“Wish,” Dr Pepper girl said. “Ha!”
Emily rolled her eyes. “Omigosh, Klara. You honestly don’t have a worry in the world, do you?”
Ava grew light-headed. She’d felt as if her heart stopped when she learned Emily’s name. Now, hearing Emily say Mama’s name—Klara—her heart stopped all over again. When it started back up, it pumped her blood the wrong way through her veins. She felt as if she were in a dream, watching a play unfold before her—and she was part of the play herself, even if the other players didn’t know it.
The two girls sitting before her on the swing weren’t ghosting her after all. She’d ghosted herself, when she made her Wishing Day wishes. She, Ava, was the ghost.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ava
She pushed her hands hard against her temples. She was a ghost and as a ghost, she had to find the Bird Lady!
Only, she had no hands. She realized that only after looking down at her body and seeing that she had . . . well . . . no body. She’d seemed to have shed her physical form as she sloshed through the lake. She’d squeezed the water from her shirt, after all.
Her now nonexistent shirt.
She was still herself—still Ava—but in spirit form. Whoa, she thought. It was possible and impossible at the same time, and the contradiction lifted her spirits.
Spirits! Ha!
Oh, good heavens, Ava had the same goofy sense of humor as the girl on the swing who’d said, “Wish! Ha!”
If she wanted that girl—Klara—to grow up to be her mother, she needed to get going. Same for the other girl, Emily. This Emily was the Emily who would grow up to be Tally’s mother, Ava was sure of it. Ava could see the resemblance between thirteen-year-old Emily and the Emily from the picture Tally had drawn.
As for the initial flicker of familiarity Ava had experienced?
Oh. Riiiight. Emily, at age thirteen, resembled Ava at thirteen. Or Ava resembled her?
That’s why Grandma Rose had called her Emily, and Papa, too. She’d given them just enough of a nudge to almost remember the real Emily.
The Bird Lady, she reminded herself, and with a scattering of light and a whoosh of wind, there the Bird Lady was, in front of Ava.
Or, wait. The lake, the grassy lawn, the bench swing. Klara and Emily. They were gone, replaced by the shadowy forest that bordered the park. The Bird Lady hadn’t come to Ava; Ava had gone to the Bird Lady.
“Oh, phew,” Ava said as she landed—if that was the right word—in front of her. The Bird Lady didn’t immediately see her, though. The Bird Lady stood half-hidden by a large maple tree, peering out from behind it and watching something avidly. She held her hand to her mouth, and her eyes sparkled with delight. She looked as if she were enjoying something delicious.
Ava looked over her shoulder. Yes, yes, she didn’t have a shoulder, but it felt as if she did, and so she decided to go with it. Perhaps some mainframes were too ingrained to shed.
What she saw made her gasp, though she made no sound. The Bird Lady was spying on Emily and Klara!
“My pet, my girl, my angel,” the Bird Lady murmured. She clapped and bounced on her toes. “Sweet Klara! I’m here for you, pet. I’m here!”
She turned and scurried into the forest, and Ava hurried after her.
“Hey!” she said. “Hey! We have a plan, remember?”
Only, crud. Ava and the Bird Lady made their plan in the future. At the present, Ava was in the past. Past, present, future . . .
Omigosh, Ava thought. Too much!
The Bird Lady reached the oak tree where her hideout was. The great oak, covered in Blue Moon wisteria. The Bird Lady found one particular knobby root and ducked into the hollow, and like a whisper, Ava was there as well.
She watched as the Bird Lady scribbled words on a scrap of paper, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. Klara Kosrov, she wrote on the top.
“How to help, how to help,” she muttered. She tapped her lip with the pen, then scribbled some more.
“No, no, no,” said Ava. She tried to maneuver in front of the Bird Lady. The Bird Lady wrote through her.
Yick.
“This is not the plan,” Ava said. She tried to take the pen from the Bird Lady. Her efforts were wisps of air against metal and ink. “Why can’t you hear me? Aren’t you supposed to be able to hear me? You hear the thoughts of thirteen-year-old girls, remember?”
The Bird Lady hummed and fussed, writing the words Nate and Olympiad and a mother with three daughters.
Ava would have sworn if swearing was something she did. Since she didn’t, she stomped around and kicked at the soil. Her actions yielded no results.
Okay, breathe, she told herself. What am I forgetting?
Oh! The Bird Lady could hear the thoughts of thirteen-year-olds! Was that the cause of the mix-up?
Pushing on her words with fierce intensity, she thought, Look at me. See me. Stop writing stuff down about my mom!
The Bird Lady hummed and rolled up the scrap of paper. She dug through a crate of glass soda bottles and pulled out one that was a murky shade of green.
“Not one of your stupid scrolls!” Ava cried. The idea of her mother’s dreams being rolled up and stuffed into a bottle made her feel nearly hysterical. She tried pulling the Bird Lady’s hair, but found no purchase.
You are supposed to HEAR me! she yell-thought with all her might. You hear thirteen-year-old girls, you dumb old Bird Lady!
Then Ava remembered . . . and the air was sucked from her lungs, the hope from her heart.
Ava wasn’t Ava, yet. She was, well, the potential of Ava. The Bird Lady couldn’t look into Ava’s eyes and see Ava’s soul, because Ava hadn’t been born yet, which meant that Ava didn’t have eyes yet, not eyes that the Bird Lady could see. Ava’s soul was
