turned Hunter into a frozen, gaping statue, just as Kaylee stumbled up.
“I was so scared—I was sure you’d landed on that rusted hunk of metal and killed yourself!” she said, pointing at the mangled remains of a car door near the top of the hill. “Thank—” Her shriek accompanied the hiss of my inhalation.
“Mila? Oh my god, Mila!” she said. “What—what is that? Because it isn’t—”
“—blood,” I breathed at the same time.
All three of us stared at my arm. And stared. And stared. It was like none of us could believe what we were seeing.
My arm wasn’t bleeding at all. There was a huge, gaping tear in my skin, but no blood. No blood. No blood because instead of blood, a thin film of red had ruptured, allowing some disgusting milky-white liquid to leach from the wound and trickle down to my elbow.
And it got worse. Inside the cut, inside me, was this transparent tube with a minuscule jagged fissure shaped like a row of clamped teeth. And inside that? Something that looked like wires. Tiny silver wires, twisted like the double helixes we studied in biology.
No. No, no. I was hallucinating. I’d hit my head, after all, and I was hallucinating. That was the only explanation that made sense.
I snatched my arm away and glanced from Kaylee’s horrified face to Hunter’s shocked one. Of course, if I was hallucinating, so were they.
My hair whipped the air as my head shook side to side. I didn’t understand any of this. “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . this is— Kaylee?” I lifted my hand, the one attached to my good arm, toward her. Only to watch her flinch away.
“Shhh, Mila, it’s okay. Let’s get you back in the truck,” Hunter said, wrapping a tentative arm around my waist. “Can you walk if you lean on me a little?”
“Hospital,” Kaylee blurted. “She needs to go to the hospital.”
My head shook faster. “No, no hospital! How can I go to the hospital, when . . .” We all looked at my arm again, and we could all fill in the rest. How could I go to the hospital when I was such a freak? When they’d ask me questions and I’d have no answers? “No hospital,” I repeated grimly. “No, no, NO!”
“It’s okay, calm down. Kaylee? Kaylee! Could you help us out here a little? Come make sure she’s steady on her feet.”
For a second, I thought Kaylee was going to refuse. She looked ready to bolt. “Fine.”
She arranged herself flush with my side, her reluctance evident in the way her arm slipped around my waist without actually touching me.
As soon as he saw Kaylee had me, Hunter stripped off his black hoodie, revealing a thin gray shirt underneath. He carefully wrapped the hoodie around my wound. Unlike Kaylee, his hands were firm and steady. He didn’t so much as flinch.
“There you go—that should be okay for now.” He gently tugged me away from Kaylee, wrapped a firm arm around my waist, and started leading me up the hill.
The ride home was as silent as the ride out had been. The entire way, Hunter cradled my hand in his and watched me with hard-to-read eyes. Eyes that were probably trying to hide his stark horror over finding out I was some kind of freak of nature, a horror that echoed my own.
Kaylee refused to say a word. Actually, she wouldn’t even look at us.
And all I could think was: no blood.
By the time we pulled up into our driveway, I was desperate to escape, even as dread crept through my chest on spiderlike legs. Because if anyone had answers, it would be Mom. And while part of me clamored for those answers, a tiny part, deep inside, whispered that maybe I was better off not knowing.
I scrambled out the door before anyone could speak, mumbled, “See you later,” and tumbled into the late-afternoon air, a chill sweeping over me that hadn’t been present before. Because even if the tiny part of me was right, it didn’t matter. I had to know the truth.
As I rushed through the guesthouse front door, I told myself, You’re blowing it all out of proportion, Mila. Mom will explain it, and everything will be fine.
I couldn’t have been further from the truth if I’d tried.
With a deep breath, I shoved open the white swinging door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house, to find Mom rummaging in the white walk-in pantry.
The sight of her slim, jean-clad figure, shuffling through cereal boxes and containers like today was any other day, gave me a sudden urge to shake her. My arm looked like something out of a nightmare, and she was looking for a snack?
When she turned around, a bag of her favorite dried pineapple in hand, she smiled and said, “Hey, honey. How was school today?”
I just stood, wordless, staring into Mom’s familiar face. It was so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that sometime, somewhere, she had started keeping things from me. But when? Why?
Was she sheltering me from something she didn’t think I could understand? Not that it mattered. It was like I could feel the fragile bonds of last night’s reconciliation snapping around us under the strain of her lies.
By the time I opened my mouth to ask, her astute gaze had fallen on the hoodie wrapped around my arm. Hunter’s hoodie. “Oh no,” she breathed, her eyes closing as if to block out the sight. Her sharp inhale pierced the room, a harbinger of bad things to come. But when she opened her eyes, efficient, capable Mom was back. The Mom who hunted noises in the night with flashlights. The Mom who didn’t let anything, not even the knowledge that she’d just been trapped in a lie, faze her. “Show me.”
Show me? Didn’t she know she was doing this all wrong? She was supposed to tell me everything was going to be okay.
Why wasn’t she doing that?
“Show me,” she repeated, louder, when I didn’t move.
Slowly, I reached over and untied Hunter’s hoodie with my free hand, let it collapse onto the cheerful blue-and-white tile floor. Contrary to my fervent wishing, the alien parts protruding from my arm had not disappeared. The white liquid had ceased leaking, but the twisted wires, the plastic—they were still there, like the guts of a child’s mechanical toy.
Mom gasped. “What happened? To do this kind of damage, you would have had to hit something sharp at an incredibly high velocity!”
When Mom said “something sharp,” Kaylee’s words clicked in my head.
I was sure you’d landed on that rusted hunk of metal.
“I was
