“I don’t know.” He lifted his fingers to his mouth, then dropped his hand in his lap. “She had to go back where she belonged.”
“I thought she belonged with us.”
“I know.”
They were quiet for a while; it was too hard to speak about it. Plus, there was a part of both of them that wondered if they were wrong, if they were experiencing some kind of mutual delusion. It struck them, though, that whatever they were experiencing, they were not alone with it the way they had once been alone. Something had changed in both of them. It was as if they were seeing each other for the first time.
“I’m glad I have you, Alien Boy.”
“You’ve got me.” He could feel his chest tingle with the surprise of saying the words out loud to her. He never stammered anymore, and his mother had taken him to get contact lenses. He’d also gained a few inches, suddenly, almost overnight, so he towered above the other boys his age—above Sarah, now the tallest girl in their grade—and his skin was clearing up. It had started to get better the day after Bee had touched his cheek. Come to think of it, that was also when the stammering had stopped.
Sarah had changed, too. The dreams didn’t haunt her anymore. Just yesterday, Haze had filmed her singing “Strange Fruit.” They were going to send it in to American Idol for fun. In the video he’d made, she wore a gold satin dress that had been her mother’s, and her grandmother had put waist-length braids in her hair.
One day, Haze and Sarah went to the park where they had once flown with their friend. They were close enough that they could smell each other, but they had not yet touched. His skin looked even paler beside hers. His hands were big. He could have covered her whole hand with his, made it disappear.
They were both beautiful. Neither realized that they had feared their own beauty, hid it intentionally. Neither realized they had been challenging the world: Find me lovely anyway, desire my friendship, come close in spite of my strangeness, my belief in UFOs and reincarnation. I dare you. But someone had come close anyway. There was nothing left for them to prove.
“Are you really an alien?” Sarah asked him, turning her head to the side, wrinkling her nose. “Because you look like a young man to me.”
“Are you Sarah?” he answered. “Or Stephanie?”
“Neither. I think I need a stage name.”
“How about ‘the Comeback Kid’?”
“Ha. What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know. Like you came back from another life.”
“I thought that’s what you meant. I’m okay being in this one now, thank you.”
“Me, too,” said Haze.
A cool low sea fog had chased all the children from the park. Night was coming, darkening the lawns. The sky was clear again now, a deep pulsing blue tinged with violet.
“Do you remember when we flew?” Haze asked her.
“Of course, young man.”
Haze stood up, brushed the grass off his seat and held his hand out to her. His heart felt light and buoyant, as if it might lift him off his feet, an internal hot air balloon.
“Will you join me?”
“Are we leaving Planet Earth?”
Haze and Sarah knew that this was not the end of the world. At the same time, they sensed that perhaps the end of the world as they had known it was near. One of them had seen, or believed he had seen, whole galaxies destroyed and new ones reborn. The other had witnessed, or believed she had witnessed, unbearable human suffering and then returned to a world where one kind of suffering had been abolished, at least in certain places, and new suffering had come to pass. They both, in their short present lives, had known war and watched the climate change enough to threaten the earth’s existence. They had found each other; they belonged to the world. They had lost Bee, but not forever. Under the earth upon which the dream city of Los Angeles had been built, they sensed a stirring as of water, a shining as of gold. They felt the reverberations of music. Magic had returned. The king and queen, having shed their old skins, reached out to embrace their lost child in an underground garden.
And her friends knew someday they would find her again.
Acknowledgments
THANKS TO
GILDA BLOCK, LYDIA WILLS,
TARA WEIKUM, JOCELYN DAVIES,
ALYSSA REUBEN, JASON YARN,
AND LAURA KAPLAN
AND TO MY READERS,
MY CONSTANT INSPIRATION
About the Author
FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK, winner of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award, is the author of many acclaimed and bestselling books, including WEETZIE BAT; DANGEROUS ANGELS: The Weetzie Bat Books; NECKLACE OF KISSES; a collection of stories, BLOOD ROSES; and the poetry collection HOW TO (UN)CAGE A GIRL. Her work is published around the world. You can visit her online at www.francescaliablock.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by Francesca Lia Block
WEETZIE BAT
GIRL GODDESS #9: NINE STORIES
THE HANGED MAN
DANGEROUS ANGELS: THE WEETZIE BAT BOOKS
I WAS A TEENAGE FAIRY
VIOLET & CLAIRE
THE ROSE AND THE BEAST
ECHO
WASTELAND
GOAT GIRLS: TWO WEETZIE BAT BOOKS
BEAUTIFUL BOYS: TWO WEETZIE BAT BOOKS
NECKLACE OF KISSES
PSYCHE IN A DRESS
BLOOD ROSES
HOW TO (UN)CAGE A GIRL
Credits
Jacket art © 2009 by Sophie Toulouse
Jacket design by Jennifer Heuer
Copyright
The title of this book is inspired by William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child,” excerpted on Chapter 9 Hand in Hand.
THE WATERS & THE WILD. Copyright © 2009 by Francesca Lia Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-191266-5
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