The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

ocean. “You spend your whole life preparing for your life. When you’re little, you want to be a big kid, to go to high school. To fall in love. To do something special. To be someone special. In high school, you think about what comes next: college, or a job. Family. Friends. Love. Independence.”

A kid on the beach screamed at a seagull. A car honked on the road behind us. I waited for him to say something—anything—else.

“I look at our parents,” he said. “I look at our grandparents. Our aunts, our uncles. At the people who teach us and guide us and love us and hate us and wish we were older or younger or something. And I think, how come they’re so angry and sad all the time? How come every time a new generation is old enough to speak for ourselves, everything is suddenly our responsibility? How come you go out into the world hoping to change it and you’re spat back out hoping that someone else will change it for you?”

“Each of us is a little bit awful,” I said. “And each of us is tired of not knowing anything at all. That adds up to everyone being downright terrible.” It was the only thing I could think. Sometimes it still is the only thing I can say in response to something like that.

“Maybe,”  he replied. He watched the sun in the sky, a dull orange through the fog as the wildfire smoke swept through, and he didn’t say anything else for a long, long time.

This was all too much. Everything was too much. I started to get to my feet when his hand on my wrist gave me pause.

“I think it’s a trick,” he said. “I think everyone is trying to trick us all the time.”

I sat back down.

“When I saw Mom disappear, I thought for a moment that it had to be a trick,” Indigo said. “I thought it was something Mint was doing to test me. A final cruel joke set up to make me fail—to make me mad.”

“It feels like that,” I agreed. “I wish it was some sort of test.

“I just want to be a kid again,” he said. “I didn’t realize I was a kid until I stopped being one.”

“Yeah. But being a kid was the worst.”

“It was,” he agreed. “And so is this. It always feels like right now is the worst time of my life. The same will be true in fifty years. In seventy. When we are almost dead. And I don’t for the life of me know why that is.”

I couldn’t say anything. I could barely think.

He flopped onto his back, his hair bunching up between the flowers.

“The world seems ever so big to me now,” he said at last, the reflection in his eyes pale grey, like the sky. “I miss stupid stuff, though. Nothing worth missing. Is that weird?”

“You miss thinking everyone else knows what they’re doing,” I said. “Even when it’s bad stuff, when you’re little, you think they know what they’re doing and why.”

“I guess that’s growing up. Realizing everyone you respect has absolutely no idea what the hell they’re doing.”

Indigo was right. People don’t know what they’re doing. Ever. We are all just floundering, paddling toward the inevitable realization that we’ve spent far too much of our time in this world upset about how little time we have left.

“I miss my mom,” Indigo said. “And I know you miss your sister. It sucks to lose other people. Particularly like this. But we’ll manage.”

We would. Probably. I knew what he was saying: other people are important, but not as essential as they feel, sometimes. They teach us to love and to act in a way that makes us worthy of being loved, but when it comes to living, the only way to learn is by living your life. As smart as other people are, as good as they are, they cannot teach what only time can tell you.

I stood, brushed the sand off my jeans, and tried not to cry.

“We’ll manage,” I echoed, and held out a hand to him. “We’ll manage together.”

He slipped his hand into mine as footsteps shuffled through the sand behind us. At the footfalls, I stiffened, and Indigo slapped his other hand to the ground as if to anchor us. We exchanged a look.

We’ll handle this together, I thought. Whatever it is.

“You two,” Mint’s voice said behind us. “You’re alone?”

“Mint,” I breathed, and finally turned to face him. “Oh—”

The man who was not Mint caught Indigo by the neck before I could finish my sentence. In the cold air, Indigo coughed warmth into mist in front of him.

I shot to my feet and jumped to tackle the man, but Indigo had it handled. He pushed out a hand in front of him and his magic slammed the man back into a boulder. I grabbed Indigo as he fell and pushed him back onto his feet.

The sea air kissed my cheeks and silence filled the space between us as the man peeled himself back up from the boulder.

“Who the hell are you?” Indigo demanded, strong and sturdy at my side. His neck had gone red, though, and he rasped a little as he spoke.

I finally got a good look at the man. Dark hair, rumpled by the wind and streaked with grey. His eyes, a pale green, jumped from Indigo to me and back again, as though he had not expected both of us. He straightened his collar and the crisp sleeves of his button down as he rose to his full height—eight feet or so, like Mint.

“Oberon,” I breathed. “Oh, shit.”

I hadn’t thought of this. Despite all of my speculation, I hadn’t thought of this.

Mint came back to life every twelve hours. Who was he for the other twelve?

“My reputation precedes me,” Oberon said.

His voice was soft; I could barely hear it over the breeze. It wasn’t what I expected from Hernandez’s descriptions.

“You were there,” I said. “You