The Devouring Gray(11)
“A little help here?” She glanced toward the vanity table, where Mitzi was weaving her founders’ medallion into her auburn hair.
“Go wake Seth up.” Mitzi tilted her head, admiring the way the glass shone. “I’m busy.”
“Busy staring at yourself?” Harper couldn’t stop the bite of jealousy in her voice. She’d never earned her medallion, and so she had to content herself with her simple stone pendant.
Mitzi’s reflection in the smudged mirror was an odd mixture of smugness and pity. “Can you blame me?”
“It’s okay!” said Nora, who was busily pulling on two completely different shoes. “I can do it myself.”
“You know those don’t match, right?” said Harper, grinning at her little sister. Nora’s boundless energy had driven many baby sitters to quit, but Harper loved it.
Nora pouted at her. “I like how they look.”
The door to their room swung open before Harper could respond. Silhouetted in the reinforced wooden frame was Harper’s father, Maurice Carlisle, baby Olly fussing in his arms.
“Come to breakfast, kids,” he told Brett and Nora. “I’m making pancakes.”
Brett and Nora bolted for the door, and as he stepped aside to let them by, a smile carved its way through his craggy features. “I can take it from here.”
Harper’s father usually took charge in the mornings, since Harper’s mother, Laurel Carlisle, was often busy with her job as an attorney in the next town over. But Harper didn’t mind. Her parents did not treat their children equally—Laurel favored Mitzi, while Maurice had always favored her. She was glad he was the one who spent more time at home.
The rest of the morning was a blur of walking Brett and Nora out to the bus, and Seth, Mitzi, and Harper piling into Seth’s broken-down car and sputtering off to Four Paths High School. Seth jolted the car to a stop in the middle of two parking spots, then made a beeline for the slackers who hung out behind the school every morning, smoking cigarettes and talking a big game about their joint-rolling skills. Mitzi vanished a moment later, her red hair whipping behind her.
Harper was slower, her messenger bag heavy on her shoulder. Ahead of her, the crowd split in two, automatically moving away from the bench where the Hawthorne siblings were holding court. Justin’s broad shoulders rose easily above the crowd, straining at the thin blue fabric of his T-shirt as he turned to laugh at something May had said. The morning light turned his blond hair into ripples of molten gold, and the medallion at his wrist shone bloodred.
Founder descendants were revered in Four Paths, but the town’s love for Justin far surpassed familial respect. He had a warm greeting for everyone, even clapping a chosen few on the shoulder. People looked dazed when they wandered away from him, like they’d been staring into the sun.
But all his carefully arranged smile did was stoke Harper’s rage, like a whetstone sharpening the edge of a sword.
After her accident, she had been convinced she was a disappointment. But her father had told her to use the word survivor instead—and she’d listened. There was no point in being angry at herself for failing her ritual. That anger belonged somewhere else: with the Hawthornes, who had decided she was nothing after she returned from the Gray without her powers.
And with Justin Hawthorne, who had cast aside a lifelong friendship when he sided with his mother instead of sticking up for her.
“Coward,” she muttered as she cut through the crowd.
Harper was the first to arrive in her senior homeroom. She took the same seat she’d had since ninth grade as her classmates drifted in, most deigning to enter the classroom only after the second bell had rung.
There were only fifty-seven seniors at Four Paths High School. They had all known Harper her entire life, and although she felt their eyes on her, they didn’t say hello. Lia Raynes and Suzette Langham gossiped as they sat in front of her; they were best friends recently turned girlfriends, already shoo-ins to be voted class couple for the senior yearbook. Danny Moore took the seat on her right, while Seo-Jin Park and Cal Gonzales slid in beside him, talking animatedly about the track team.
Harper was used to being avoided. After the accident, she’d learned quickly that no one knew how to talk to her anymore. At first, she’d thought it was because of her hand. She’d chosen not to wear a prosthetic on the bottom half of her left arm; her family couldn’t afford a myoelectric prosthesis, and she didn’t want a cosmetic one. Everyone knew what had happened to her; they would stare anyway.
But by now, she knew the stares and the awkward conversations weren’t really about her arm at all.
Nobody in Four Paths had ever survived the Gray for longer than a few hours. Harper had made it four days.
She’d heard the rumors that the Gray had left her forever altered, that she’d only been released because she’d been allowed out by the Beast, that she was a founder turned spy, a monster lurking in a teenage girl’s skin.
They were nothing more than stories. But Harper had learned by now that some people would always prefer a story to the truth.
She was fiddling with her pencil case when Justin appeared in the doorway. Half the class called out greetings as he walked through the room, flanked, as always, by Isaac Sullivan—his flannel-clad shadow.
Isaac had never warmed up to her, despite a lifetime of being shoved together in the way all founder kids were. But the dislike was mutual. After Harper had been forced away from Justin’s side, Isaac Sullivan had taken her place. And although Harper knew she shouldn’t resent Isaac for being living evidence of how easy it had been for Justin to replace her, she did it anyway.