King and the Dragonflies: Chapters 7–11

I remember the last secret I told with a pang.

There were still curlers in my mom’s hair when her mouth opened and that sob fell out. It went on long, like she forgot she had to breathe, her voice getting lower and lower, grating and scraping as she sank slowly to the floor—until, finally, she gasped in air and let out a scream.

My mom’s sobs are muffled now, gasping and shuddering, and I can imagine her face is buried in my dad's shoulder and that my dad might even be crying, too—crying those silent tears, like he did at the funeral, all the water of the world pouring out of him again.

Planets I’ve never seen before line across the sky: a big purple planet that has swirls across the surface like a marble, an even bigger red one that looks like a dying ember, a little green-and-blue one that kind of looks like Earth.

He gets up without another word, snatches his backpack, and fumbles with the tent’s zipper. I watch him struggle to get out.

My father isn’t really listening. I can tell, or he would’ve turned the station already. I reach for the dial and change it to static, and my dad snaps out of it.

“You’ve got so much power in you, King,” he says, and I’ve never heard my dad speak this way before, like he’s suddenly got the spirit of a poet or a pastor or maybe even a prophet.

An arm hooks around my neck, and Darrell almost topples me over, cackling all the while.

I sit at the same table I always sit at, where Camille and everyone she deems worthy sits, too.

“Look,” he says, voice all low and conspirator-like, “either you want to ask Jasmine to be your girlfriend or you don’t. But I have to tell you—if you don’t want to, I have to start questioning why you used to always hang around Sandy Sanders.”

I can already feel the silence like a wall, barbed wire crawling up my legs to trap me where I stand.

They’re standing so still in the bush, I almost think it’s a ghost—but after I get to my feet, waver, and walk across the grass, the closer I get, the easier it is to see that it’s Sandy, hiding behind the leaves and thorns.

The dirt road and all the trees seem like a completely different world, like the bottom of a lake with flecks of dust floating by in the silvery light.

We walk until we get to the dirt that sinks and sucks at our shoes, squelching with every step.

I’m technically not supposed to watch horror movies, or anything with violence in it, but while Khalid was streaming movies and shows on his phone, he’d let me peep over his shoulder, as long as I didn’t tell our mom or dad.

He’d look over at me every once in a while, at all the scary parts, and if he could tell I was shivering and shaking with fear, he’d fake himself a big yawn and turn off whatever we were watching and say he wanted to go to bed, just to spare me the embarrassment of having to say I was too afraid to keep on watching.

The sidewalks are cracked, tufts of weeds forcing their way through, and sometimes there aren’t any sidewalks at all but dirt paths along the black pavement of the street.

He looks smug as he takes his hand off my shoulder and crosses his arms.

I look where he’s staring—at his hands, where the line he’s holding goes taut.
“You caught something!” I yell at him.

He only finds one chipped plate and a spoon, so we sit together on the couch and try to pull apart some slivers, careful not to cut our fingers on the leftover scales or bones.