My mother fell in love with a trickster-man, an unstoppable-man; a man who stole back the roses he picked from his mother's garden.

My sister fell in love with an uncommon man, a blue-eyed, broken-down man; a man who cried her to sleep at night.

But I?

I fell in love with a leaving-man, a loose-fingered, dream-breathing, magic-man, a letter-writing man; a man who disappeared.

***

Right after the divorce, I told Kellen my love story, woven from the smeared lines where fact meets fiction. I wasn't planning on sharing it – not then, not ever.

But I woke up to find my older sister hunched over the kitchen counter, elbows propped on the lip of the sink, chin resting against her palm, eyes vacant as she watched the bluebirds sing. When I touched her back to say good morning she didn't move. So I slipped my wrists over the ceramic, shoulder brushing hers. Cleared my throat, voice trembling – slight, ever slight, but trembling – and told her again how she had fallen out of love, and how I had fallen into it.

***

It was the morning after final tryouts for next season. I had been varsity team captain since freshman year. My spot in the team: secure. But my status, despite seniority, as an insider: uncertain. I underwent the perfunctory tumbling and yell drills and mounted the gym bleachers, white cheer sneakers unlaced and sweat sticking behind my knees, ears, and elbows.

By noon the tryouts were half-over and most of the sophomores grappling for spots had slunk home defeated. Our team was defending regional champions. Not much of an accomplishment, considering the region, but: it was an important title, because it was ours.

I sat taking notes – sloppy form; loose ankles; sharper wrists, Kristin, sharper! – until footsteps rattling up the bleachers stopped on the row below me.

"Brioni." Sherren, co-captain, twisted a dreadlock back out of her face. "We're narrowing down top ten over coffee."

"Is that an open invitation?"

"Maybe." she glanced down at my notebook. "Depends – did you vouch for me?"

"Never and always."

"Well." tugging down her athletic shorts, she looked over her shoulder. Lingered. Back at me. Below, our faculty advisor picked shoelaces, headbands, and pre-wrap off the gym floor. Knots of teammates – mine, but also not mine – laughed, stomped, clapped, shrieked, smudged each other's eyeliner, shoved each other's shoulders.

I was their leader, sister, but sometimes I was not. I was one of them, sister, but sometimes I was not.

Sherren watched me watch the wall. Perfume soured beside sweat. One of the girls under the hoop attempted a back handspring, landed on her ankle, screamed.

"I'm inviting you," she said. "So come."

I capped my pen. "I'll think about it."

She left.

***

Max found me at midnight.

Walking back from the public library, sneakers knotted together and hanging from my hand. None of the teammates had been out for coffee. I spotted a car flashing blue, gold, blue, pom-pom confetti dust crushed against window glass, heading into the hills behind Wuthering Stones, drawn by the insatiable pull of free alcohol and cramped spaces.

In the dark, Colorado Springs was a jungle of concrete and desperation. Developments rose from one corner, slack-jawed, lopsided, fresh and wooden and barely inhabited. Half-finished office complexes gaped across fields of dead grass and concrete roads. Yawning mouths, swallowing sound.

Bike tires swished on gravel. The familiar rattle-creak of loose handlebars neared. Beside me, it stopped, thrown to a halt by a sneaker attached to a long, denim leg.

"What do you want?"

"Me?" Max, who never spoke to me; Max, who used to live down the street; Max, the magician; Max of silk ties and holey gloves and cough medicine. He rocked his bike back and forth, considering my question. "Would my pure-hearted motive to escort an innocent to safety be enough?"

"No." I kept walking.

My books were heavy, sister. I couldn't stem the jumpiness in my hands.

"Would you believe me if I told you a lie?"

"That depends?"

"Does it – on what?"

"How well you lie."

He pushed a hand through shoulder-length blonde hair. In the dim light, his eyes were bruised shadows, his mouth a purple slit.

"I'm magic," he said, "or at least I've found some."

I didn't believe him until we walked beneath a flickering traffic light and he pulled the dye from my hair. He rapped my braid with his knuckles. The black seeped onto his skin, disappeared. When he shook his fingers it sank back in around the elastic.

That's a cheap trick, I told him. Anyway I had heard he was into that magic crap – stockpiling pennies for a trip to Vegas, jumbling card tricks at graduation parties, turning poker chips to throwing stars and pinning jocks to lockers by the embroidery of their varsity jackets.

