“When I told her,” he continues, “she didn’t say all the right things. In fact, she said a lot of things that really hurt. The very first thing she said was, ‘I still love you, no matter what.’ ” He shakes his head. “That kind of hurt the worst, you know? It felt like she was saying she loved me in spite of something. It felt like she was saying it was hard to love me, now that she knew who I really was.” He clears his throat. “She grew a lot over the years. By the time I met your dad, she’d figured out how to say things a little better. We adopted you. She got to be a grandmother for a couple of years before she passed. It was really amazing to see the way our family changed—but I never forgot how ‘I love you anyway’ felt.”
“Wow,” I whisper. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt.
“Yeah,” he says. “But then, you remember when you were really little and she passed? I had to go away for a couple of weeks to clear out her house?”
“Kind of?” I remember my dad’s friend Patricia coming over to hang out with me a lot, and I remember eating macaroni and cheese for breakfast a couple of days in a row because we ran out of cereal and Dad kept forgetting to go to the store.
“I found her old journals while I was there.” His voice is far away now, like he’s completely lost in the memory. “I kept going back and forth on whether I should read them, but one night I cracked open a bottle of whiskey and went for it. I read all of them in one sitting. And I realized I had it completely backward that whole time.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wrote pages and pages about how she could tell she was getting things wrong, and how she wanted to say the right things but didn’t know how to. She kept writing about how she hoped I knew she loved me, even when she messed up.” He smiles. “She wasn’t saying ‘I love you in spite of who you are.’ She was saying ‘I might screw this up a lot, but the biggest thing is that I love you. The most important thing in my heart is that I love you.’ Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” I say, although I’m not really sure if it does.
“The point is, whatever it is you think you can’t tell me about, bug? I might not know how to say the right thing about it, and I might have questions. I might not understand right away. But I love you, and that doesn’t change. That’s the biggest, most important part of this.”
“Are you sure?” I ask again.
“I’m sure,” he says back.
My heart is pounding so hard that I can see the front of my shirt fluttering just a little. My breathing is too loud. I’m going to throw up. I’m going to black out. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t—
“This is who I am.”
I take my hands out from under my thighs and hold them out in front of me, palms up.
Magic.
I can’t see the threads of my magic, but I can feel them. I can feel the power spiraling out of me. It feels like I’m exhaling a held breath. And there’s at least one thing that Pop and I can both see.
Blood.
There are crescent-moon divots in each of my palms, dents from my fingernails. They open up slow, like sleepy eyes. Blood curls up out of the wounds. A tiny stream of red from each little crescent-wound, coiling together to form slender vines. Four delicate orchids bud and bloom along the lengths of them, each thumbnail-sized flower unfolding in perfect stop-motion synchrony with the others.
It lasts for only a few seconds. Then, realizing what I’ve done, I gasp and clench my fists. My fingertips sting the places where my palms are wounded. I squeeze my eyes shut against the pain. When I open them again, I peek at my hands to see how bad the cuts are.
They’re gone.
My skin is smooth, completely intact. There’s blood threaded into the creases of my palms, though, and four impossibly small, impossibly perfect dark-red orchids rest in each of my cupped hands. The petals, each the size of the white crescent at the tip of my smallest fingernail, curve across each other like the panels of a spread fan. I gently stroke one with my thumb. It feels like warm glass.
I made this. I made it with a tiny bit of blood, and then I healed myself. It didn’t feel like it does when Roya heals me, though—it felt like something different. It felt like the blood was trying to come to me for a purpose, for a reason, and once that was finished, the healing happened by itself.
I look up at Pop.
He isn’t doing so good. His lips are white and his eyes are wide and I’m not sure if he’s going to pass out or not. Beads of sweat stand out on his scalp. He opens his mouth once like he’s going to talk, and his jaw trembles and then snaps shut again. I’ve never seen his nostrils flared so wide. He glances up at me, then back down at my hand, and I wonder if he’s about to say that he loves me anyway.
After a long silence, he opens his mouth again. “This … um. This is who you are?” he asks tentatively, reaching out to touch one of the orchids and hesitating with his fingertip an inch away from it.
“Well. I didn’t know I could do that,” I whisper. “But yeah. I guess this is who I am.” He doesn’t touch the orchid. He curls his finger back away from it. When
