The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic #2)(41)
“She was hilarious,” Vincent said. “She has a notebook listing all the men she’s ever slept with. She took photographs of their dicks and taped the photos in her book. She said she was going to make a collage out of them. So how could I deny her?”
There wasn’t anyone to tell Vincent no, except for Franny. Since their parents’ deaths, he refused to take anything seriously.
“Don’t you get it, Franny?” he said. “We have to live now, while we can. It will all be over soon enough.” He was almost sixteen, tall and dark and brooding, usually carrying a guitar, which made him all the more attractive, and all the more dangerous both to whoever might fall for him and to himself.
As for Jet, she remained in bed long after the doctors insisted she was fine. Her cracked ribs had healed, her bruises were fading, and what had been gashes in her hands and knees were thin red striations no one would recognize as wounds. The only thing that remained was the scar on her face, a jagged line shaped like petals on a stem that could be seen only in certain sorts of light.
“What’s the point?” she would say when Franny suggested they go for a walk.
Jet’s hair was so tangled a brush would no longer go through it. She didn’t bathe and ate only crackers and ginger ale. She slept with the edition of Emily Dickinson that Levi had given her. Inside he had written Forever—is composed of—Nows. Because they could hear Jet crying at all hours, Franny nailed the second-floor windows shut just to make sure her sister couldn’t make the rash decision to leap.
More and more Franny turned to Haylin, though she knew it was a mistake to do so. She had vowed to be with him only once, yet they were together every day. The closer they became, the harder the inevitable break would be. She should have told him about the future that loomed, but she couldn’t speak it aloud. Not now and not ever, she should have told him. Not if it will bring you to ruin. Every day she planned to end it, but instead of breaking up with him, she had sex with him in the spare room until they were both depleted and euphoric. Then they would lie there entwined and watch the crow fly through the room like a shadow.
“My mother would be mortified,” Franny confided. “She had an aversion to animals.”
“Lewis is not an animal,” Haylin said. “He seems to know what you’re thinking.”
“Are you saying he’s my familiar? That would make me a witch.” Franny rested her face against Haylin’s chest. She could hear his heartbeat, which gave her great comfort. She thought of the entries in Maria’s journal, and kept quiet even though she longed to tell him everything.
“I don’t care what you are, as long as you’re mine,” Haylin told her.
On the day Jet finally came out of the bedroom her stunning black hair was shorn as short as a boy’s. She’d used a pair of nail scissors and the ends were choppy. She was paying her penance. She had ruined all of their lives. She knew why Franny’s eyes were often brimming with unshed tears, and why her sister was still wearing the dress she had worn to their parents’ funeral. Franny had locked herself in her father’s office, the desk strewn with scattered papers, dust motes spinning through the air, and there she had telephoned the admissions office at Radcliffe to withdraw her acceptance. She did so in secrecy, but her voice had risen through the vents, the way their father’s patients’ tearful confessions had during their therapy sessions, and Jet had overheard.
“Oh, Jet, you’ve cut your hair,” Franny said when she witnessed what her sister had done.
Jet was still in her nightgown, barefoot. She resembled a cat, with a cat’s suspicion and mistrust, a gorgeous creature despite her attempt to ruin herself. Jet had already decided she would not be finishing high school. She felt far too old for that, and from that day forward, she wore only black. She rid herself of the girlish clothing she’d favored in the past—frilly, floaty dresses in shades of pink and violet—giving it all to Goodwill. Her clothes no longer suited her, for she wasn’t the same person she’d been before her birthday. That girl was gone forever. Sometimes she went back to the scene of the accident. She could no longer hear other people’s thoughts and was so alone she felt like a moth in a jar. She sat on the curb, like a beggar woman, but no one passing by could grant her forgiveness and that was something she certainly couldn’t allow herself.
Her one salvation was the novels she read. On nights when she thought it might be better not to be alive without Levi in the world, she opened a book and was therefore saved, discovering that a novel was as great an escape as any spell. She favored Jane Austen and the Bront?s and Virginia Woolf, reading one book after another. On most days, she was happy not to leave home. She, who was once the most beautiful girl in two states, who had inherited their mother’s gorgeous features, now seemed mousy and unremarkable, a bookworm who could hardly be convinced to look away from the page. Boys no longer noticed her, and if they did, she made it clear she wasn’t interested. She walked late at night, when the avenues were deserted, as if tempting fate. She felt a kinship with the lonely, forsaken people drifting through the streets at that blue hour.
Seeing her sister’s distress, Franny wrote to their aunt. Surely there was a remedy to help Jet through this terrible time. Two days later a crate arrived with Jet’s cure. Franny laughed when she looked inside, then immediately went to wake Jet.