But the water is a good ten feet down the embankment. Rings of dried silt line the walls, reveal the declining water level. This lake used to be twice as full of water, I realize, and my heart sinks.

  I walk on.

  The bench looks exactly as promised. Old. And like a bench.

  It’s so decrepit-looking, I’m worried if I sit down it’ll disintegrate into dust under my ass. But I test it out, lowering myself as carefully as possible, and although it’s been here a long while, beaten to death by the environment, much like the town of Barbazal, it’s still standing.

  I feel the morning breeze roll through and prickle my skin, and I look out at the lake, which is bigger than I expected for a town going through a drought. I wonder what the environmental provisions are around this water. Is it clean enough to filter and drink? Is it being used for something? Are people siphoning it off to water their crops?

  Is that legal?

  Will there come a time when people decide they don’t care about the law if it means going without a resource so precious?

  I sigh, and hope Clover was right. I hope Jonah takes his 5 am run. I look down at my phone clock. 5:25.

  I hope I’m not too late.

  I look around and realize just how alone I am out here, and I smile. It feels… good almost? The silence, besides the chirping of the crickets and, now that I really stop and listen, the occasional croak of frogs. This place feels more like Haven Springs than I realized, and I find myself yearning for music, my fingers itching to pick the strings of my guitar.

  Something about being alone, especially by water, spurs me on to create. The ocean, a river or stream, this lake… I wonder what it’s called.

  Given the name of the Crown Inn and the Plate and Skate, it’s probably got some cheesy name like It’s a-Boat Time Lake. Or worse.

  I sigh again. Maybe I don’t have my guitar, but I have my voice. So I hum.

  Driving to the middle of nowhere with peaches on my plate…

  And I think of Steph.

  And I wonder what she’s doing right now. Her words flood my head until I can think of nothing else.

  The last time you went to see a man in the woods, you fell down a mine shaft.

  I really, really hope this is a good idea.

  “Is that the Mooring Shores?” comes a voice from behind me, driving a spike straight through my train of thought.

  I whip around so fast, my neck clicks, and I wonder if I’ve literally just broken it.

  “Ugh,” I groan, rubbing the pain out of my collarbone area and studying the source of the voice.

  Jonah stands there, in electric blue basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt, hands in his pockets, fitness watch around his wrist, and a big smile on his face.

  But it’s not that fake smile he was wearing at the parade, the one I’ve seen on TV. He’s smiling at me like we know each other. Like we’re friends or something.

  “Don’t be mad,” I say, but it comes out more like a question. I rise to my feet and tuck my hands behind my back, willing myself to wait until that color blooms over his head and his back is turned before I start digging into his brain. “Clover—”

  “Must have sent you,” He finishes the sentence for me, stepping forward and sliding onto the old bench beside where I’m standing. “So this must be important.”

  He smiles up at me warmly, and now that he’s sitting so close to me, I can see the red flush in his cheeks.

  “Oh,” he says, and checks his watch like he might have forgotten something. I watch as he clicks an app, three little dots light up along the bottom, and a big green “0” pops up in the middle.

  “Ah, wow,” he says, looking up at me in surprise. “So you’re not paparazzi?”

  “How’d you know?” I ask.

  “Well, for one, Clover wouldn’t tell you about my secret run if you were, but for two, you don’t have any recording devices going.”

  “Your app told you that?”

  “Can’t be too careful,” he shrugs.

  Damn. I can’t imagine leading a life so public that protecting your privacy requires device-scanning apps to tell you if what you’re saying is safe.

  “Well then,” he begins with a big sigh, clasping his hands in his lap and looking out over the lake. “Why are you here? Actually, let’s start with names. I’m Jonah Macon.”

  He reaches out for a handshake.

  I smile. This guy is actually pretty handsome when he’s not all buttoned up and Ken-doll-ified for the cameras. Handsome in a real-live person kind of way.

  “Alex Chen,” I say, taking his hand and shaking it.

