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Magne blames himself.
No he fucking doesn’t. That’s a lie. It’s Laurits’ fault.
When he gets home, the first thing he does is find his brother and slam him into a wall at arm’s length. He can’t see properly. He can’t tell whether his brother is annoyed or bored or afraid or pissed— the tears distort his vision. Laurits shoves at his arms.
“Magne, let— let go—“
“It’s your fault,” Magne spits, his voice pitching up like it does when he’s angry, which he hates and only ever makes him angrier. “Your fault she’s dead.”
Laurits struggles, but he’s always been a scrawny nerd, so it’s futile. Magne shakes him, hard, so he’ll stop. It doesn’t quite work, even though they both know Laurits is supposed to be the smart one, the leader, while Magne is the idiot meathead. Magne’s the one who got held back a grade while Laurits skipped two. Laurits should know better. If he’s so much smarter than Magne.
“Your stupid— your stupid fucking prank,” Magne says through clenched teeth, and that’s what makes Laurits go still. Magne doesn’t swear. Doesn’t even like it when Laurits does, really. There’s something tight and vindictive in his chest that’s pissed that he’s the only one hurting, that Laurits always gets away unscathed, that Laurits gets his friends at Magne’s expense. Something that makes Magne want Laurits to hurt just as bad for once. Worse maybe. So he chokes out, “If you hadn’t called me I would’ve been on that mountain with her. She wouldn’t be—“ And Magne wavers, his chest convulsing once as he sobs involuntarily, and Laurits scrambles to push him off.
Magne collapses. Pathetic. Pathetic. Thunder rumbles outside. He can feel his tears as they drop away to the floor, huge and wet. There’s a shifting as Laurits slides down the wall to sit next to him.
“I’m sorry,” Laurits says, and maybe he remembers deep in his childhood memories how it felt when their dad died, because he’s not being snarky for once. He’s not being defensive. It’s unguarded, open, and Magne’s chest fills with a rush of love and shame and gratitude and fury. For a moment, it almost blocks out the ice fog of grief.
Magne looks up and his vision has cleared a little: everything is still distorted but he thinks he can see Laurits enough to know what’s on his face, and he thinks Laurits still looks scared. It takes him a minute to place the expression, but he thinks it’s the fear for him, not fear of him. Love-fear. It’s been a while since he saw it. Hasn’t been since he was 13 and got a black eye for reading something wrong and accidentally insulting the wrong kid. Little 10-year-old Laurits had come up with a million revenge plans. None of them ever panned out— even if he was smart, he was still only 10— but it had made little Magne feel safer because they were on the same team. It was one of the only times that ever happened.
Laurits hunches his shoulders and gets quiet. “I really am sorry.”
There is a pause for Magne’s silent sobs to stop again. “Thank you,” Magne whispers, and realizes that it’s pouring rain and he’s left the front door open.
—
The first day back at school is hard. It’s so hard.
“Shame about your girlfriend!” some asshole calls to him during lunch, and Saxa gasps and scolds him, but she’s trying not to laugh and so are the rest of them. Gry catches his eye and her face falls. She fidgets with something in her lap.
There’s something roiling in Magne’s chest and stomach. Grief and fury, probably. They sit right next to each other with hands interlaced. He wants to yell, maybe break something.
So he storms over to their table. He’d like to think he keeps some semblance of dignity, something that doesn’t show on his face just how angry he is, but it must, because some of them shrink back from him. He slams his hands on the table so hard that the next table over rattles too.
“She’s fucking dead,” he spits. Actually spits: there’s a couple droplets on the table, right in front of Saxa and her terrible boyfriend. “Actually fucking dead, and all you can think of to do is make jokes.” He looks up and makes eye contact. Saxa’s boyfriend’s eyes are wide and scared, but Magne can already see how he’s going to laugh this off later, call Magne a crazy freak. He feels like a wounded animal, lashing out. Grief makes him into more of what he is.
He stalks off to the table— their table— by the stairs, and doesn’t look at Gry as he leaves. He doesn’t want to scream at her, too.
He takes Isolde’s seat. The thought makes his shoulders shake.