"The truth now," I said. I stepped back from his dancing fingers and rattling, off-beat adrenaline.

"The truth is how you see the truth."

"No bullshit, remember?"

"Fine." he sighed. "Killer of killjoys. Okay – the old hotel? There was a fire five years ago."

"Yes," I said, "the news looped the third floor windows – I watched sixteen fuzzy silhouettes jump before the firefighters got there."

You would know it, sister. Didn't Dane used to work there? After the fire all the workers lost their jobs and then – I'm sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned him, shh – and then developers left the remains alone.

"It was where my uncle lived. When I was a kid I helped him cook breakfast on the weekend – squeeze oranges, preheat the ovens, whatever. Now I practice in whatever's left of the kitchen – a shell, ash floor, you can still see the cabinets. I pretend I'm juggling apples for him and I leave my throwing stars in my pockets."

Max started pedaling. Slow enough to keep pace beside me, but just too fast for me to see his face. His features blurred together. I wanted to kick his tire, but I didn't, because after all he was almost a stranger.

That's a terrible story, I told him. And I didn't believe the part about the cabinets. The news anchors had been certain and dire: nothing left untouched. Not even the foundation.

"I could show you," he said. Glared up at the full, sinking moon. Headlights split velvet black.

"Not tonight." I came up alongside the fountains outside the park. The water had been incognito for the last four months. Rust dripped from empty faucets, stained red-brown flowers on cracked white brick. Feathery weeds grew up through stacked tires. Before they left for India my grandparents lived among the trailers, snug in their mobile home.

Sister, remember when we first found the cabins hidden behind? How excited you were when they were vacant? Remember, remember.

The cabins were a good half mile downhill. I eyed Max's bike.

"I'll see you around," I said.

No, he told me, you will not, because we all have graduated and you're probably leaving, I'd bet money you're leaving, you seem like a runner, an ex-o-tic world traveler but I'm stuck here working in a steel factory.

I was so angry at his assumption, I pushed his front tire askew and left without another word.

***

My story pauses in my mouth, on its own. I check Kellen. She isn't counting the bluebirds anymore and her frantic breathing has slowed. Clear tears leak down her cheeks.

I touch her back through its gossamer cardigan; her hair, brittle and fine; her skin, autumn-rough; and her neck, where the NEDA logo stamps the top of her spine.

For a soft exhale we begin to name the leaves, falling like paper-white snow on the steps, and I begin again.

***

During the month of June Sherren and the rest of the squad left me alone. I knew where they were: dancing, drinking, sleeping with pimpled, overbearing, boastful, graduated boys. They didn't have to reach a consensus to exclude me. It happened, vicious, quick, and simple, as most things in high school did.

Max declared his allegiance to nothing in particular and started meeting me, sometimes, at midnight or two o'clock on the crossroads between the ruined hotel and the highway out of town. We didn't talk often. When we did, we lied.

It was a game, sister. Like the games you and Dane played, except...

Less cruel.

For instance I told him my parents were rich as shit and vacationing in New England. He said his parents were civilians, and nothing in his life – least of all his childhood – had revolved around the Air Force Academy. If it was light enough we watched for the silver wings, carved into upraised grass, as we passed. The steady hum of planes, traffic, and dorm lights told us enough: that life was full, and moving, and settled, for the cadets but of course not for us, the outsiders.

He lied about high school: he hated it, he had minimal friends and zero collateral damage. I lied back, about teammates who accepted me and principals who didn't treat me differently after car accidents and ruined 'til death do us part's.

On a whim, during a dusty walk home where the sky shimmered purple and owls peered into the night, I told him a truth.

Max jerked on his handlebars in surprise. "You're a virgin? Is that the secret, then – you command their distaste?"

My mouth felt hollow. Dry. I clutched my ribcage, set my chin.

"Yes. I'd like to say respect, not distaste, but no one respects what's socially rejected and recognized as some sort of sign of radical weakness, weirdness, or acid-induced behavior."

"You're –" he started laughing. "A very passionate person, Brioni. I think they're afraid of you."

"So what?"

"So what, indeed," he said.

I asked him, then and later, whattthell indeed meant, but he never told me. Just smiled, half-amused, half-grimacing, and said "Indeed," over and over and over again.

