Give the Dark My Love(40)

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Nedra said, standing up on her tiptoes to whisper in my ear. Her breath made the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up, made my heart race, made my body forget that anyone was watching us. “I learned a long time ago that as long as you don’t care what others think of you, you’re much, much happier. And besides, no one ever really cares about anyone but himself.”

Well, that just wasn’t true. I whirled Nedra around, relishing the feel of her body pressed against mine, then tilted her so she could see the crowd dancing on the roof, and the eyes that watched us.

“That girl’s staring,” I said in a low voice, nodding subtly to a girl standing by the clockface.

“Not at us,” Nedra said, her voice much louder. “She’s looking in our direction, sure, but she’s not really thinking about us. She’s wondering if she should dance, too. Her feet are tired and she wants a break, but she’s not sure what others will think if she leaves. And that guy?” She nodded to Ervin, who leaned down to whisper something to his partner as he stared at us. “He’s asking his boyfriend when he thinks they can leave and no one will notice. And her? She’s upset that she didn’t eat more before coming up; her stomach hurts. And he’s worried people will notice the mustard stain on his shirt. No one cares about you, about us, not really. They may use us as words to fill the silence because they can’t think of anything else to say, but we are not their true focus.”

She wrapped her arm around my neck. “So quit worrying about what others think, Grey,” she said in a soft voice. “Worry about what you want.”

I’d gotten used to the hard glint in her eyes, her stiff spine, the way she never let herself betray an ounce of emotion in front of others.

But she had emotion now. There was fire in her eyes.

A fire for me.

My body stilled. The whole damn world stilled. Because she had said my name like it meant something to her.

She looked at me, and it was as if she had only just then realized that she’d let her walls come down for a moment. She stopped dancing, and she glanced around, and she saw that I was right.

Everyone was watching us.

She took one step back, and then another. And then she turned around and fled, away from the party, away from the prying eyes of our classmates.

Away from me.





TWENTY-ONE


    Nedra



The letter in my pocket weighed a million pounds. It clattered against my leg, it bruised my skin, it threatened to crush me under its weight.

I hadn’t been expecting the slim little envelope. The letter from home that came in time for Burial Day had been large enough to sustain me for weeks. But when I’d finally gotten home after such a disastrous day at the hospital, I’d seen my sister’s handwriting, and my heart had surged with hope. I needed her cheerful voice in my head. I needed it to drown out the screams of the mother whose baby had died, the rage of Ronan’s father, the taste of my own blood on my teeth.

I opened it again now.

Dearest Nedra, it started, in Ernesta’s almost illegible script. For a page, she talked about small things. How she hoped I was happy, how Mama burned the bread and she and Papa ate it anyway to spare Mama’s feelings, how a new kitten had taken residence in Jojo’s stall.

Then she said that Kava had died. The shoemaker’s apprentice, the one she planned to flirt with when I left for Yūgen.

Her fingers turned black, Neddie, she wrote. Withered up like dead sticks. She said it hurt so much, but then she didn’t feel it at all anymore. And then she died.

She scratched something out after that. Heavy black ink, gouged into the page so hard that it had started to rip.

Maybe it’s best you’re not here now. Her words bit at me, a wolf nipping at my heels. I worry about Papa all the time. He won’t quit going out with his book cart, even though so many villages are draped in black bunting, warning people not to enter.

She had crossed through something else then, a little less violently, but not more legible.

I worry, she wrote instead.

Nessie never worried. It wasn’t her style. I was supposed to be the twin who worried for the both of us.

It was too easy here in the city. Too easy to forget about the bustling world beyond the walls of Yūgen. Too easy to believe that I had done enough, that the plague existed in the hospital but not out there. Not where they were.

Too easy to put an iron circle on the graves, and promise myself it would never be them.

You! Dannix had roared. It’s all your fault!

After I read the letter the first time, there had still been about an hour before I needed to go to the party. I washed my skin and imagined the soap could seep into my soul. And then I read the book Master Ostrum had given to me. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, and I was almost late to the party. Every time I heard Dannix’s voice again, I forced more words from The Fourth Alchemy into my head.

I had tried to pretend the letter didn’t exist, at least for the night. But it had been there the whole time, in my pocket, blacker and heavier than coal. It dragged me down like an anchor, pulling me under the waves until I couldn’t breathe.

One night, I had promised myself. I would give myself one night to forget.

Just the one.

But even that had proven too much.