Might as well get some work done. (He thinks about Isolde standing up for him that first day in class.) He puts his laptop on the table. (Him and Isolde, walking together through the woods. She’d asked if he wanted to run away together.) He opens his laptop. (Isolde’s sticker is still there, holding the screen and the plastic together. He thinks about her peeling it off the back of her own laptop when she saw that his was broken. How she’d smoothed it down with her thumb. How she hadn’t even smiled at him afterwards, like it wasn’t a big deal, like it was nothing at all.)
He puts his head in his hands.
—
Magne does blame himself, actually. Once the powers become apparent, once it’s clear what he can do, clear that he can manipulate electricity and lightning, the realization washes sickly over him.
It is his fault. He stood and watched. He’d yelled and it was futile. When he’d ran to her it was too late. He thinks about the blood that was sticky on her face. He thinks about the shower of sparks as she hit the power line.
Isolde had died by electrocution. He should have been able to save her.
But he didn’t.
—
The first time he gets a crush on a boy, he misses Isolde so much that it feels like he’s being stabbed right in the lungs.
He is acutely aware of how alone he is. His mother won’t believe him: he thinks about how she reacted when Laurits outed Isolde at dinner. How she said it was a phase because she had crushes on girls, too, and she’s totally straight. (Magne’s pretty sure that’s not how it works.) Gry’s the closest he has to a friend right now, and they don’t even talk aside from a few clipped words about their joint school assignment. He doesn’t want to be her friend, anyway. She‘s one of those spineless wimps who’s nice to your face but won’t stand up for you when someone’s mean behind your back. He’s already seen it with how everyone talks about Isolde, in hushed tones, guilty jokes punctuated with gleeful, quiet laughter.
He could talk to Laurits. But he’s been too vulnerable already. Doesn’t trust him enough not to use it against him. (He thinks Laurits might be going through it too: there’s nail polish in the bathroom cabinet, and their mom doesn’t wear nail polish. And sometimes he sees how Laurits looks at people with the wrong kind of longing.) (But his brother isn’t safe to trust. Not when his compassion as fickle as the weather over the fjord. More, these days, now that it’s almost always storming.)
And Isolde would understand. The boy he likes is one of Fjor’s friends. Some other rich kid from another town, just visiting so Fjor can show off the family mansion. He feels terrible about it, guilty: this new boy is complicit in the pollution of the water, the degradation of the town. Every minute he stays with Fjor’s family without saying anything enables their careless destruction.
But he’s sweet, and he has curly hair and long fingers, and when he throws back his head to laugh, his neck is elegant. And he smiles at Magne even when barely anyone else does. So he thinks Isolde would understand.
He closes his eyes and flops back onto his bed, imagines away the bare wood at the end of it, pretends he’s at Isolde’s house on Isolde’s bed and she’s lying next to him. Intimacy without romance. He imagines telling her about the boy, imagines her scrunching up her nose while she laughs at him, imagines her voice going steady and serious when she tells him that it’s okay, that he’s not alone. There’s a low crash of thunder outside. He wipes a tear off his cheek.
—
He dreams about Isolde that night. He dreams about Isolde a lot, but it’s only ever just been nightmares. In sleep, he’s re-lived holding her body (still warm even through the paragliding gear) so many times that his memory of the real thing is fuzzy. He’s sure the sky had been clear. He can’t wrap his head around that when his dreams are thick and warped with heavy rain.
Tonight, though, he’s back on the mountain with her. It’s dusk. The orange sun turns her blue hair grey. This isn’t a memory: this is something his brain is inventing for him. This isn’t the real Isolde, but it’s the closest he’ll ever get again other than a few YouTube videos.
She turns to look at him and smiles. It’s a matter-of-fact smile. It’s the smile of someone who has seen him yesterday and is confident she will see him again tomorrow. Dream-Magne doesn’t remember she’s dead, so he smiles back and sits down on the ground next to her.
They look out across the water. The air is alive with the sound of night-birds. The air is clear. There’s a new white flower growing up by Isolde’s feet.
“Hey,” says Magne.
“Hey,” says Isolde, not looking at him. “Listen, it’s not your fault.”
Magne thinks— insofar as he can think separately from the dream— that she must be talking about the pollution. He says, “I’m still going to stop it.” Her profile glows red in the last of the sunlight.
She turns to him. “What’s done is done,” she says. “You can’t.”
“I know,” he says. “But I can try to make it better.”
He doesn’t remember what he was dreaming about when he wakes up, but the sky is clear for the first time in weeks.