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skin.
    â€œI shouldn’t have waited. I get three months. That’s the rule.”
    â€œWhat rule?”
    â€œI wanted to say good-bye.”
    â€œEli—”
    â€œI was selfish. I didn’t want you to go to the city. I needed you to look forward to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Gracie. The winters get so long.”
    â€œEli, I have my phone. I can call—”
    â€œI’m dying now, so I can tell you—”
    â€œ You’re not dying, ” Gracie shouted. “You’re dehydrated, or you have hypothermia.” But even as she said it, she realized the water was warmer than it should be.
    â€œIt was me that day. You were skipping stones. You’d skinned your knee. I saw you just for a second. It was the last day of May.” His eyelids stuttered open, shut. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, but I wanted to for so long. It was better than ice cream. It was better than books.”
    She was crying now. “Eli, please, let me—”
    â€œIt’s too late.”
    â€œWho says? Who says? ”
    He gave the barest shrug. It became a shudder. “The lake. Three months to walk the land. But always I must return to her.”
    Gracie’s mind flew back to that day at the cove, the creature in the water. It was impossible.
    â€œThere are no books, below,” he said. “No words or language.”
    No Dairy Queen. No bicycles. No music. It couldn’t be.
    Gracie blinked, and Eli’s form seemed to flicker, ghostly almost, part boy and part something else. She remembered Annalee tapping her hand with the pen. Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.
    Gracie’s eyes scanned the beach, the tangle of brambles where the woods began. There, a dark little hump in the leaves. She’d never seen him without it—that ugly purple backpack—and in that moment, she knew.
    She scrambled for it, fell, righted herself, grabbed it open, and split the zipper wide. It gaped like a mouth. It was full of junk. Skee ball tickets, mini golf score cards, a pink and gold lip gloss tin. But there, at the bottom, glinting like a hidden moon …
    She pulled it from the bag, a long, papery cape of scales that seemed to go on and on, glittering and sharp beneath her fingers, surprising in its weight. She dragged it toward Eli, trailing it behind her, stumbling through the shallows. She pulled his body close and wrapped it around him.
    â€œHere,” she sobbed. “Here.”
    â€œThree months,” he said. “No more.”
    â€œIt was only a few days—”
    â€œLeave Little Spindle, Gracie. Get free of this place.”
    â€œNo,” she shouted at the lake, at no one at all. “We can make a trade.”
    Eli’s hand gripped her wrist. “Stop.”
    â€œYou can have me, too!”
    â€œGracie, don’t.”
    The water lapped against her thighs with its own slow pulse, warm as blood, warm as a womb, and she knew what to do. She curled herself into the cloak of scales beside Eli, letting its edges slice into her arms, letting her own blood drip into the water.
    â€œTake me too,” she whispered.
    â€œToo late,” said Eli. His eyes closed. He smiled. “It was worth it.”
    Then the hand around her wrist flexed tight, retracted. Gracie watched it stretch and lengthen—a talon, razor sharp.
    Eli’s eyes flew open. The smell of rain clouds reached her, then the rumble of thunder, the roar of a river unleashed. The rush of water filled her ears as Eli’s body shifted, blurred, shimmered in the fading light. He rose above her, reeling back on the muscular coils of his body, a great snake, a serpent of gleaming white scales, his head like a nodding dragon, his back split by iridescent fins that spread like wings behind him.
    â€œEli…” she tried to say, but the sound that left her mouth wasn’t human.
    She raised a hand to her throat, but her arms were