She glances at her watch, then throws up her hands. “Who am I kidding? I’ll make time.” She squeezes between her desk and her bookshelf and grabs her keys off a tray balanced precariously on a stack of papers. Suddenly she freezes and grabs my arm. “Brother Black and Brother Red,” she gasps.

“What?”

“Brother Black and Brother Red—the story you recorded for me last week. Holy dear freaking Grandmother.”

“Alice—use your words.”

“Two different versions of the same person,” she breathes. “The answer was in the story.”

Goose bumps prickle up along my skin beneath my still-damp clothes.

It’s all in the stories. Everything. The truth. The whole world, Natalie. That girl jumped through the hole, not knowing what would happen, and the whole world got born.

18

I tell Megan everything that’s happened since Beau showed up outside my house, leaving very little out. Every few words bring a new gasp from her mouth, and when I’m finished, the first thing she blurts out is “Grandmother is so God. Or a spirit. Or an angel. Or the missing link—ooh, an alien. No, wait, I think God.”

“I don’t know what she is,” I say. “But she’s not like us. I know that. She’s something different, and she’s helping me.”

“So do you think it’s Beau?” Megan asks. She’s panting as she talks, feet audibly pounding against the treadmill in her dormitory basement. “The guy you have to save, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s only one Beau. If Alice is right, if the story of Brother Black and Brother Red has something to do with all this, I’d guess I’m looking for someone there’s two of.”

“Oh my God,” Megan gasps. “What do you think the other me’s like? That is so freaking freaky.”

“Not nearly as pretty,” I joke. “Probably a real bitch.”

“Probably,” Megan agrees. “Do you think she’s at Georgetown?”

“I guess? I don’t see why not.”

“This sort of makes me feel like I’m going to puke.”

“Could that be the torture device you’re running on?”

“It’s certainly not helping.”

“Hey, so tell me about things there,” I say.

“Intense,” she says. “The girls are nice. Some like to party. Some never do anything except work out. There’s a sophomore named Camila who’s pretty cool, kind of moderate.”

“Don’t you mean horrible and hideous and nothing like me?”

“I mean, if I were speaking comparatively, yes,” Megan says. “But without my soul mate standing next to her, Camila seems all right.”

“I’m glad you’re making friends,” I say, despite the pang in my chest.

“You don’t have to be,” she says. “I won’t feel bad if you loathe them on principle.”

“Honestly, I kind of do.”

“And I promise to feel the same insane, possibly unhealthy jealousy when you go to Brown and all your friends are genius history buffs with gender-ambiguous names like Kai and Fern and The Letter Q.”

“Does it make you feel better to know that Kai’s legal name is Jamantha?”

“I would pay the Universe and Grandmother big money if they could put a new friend in your path named Jamantha.”

“I would pay them big bucks to be at Georgetown with you.”

Megan sighs. “Listen, I’m not saying this to put any pressure on you, but you know there’s always transferring. If you don’t like Brown or I don’t like Georgetown, no problem, we’re back together.”

“I know,” I say, and I almost hope that’s what happens. I’m honestly more worried that I will love Brown, that Megan will fit Georgetown like fuzzy lime-green socks on a pair of cold feet, that we’ll go off down our separate paths, loving our lives but getting further apart with every new turn. “Kentucky’s beautiful tonight,” I tell her, staring down past my porch to the houses across the street. The setting sun casts deep shadows along the surrounding foliage, painting everything in streaks of yellow and blue. It’s raining, but in a mist so light it’s barely palpable.

“Kentucky is always beautiful,” Megan says.

My heart aches, an internal acknowledgment that what she said is true.

You belong here more than anyone I’ve met, Beau said.

Three months, Grandmother said.

“Anyway, you know what I’m going to ask next,” Megan says.

“I do.”

“How was kissing him?” she says. “No Cheetos breath, I hope.”

“He tasted like cheap beer and he smelled like football practice, and somehow it was perfect.”

Mom and I are in the car, talking and laughing as we drive down a winding country road that meanders through the woods. It’s bright outside, the sky a pale blue, completely absent of clouds, and sunlight sparkles over the creek that runs along the right side of the narrow road.

The dark orb appears overhead, an inky blemish blotting out the sun, but Mom doesn’t see it. She keeps driving, talking, laughing. She doesn’t hear me start to scream. She’s waving her hand to emphasize what she’s saying, and suddenly the darkness shoots upward like a tower made of oil. It arcs over itself and pounds the side of the car.

Mom starts screaming now too, and all of a sudden it’s night. The car spins off the road, plummeting down into a ditch like a falling star, the side of the car wrapped around a gnarled old tree trunk. Thunder crackles in the sky and rain pours down on us. The car begins to fill, not with rain but with blood.

“Mom? Mom, are you okay?” I plead.

She’s staring, dazed, at the steering wheel. I grab her hand and search her for cuts, her arms, her head, her neck. I find none, and none on me either, yet the car is still flooding with blood.

The world had gotten so dark and violent that no one could survive without fighting back, I hear Grandmother say in my mind. And the Yamasee’s hearts were broken, because they didn’t want to kill to live. They couldn’t justify it. So when the water started to rise, rather than wasting their time fighting, they walked deep into the flood, singing as they went. And that was how they were lost.