Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

“Who do I call if I’m interested in these?” Jordan asked. “With follow-up questions. You?”

Fisher looked confused. “You don’t like them?”

“They’re neat.” Please, please, Jordan’s body said.

“Most people would do anything to have one.”

Jordan grinned. “I’m a strange person.”

If Fisher remembered saying it earlier, she didn’t show it. Instead, she said, “Better make up your mind soon. These days, lots of people are trying to stay awake.”

I hate Philadelphia. I hate its quaint little streets,” Hennessy said. “I hate Pittsburgh. I hate its gleaming broad rivers. I hate everything between those two places. I-70, how she twists, how she turns, she rises, she falls like an empire. Hate it. Those barns, the Amish ones, you see them in calendars? Liquid loathing. Truck stops? Yes, let’s talk about truck stops, yes. Hate them, too. I hate the cows. Black cows, black-and-white cows, even those brown ones with eyelashes longer than mine. I think I hate them more because of it. Oh. Right, how about this: The song ‘Allentown.’ Breaks me in a rash. I’ve got one now thinking about it.”

By Ronan’s estimation, Hennessy had been listing all the ways she hated Pennsylvania for thirteen miles’ worth of interstate. Not her longest monologue, but perhaps one of her most pointed. There was something kind of hypnotic and satisfying to a proper Hennessy monologue. She had that clipped but sloppy British accent that made everything sound funnier, more performative. And she had a ceaseless push and pull to the way she threw the words together that was kind of like music.

“I hate the historic downtowns with their plaques and their parallel parking. I hate the pastel suburbs with their antilock brakes and their sprinkler systems. I hate the way the state is spelled. Uhllllllvania. It rhymes with ‘pain yeah!’ When I say it out loud, I can feel how my mouth ends on a vomit shape. I hate the way they call places ‘townships.’ Are they towns? Are they ships? Am I at land? Or at sea? I’m adrift and the anchor is my motherfucking keystone of a heart. Why is it abbreviated TWP? Twip? Twip? Shouldn’t it be the SS Allegheny? That’s a pun. It’s a town. And a ship.”

Ronan didn’t answer. He just looked out the window at the cold, fine rain bleaching the landscape of color and tried not to think about his brothers driving in Boston.

“Kennywood!” Hennessy said, with a certain amount of triumph. She let out a puff of breath. In the rearview mirror, Ronan could see that she’d exhaled on the backseat window and was now drawing in the condensation. “I hate that people go to Kennywood and then they tell you about it, as if it’s a thing we now have in common, a personality type, Kennywood. Pennsylvania! Yes, we both bought tickets to this tourist attraction and now we are bonded in a way usually reserved for people who have survived combat zones together. I hate—”

“Also,” Bryde said mildly, “your father lives here, does he not?”

Hennessy was momentarily silent. She had to switch gears from monologue to duet. “Let’s talk about your father. Father of the Bryde. Do you keep in touch? Who do you call late at night? Not with a phone, of course. That’s for normies.”

Bryde smiled faintly. He was a party of one. From mystery to mystery, that was where he was headed. Saving the ley lines.

“Speaking of calls, how did your call to the fam go?” Hennessy asked Ronan. “They doing well, keeping up your garden while you’re gone?”

Ronan said, “Please shut up.”

“As you pointed out already, my to-call list is shorter. Girls, dead. Mum, well, you know her, you met her,” Hennessy said. “In my dreams. About forty times. J. H. Hennessy, that portrait artist you might have heard of, collected, bid upon. Known best for her final self-portrait, entitled Brains on a Wall. Don’t have to call her, either. Now, you haven’t met the other one, Bill Dower, dear old dad, the one who dropped his seed into the ocean to make it boil. What! you’re thinking, what’s he doing in Pennsylvania, hateful Pennsylvania, in a story told with this accent? Well, Bill Dower came from Pennsylvania, and to Pennsylvania he returned after Brains on a Wall. I think he gave up the whole seeds-and-oceans thing, though.”

“And you said I had daddy issues,” Ronan scoffed.

“They’re like chicken pox,” she said. “More than one person can have them at a time.”

She didn’t say whether or not she’d called Jordan, and Ronan didn’t ask. The truth was that in the broad light of day, the phones did seem to belong to a different kind of life, one they didn’t live in anymore. Calling Declan had made Ronan feel more unmoored, not less.

“Your exit,” Bryde said, “is here.”

“And what is our destination?” Hennessy said. “You’re being even more ‘mysterious stranger’ than usual. Is it more French fries?”

“You said we could stand to add another dreamer, so I found one.”

Ronan snapped to attention. “You what?”

“I thought about the suggestion and decided Hennessy was right,” Bryde said.

“I was joking,” Hennessy said. “Do they have jokes where you come from? Jokes are concepts presented in a way to shock or delight because of exaggeration or, sometimes, subversion of cultural norms. There are ha-ha bits at the end of them.”

Bryde smiled thinly at her. “Ha-ha. We will have to be watchful. This is a dangerous place.”

It didn’t look dangerous. It was a treeless rural valley, objectively beautiful, the long-frostbitten fields rolling off toward a distant line of low mountains. The only sign of civilization was a fine old stone mansion and a massive commercial turkey house, the sort that housed thirty thousand birds who never saw daylight.

And somewhere in this place was another dreamer.

“This is quaint,” Bryde said as they pulled up in front of the mansion.

Hennessy growled, “Too bad it’s Pennsylvania.”

Ronan stared at the house. It was not as fancy