  “Lovely to meet you, Alex. How can I help you?”

  Oh god, where to even begin?

  What the hell is up with this drought?

  What the hell is up with this dam?

  What the hell is up with your secret relationship with Clover?

  What the hell is up with you and Elias?

  What the hell is up with eating chocolate-chip pancakes and pickles in the morning?

  In the end, I start at the beginning.

  “My friend and I.” There I go again with the word friend. “My… girlfriend and I,” God, that sounds perfect. Focus, Alex, this isn’t about you and Steph, it’s about Jonah and Barbazal. “We were on our way to Fort Collins for a show tonight.”

  “Oh, what do you play?” he asks, intrigued.

  “Guitar,” I say.

  “Ukulele, myself,” he says with a grin. “Please, continue.”

  “We broke down outside of town, and ended up at Elias’s shop,” I explain.

  And there’s the first bloom.

  Blue.

  So, Elias and Jonah make each other soul-crushingly sad. Why? What’s their history?

  “Bet he wasn’t in too great of a mood since I’m back in town.”

  “Yeah,” I admit, wanting so badly to ask more. And then I decide, hell, the rest of the story can wait. “What’s up with him anyway?”

  “Let’s just say,” he says, “some people don’t like change. Like, really don’t like it.”

  “What kind of change?” I ask.

  “The kind that helps everyone,” he says, smiling at me sadly.

  Oh, we’re being vague now, are we?

  “Like the dam?” I ask, cutting directly to the chase. Something changes in Jonah’s eyes at that question, and that blue aura fades into indigo, and then into a brilliant royal purple.

  The dam makes him nervous.

  A wave of disorientation comes over me. The floor sways below my feet, and swirls of dizzying magenta stars float around my head, bouncing in the air, and I hear a deep, looming cackle. I know this feeling well. Jonah’s not just nervous.

  He has full-blown anxiety.

  He’s terrified.

  “Um… well, yes, like the dam,” he says, opening and clasping his hands earnestly. “I just… I want to do the right thing by all of Colorado, and that’s hard, because technological advancements like hydropower and wind power—you know, things that will really help the environment—they make people nervous.”

  He’s baiting me to ask the obvious question, Why? But I’m not going to do that. You don’t get through to someone’s sharpest emotions by asking the questions they expect you to ask. You get through to them by shocking them into it.

  “Is Clover nervous about the dam?”

  He doesn’t look at me. He keeps his eyes down, glued to his own hands, which he clenchs together just a little bit tighter, and that purple glow remains.

  “Clover,” he begins. There’s weight to her name in his mouth. I can tell she means everything to him, and I wonder what could possibly keep them apart. “Clover is… concerned… that if the dam remains, it will hurt Barbazal’s farming community.”

  I cock an eyebrow, letting the silence do the talking for me. That’s horse shit and Jonah knows it. Clover doesn’t care about Barbazal’s farming community nearly as much as Opal does. Because once the farming community goes under, Barbazal goes under, and without Barbazal, Opal doesn’t know who she is.

  I watch the dancing stars, that cackle welling up again in my ears.

  Something else about Clover and the dam is making Jonah scared out of his mind.

  “Why does Clover care about Barbazal’s farming community?”

  The purple aura disappears.

  I fucking knew it.

  His face relaxes at that question, and I realize I’ve asked him something easily addressed with a diplomatic tied-up-in-a-neat-little-bow answer. His specialty.

  “Clover loves this place,” he explains, his voice earnest. “She was born and raised here like me. We went to grade school together. Of course we both care deeply about this place. She has eleven sisters who live here, and I have—” He cuts himself off, and he’s quick to recover, but I catch it. “Friends. A handful of friends from my childhood.”

  Uh-huh.

  “You don’t have friends in Denver?” I ask.

  Those big-wig donors who would pay anything to give him a seat at the Senate table.

