Chapter 28

28

My phone vibrates with a text. It's Sky. Meet me outside before you and Carter leave.

I'm nearly in the car when it pings, and I groan. It takes me too damn long to get in and out of this vehicle, thanks to my ankle. "Hold on," I say to Carter. "I've got to see Sky about something."

"Want me to come?" he asks as he leans down to help lift me back up again. Even with everything rolling around in my head that I've learned in the last hour—the fact that Mom took my mother-flipping soul from me, which, I agree with Amá, that bitch …to the idea that not only can I be fixed, but Nadia also already knows how to do it …to the fact that Sky wasn't a virgin when she fell? Who the hell was she fucking back then? It couldn't have been with her boyfriend at the time, whose name I can't even recall right now, because that boy practically lived at the church and blushed anytime someone said the word screw , even with regard to the Home Depot hardware department. It honestly sounds like she had more game than me and I was four years older than her and had way more boyfriends.

Back to my point. Even with all the crap in my head, I still get goose bumps when Carter's hands are on my arms. I still lean in a little, to smell that sweet salty note on him that makes me so crazy, I keep thinking dumb thoughts like I want our marriage to be real .

"No, I think she wants to chat alone for a few minutes. Maybe give me some encouragement or something."

Carter gives me a warm smile. "I'll be right here."

"I know." I smile back at him.

"Teal! Stop hitting on your husband and get your butt over here!" Sky's voice rings out and I laugh, turning to her.

"Okay, okay," I say, stumbling to the side of the parking lot that is lined with tall, pointy evergreen trees. "What's going on?"

She's standing with Sage, and they're both staring at me with equally weird looks on their faces.

I frown. "What is it?" I glance at Sage's belly. "Is the baby okay?"

"Oh, he's fine," Sage says. "Sky just has some interesting… ideas on some things that have transpired today."

"We need to find Mama ourselves," Sky exclaims, then puts a hand over her own mouth, looking around, presumably for either Amá or Nadia to jump out to stop her. "I mean, we need to find Mama ourselves," she repeats with a whisper.

"But—" I shake my head. "Isn't Nadia the one who, like, knows what she's doing?"

Sky huffs. "First of all, if it weren't for A, Nadia teaching Mama magic to start with, and B, not teaching us magic to start with, none of this would have happened."

I lift my shoulder. "You're not wrong, but now she can, you know. Make it up to us and fix this."

"I'm just saying," Sky says, throwing her arms about, "that we can totally do it ourselves. We don't even have to wait till the full moon. We won't have Amá Sonya's nasty energy ruining things, and we won't have Nadia there acting like she wasn't a neglectful caretaker to us. It would just be us. Sisters." She lifts the necklace that's wrapped around her neck, the mossy stone glinting in the sunlight. "Sage, sky, and teal. The whole sisterly landscape."

"But what if we mess up?" Sage asks gently. "Teal is right. We don't have the faintest idea of what we're doing."

Sky lowers her voice. "I found a book at work. It's got ancient rituals in it, from the same place in Texas where Nadia says our ancestors are from. In fact, I think this book may have belonged to one of our ancestors. And it has, like, spells in it. Including one on how to find a lost piece of soul."

Goose bumps ripple over my arms, and Sage glances down at her own hands. "Wow, did you guys feel that?"

"I declare," Sky says, putting on an unnatural, regal tone while ignoring Sage, "that if we are all wearing our necklaces that Sage made us, then it's a sign we've got to do it ourselves. A sign from the old gods." She makes her voice drop as dramatically as possible. "That we must do the ritual tonight ."

Sage laughs. "But you can totally see that I'm already wearing the necklace." And it's true, I hadn't noticed it earlier, because under the big moonstone necklace, the moss agate pendant is being eaten alive by her monstrous pregnancy cleavage.

Sky nods. "Which just leaves Teal. Who, may I add, almost never wears her necklace."

"That's only because I am constantly working out and I don't want to tarnish the silver with my sweat," I respond, putting my hands on my hips.

"So you're saying you're not wearing the necklace," Sage says, lifting her eyebrow.

