The Devouring Gray(44)
“Daria? Violet?” called Juniper’s voice from the other side of the house. Whatever had caught her attention before, it was clearly over with. “What are you two doing?”
“Better go,” said Daria hoarsely. “She won’t understand.”
Violet nodded. She clutched the cylinder and Stephen’s journal close to her chest and hurried back to her room.
When the door was safely shut and locked, she let herself inspect her aunt’s strange present.
It was almost a foot long, and hollow, if the weight of it was any indication. There was a gap in the wood grain, close to the top. She twisted the edge of the cylinder, and it came off in her hands, revealing the roll of paper inside.
The lines and dots inked on the pages were incomprehensible. It took Violet a few seconds to realize what she was looking at, and when she did, she was even more confused.
It was the blueprints to the Saunders manor, hand-drawn in faded ink on yellowing paper. She spread the pages out on the floor of her room, weighted them with books, and looked them over, but as far as she could tell there was nothing interesting about them aside from how old they had to be.
She rolled them up again and sighed. She didn’t understand why Daria had wanted her to have these.
Beside her, Orpheus mewled. He was batting around a yellowing piece of paper that sat beside the blueprint case. It must’ve been in there as well—she just hadn’t noticed it before.
Violet snatched it away from his claws.
And then she gasped, because it wasn’t a piece of paper at all—it was a photograph.
Three teenagers sat on the front porch of the Saunders house. The girl in the center had perfect posture and a poised, careful smile on her face, dark eyes fixed on the camera lens. On her right sat another girl with her head turned to the side, mouth wide open in a raucous laugh as her hands reached up to clutch the edges of her oversize windbreaker. Her dark, frizzy hair fell almost to her waist.
But it was the boy on their left that held her attention. Dark curls, a thin, handsome face, an easy grin.
She turned the picture over and read the caption:
The Saunders siblings (from left to right): Stephen, Daria, Juniper. 1984.
Violet flipped the picture over again.
The girl in the windbreaker was Juniper.
Laughing, wild, free. A version of Juniper unburdened by a dead brother, a dead husband, a dead daughter.
She was completely unrecognizable from the woman Violet had always known.
For the first time, Violet considered how much Juniper had been shaped by the people she loved being taken away from her. Losing Rosie had demolished Violet’s world. To endure that three times was more than any one person should have to bear.
Were the past few months just the first step to her becoming as jaded and cynical as her mother?
Violet shuddered, wondering if, years from now, her own daughter would be thinking the same thing about her.
“That’s not who I’m supposed to be,” she whispered to the photo.
But maybe that wasn’t true.
Maybe the thing no one had told her about growing up was that nobody ever really became the person they’d wanted to be.
Violet slid the picture carefully into the bottom compartment of her jewelry box, then crawled into bed, her fingers curled around Rosie’s bracelet, Orpheus at her side.
Her heart was so heavy in her chest, she was surprised it could still beat.
Parties in Four Paths were small by necessity, because although inviting anyone meant inviting everyone, there weren’t many kids to go around. But tonight, the shadowy interior of Suzette Langham’s barn was packed, everyone yelling over the blasting music and posing for pictures under the out-of-season holiday lights strung up on the walls. A cloud of cigarette smoke drifted above Justin’s head.
If Justin left Four Paths, he’d get to go to real nightclubs someday. Sit in real bars, flirt with girls he hadn’t known since preschool, instead of dutifully avoiding eye contact with Seo-Jin and Britta and all the other girls he’d dated for a day, a week, a month. But if he didn’t know them, they wouldn’t know him. Before his ritual, Justin had relished the way any high school party’s focus shifted where he walked. He could step into whatever conversation he wanted and know he was welcome there.
Any conversation, unless it included Harper Carlisle.
Years away from her, and still, within seconds of talking to her earlier that week, he’d wanted to tell her the truth. About what he’d really done to her. About what had truly happened the night she’d vanished into the Gray.
Harper had always been able to disarm him without trying, whether she was holding a sword or not. That hadn’t changed. It had cost him Violet Saunders, which meant it had cost him everything. But he deserved it.
He hadn’t told May and Isaac that he’d been desperate enough to confront Harper in person. Justin was drunk enough to enjoy the taste of the cheap beer someone’s older sibling had bought, but he wasn’t drunk enough to admit that he had failed. He wasn’t sure he could ever be drunk enough to do that.
He wove through the barn, high-fiving Cal Gonzalez and tapping his red cup against Suzette and her girlfriend Lia’s matching ones before tipping it up to his mouth.
But all socializing made him realize was how little he deserved to be treated this way. The way his classmates stared at him, with respect he hadn’t earned…Fake. It was all fake.