Page 21 of Seasonal Fears

“Where are we going?” asks Jack.

“We are not going anywhere,” he snaps. “Melanie and I are going to my house so my parents can take pictures of us before we head for the dance. I bought our tickets almost two months ago. I bought these flowers special. We’re going to the dance, and we’re going to dance, and we’re not going to deal with whatever weird-ass thing you’re trying to sell. We’re not interested.”

“I think you’re going to be,” says Jack. “I think you’re going to be a lot more interested than you think you are.”

“Well, one of us is wrong,” says Harry. “Let’s find out who, shall we?” He keeps driving. The road still makes sense. The road isn’t speaking in riddles or materializing in his car or ignoring calls from its father. The road is normal.

“Harry,” says Melanie.

“No,” he says, almost cheerfully.

“Harry, I just need to—”

“Nope. We’re going to my house.” It’s getting easier to sound cheerful about everything that’s happening. Maybe this is what it feels like to go mad. Wouldn’t that be nice? If mental illness worked the way it does in books and movies, and just happened all at once and perfectly cleanly, no psychologists or arguments over whether his tendency to answer everything with a joke signaled some deeper childhood disorder. He’s tried telling the concerned adults who insert themselves into his life from time to time and refuse to go away, that he has dying girlfriend disorder, a rare condition signified by sometimes waking up feeling like he’s fallen into an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, like his whole life is being dictated for the ratings by some asshole author who doesn’t fully believe in his existence or autonomy or right to make his own decisions. He’s tried to tell them, and they’ve made little notes in their computers about him having issues with reality, or not understanding the difference between fiction and things that actually exist, and he’s pretty much done with the whole concept of “sanity.” So if this is madness, finally showing up to take him home, he’s happy to go.

“Harry.” Mel sounds exasperated. He hears that from her a lot. “I need you to stop driving and listen.”

“Nope. Had your chance to explain things in small words that weren’t confusing and didn’t involve teleporting preteens, didn’t take it, so I’m going to need you to not talk for a while, so I can focus on the road.” The kid in the backseat is still there, he can hear her breathing, and that means this is really happening, this isn’t just something he can wish away by refusing to see it, and he hates that. He hates it with a brightness that’s almost surprising, because this isn’t how the world is supposed to work.

Melanie sighs and places a hand on his arm, and he barely suppresses the urge to jerk away. Like the kid, her skin is bracingly cold. She’s always run a little toward the chilly side, but this is like she’s just taken her hand out of the freezer, like she’s been juggling ice cubes when he wasn’t watching. Unlike the kid, it doesn’t feel like shoving his arm into a puddle of slush. It feels like …

It feels like the first thaw, when winter starts to break and the spring starts pushing through. Like snowdrops breaking ice, like icicles melting in the eaves. It feels right, and while Melanie has always been perfectly fitted to his arms, she’s never felt this right before.

It makes him want to stop the car and take her in his arms.

It makes him want to never touch her again.

Something people often overlook about Harry March, easygoing and laughing as he is, and something he’s never even admitted to himself, would be surprised to hear anyone say about him: the boy—almost man—has a streak of stubborn in him wider than a four-lane highway, same as Mel. It takes a lot of hardheadedness to stand up to every adult in your life saying—some openly and some in little, brutally considerate hints—that you’d be better off leaving the girl you love before she can die on you. It takes a remarkable amount of self-possessedness to be so sure of who you are and what you want that you’re willing to fight the world, fight death itself if necessary, and all by the age of seventeen.

Harry doesn’t like to be told what to do, not even by his own feelings, and it’s only the fact that he’s loved Mel for so long that the thought of not loving her is almost alien that keeps him from shaking her hand off his arm. He settles for shooting her a quick, sharp look across the darkness of the cab.

She either doesn’t take the hint or doesn’t see it, because she leaves her hand where it is. Her fingers aren’t warming up, not at all. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” he asks. “Why don’t you want me to answer mine?”

“Daddy wants me to come home right now,” she says, and finally, blessedly, takes her hand away. “He says it’s an emergency.”

“So maybe it’s an emergency. Emergencies can happen any time. That’s what makes them emergent.”

“He didn’t sound like it was an emergency. He sounded like he was sad, like he didn’t want to be saying that to me, but he felt like he had to, and I know if you take me home now, you’re never going to see me again, and I’m never going to see you again, and I don’t know which is worse.”

They’re the same thing and they’re not the same thing and Harry doesn’t say anything, because whatever she’s trying to wrestle with, he’s not going to help by making a crack about it. Not right now.

“I don’t know how I know that. I just do.” Her voice is small and miserable, and for a moment he’s furious with whoever made her sound like that, until he remembers it was him. She’s not making any sense, and so he’s not doing what she asked, and she’s upset about it.

They’ve never manipulated each other, never used tears or tricks to get their way. It’s like they both understood instinctively long before they knew how to articulate it that their relationship has to be built on honesty or it won’t work. (In some ways, Harry March and Melanie Cosgrove are both older than they ought to be, growing up too fast in the face of overwhelming pressure. In other ways, both of them are younger than they ought to be, sheltered in her case by medical necessity and in his case by wealth and confidence. They’re both aware of the ways in which they’ve been lucky, although the ways in which they’ve been unlucky sometimes seem to loom much larger.)

“She’s at the tail end of her season, but it still knows how to speak to her,” says Jack. Harry, who had almost managed to forget the impossible child in his backseat, jerks upright. “She’s been lurching into it for longer. Yours will start speaking to you soon enough. I just hope we can find your guide before then. I hope whoever it is will be someone I like. Maybe we could get the Corn Jenny who coached me. Probably not, though. I’m sure she’d already be here if she’d been chosen for you.”

“Kid, you don’t make any sense at all,” says Harry tightly. “I need you to start making sense and I need you to start making sense right now.”

“Or what, you’re going to put me out of the car?” Jack laughs derisively. “Good luck with that.”

Harry takes a gamble. It hurts a little, because it goes against so much of what’s become instinct over the last decade, but it’s what he has. “I’ll call Mel’s father and tell him where we are,” he says. Mel gasps, wounded. He doesn’t allow himself to look at her. This is all too weird, and he needs it to start making sense before he can decide what happens next.

“You wouldn’t.”

“You really want to test me on that?”

Jack is quiet for a long, sullen moment before she asks, “If I tell you what’s going on and you still don’t think it makes sense, will you call him anyway? Because there’s not much point to this if you’re going to call him anyway.”