I sigh and close my eyes briefly. Then I pull the collar of my crewneck and pull up on the chains there. I'm wearing three necklaces, in fact, because I'd read an article about the art of layering from The Beauty Martyr, that white woman homogeneous design store that Leilani's hawking now. And as dumb as Leilani is, and as ugly as everything in that store is, they made me want to layer jewelry. And then I felt humiliated, because why am I taking advice from these assholes anyway, and why am I still internet-stalking Lani anyway, and I threw a crewneck on to hide all of it.

So the necklaces I procure are in this order: a little gold bee that looks like it was pressed in a gold seal of wax, a small, brilliant-cut topaz set into white gold, and lastly…moss agate.

Specifically, the moss agate that Sage set into silver and told us the stone represented our sisterhood.

Sky squeals and claps her hands and jumps up and down at once. "See? The old gods want us to do illegal shenanigans again!"

"Wait, who said anything about illegal?" Sage asks, but Sky is already walking away.

"Meet you both at the church at six p.m.!" she calls.

"I can't drive, remember?" I lift my foot up in a big show.

"I'll pick you up th— Oh! Hello, friend." She pauses, looking toward the line of evergreens, where a full-grown raccoon begins to follow her as she heads back to Nadia's waiting car.

"You think she's going to take it home?" Sage smirks at me.

I nod. "I think she's going to fasten it in its own seat belt in the back seat, and tonight Nadia's going to lose her shit when she sees she's sitting next to a raccoon at the dinner table."

"She wants us to meet at dinnertime," Sage reminds me. "I can bring it. Tenn introduced me to this awesome food truck a little while ago."

I blink in surprise. "Oh—okay. Tacos sound good."

Sage leans on her hip. "You thought about taking that class yet?"

I shrug. "Um—"

She puts her hand on my arm. "Just think about it, Teal." She gives me a smile and a wink. "It's not your job to fix everything, you know that, right? You deserve happiness whether you buy me and Sky shit or not."

I look down because I feel like my eyes might water and, dammit, I just don't feel like crying for the millionth time in a row this week. Crying is exhausting . "Okay. I hear you. I'll think about it."

"I'm going to have dinner with my sisters tonight," I tell Carter, and he nods, giving me a half smile.

"That's good. You mind if we make a stop on the way home?"

"Uh—" I say, thrown off a little. "Sure, that's fine."

"Even if it's kind of a long stop?"

I shake my head. "Why…would it be a long stop?" I pause. "Wait. Another best friend thing?"

He glances at me and winks. "You'll see."

"Carter, you've already done too much." But I can't help grinning and wiggling in my seat a little. "You'll spoil me."

This time, he grins. "Maybe I like the idea of spoiling you. You ever think about that?"

Somehow I'm able to smile even wider as I try to figure out where we're headed.

It takes us about ten minutes before we're pulling into the Cranberry Vintage Cinema. I guess back in the seventies, this used to be the big, fancy place people would go to see movies, but now we have a couple of theaters that outshine it by far. So CVC now shows old movies for a serious discount—I'm talking five dollars and under—making all their real money on overpriced snacks.

I gasp when I see what it's showing today. " The Matrix ?"

He nods, beaming when he sees my own smile.

"The original Matrix ? The one Abuelo Gene took us to? Not one of the weird sequels that didn't make any sense to me?"

"Yes, Teal. It's the one we saw." He nudges his head toward the theater. "So what do you say? Is this okay for some best friend shenanigans?"

"Yes!" I fling open my car door and about jump out, till I remember one of my ankles isn't working. "Shit."

"Here, here." Carter rushes around and helps me up, one big hand under my arm, along my rib cage, the other at my waist. When he lifts me up, I wrap my arms around his neck, and before my brain can notice, I hug him, hard.

"This is awesome," I whisper.

He laughs into my shoulder, running his hand around my back in a circle. "Baby, you haven't even seen the snacks I brought yet."

"Snacks?"

"Yes, snacks. But we gotta sneak them in your purse, okay?"

