“If you ever speak to me in that tone of voice again, I will do crimes to you.”

I should’ve known this would be way harder than leaving a note for my folks. I shut my mouth and fiddle with the wooden splinter in my hands. It’s spent the last three weeks in my pocket, and the edges are already beginning to smooth with use. The end is still plenty sharp.

I feel Charm’s eyes on my hands, hear the soft rush of her breath. “You’re running, aren’t you.”

It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer it. I nod once to the ground.

“May I ask why?” Her voice is so carefully, ferociously calm, but I hear the bite beneath the calm, and the pain beneath the bite. “Why, now that you are magically healed, would you—”

I interrupt her in a soft, level voice. “I’m not healed. Not really.” She already knows that. I showed her the little grayish blooms on the X-rays, my curse as-yet un-lifted. “All I have is more time.”

She makes a surly, stubborn noise. “Which you could spend with us.” I wonder if she realizes how quickly and tellingly her me has transformed into an us.

I don’t look at her, speaking instead to the hazy green of the horizon. “I’ve spent every day since second grade with you, Charm, and I’m grateful for every second of it.” I scuff my shoe against a dandelion, staining the earth yellow. “But even at the very best of times, there was a part of me that was just … playing out the clock. Waiting. Wishing I could save myself somehow, but never thinking I could aim higher.”

“Higher?”

I clear my throat, wishing the truth was just a little less cheesy. “Saving others. I should have gone to all those stupid protests with Roseville’s Children, I should have at least tried, and now it’s too late.” Last week a reporter from CNN asked to do a profile of me as “the oldest surviving victim of GRM.” I never wrote back, but the word victim burrowed under my skin and itched at me, a brand-new allergy.

Charm doesn’t say anything, so I keep talking to that green horizon. “I can’t stop thinking about the others. Not just the other kids with Roseville’s Malady, but the other sleeping beauties. The girls in other worlds who are dying or trapped or cursed, who deserve better stories than the ones they were given. Who are all alone.” I run my fingertips across the point of the splinter and I know by the sharp sound of Charm’s breath that she understands. That she sees the infinite pages of the universe turning before me, a vast book filled with a thousand wrongs that need righting, a thousand princesses that need rescuing, or at least a hand reached toward theirs in the darkness. “I don’t know how much time I have, but I know what I want to do with it.

Charm exhales very slowly beside me. “And they said a folklore degree was impractical.”