Some days it's fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can't survive each other? RORY POWER, WILDER GIRLS
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If you're from Rockland, you know how to hike up steep hills, how to rip thorns from the palms of your hands, and how to suck the meat out of a lobster claw the right way. You are made on the dock, bones crafted from splintering wood, ready to set sail on the first gust of wind that will catch. Rockland is a home, cold as it is.
Freya knows Rockland. She knows that when she was eight, a surfer got caught on a boulder with sharp edges that jutted from the sea, and died laying on the shore, eyes towards God. She knows that if you hike up near Goldsman Peak, there's a chance you might not return home at night — something might snap you between it's teeth before you can even make it to the Turnpike. Freya knows these things like the back of her hand; she is the girl that Rockland made from fire and brimstone.
And then, with a snap of a finger, half of Rockland disappears in the dust, and her mother is nothing but ash on the rocks. The last pieces of her life crumble away and all Freya has is her magic, passed to her in Rockland, before she's swept up to live in her uncle's bachelor pad in Queens.
"I just need some space."
When he tells her this, they're standing in front of Midtown, both with iced lattes, shouldering their backpacks full of textbooks. Freya thinks they're on two different planets then — her on Pluto and Miles on Mercury, too far apart to tell the difference of anything. Space? They already have it all.
Freya feels it bubbling then, the magic at her fingertips. They're halfway through senior year now; snow on the ground, already accepted into the colleges they wanted, and here he is. They had plans: they had Yale and trips to Rockland, her showing him how to break the lobster claw and balance on the rocks. All gone like the dust that took her mother away five years ago. The same dust that put her back together, just to rip her away again.
