Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(15)

“The girl who died today. She was my age,” I said. “She was crossing the street and then she was gone. I am sorry for her friends, her family, and especially her parents. It is a tragedy. I would hope that the fact that an infamous person was riding on the bus wouldn’t take away from that.”

I got into the car, then pulled the door shut.

Mr. Kipling patted me on the shoulder. “Well done, Annie. Your Father would be proud.”

When I got home, Imogen and Natty were waiting for me, and no small amount of tears was shed over my safe homecoming. I told them they were making too much of it, but it was nice to know that my absence had not gone without notice. It could not be denied that I had been worried over. I was missed. I was loved. Yes, I was loved. And in that, at least, I was blessed.

III

I RESUME MY EDUCATION; MY PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED; MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND

BY THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Charles Delacroix was down two points in the latest Quinnipiac polls, officially putting him in a dead heat with Bertha Sinclair, and I was still no closer to finding a school. Mr. Kipling and I discussed both these issues in our daily phone call. We kept the calls pretty short to manage costs, but their profligate regularity was a sign of just how worried about me Mr. Kipling was.

“Do you think it was the bus?” I asked.

“That and—you won’t like hearing this, Anya—the fact that you were on the bus allowed the Sinclair people to dredge up the old story about you and Charles Delacroix and his son. There are some people who think your sentence to Liberty was too light and showed favoritism, and the Sinclair campaign is playing right into that.”

“Too light? Obviously they’ve never stayed there,” I quipped.

“True, true.”

“You know, Simon likes him. Charles Delacroix, I mean.”

Mr. Kipling laughed. “Yes, I think my young colleague has a bit of a crush. Ever since he talked to him last September to arrange your release from Liberty.

“Anya, I hope you won’t think this is an invasion of your privacy, but I had a question I wanted to ask you.” He inhaled. “Why was Win at the hospital?”

I told him I had no idea.

“If you’re still with him, as your attorney, that’s something I should know.”

“Mr. Kipling,” I said, “Win has a new girlfriend, though I do think he has the tragically misguided idea that we should still be friends.” I told him about Alison Wheeler and how they had rekindled a romance while working on Charles Delacroix’s campaign.

“I am sorry, Anya, but I can’t pretend to be anything but relieved.”

I had wrapped the phone cord around my wrist. My hand was starting to turn white for lack of blood.

“Onward! Let’s talk schools,” Mr. Kipling said brightly.

“Did you find something?”

“No, but I had an idea I wanted to run by you. What would you think of homeschooling?”

“Homeschooling?” I repeated.

“Yes, you’d finish up your senior year at home. We’d hire a tutor or tutors even. You’d still take your college entrance exams…” Mr. Kipling rambled on about homeschooling, but I had stopped listening. Wasn’t homeschooling for the socially maladjusted? The outcasts? But then, I suppose I was well on my way to being both. “So?” Mr. Kipling said.

“Kind of feels like giving up,” I replied after a pause.

“Not giving up. Just a little retreat until we can come up with something better.”

“Well, on a positive note, I guess I’d graduate top of my class.”

“That’s the spirit, Annie.”

Mr. Kipling and I said goodbye and then I hung up the phone. It was only ten in the morning, and I had nothing to do for the rest of the day except to wait for Natty to come home. I couldn’t help but think of Leo after he’d lost his job last year. Was this how he had felt? Forgotten, discarded, outcast?

I missed my brother.

Natty and I hadn’t made it to church on Sunday, so, lacking other plans, I decided to go.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, the church Natty and I went to was St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I loved the place even if it was falling apart. I’d seen pictures of it from one hundred years ago, back when it still had turrets and there hadn’t been a hole in the ceiling. But I was fond of that hole actually. I liked to be able to see the sky when I was praying.

I put some money in the basket for the campaign to restore St. Patrick’s and went into the nave. The kind of people in a church in a decaying city in the middle of a Monday morning were a pretty sad lot—aged, homeless. I was the only teenage girl there.

I sat down in a pew and crossed myself.

I said my usual prayers for my mother and father in Heaven. I asked God to watch over Leo in Japan. I thanked Him that I had been able to keep us safe to this point.

And then I asked for something for myself. “Please,” I whispered, “let me figure out a way to graduate on time.” I knew it was kind of a silly thing to want, considering the more complex problems in my life and in the world in general. For the record, I also thought it was cheap to use prayer in this way—God wasn’t Santa Claus. But I had sacrificed a lot and well, the heart wanted what it wanted, and sometimes what the heart wanted was to walk down the aisle at its high school graduation.