“But you have to say your wishes out loud,” Tally demanded. “I want to hear for myself that you’re wishing for what you said you’re going to wish for, and I want to hear the specifics and the clauses and whatever.”
Ava blanched. Making her wishes out loud, in front of Tally . . .
“I don’t think I can do that. It’s too private.”
“Ava? You’re asking me to watch over you and make sure you don’t die. I think you can.”
“Omigosh, I’m not going to die. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Right, because you’d pass out before that,” Tally said. Using her Ava voice and sounding embarrassingly young, she said, “I’ll be fine! Two minutes won’t even give me brain damage!”
Ava blushed. “It’s the truth.”
“And here’s another truth: If you want me to watch over you, then I want to watch over you. Literally.” She swished the water around them. “Right here, so I can keep my eyes on you.”
“Here? It’s, like, one foot deep. How would I stay underwater?”
Tally rolled her eyes. “I guess we can go out a little farther.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Tally spread her arms. “Hey . . .”
“No, no. Whatever.” Ava chugged through the water: shin high, waist high, chest high. Tally kept pace with her. They were both nearly soaked by the time Tally grabbed Ava’s arm.
“Here,” she said.
Ava scratched her nose.
She curled her toes into the oozy mud at the bottom of the lake.
She let her body sway gently as the water rocked her like a baby.
“Do it or don’t,” Tally warned.
Ava took a breath and let it out. She was aware of the movement of her lungs, the expansion and contraction of her ribs. She nodded and pulled back her shoulders.
“First, my impossible wish,” she said aloud. “For my impossible wish, I wish for City Park Lake to be a membrane between different whens.”
“Membrane?” Tally said.
Yes, membrane, Ava thought testily. Ava had thought about this and thought about this. She wasn’t about to let Tally derail her.
“Just to be clear, I wish for City Park Lake to be a membrane between today and the past, when my mom was thirteen. Klara Blok. That’s my mom. Although back then, she would have been Klara Kosrov. And only this part of the lake where I am right now, and only for me.”
“Are you explaining this to the wish fairy?” Tally asked. “I mean, just to be clear.”
“For the wish I can make come true myself, I wish to go underwater—right here, right now—and travel backward through time to the last day of the second month of my mom’s thirteenth year.”
“Sure, because that’s totally within your grasp,” Tally said. “I mean, obviously you can make that come true yourself.”
“I can make myself dive underwater,” Ava said defiantly. “I can do that. I can choose to do that. And I can choose to stay under for as long as I possibly can, to give the magic time to happen.”
“Ohhhhhhh,” Tally said. “Well, in that case. Why the last day of the second month?”
“So that I’ll be there before my mom’s Wishing Day. So I can get the lay of the land and figure out what to do on the third day of the third month after my mom’s thirteenth birthday, since that’s when she’ll make her wishes.”
“Of course. Yeah. Sure.” Tally gave Ava a sarcastic thumbs-up.
“And for my third wish, the deepest wish of my most secret heart, I wish to return to this when once I’ve done what I need to do, and I wish to come back as me.”
“That’s two wishes rolled into one. Can you do that?”
“I just did, didn’t I?” Ava shot back. She’d tried countless times to phrase it more concisely, but this was the best she’d come up with.
The breeze picked up, rippling the water and making Tally’s hair fly crazily around her face. Ava’s hair was in a ponytail, but even so, several of the shorter strands came free, lashing her cheeks and eyes. Goose bumps pricked all over her. Something powerful and wild coursed through her veins.
“My name is Ava Blok,” she said under her breath. “My name is Ava Blok.”
A flock of songbirds erupted from a tree on the water’s edge. Leaves fluttered, wings flashed, trills of music filled the air. Starlings, Ava thought, identifying them by their brilliant blue feathers. A murmuration of starlings; Papa had taught her that.
“Fascinating birds,” he’d told her. “They mimic the sounds they hear around them—cell phones, car alarms, you name it. Once I met a guy who taught a starling to sing Mozart. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Ava, Ava, Ava!” the starlings cried as they swooped above her in a loose oval.
“Ava?” Tally said, her eyes enormous. She stepped closer, reaching out.
Ava raised her arms above her head, pressing her elbows to her ears and bringing her hands together. She ducked her chin, bent her knees, and pushed. Water split at the touch of her fingertips, and the lake swallowed her whole.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ava
Ava held her breath for as long as she could. She dug through the thick mud at the bottom of the lake and found a root, or maybe a vine, to cling to so that she could keep from rising to the surface. Her feet, though. Her feet were like little helium-filled balloons. They floated up and up and up.
Get back down here, feet, she told herself, frog kicking to bring them back.
She thought of the endless tea parties she’d had with her sisters on the bottom of the public pool. On the count of three, Natasha, Darya, and Ava would suck in a big breath of air and sink to the bottom of the pool. They’d sit cross-legged on the bumpy concrete that always left nubbly spots on Ava’s bathing suit bottom. They’d pump furiously with uplifted palms, pushing the water up so that they’d stay down.
Darya always won. Darya was always too stubborn to lose.
Ava swiveled