***

In July I finished up early at the library. I was hooked on Neil Gaiman but American Gods was still on hold. Ten o'clock, Max nowhere in sight. I almost missed him.

Sister, is this what it felt like? With Dane? Pain and magic and miracles. Soap and burning eyes and orange twilight and cracked windowpanes.

Semis trundled over the highway, bearing down the horizon. Headlamps flashed fluorescent white, tinted lightning blinded me when I forgot to turn away. I had just stepped over the crossroads when it flared up: green smoke, rising from the eastern corner of the square, flat-planed world.

Sparks cracked through the dark. Plumy fireworks, curling around the roof of an abandoned building. Fear gripped my chest. Max. Max, you idiot.

I kept walking. Within ten minutes I caught sight of him: hunched over his bicycle, legs pumping around his ears. Blonde hair a flattened white flag in the wavering light. Faster, and faster, until he split the night, jumped the train tracks over the crossroads, and skidded up next to me. Ash blackened his hollow cheeks. His shirt was torn apart, hanging off one shoulder, falling lower than his bony collarbone.

"You –"

He cut me off. "Come see this."

"Max, no. Were you standing under the green smoke? That was you. The soot on your face –" I reached for it. The first time I touched him, and it was to clear smudges off his skin. "– it's sparkling."

He pressed his thumb into the inside of my wrist. "Brioni."

"I have work tomorrow."

"So do I!" his eyes were serious, hunted. "I've never asked you before. So I'm asking you."

"That doesn't mean I have to say yes."

"It should. God, Brioni, this is important. I don't – I don't know – I don't understand – and I don't think you will, but maybe you won't think I'm so goddamn crazy –"

"Okay," I said. I reclaimed my wrist. "I'll come."

I deposited my books in the shed behind the cabin, grabbed my bike, followed him back through the middle of the night haze. Iron flowers looped stunted street lights. A local diner – windows blinking out like firebugs, parking lot hushed – stood sentry beside the ruins. Max didn't seem interested in the front entrance. He pedaled a wide circle around the striped concrete, turning his hand at me, and charged forward into the impenetrable ash.

The backside of the hotel, I discovered, was indeed still standing. Skeletons of frames, a door, a hollowed-out room, rose above me, timid monstrous ghosts that sighed in the breeze. The faint smell of char, wet concrete, and plaster lingered.

We dumped our bikes further behind the ruins. Max brushed my hand, moved forward.

"Watch your forehead."

Boots crunching broken glass, I stepped over the doorframe. I was suspended, between the darkness and ruins and empty, worn-down sky, then I jumped onto the first stained floorboard.

And sister, sister, everything changed.

The hotel didn't change. Or – I wasn't sure. It seemed to hunker down around us, as if accommodating an old friend, and silence settled where the hum of crickets and passing cars had been. Up close the ruins weren't quite as severe. A dining table, bow-legged and smoke-blackened, lay overturned beside a melted basket of fire pokers. Plastic leaves, curled shapeless and stringy with heat, stuck to the remains of the floor, the infrastructure of the walls.

As Max pushed forward two things became clear. First, what he had been talking about. The cabinets sitting in a circle beside what must have been a stove. Second, the acrid stench of chemical and the same green smoke. Twisting, wraith-like, over our heads.

He reached out and grabbed a tendril. It slide down his wrist, leaving shimmering, upraised lines on his skin. "See," he said, "I'm not such a terrible liar."

"Can I?"

The smoke drifted, aimless, toward me. I reached for it but it passed right through me. No shock, heat, sudden flash of pain. No upraised skin or shimmer, no soot.

"You're unrecognizable," Max said, and laughed.

"These could be toxic fumes."

He raised his hands. "Hardly." he grabbed it, the smoke pulled back into his skin, up his elbows and shoulders and around his neck. Almost as if were bracing him. Almost as if it waited.

"You want to see something?" Max asked.

"Only," I said, "if it isn't toxic. This proves nothing."

"Excellent." he curled his fingers around mine. "I have nothing to prove."

We left the kitchen. The next room – whatever was left of it – might have housed a bed, from the sunken iron frame. Photographs. Carpet. I stepped onto a soft spot and my heel dropped an inch. Wildflowers surged through the cracks. White, purple, yellow-tipped pink. Fragile green stems barely visible in the dim glow of the smoke.

