Every time he talks, my jaw drops lower and my eyebrows climb higher.
“How on earth did you lose your last name?”
“Told it to the wrong fairy.”
My hands are in the air. “How have you met so many fairies!”
“I fell in with a crew of them…”
“Shepard—hell’s spells, is your name even Shepard?”
“Yes! I only lost my last name. And I only ‘magickally and profoundly’
lost it; I can still say it, I can still wear name tags. There’s just one more thing—one more big thing…” He closes both eyes for a second. “I have a, um, well … I don’t have a sexually transmitted disease. But I am a carrier.
Only other merpeople can get it. So it’s probably not relevant. Unless you want to sleep with a merperson. And also me. Me first. Which I’m not suggesting…”
Hell’s spells …
Shepard.
I climb off his lap.
55
SHEPARD
Penelope has the refrigerator door open. “I knew that Simon left some milk…”
The kitchen is behind the living room. I’m kneeling backwards on the couch, trying to get her attention. “It sounds worse than it is—‘mermaid venereal disease’…”
There’s a succulent in a pot on the kitchen counter. Penelope dumps it in the sink.
“I’m sure I can’t pass it to another human being,” I say. “It’s not even a disease, really—it’s tied to how they fertilize eggs—”
There’s a stack of mail on the table. Penelope picks it up and sets it on fire.
This is going so much worse than I expected, and I didn’t think it would go well. I sit back onto the couch and look for my glasses. I find Penelope’s glasses first and take them to her in the kitchen.
“Penelope,” I say holding them out to her.
She grabs my wrist and jerks her fist over my hand. “There will be
blood!”
“What the fuck!” My hand is bleeding.
Her glasses are on the floor. She picks them up. “Hang on,” she says, “let me get a teacup for you to bleed into.”
“Why am I bleeding?”
“So that we can draw a door.” She holds a teacup under my palm.
“What? No!” No, no, no, no, no, no …
“We’ll have to move the sofa out of the way … How big was the door you drew the first time?”
“We can’t do this, Penelope. We aren’t ready for this.”
“I’m ready,” she says. “We’ve got everything we need—milk, soil, ashes…” She looks at the empty teacup and squeezes my hand. “Blood.”
“But we don’t have a plan.”
“I have a plan.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
She tilts her head up at me—“No”—then looks down at my hand—“Can you bleed faster?”
56
BAZ
I helped Simon pick out a sofa today.
One minute, we were eating toast in his bed, and he was wiping his hands on my pyjama bottoms, and I was wiping my hands on his pillow—and the next, he was practically daring me to go to Ikea with him. （He’d been in a such a desolate mood last night, after visiting Ebb’s grave; I was relieved to see him so cheerful.）
He purchased: A navy-blue sofa. Four plates, four mugs, cutlery. Two sets of towels. Two pillows. A duvet. And two sets of bedding—one with thick purple stripes and one with giant green apples. （Who knew Snow was whimsical?）
“You should choose one set, Baz.”
“They’re your sheets, Snow.”
“Yeah, but you’re going to be sleeping on them.”
（I would sleep on a bed of straw to be close to him. I’d sleep in the back of a truck.）
He found a kitchen table he liked, then got kind of overwhelmed looking at chairs. “I need everything,” he said. “This is going to take all day.”
“We can come back,” I said. “Ikea isn’t going anywhere.”
We ate lunch in their cafeteria, and Simon spent half his inheritance on Swedish meatballs and Daim cake.
He was wearing another Watford hoodie to cover his wings. One that he hasn’t yet sliced to ribbons. I could tell he was overheated. （I don’t know what the short-term solution for this is—a silk shawl? A lightweight poncho?） I noticed a few people noticing the hump on his back. But none of them seemed to think he was hiding anything.
We held hands the whole day. At lunch, he sat with his arm resting on the back of my chair. “If you can’t be gay at Ikea,” Snow reasoned, “where can you?”