The Girl Who Would Be King(99)

I sit on the patio with the stone around my neck, verifying Bonnie’s location, which still looks to be somewhere in Central Park. “What is she doing, living there? Weird.” I meditate – or do the closest thing to what I think meditation is – for another brutal half hour, until I feel my strength returned to full power. Once I have it all back I shoot into the atmosphere like a freaking rock star. I can’t wait to see the look on Bonnie’s face.



Somewhere over Manhattan I start to feel a bit nauseous. Like I did in Joan’s tent. I decide to set down in a big wooded area, afraid that the feelings will overpower me again and I’ll just fall out of the sky. The blinking light that is Bonnie is somewhere just below me anyway. The feeling on the ground is a lot stronger for me than it was in the air, so I know I’m close to her. But I find, strangely, I’m not as sick as I was last time. I feel all the same things I felt before, but they are not as incapacitating. I chalk this up to the amplified power of the stone, and play my little game of hot and cold, trying to locate her exactly, which is a little more difficult, but a lot less painful, now that the symptoms are less intense. I realize that though I’m tired after my flight, I’m already getting used to it. Less than ten minutes after setting down I feel almost at full strength.

I’m about to add it to the list of ‘things that are awesome about being me’, but I find I’m growing tired of the idea.

The game of hot and cold gets boring, and seeing all the innocent civilians around biking and jogging I get a better idea. If Scarlett’s letters to Delia are any hint, and Bonnie is the goody-goody I suspect she is, she’ll come running.

I step back into the woods a bit and push a tree straight onto the bike path. A biker doesn’t stop in time and does a header into the pavement, screeching as he goes down. Several people come running and I step further back into the shadows of the trees and push on another one until it falls into the crowd. They try to scatter but I push two more trees onto the path and even before they finish falling the park is filled with screaming and crying. Babies.



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When employees began arriving at the boathouse in the morning we had surveyed the commotion from a peaceful bit of grass nearby. Everything appeared to go well. Nobody got hurt, a bomb squad came and took away the bomb, and all six of our thugs were led away in handcuffs. It was such a good feeling that we decided to stay in the park, rather than go home to sleep. Bryce jogged over to a kiosk and bought us both a hot dog and a pretzel each and we shared a soda while watching people jog and lounge and generally be happy. It was nice to see the park like this and know that we’d helped make it this way, that because of us, it wasn’t all flames and explosions and screaming people.

But our joy is short-lived as by midday I hear an incredible chaos somewhere nearby. Bryce hears it too and we go running in that direction. But as we close in I start feeling dizzy and veer off the grass and past the path and plunk down on the soft dirt in a group of trees. I put my head between my knees and try to concentrate. Bryce comes up behind me.

“You okay?” she asks, concerned. I wave my hand at her trying to signal that I’ll be fine, but before I can even finish the motion I start to feel more sick, the same visceral sick that I’d felt outside Joan’s trailer. I hold up my hands in front of my face and they rattle like dry leaves in winter. “Bonnie, you are seriously freaking me out,” Bryce says, bending down toward me. “What should I do?” My heart hammers in my chest and the nausea takes over. I pivot to my knees and my stomach knots up trying to crawl into my throat. I vomit into a pile of dirt and wait for it to pass. Surely it will pass. Bryce leans down and pulls my hair back from my face gently. I throw up again. The feeling is not going away, in fact it’s intensifying. We sit together for whole minutes and then all of a sudden, my vision clears. The nausea passes. I should feel all better, but a dread I’d never felt before has overtaken me. Thick clouds are rolling over the park, cloaking everything in a night like darkness. People begin to pack up, feeling the pressure of a storm coming. Looking out onto the lawn I see a girl, about my age, standing on the green grass with tendrils of bright light leaking out of her. Lines of light seep out her limbs, snake across the lawn, and spread like disease across the park. She’s standing there like something out of a dream. Like the storm my mother’s been warning me about.

And there it is.

Because I look back at Bryce and for the first time I realize she’s as human as anyone else. Exceptional maybe, but human and normal and not like me. Not like this girl leaking her bright poison all over the lawn is like me. Bryce is just Bryce. It’s so easy to see now, I don’t know how I missed it, except that I wanted it too much. I had friends in Liesel and Ben, and a lover in Clark, but all this time I’ve still been looking for a sister, and who but Bryce could have passed for that? And looking at this girl that looks like some twisted version of me, it’s almost comforting to know that, in a way, I was right all along, that there is something else like me out there. But it’s not Bryce, and I’m a naïve fool, because I should have realized that if there was another half of me out there, then, of course, it would be something closer to the opposite of me, not something the same as me. And a split second after realizing that, I realize what that means.