  “Oh, they’re not the same, you know?” he says, coolly dismissing my answer. But I give him a nod, inviting him to go on.

  “Clover cares about the farmers here for the same reason we all do,” he says, pushing himself up off the bench and taking a step forward towards the lake. “We don’t want to give up this place. I don’t want to give up this place. This is my home. That’s why I’m back fighting to keep it as great as it always was.”

  That purple aura is still gone, and I know exactly why. That was the most canned answer I’ve heard in a while. God, he’s reminding me of Diane from Typhon. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t written on his campaign website word for word. He’s comfortable again.

  “Then why are you routing water away from Barbazal?”

  That aura is back, but this time it’s red, blazing and angry as the sunrise.

  I reach in.

  And suddenly, I’m standing outside under the midday sun. It’s blazing hot, hotter than it was even on that first day when Steph and I were lugging our gear miles to Barbazal. I look down, and my feet are nestled in gravel, and I hear a car engine rev somewhere behind me. I whip around to find I’m standing in front of…

  …Elias’s shop?

  …what?

  This is the last place I expected to end up, but then I hear my question repeated word-for-word, from a familiar voice.

  “Why are you routing water away from Barbazal?” hisses Silas, A Silas far different from the cheery one who met Steph and me with the most southern hospitality one can expect.

  Woah, I think. I thought Silas and Jonah were cool, but I guess not as cool as I thought.

  “Why do you care?” comes Jonah’s voice. His real voice. Lower, and angry. Bitter. So, so bitter. “Another six months and you’ll be out of here anyway. Off to do whatever it is they do in Minnesota.”

  “And? You whisked off to Denver the minute you got the chance. What’s so different? At least I stayed past high school! Sellout.”

  “Don’t you dare call me that!” barks Jonah. “I’ve worked my ass off for this place, fighting for our rights in courthouses and council meetings. You should be grateful—”

  “Grateful!” exclaims Silas, with a sad chuckle. He steps out from inside the garage, nestling his cowboy hat snugly on top of his balding head, and walks back to his truck without another word. “When your fancy little dam dries this place up, you’ll be fighting for the rights of a ghost town.”

  Jonah stands at the entrance of the garage with his arms folded defiantly over his chest. He and Silas may be around the same age, but Silas looks like he’s been working out in the sun for decades, and Jonah… well, he looks like Jonah.

  And I’m back at the lake.

  “I’m not, uh,” Jonah says to me, pausing to think through how to answer my question. “I’m not rerouting the water, per se.”

  “Aren’t you? The dam holds up the water where the Colorado River branches off toward Barbazal, right? Doesn’t that mean more water for Denver and less for Barbazal?”

  “Not quite,” he says. There’s a bite to his voice that wasn’t there twenty seconds ago, and he turns and looks at me with the same darkness in his eyes that I saw outside Elias’s shop just now. Jonah’s angry. Very angry.

  I’m back in my living room, watching the silhouettes of Gabe and Dad screaming at each other, teeth bared, through the curtain on the other side of the record player. My only lifeline.

  I slip a new record onto the player, rest the needle down at the perfect spot, shut my eyes and pretend to be somewhere else. Pretend like the threat of violence isn’t so close I can almost see it.

  But no. Breathe, Alex. You’re here. By this lake. In the woods. With this stranger.

  I take a deep breath. That helps.

  “Not quite,” he says again, calmer. That helps too. “I wish it were that simple: send water to Barbazal and screw Denver, or send water to Denver and screw Barbazal.” He sighs. “I know how it looks to everyone. Kid who was born and raised here in a small town grows up, thinks he’s better than everyone else and moves to the big city, where he doesn’t have to be a big fish in a small pond—” He stops himself again. There’s more he’s not saying.

  But to my surprise, he turns around and gives me a sad laugh. He’s wound tight, and everything’s complicated and compacted inside him. Anything connected to Barbazal sends him spiking off in a new direction.

