CHAPTER
TWELVE
The morning of my birthday, I don’t initially remember it’s the day that it is until I feel the notches I’ve been making under the table and do the maths in my head.
I’d hoped he’d remember, see? All my birthdays till I was twelve were incredibly celebrated, and then every year after my twelfth marked another year where the boy in the window hadn’t come back. I’d watched my birthdays wear away my grandmothers’ hopes, watched me getting older as my age frightened them into wondering what happened to the boy they love（d） so very much. So I have mixed feelings about birthdays as it is. Around age fourteen, I started taking myself out on my birthday. I’d tell Wendy and Mary I had something I had to do for school, and then I’d make my own way to someplace I wanted to go.
Last year, I took myself to the white cliffs of Dover. That took some planning and lying and roping in Charlotte and her older cousin* to drive us there, but it was worth it not to see the worried looks on my grandmothers’ faces all day.
They never meant to say it. They didn’t say it actually. It was always tacit, never aloud, but their faces told me that getting older was a terrible thing, and it was never a conviction I’ve shared. Still don’t, I don’t think.
I did love that day too. My friends humoured me the entire day, prattling on about the formation of the cliffs, how between one hundred and sixty-six million years ago, Great Britain and really most of Europe was actually submerged under the sea, and this sea’s floor was covered in this white mud that was made from the skeletons of this very, very small algae called a coccolith, which combined with the microscopic remains of other bottom-dwelling creatures to create this white, muddy sediment. It wasn’t until the Cenozoic era during the Alpine orogeny that it was raised above sea level.
We stayed out the whole day, and when I got home, they were sitting around our dining room table with a cake and candles, and I felt guilty for not spending the day with them, but I wasn’t even two bites into my birthday cake when Mary’s face twisted like something was hurting her. She looked at me.
“Where is he?” The question—even then, even before I knew him—was asked with such a genuine agony.
All I could do was shrug.
“Did something happen to him?” she asked Wendy, both their faces old by then yet still rimmed with an old pain they had each acquired in their youth.
Nothing happened to him, so it would turn out.
He forgets what he wants to forget, remembers what he wants to remember. I think I believe that to be true now. I might drop that revelation off up in the sky later.
Peter walks into the dining area about ten minutes after me, his face tired from a heavy sleep. He sleeps through everything; I sleep through nothing. Every sound, every creak, every time he moves in the bed,? ? my eyes spring open. Never his. Not a care in the world. He sleeps so loudly too, sometimes it keeps me awake. I’ve tried sleeping elsewhere around the place, but there are no spare blankets, and now I’m used to the sound he makes, his loud breathing that isn’t quite committed enough to be a snore but certainly not soft enough to be able to ignore either. I always end up wandering back to him.
“Where’d you go?” he asks me, sleepy every time.
“Nowhere,” I always say as I cuddle into him but still feel cold anyway.
“Morning.” Peter grabs the top of my head and kisses it gruffly, sitting down next to me, arm slung around my shoulders.
He bangs the table twice—a demanding thing he does that I don’t care for—and then a plate appears in front of him, and an orange squeezes itself into a goblet.
Brownie magic is very strong, Rye told me; it’s not to be trifled with. But I suspect Peter trifles with it often all the same.
“Thank you!” I call out to the brownie for good measure, and Peter rolls his eyes.
Peter starts eating his breakfast—three different kinds of eggs and a lot of bacon.
“Do you know what day it is?” I ask him pleasantly.
He ducks his head a bit to peer out the window. “A sunny one.”
“Yes.” I nod once and lift my eyebrows. “And?”
“And—” Peter looks out the window again before glancing at me with a confusion he masks with annoyance. “Breezy?”
“Sure.” I offer him a little smile. “Also, it’s my birthday.”
His face falters. This displeases him. “Oh.”
I shift a little next to him.
“How old are you?” he asks, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.