Jordin Yu's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Jordin left Ray's hut with the traced page folded against his ribs. He needed a sample of handwriting to test against the second hand on the copy. He knew one place he had never checked. The boy he had drawn Lucas Andreas from kept a stack of old papers in his room, and some of those papers were older than Jordin remembered giving him. He crossed back out of Marshwood and drove to the house where his godson lived. The kid met him at the door with the iPad tucked under one arm and the blue headphones pushed down around his neck. Bluey played low against his hoodie. Jordin had not called ahead. The boy did not seem surprised. "You look tired," Lucas said. "More tired. Sorry. Worse." "I need to see the fort," Jordin said. "The one you built in the closet. You keep stuff under the cushions." Lucas nodded once and turned. Jordin followed him down the hall. The pillow fort filled half the bedroom, couch cushions stacked into walls, quilts pinned across the top. Lucas crawled in first. Jordin got on his knees and followed. Inside it smelled like laundry soap. Lucas lifted a corner cushion and pulled out a shoebox. Drawings. Worksheets. A church program. And under those, a single lined page covered in colored pencil, letters looping the wrong way, words half-spelled, hearts and stars pressed into the margins. "You gave me your sketchbook once," Lucas said. "When I was seven. I wrote in the back. I thought you would be mad. You never said anything, so I thought you didn't see." Jordin took the page. He unfolded the vellum copy beside it on the carpet. He held the lamp down close. The tilt matched. The way the L leaned. The way the T crossed low. The second hand on the 1692 page was a child's hand grown careful, the same loops stretched into cursive but still built on the same bones. The curse's second author was sitting across from him in a pillow fort, eating a fruit snack. Jordin's throat closed. He had spent two years believing a stranger had reached into his book. It had been a seven-year-old kid with a pack of colored pencils. "Did you write about a curse?" he asked. "About names being crossed out?" Lucas thought. "I wrote a story. About a town that was sad because it forgot something. I wanted to help. Your book had empty pages." "You remember what you wrote?" "Some." Jordin folded both pages together. His hands were steady for the first time in a week. The author was not a stranger. The author was a child he loved, who had written a story into a book he thought was finished, and the story had taken root in the soil under Marshwood. He was going to have to ask a fifteen-year-old boy what he had done to a city.