  “I’m working through all of that in therapy,” he says. Oof. Congrats, I guess. Jonah didn’t seem like the type who went to therapy.

  “But the reality is,” he continues, “I left Barbazal to help Barbazal. We’ve been facing climate-change issues for a long, long time. Electrical bills around here are two hundred and thirty percent of what they were just three years ago, which hurts a farming community just as much as a drought. The power situation is just as detrimental as the water situation, and that’s what we’re trying to fix with the dam.”

  I think for a moment. I guess I never considered the power situation.

  “So the switch to hydropower would also help Barbazal?” I ask. He nods.

  But then I decide to press.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  There it is. Purple. Jets of black ink breach a twilight core, punching through his crumbling defenses.

  He turns back to the lake, his face composed, searching for words, probably looking for a way to make this look better.

  I reach in.

  The stars are back, dancing around me in a purple haze.

  I’m sitting at a huge oval wooden table surrounded by tall office chairs, and a single person sits at the very end. An older man, balding, slightly hefty under a grey herringbone suit. He clears his throat and checks his phone just before Jonah Macon steps further into the room from behind me, sending dozens of stars flying through the air. And then I notice the ceiling. A huge thundercloud sends a flash of lightning through the room, looming over us. It feels heavy, and ominous, like it could crash down on our heads at any minute. I gulp, push down the urge to run from it, even though I know I’m the only one who can see it. It looks—feels—so real.

  “Morning, Senator Brickleby, sir. You wanted to see me?” Jonah looks much, much younger, but it must have been only five years ago or so? He’s the same height in this memory. Just, more vibrant. Less… I don’t know, worn down?

  “Yes,” replies the man.“I wanted to see you.”

  There’s a darkness to his tone, and despite the optimistic smile on Jonah’s face—clearly he’s eager and maybe a little bit starstruck—I know this is about to go south real quick.

  “I want to talk about who the fuck you think I am.”

  Crash! The lightning flashes through the room again, making me jump.

  Jonah’s spirit looks absolutely crushed. He shrinks to half his size as he ventures, “Sir?”

  The man—Senator Brickleby—rises to his full height and buttons one of the buttons on his suit, clears his throat again, and begins to pace.

  “That stunt you pulled out there was unacceptable.”

  “But sir, I was—”

  “Why would you ask me about the fucking dam? Of all things, why would you write a prompt question about that?”

  “Because if I hadn’t asked it neutrally, someone else would have asked you with an angle—”

  “I can handle an angle! What I can’t handle is you writing prompt questions that invite the angles! You saw what happened out there! You opened up a cesspool of questions about fucking Barbazal and the water, and the river, and the dam!”

  Jonah looks near tears, and as silence settles into the room, I wonder what he could possibly do with that statement.

  “I—” begins Jonah timidly. “I thought the dam was important.”

  “It is important, you idiot,” spits the senator. “The dam might win us the goddamn election, but that doesn’t mean we have to invite in the scrutiny on the way!”

  Jonah folds his arms, and just as I think he might crumple completely, he says, “The dam will bring hydropower to small towns all throughout central Colorado—”

  “The dam,” the senator cuts in, “will bring money to small towns all throughout central Colorado.”

  What?

  “When I hired you, Jonah, I assumed you had a basic understanding of economic principles, but—since you apparently don’t even understand supply and demand—let me elucidate.”

  He steps forward and sets his hands on the table like he’s cutting something.

  “We build the dam,” he explains. “We create hydropower. We power Barbazal and other small towns with clean renewable energy, right?”

  The senator looks up at Jonah to make sure he’s following along. Jonah nods nervously, and the senator slams both hands on the table and hollers, “Wrong! We sell eighty percent of that power to Denver and send that revenue to the towns.”

  “Oh,” says Jonah. “That sounds… kinda charitable, actually—”

  “Wrong again,” explains the senator. “That means more money to replace the public funding we already funnel into dead-end places like that.”

  Jonah narrows his eyes at him.

 

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