1 The Boy at the Bus Stop

ESTHER SOLAR had been waiting outside Lilac Hill Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for half an hour when she received word that the curse had struck again.

Rosemary Solar, her mother, explained over the phone that she would no longer, under any circumstances, be able to pick her daughter up. A cat black as night with demon-yellow slits for eyes had been found sitting atop the hood of the family car-an omen dark enough to prevent her from driving.

Esther was unfazed. The spontaneous development of phobias was not a new phenomenon in the Solar family, and so she made her way to the bus stop four blocks from Lilac Hill, her red cape billowing in the evening breeze and drawing a few stares from strangers along the way.

On the walk, she thought about who normal people would call in a situation such as this. Her father was still interred in the basement he'd confined himself to six years ago, Eugene was AWOL (Esther suspected he'd slipped through another gap in reality-it happened to Eugene from time to time), and her grandfather no longer possessed the fine motor skills required to operate a vehicle (not to mention that he couldn't remember that she was his granddaughter).

Basically, Esther had very few people who could bail her out of a crisis.

The bus stop was empty for a Friday night. Only one other person sat there, a tall black guy dressed like a character from a Wes Anderson movie, complete with lime-green corduroy pants, a suede jacket, and a beret pulled down over his hair. The boy was sobbing quietly, so Esther did what you're supposed to do when a complete stranger is showing too much emotion in your presence-she ignored him completely. She sat next to him and took out her tattered copy of The Godfather and tried very hard to concentrate on reading it.

The lights above them hummed like a wasp's nest, flickering on and off. If Esther had kept her eyes down, the next year of her life would've turned out quite differently, but she was a Solar, and Solars had a bad habit of sticking their noses where they didn't belong.

The boy sobbed dramatically. Esther looked up. A bruise was blooming across his cheekbone, plum-dark in the fluorescent light, and blood trickled from a split at his eyebrow. His patterned button up-clearly donated to a thrift store sometime in the mid- 1970s-was torn at the collar. The boy sobbed again, then peeked sideways at her.

Esther generally avoided talking to people if it wasn't completely necessary; she sometimes avoided people even when it was completely necessary.

Hey, she said finally. You okay?

Think I got mugged, he said.

You think ?

Can't remember. He pointed to the wound at his forehead. Took my phone and wallet though, so think I got mugged.

And that's when she recognized him. Jonah? Jonah Smallwood?

The years had changed him, but he still had the same wide eyes, the same strong jaw, the same intense stare he had even when he was a kid. He had more hair now: a shadow of stubble and a full head of thick black hair that sat up in a kind of pompadour style. Esther thought he resembled Finn from The Force Awakens , which was, as far as she was concerned, a very good way to look. He glanced at her, at the Jackson Pollock painting of dark freckles smattered across her face and chest and arms, at the mane of peach red hair that fell past her hips. Trying to place her. How do you know my name?

You don't remember me?

They'd only been friends for a year, and they'd only been eight at the time, but still. Esther felt a twinge of sadness that he'd apparently forgotten about her-she had certainly not forgotten about him.

We went to elementary school together, Esther explained. I was in Mrs. Price's class with you. You asked me to be your valentine.