I feel instantly dumb that I never thought to feel for sorrow before. Usually around Sam the sorrow overwhelms me without me having to seek it out. I gaze up at the bird, slowly open the door of my mind, and wait to be flooded with Samjeeza’s sad, sweet despair. But before I can discern anything beyond my own anxiety, the bird squawks, almost in a mocking way, and flaps off through the trees.

Angela and I stare after it.

“It’s probably just a bird,” I say. A shudder passes through me.

“Right,” she says, in a voice that conveys she doesn’t believe that for a second. “Well, what can you do? I guess if it’s a Black Wing, you’ll find out soon enough.”

I guess so.

“You should tell Billy about it,” Angela says. “See if she has any, I don’t know, advice for you. Maybe some kind of bird deterrent.”

I want to laugh at her choice of words, but for some reason I don’t think it’s so funny. I nod. “Yeah, I’ll call Billy,” I say. “I haven’t checked in with her for a while.”

I hate this.

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed with my cell in my hand. I don’t know how Billy will react to the news that I’m possibly seeing a Black Wing, but there’s the high likelihood she’ll say I should run away—that’s what you do when you see a Black Wing, we’ve all been taught over and over and over again. You run. You go to someplace hallowed. You hide. You can’t fight them. They’re too strong. They’re invincible. I mean, last year when Samjeeza started showing up at my school, the adults went full lockdown on us. They got scared.

I might have to leave Stanford, is what that would mean.

My jaw clenches. I’m tired of being scared all the time. Of Black Wings and frightening visions and failure. I’m sick of it.

It makes me think of when I was a kid, maybe six or seven, and I went through a scared-of-the-dark phase. I’d lie with the covers clutched up to my chin, convinced that every shadow was a monster: an alien come to abduct me, a vampire, a ghost about to lay its chilly dead hand on my arm. I told my mom I wanted to sleep with the lights on. She humored me that way, or let me sleep in her bed, curled against the security of her warm, vanilla-scented body until the terror faded, but after a while she said, “It’s time to stop being afraid, Clara.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” She handed me a spray bottle. “It’s holy water,” she explained. “If anything scary comes into this room, tell it to go away, and if it doesn’t go away, spray it with this.”

I seriously doubted that holy water would have any effect on aliens.

“Try it,” she dared me. “See what happens.”

I spent the next night muttering, “Go away,” and spraying shadows, and she was right. The monsters disappeared. I made them go away, just by my refusal to be afraid of them. I took control of my fear. I conquered it.

That’s how I feel right now, like if I just refuse to be afraid of the bird, it’ll go away.

I wish I could call Mom instead of Billy. What would she say to me, I wonder, if I could magically go to her, if I could run downstairs to her room in Jackson the way I used to and tell her everything? I think I know. She’d kiss me on the temple, the way she always did, and smooth the hair away from my face. She’d draw a quilt around my shoulders. She’d make me a cup of tea, and I’d sit at the kitchen counter and I’d tell her about the crow, and about my vision of the darkness, how I feel inside it, about my fears.

And here’s what I’d want her to say: It’s time to stop being afraid, Clara. There’s always going to be danger. Live your life.

I turn the phone off and set it on my desk.

I won’t let you do this to me, I think at the bird, even though it’s not present at the moment. I’m not scared of you. And I’m not going to let you drive me away.

5

I REALLY WANT A CHEESEBURGER

The days start zipping by, October leaning toward November. I get caught up in the busyness of school, the “Stanford duck syndrome,” which is where it appears like you’re swimming calmly, but under the water you’re furiously kicking. I go to class five days a week, five or six hours a day. I study roughly two hours for every hour I spend in class. That’s at least seventy-five hours a week, if you do the math. Then once you subtract sleeping and eating and showering and having sporadic visions of me and Christian hiding in a dark room, I’m left with about twenty hours to hit the occasional party with the other Roble girls, or get my Saturday afternoon coffee with Christian, or go snack shopping with Wan Chen, or go to the movies or the beach or learn how to play Frisbee golf in the Oval. Jeffrey’s also calling me every once in a while, which is a huge relief, and we’ve been having an almost-weekly breakfast together at the café where Mom used to take us when we were kids.

So there’s not much time to think about anything but school. Which suits me just fine.

I keep seeing the crow around campus, but I do my best to ignore it, and the more times I see it and nothing happens, the more I believe what I keep telling myself: that if I don’t engage it, everything will be fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s Samjeeza or not. I try to act like everything’s normal.

But then one day Wan Chen and I are coming out of the chemistry building, and I hear somebody call my name. I turn around to see a tall blond man in a boxy brown suit and a black fedora—I’m thinking circa 1965—standing on the lawn. An angel. There’s no denying that.

He also happens to be my dad.

“Uh, hi,” I say lamely. I haven’t seen or heard from him in months, not since the week after Mom died, and now poof. He appears. Like he walked off the set of Mad Men. With a bicycle, bizarrely enough, a pretty blue-and-silver Schwinn that he takes a minute to lean against the side of the building. He jogs over to where Wan Chen and I are standing.

I pull myself together. “So … um, Wan Chen, this is my dad, Michael. Dad, my roommate, Wan Chen.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Dad rumbles.

Wan Chen’s face goes greenish, and she says that she’s got another class to get to, and promptly takes off.

Dad has that effect on humans.

As for me, I am filled with the sense of deep abiding happiness I always get when I’m around my father, a reflection of his inner peace, his connection with heaven, his joy. Then, because I don’t like feeling emotions that are not my own, even the good ones, I try to block him out.

“Did you bike here?” I ask.

He laughs. “No. That’s for you. A birthday present.”

I’m surprised. Never mind that my birthday was in June, and it’s November. I can’t remember ever receiving a birthday gift from Dad in person. In the past he usually sent something extravagant in the mail, a card stuffed with cash or an expensive locket or concert tickets. Money for a car. All nice things, but it always seemed like he was trying to buy me off, make up for the fact that he’d abandoned us.

He frowns, an expression that’s not quite natural on his face. “Your mother arranged the presents,” he confesses. “She knew what you’d want. She was also the one who suggested this bicycle. She said you’d need it.”

I stare at him. “Wait, you mean it was Mom who sent all that stuff?”

He nods in this half-guilty way, like he’s admitted to cheating on the good-father test.

O-kay. So I was actually getting presents from my mom when I thought I was getting presents from my absentee father. That is messed up.

“What about you? Do you even have a birthday?” I ask, for lack of something better to say. “I mean, I always thought your birthday was July eleventh.”

He smiles. “That was the first full day I got to spend with your mother, the first day of our time together. July the eleventh, 1989.”

“Oh. So you’re like twenty-three.”