“Thanks. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Is everything okay? I saw you limping.”
“I stepped on a fork.” Finn smoothed the bandage over the wound and gingerly placed her foot back down on the floor.
“At least it wasn’t a knife.”
Finn opened the door and Steve handed her a pair of flip-flops. “For your own safety.”
“Thanks.” Finn took the flip-flops without protest and slid her feet into them.
“I’d like to say you learned your lesson, but I know you better than that,” he said, amused.
Finn smiled. It was true. Steve knew her better than almost anyone. She didn’t remember much about her biological father, and based on the things she’d heard about him, she never really cared to. Steve was the only person she would ever dream of calling Dad.
“Well,” he continued, “I’m going to go find a strategic spot next to the cake so I’m first in line. Unless there’s something else on your mind?”
Finn hesitated. Sometimes she wondered if Steve had a special gift like Zadie and she did—he was that good at reading people. “No. I’ll see you out there.”
“Okay. Cake’s in five,” he said, holding up as many fingers.
The guests began to filter out onto the back deck, where a large dessert table had been set up. In the middle of it sat a huge sheet cake decorated to look like a mortarboard. A few weeks ago, Kathy had asked Finn what flavor she wanted her cake to be. Finn had changed her mind several times before deciding on strawberry with vanilla frosting.
“There she is! Finn, come here,” Kathy flagged Finn down as she stepped out onto the deck. Her senses were suddenly flooded: coffee-singed tongues, static cling, itches that could not be scratched because they weren’t really hers. Most of her echoes were mundane like this. Finn guessed that it was because those memories existed on thesurface of peoples’ consciousness. They were looser, more likely to flake off and catch wind. The memories that really mattered, they lived somewhere deeper, somewhere that had to be mined to get to them. That’s where the good stuff was: the diamonds and the coal.
Finn shooed away the echoes as though they were a cloud of gnats and smiled back at Kathy. “If I come over there, do I get cake?”
“Better,” Kathy replied. “You get a heartfelt speech.”
Finn performed an exaggerated eye roll for the crowd, then crossed the deck, flip-flops slapping against her heels as she walked. She joined Kathy and Steve by the cake table and braced herself for an embarrassing display of parental affection.
“Finn. It seems like only yesterday—” Kathy’s voice croaked. Finn was surprised. She usually got at least three or four sentences out before the tears started. Kathy took a deep breath and continued, “It seems like only yesterday that you came to live with us. Over these past five years, we’ve seen you grow from a little girl into a woman.”
Kathy’s speech was starting to sound like the puberty talk she’d given Finn in the seventh grade. She shifted uncomfortably and looked away so that she didn’t meet the gaze of any of her friends. Then she felt something inside her shift, like a dip in barometric pressure before a storm.
This echo wasn’t like the ones she was used to. What she was experiencing wasn’t a specific sound or smell or taste. It was a feeling, a feeling of familiarity, like she was remembering something from her own life. Finn needed to know more. As discreetly as she could, she pulled at the thread of the memory. She felt it start to unravel, felt the stitches drop one by one, row by row.
The tractor hadn’t yet come to a complete stop when Zadie jumped out of the hayride. “Somebody’s excited for cake!” Daniel joked.
Zadie laughed halfheartedly. “Yep. Can’t get enough of the stuff.” She didn’t even like cake, but Daniel had given her an out and she wasn’t going to waste it. “See ya later, Dan.”
All of Finn’s guests were either squeezed onto the pavilion deck or had spilled out into the surrounding wildflower garden. Zadie didn’t see her sister, but she did hear what sounded like a parrot saying Finn’s name.Speech time,she thought, grimacing at the memory of the last of Kathy’s speeches she’d had to sit through. It was at Finn’s end-of-the-season cross-country banquet. After Finn was presented with the MVP Award, Kathy had practically shoved the coach aside to get to the microphone. Her sister had looked mortified by the whole display and couldn’t get off the stage fast enough.
Zadie couldn’t see anything from down on the lawn, so she circled around the building and went in through the front door. The deck was so packed that Zadie had to stand half in, half out of the sliding patio door. To not waste precious AC, she closed it as much as she could without squishing herself. It gave her the appearance of someone who had made a run for an elevator and got there a second too late.
As Daniel had predicted, the object that had drawn the party guests to it like bees to a punch bowl was indeed a cake. Finn stood patiently beside it, smiling mildly. Zadie tried waving at Finn, but succeeded only in drawing the attention of Kathy, who was in the middle of delivering her Proud Mom speech: “—of her accomplishments: star track athlete, magna cum laude, just to name a few.” From the bravado in Kathy’s tone, you’d thinkshehad done all of those things herself, not Finn. Zadie had always suspected that Kathy was the kind of woman who lived vicariously through her children, and now she was surer of it than ever.I promise not to do that to you,Zadie told the Ladybug inside her.
All of a sudden, her gut did a somersault. She didn’t have time to close her eyes or hum a song. The premonition came at her with such force she felt momentarily dizzy.
THE SKY IS FULL OF BIRDS.
Each word was a boulder. The heft of them made her sway, made her brace herself against the doorframe and look to the sky, halfexpecting birds to start falling to the earth, biblical style. But Zadie didn’t see even a single sparrow.
THE SKY IS FULL OF BIRDS.
As with most of her premonitions, the message was so obtuse it was functionally useless. She shook her head, trying to knock the words loose so she could flush them from her system, but they stuck to her brain like a bur.
THE SKY—