Max jumped on the windowsill.

"Careful –"

Wind whistled into the remains. The moon cut his face into a checkerboard of ambitious, feckless, young, half-invisible.

"Watch this," he said, and he threw open his arms to send a thousand pink paper cranes loose above my head. Fragile wings beat against the bones of the ceiling, a sweeping cloud of peony petals that swooped down to light on my hair, my nose, my upturned hands, my shoulder blades.

I shouted in surprise. His teeth flashed, his smile the curve of a bleeding rose through the dusky cloud. Max cupped a handful of the cranes and pushed them toward me. A hundred beaks, soft as snowflakes, bare brushes of movement on my skin. I opened my eyes – blue, grey, sunlight, moon, playing cards that danced and birds that folded too soon – he was there, a solid immovable thing, bending into the fairy dust to place his mouth upon mine.

***

The mystery, sister, was that there were no mysteries to me. Because don't you see it, happening? The things that tick outside the realm of reality?

Max was already one of those things. I think it was a matter of believing in him and accepting all the rest.

***

For a week afterward, I didn't return to the library. I shut myself in the cabin and wrote myself stories because somehow that was easier than admitting what had been right in front of me.

You were there, sister. Fighting with Dane – shh, I'm sorry, it's just a memory – and I felt so trapped.

I didn't expect him to come looking for me.

Max appeared on my back steps within eight days. He was skinnier, I thought – all of his ribs were showing. Also, missing his shirt, frantic confusion looking out of his eyes.

"Brioni." he stuck his hands in his back pockets. "I suppose you haven't seen the blue smoke."

Not tempted. No. Not in the slightest.

Faltering, I stepped further back into the cabin.

"I don't suppose I have."

"Have you seen the glider sorties?"

I was thinking of Sherren, and her pinched-up nose and her distaste. I was thinking of the week before June ended when I saw my teammates sitting on the edge of the bridge. I was thinking that I was an outsider even when I tried to protect myself.

He waited, but I didn't answer, so instead he said: "They've been flying crazy low, Brioni, it seems like something's happening, I think, or it could just be me – it's going to my head, Brioni, I'm afraid I'm going crazy."

"The green smoke – it wasn't real."

"Yes." groaning, he raked his fingers back through his hair, tying it at the base of his neck. "No. Not yes. It was as real – as real. But now there's blue, and I don't know what to make of it. And – why have you stopped walking?"

I've been terribly busy, I told him, but I was thinking of the way his smiled pulled back against his teeth when he kissed me.

"C'mon," he said. "Humor me."

Splinters dug into my fingers. I gripped the edge of the doorframe, tried not to focus on his bones pulled taut against his skin. "You want someone else to believe you." I touched my mouth, the back of my hand, my throat. Narrowed my eyes at the sandpaper sky. "Pretend it, Max, and it comes alive."

I closed the door before I could stop breathing.

***

In August Max put on a magic show, and my fledgling fragile silly dreams disappeared.

We hadn't talked in weeks. I went because – sister, remember? – Sherren finally invited me to something. I was too tempted to reject her.

From the back row, I couldn't make out his features. Just the blurred, faded edges of his hair, white under the spotlight, and his crooked resistant smile. Cards fanned from his fingers. He made trapped rabbits sing and butterflies dance across the ceiling of the auditorium. Blood dripped from broken glass when he cut his hand, but still the green smoke appeared. Slow, careful. Blue next. Purple.

I reached for it, and it retreated.

He saw me, and it vanished.

"Brioni." after, on the street outside, he cornered me. The rest of the squad had scurried off to a house party. It was cold, for late July, and my sweater knit sagged open-mouthed against my shoulders. "Can you forgive me?"

"For what," I asked.

He held out one hand. Tentative, distraught. "Not believing in you."

"I shouldn't."

"No."

"Well." his fingers, when I laced them through mine, were shivering. Heartbeat like rain on the roof of the cabin at midnight. "I did love the butterflies."

Sister, his smile was magic.

Opening his left palm, he held out a monarch. Pink wings, minute fuzzy black body. Crushed silk and eyelashes fluttering over my wrist. "These," he said, "are a personal favorite."

***

"What happened?"

Kellen's voice startles me from the murky haze of memories. When I turn to look at my sister, she is alive again: half-lidded eyes intent on my face, collarbones pushing out of her chest. Veins swim, blue as moonlight, beneath the surface of the skin.

