Splintered (Splintered, #1)(35)

After another slow drink of water, I tell him my history, from the pruning shears to the bleeding daffodils. But I’m not ready to share details of the moth or my dark guide. Those memories feel private, somehow.

When I get to the part about the talking bugs and plants that Alison and I both hear, his gaze intensifies.

He plays with the laces on my boot. “So, you chose bugs for your art because it was the only way you could—”

“Shut them up? Yeah.”

He shakes his head. “And I thought my childhood was warped. No wonder you’ve been scared of ending up at Soul’s, too.” He leans back on his elbows. “Now I get it. That battle I always see in your eyes. Light and dark. Like my gothic fairies.” He’s studying me as if I’m a piece of artwork again.

“So the sketches you made of me … they’re the basis for your paintings?”

His eyebrows rise.

“All those times I caught you looking at me like I’m a palette of paint.”

Thumping his fingers on the boat, he frowns. “Not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I know about the sketches Taelor found.”

Something—either shock or embarrassment—flickers through his eyes.

I clench my fingers. “She’s right, huh? The morbid and revolting are such fascinating subjects.” It hurts to say it almost as much as it did to hear it.

“Is that what she said?”

I lift a shoulder in silent affirmation.

He sits up again and places a hand on my shin. “Look, she lashes out when she feels threatened. After finding the sketches … well, she kind of lost it. I mean, the guy she’s been dating has an aesthetic obsession with another girl. You can see her side, can’t you?”

“Maybe.” I never would’ve guessed I was anyone’s obsession, aesthetic or otherwise. If I inspire his art, then why is Taelor the one he chooses to have in his life? “Jeb … why do you put up with her?”

He pauses. “I guess because I’m the only stable thing she has.”

“And by fixing her problems, you hope to make up for everything your dad did to Jen and your mom?”

He doesn’t answer. That’s as good as a yes.

Hatred for his father’s weakness and violence flashes through me. “You’re not accountable for his mistakes. Only for your own. Like going to London with Taelor.”

“That’s not a mistake. It’s going to help with my career.”

I stare at my boots. “Right. Just like my ‘mortician sense of style’ will help with mine.” I attempt a laugh, but even to me it sounds false.

“Hey.” The insistence in Jeb’s voice makes me look up at him. “Tae was wrong, you know. About that. Do you think my paintings are ugly or freakish?”

I think of his watercolor paintings: darkly beautiful worlds and gothic fairies weeping black tears over human corpses. His depictions of misery and loss are so poignant and surreal they break the heart.

I twist my gloved hands together. “No. They’re beautiful and haunting.”

He squeezes my shin. “An artist is only as good as his subject.”

For one raw, drawn-out moment, we’re silent. Then he lets go of me.

I rub my knees, warming my leggings. “Can I see them someday?”

“The sketches?”

I nod.

“Tell you what. We get out of this in one piece, and I’ll give you a private viewing.” He holds my gaze for a minute too long, and my blood runs hot. How am I supposed to figure anything out when I can’t even read my own body’s signals anymore?

“Okay.” He looks down at the Wonderland book in his lap and slides out the pictures of Alice, moving close. “What’s up with these?” Flicking on the flashlight, he points its yellow glow at them, effectively distracting me from my whacked-out emotions.

The pictures are faded and worn, one of a sad and lovely young girl with dirty smudges on her dress and pinafore. The words Alice, seven years of age and fresh from the rabbit hole are handwritten on the back. The other picture is of Alice as an eighty-two-year-old woman.

I place them side by side. What was it Alison said? “Photographs tell a story. But people forget to read between the lines.”

She said the same thing when she traced my birthmark—insisting there was more to the story than people realized.

Peering more closely at the pictures, I search the young Alice’s face and body. There’s a shadow on her left elbow that seems to match the pigmented maze Alison and I share. I study the same spot on the elderly Alice, but there’s no birthmark.

“That’s it!” I point to the pictures. “There and there. Alice had a birthmark that matches mine and Alison’s when she was a kid, but she lost it as an old woman.”

Jeb holds both pictures up to the light. “Could be the photo was retouched.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

Jeb reaches for the energy bar on the seat beside me, tears the wrapping, and curls my fingers around it—unspoken insistence that I eat. “Are there any answers in the book?”

Chewing a bite of granola, I flip through page after page. I trace a finger over Alison’s blurred notes in the margins while Jeb holds the flashlight. “There might’ve been, if these were legible.” I reach the end, past the sketches and final pages, and am just about to put it away when Jeb tugs it out of my grasp.