Ten minutes later, Carter and I are the only people seated to watch The Matrix in this year of our Lord, at two in the afternoon. I pull out the chili-dusted dry mango and the bar of cookies-and-cream chocolate, and meanwhile Carter's already munching on the extra-extra large and extra-extra buttered popcorn he'd insisted on dropping twenty-five dollars on.

"Man, I always wanted popcorn when we went to the theater, but no one could afford it," he says, shoving handfuls into his mouth.

"Don't eat it all!" I say, reaching over for my own share. I close my eyes when I first taste it. "God, I haven't had popcorn in so long. Johnny never let me get it." I snap my mouth shut when I realize the dumb words that have come out of my mouth.

"Why?" Carter asks, which is a perfectly reasonable question.

I shrug. "He was always scared I was going to get fat."

"You?" Carter looks me up and down. "Look, there's nothing wrong with fat. You'd look hot no matter what. But, Teal, you've got more abs than I do! Your body has always been—" He coughs a little. "You've always been thin and cut, you know?"

"I know. But he was—" I shake my head, unwrapping the package of mangoes carefully, so the chile doesn't fly out all over us. I take a deep sigh and say some things that have been on my mind for a while now. "It was like he lived to antagonize me. His whole purpose for existing was to critique any word I said, any move I made. If I wanted popcorn, I better not because I might get fat. If I spent too long on a gym workout, I better stop before I got too muscular. If I wanted to put my hair up, no, he wanted it down because it made me look more feminine, and if it was down, he wanted it up, because it wasn't silky enough to let it loose." I sigh and close my eyes, letting waves of emotion run over me. They're not intense emotions—so I don't have to worry about a lightning storm cutting off the power or something—but they're still visceral. This looming sense of sadness and grief over the years I gave to a man who would never be pleased with anything he had, including me.

For a long time after Johnny, I was numb, because that was what I had to make myself in order to survive that relationship. And it one hundred percent was survival. I've had a few of our former asshole mutual friends come up and say—or strongly imply—that if it was as bad as I made it sound, then why wouldn't I leave?

If you thought leaving a man meant he might murder you…wouldn't that give you a goddamn pause?

But no, because beloved, loud Johnny would never be like that. He never shoved me around, never slapped me, never demanded that I have sex with him if I knew what was good for me. Johnny was just so nice .

If Sage hadn't threatened him, I know he would've retaliated. He would've made it hurt, to punish me for daring to leave him. I was so angry at her for getting in my business…but the truth of the matter was, I was afraid for her. I spent weeks all tense, afraid Johnny would hurt her to get to me. But she must've been very thorough in scaring him. She says she almost choked him to death with a dogwood tree. I thought she was exaggerating at first—because Sage is the best person I know—but then I realized that nothing less would have stopped Johnny. He would have to have been scared shitless to leave me alone without having to have the last word, or last hit, or whatever.

"That sounds exhausting," Carter says. "Teal, I'm so sorry you went through that. I wish…" He clears his throat and looks away. "I wish I had known. I mean, I knew he wasn't good enough for you. Anyone with eyes knew that. But all that other stuff. You know I would've helped you."

I breathe out a sigh of relief, a sigh I didn't even realize I was holding in. There was no But why didn't you leave? from Carter. Of course there isn't. "I didn't want him to hurt anyone I loved." As soon as the words come out, my heart feels like it might jump out of my throat.

I've always told Carter I loved him. You can't have the same amount of history we do and not, I don't think. But this time…I didn't even say it directly, and for some reason, it feels different. It feels like the idea of loving Carter resounds inside me like a bell, ringing through all of my veins and nerves and bones.

"I wouldn't have let him," Carter responds, and that's when the movie begins.

So our conversation ends, and we're snacking on our junk food, watching as Trinity—the absolute badass that she is—runs away from a group of agents while wearing head-to-toe shiny black leather.

But I can't relax. I keep crossing and uncrossing my legs. I tap my fingers on my thighs, on the armrests of my seat.

Because, shit. I think I'm in love with Carter.