Beside us a full bowl of cereal milk curdles. The berries clustered on top have turned the insides soft, splotchy pink. I think of the vulnerable edge of a baby's foot, the curve of my sister's wrist, my grandmother's eyes behind her sunglasses when she stuck her head out the window to wave goodbye.

I pause. Because I cannot lie to her.

"One day," I said, "it just stopped existing."

***

Midnight, the week before Max threatened to leave for college.

Neck thrown back, head brushing concrete, hands clutching empty air. We were back at the hotel and he wanted to stay the night.

I said: no.

He said: "This is not a 'no' space. It's a non-word here. In fact it shouldn't exist, here."

I said: "No and goodbye will become our daylight staples."

Quiet crept between us. The kitchen was wide-boned, ash floating through the missing ceiling, cabinets hanging open in eerie, perpetual pleas. Carpet cracked under my feet. Smoke startled away from me, but tonight I didn't mind, tonight I wanted Max, all of Max, and so I was leaving.

Sister. This was how.

Pulling himself to sit cross-legged, Max examined me. The flashlight I brought cast his face in divots, finger-pressed hollows, unfinished shadows.

"In this place, there are rules," he said. "They can be bent, maybe even broken, but not for you or I, and not for the word no, and –" he stopped "– Brioni. The smoke."

The clouds around him began to break apart, piece by piece. Sparks dissolved into the air. Glitter, like pixie dust, hung suspended, then dropped, spilling onto the floor.

He scrambled to his feet. Blue smoke burst open on his sleeves, his shoulders. It left splatter marks, soft watercolor, before disappearing. Frantic, he grabbed my arm.

"It's not a no space, I told you, it's –"

"Max," I said, running my heel through the dust, "I'm afraid we say goodbye."

"I'm afraid you're wrong."

When I kissed him, this time, he tasted like fading, the after edge of fog, a breath trapped in my throat. "No," I said, "I'm afraid you were right."

***

The clouds became cables, the hotel fell to ruin, the diner drew shut its doors. The sun rose and set upon my shadow, but Max, it left alone.

We carried two o'clock on our shoulders to the cabin, where he dug his fingers in my hair, touched the hollow below the base of my neck, before he walked away. I tried to cry, but anger won back my tears: Max, who could have saved our solitude, was the one who shut it out.

But as I watched his back, limping toward the horizon, I noticed a paper crane sitting on my bicycle.

"Max!" I scooped it up, gentle, as color bloomed across the paper, rose gold settling into the folds where pale white paper had been. "You left this."

"I didn't." he leaned so close I could smell the sweat, crisp on his skin.

It stirred, wings beating my palms, and rose into the morning air. With a little push, it scattered up above our heads. The sun sliced through it. In the light it exploded into a thousand miniature paper birds that strained toward the clouds, held aloft by uncertainty, together by a paste of frantic anxiety, careful joy.

As the last crane folded into the space above us, the boy who had loved me, the boy who did love me, turned. "I was never the one who believed in this," he said.

"I know." I touched his jaw. "I'm sorry – I guess it fell apart, when I forgot I should."

The rest, sister? The rest is silence.

***

My mother fell in love with a man who picked her roses from his mother's garden, a broken man, a reverent, open-hearted man.

My sister fell in love with a man who held her when she cried to sleep at night, a light-edged, remembering man.

But I?

I fell in love with a man who disappeared.

***

Kellen and I hunker by the sink, hands clinging to shoulders, heads inclined. Watching as dawn stretches out its fingers and the moon beats its retreat.

The last word closes in my mouth. She turns to me, light shining faint behind her eyes, her grip is soft, but determined. My sister is so determined to coax me through the rest.

"I don't like the ending."

"No one does," I say, "but it happened."

She is insistent. "Rewrite. Rewrite. Retell."

I clear my throat. From deep within the cabin, floorboards creak. Birds tap against the glass. My handprint, pressed flat before their tugging, straining, chirping beaks, halt them.

And I began again.

"After the smoke, the magic, the rain..."

***

My mother and sister had the good sense to fall in love with men who loved them, despite their flaws, despite their failings, despite their differences.

But I?

I fell in love with a man who couldn't love me, because: when I was angry, I could always make him disappear.

***

THE END