Well, really, I wouldn’t want them to see me because then I’d have to see them. And I don’t have many good memories of my childhood outside of Watford.
My therapist (the one I was seeing last summer) always wanted me to talk about that—what my life was like as a kid, how I felt, who took care of me. I tried to tell her that I can’t remember—and I really can’t. It’s all sort of spotty. I vaguely remember where I lived before my magic kicked in, what school I was in, what I watched on the telly … I can remember that things were bad, but not specifically why. Trauma affects memory, my therapist said. Your brain closes off painful corridors.
“That sounds good to me,” I told her. “Thank you, brain.”
I don’t see why I should go looking for pain and trouble in my childhood, especially things my head has already taped off. I’ve got enough pain and trouble on my plate.
The therapist said I needed to work through the past to keep it from undermining the present. And I said—
Well, I didn’t say anything. I skipped my next appointment and didn’t make any more.
* * *
Penny hired us a car, but we’ve got to walk half a mile to get to it. Baz looks completely wiped, even though he slept on my shoulder through most of the flight. (I needed a piss for the last four hours, but I didn’t want to wake him.)
When we get to the car, it stops me in my tracks. Baz walks right into me.
“Penelope…” I’m actually holding my head, like someone who’s just seen their renovated living room on a DIY show. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Penny laughs. “Nope.”
Crowley, it’s beautiful—sleek, saltwater blue. With a nose like a Doberman pinscher. “A classic Mustang! Are you kidding me?! Just like Steve McQueen!”
“Well, we can’t drive across America in a Ford Fiesta.”
Baz is frowning at the bonnet. “Nineteen sixty-eight … Tahoe Turquoise.”
I climb into the driver’s seat, even though I can’t drive—I wish I could. The seats are sky-blue vinyl and shorter than any car I’ve been in.
“Room for your wings,” Baz comments.
“Oh, speaking of,” Penny says. “Let me freshen you up.” She holds up her ring hand. She’s got a bell hanging from her middle finger. “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings!” she casts. Then she spins her hand around, ringing the bell and hissing, “I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it!”
I hear Baz take a sharp breath just as the magic hits me—with a much bigger oomph than it had back in our flat, when Penny tried this spell on me the first time. An icy feeling blooms between my shoulders.
“Great snakes, Bunce, that’s genius.” Baz’s eyebrows are at maximum up and down positions.
Penny shakes out her hand. “That was far more powerful than back home,” she says excitedly. “Do you think it’s because the phrases are of American origin? This could affect our whole vocabulary!”
“Does the second spell work as a blanket reversal?” Baz wants to know.
“I’m not sure yet,” she says. “It’s a pop song, so it’s unstable.”
“I can’t believe you tested an unstable spell on your best friend.…”
“Simon said I could!”
“… and I can’t believe he was angelic enough for it to work!”
“He’s sufficiently angelic for the purposes of the spell,” Penny says. “Magic understands metaphor.”
“Thank you, Bunce, I also completed first-year Magickal Theory.”
They keep talking, but I ignore them. Too busy pretending I’m Steve McQueen. I generally don’t go around thinking about how cool I look (I’m not Baz), but I feel like I must look very cool right now.
Penny is fiddling with the windscreen. “Watch!” She reaches over me to flip a switch on the dashboard. An engine whines, and the top of the car folds out of sight. “Magic,” she grins.
I’m grinning right back. This is brilliant. If I were by myself, I’d be making vroom, vroom noises.
Baz puts our bags in the boot, then comes around to the driver’s side; he’s the only one of us who can drive. “Shotgun,” I say, making my way into the passenger seat. I’ll get carsick if I ride in the back.
Penny practically crawls over me to get to the back seat, and Baz settles in, clicking his seat belt.
“Come on, Snow. Let’s see America.”
* * *
If I thought I looked cool behind the wheel, I wasn’t prepared for Baz.
I wouldn’t be able to look away from him, if there wasn’t so much else to take in. We’re headed out to the Chicago suburbs, where Micah lives. Nothing here is like anything I’ve ever seen before.
The roads are staggering—five lanes across, and full of massive vehicles. Everyone in America seems to drive a military transport. And there’s advertising everywhere, giant posters along the road, for just about everything. Pizza and lawyers and hair-growth supplements.
Baz acts like he does this every day. He’s completely relaxed, with one long, pale hand resting on the steering wheel and the other firmly managing the gear stick. He’s wearing light grey trousers, a white shirt cuffed just below his elbows, and a pair of sunglasses I’ve never seen before. His hair has got longer since we left school, and the wind is bringing it to life.
I still feel manky from the plane. I know I sweated through my T-shirt (sour, sitting-still sweat), and my jeans are too hot for Chicago in June. My hair’s longer these days, too, but only because I haven’t cared enough to get a haircut. I’m exactly the sort of thing Baz doesn’t bother with.
Penny climbs up between our seats to fuss with the radio. “Where’s the plug?”
Baz tries to elbow her back. “Put on your seat belt!”
“But I made a road trip playlist!”
“Are you trying to kill us all before we can listen to it?”
I turn on the stereo. It looks like it came with the car. “I think it’s just got a radio,” I say, fiddling with the dial. It makes a staticky wow-wow sound, just like in the movies. Maybe everything in America is just like in the movies.
“Can’t I plug in?” She’s still hanging between us.
“I don’t think so. I’ll try to find some music.” It takes me a second—you have to turn the dial really slowly and kind of trap the signal. I twist past people talking about politics and baseball, and find a station playing classic rock. “I think this is the best I can do.”