How Not to Spend Your Senior Year (22 page)

Then he smiled. Not a strained smile, a genuine one. As if he was really, truly glad to see me.

“Hey, Jo.”

My father bustled into the room. “I'm going for a walk,” he announced.

“Dad, it's raining cats and dogs out there,” I said.

“Really?” said my father. He leaned over one of the couches to peer out the window. “You're sure it's not just incredibly heavy fog?”

“You'll have to excuse him,” I told Alex. “He hasn't been himself lately. The stress. You know.”

“I understand,” Alex answered solemnly, though I could see the laughter at the back of his blue eyes.

“Take your umbrella, Dad,” I said.

“You know what?” my father answered. “I don't think so.”

He left the house without another word, closing the front door gently behind him. In the silence that filled the living room, I could hear the rain tapping on the roof.

“Your dad is pretty great,” Alex said.

“He is,” I nodded. “The absolute best, in fact. Alex, I'm so sorry.”

“No, don't, Jo,” he said at once. “Don't
do that. That's why I came over. You don't owe me an apology.”

“How can you possibly think that?” I asked.

Alex sat down on the nearest couch with a sigh. “I've been asking myself that question ever since I read the newspaper articles. I guess the truth is, I feel responsible for what happened too. I'm the one who declared I'd seen a ghost, after all.”

“Tell me the truth,” I said as I sat down beside him. “Did you
really
think you'd seen my ghost?”

“You know,” Alex said, “for those first few seconds, I think I honestly did. I just couldn't come up with any other explanation for seeing you. I was so freaked, so confused, seeing a ghost didn't seem all that weird, somehow.

“I probably would have come to my senses sooner or later. Unfortunately I'd blurted it out in that counseling session in the meantime. After that the whole thing just sort of snowballed. I couldn't seem to get back in control no matter what I did.”

“I'm familiar with the feeling,” I sighed.

“Jo,” Alex said. “You didn't stay away from Beacon because of me, did you?”

“No, Alex,” I said swiftly. “Of course not. It just . . . seemed too much like going backward.”

“Okay, I get that,” Alex nodded.

There was silence. “How are things with Elaine?” I asked.

“Great,” Alex said at once. “You know she's going to the U next year?”

I nodded. The “U” was the University of Washington.

“Well,” Alex said. “So am I.”

“What about Harvard?” I asked, surprised.

Alex shook his head. “That was always my dad's dream, never mine. I want . . . I don't know, simpler things, maybe. Different, anyhow. I want to stay in my hometown, go to the hometown college, play football. I'm sure I'll want to go away at some point. Just not right now.”

All of a sudden he smiled. “I practiced my telling-dad-the-truth speech on Elaine till she could recite it from memory herself. It's a wonder we're still together.”

“I'm glad, Alex,” I said. “Glad you're going to get what you want.”

“What about you?” he asked.

“I honestly don't know. But don't be surprised if you see me on campus. After all the moving around I've done, I'm thinking I'd like to stay put for a while.”

“Maybe there's some dance we can all attend together,” Alex said.

“Ooh. Low blow.”

“Sorry,” Alex said. “I had to get just one shot in.”

“That's okay,” I said. “You're probably entitled to more!”

“Pass,” Alex said. He stood up. “Well, I guess I'd better go.”

“Thanks for coming by. I really appreciate it,” I said.

We walked to the door.

“See you around, Jo.”

“Okay,” I said. I reached for the door-knob just as the doorbell sounded for the second time that afternoon. “What is this?” I said. “Grand Central Station?”

I pulled the door open. Mark London was standing on the porch. At the sight of Alex, his face shuttered.

“Sorry,” he said. “Bad timing.”

“Nope,” Alex said cheerfully. He stepped around me, then past Mark, and moved to the edge of the porch. “Try not to be stupid, London. If I hear you've hurt her, I may feel compelled to do something macho like break both your arms. I'm a jock. We can do things like that, you know.”

Then he sauntered down the porch and out into the rain.

“So,” Mark said after a moment. “You guys kiss and make up or something?”

“You are an idiot,” I said. “You know perfectly well he and Elaine are crazy for each other. He's probably heading next door right now. If the only reason you're here is to be a pain, you'd better watch out because I'm planning to slam the door in your face.”

“Don't,” Mark said suddenly. “Don't make me go away, Jo.”

I felt the breath back up in my lungs. “Just tell me what you want, London.”

“To see you, for one thing,” Mark said explosively. “You've been avoiding me for weeks.”

“
I've
been avoiding
you
!” I all but shouted. “Who stopped talking to me as soon as his award-winning articles came out? What happened? You got what you wanted so you didn't need me anymore?”

“I can't believe you'd think that,” Mark said.

“What am I supposed to think?” I said. “I don't even know you!”

“Stop,” Mark said suddenly. “Just stop.” With one quick motion he reached out and pulled me onto the porch and into his arms. “I didn't come to fight. God, you feel good.”

“I am not a pushover,” I mumbled against his chest. I felt, as well as heard, the rumble of his laughter.

“No, I know you're not.”

He eased back, taking my face between his hands, running one thumb along my right cheekbone. “I know we don't know each other very well,” he said. “That's going to change, beginning now. I want to spend as much time with you as possible.”

“What about what I want?”

He kissed me then. Long and deep and slow. I felt my heart roll over inside
my chest, then settle down to beat in time to his.

“What
do
you want?” Mark said when the kiss was over.

“I don't know,” I confessed. If ever there was a moment for absolute truth, I figured now was the time. “Not altogether. But I'm pretty sure you're a part of it.”

His lips twitched, with suppressed laughter or irritation, I couldn't quite tell.

“When do you think you'll know for sure?”

“Are we going to stand here and play twenty questions all day? How the heck should I know?”

He laughed then, the sound unlike anything I'd ever heard from him before. Open and joyous.

“I think I'm going to enjoy the next few months,” he said.

I smiled. “Just so long as you don't mind a few surprises.”

Romance abounds in Cameron Dokey's magical retellings!

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Once

W
HAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF
? W
HAT ARE YOUR
stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

This is the first story I ever heard about myself: that I came into this world before my time. And that my coming was so sudden, hot, and swift, it carried everything before it away, including my mother's life.

Full of confusion was the day of my birth, of portents, and of omens. Just at daybreak, a flock of white birds flew across the face of the sun. Its rising light stained their wings bloodred. This was an omen of life taking flight.

At full noon, every single tree in every single orchard on my father's estate burst into bloom at once, in spite of the fact that it was October. This was an omen of life's arrival.

At dusk, a great storm arose, catching everyone by surprise. My mother was in her garden, the one she planted and tended with her own two hands, when two claps of thunder, one from the east and the other from the west, met above her head in a great collision of sound. The earth shook beneath her feet. Crying out, my mother tumbled to the ground. What this portended nobody ever did decide, because it was at precisely this moment that I declared my intention to be born.

Fortunately for my mother, she was not alone. The healer, Old Mathilde, was with her, as she often was when my father was away from home. Just how old Old Mathilde is, no one really knows. But no matter what her years, she was strong and hale enough to lift my mother up and carry her indoors—through the gate in the garden wall and around the side of the house, up the steps to the front door, and across the great hall. Then, finally, up a wide set of stairs from the great hall to the second floor. By the time Old Mathilde reached my mother's chamber, it was storming in earnest, and she, herself, was breathing hard. The wind wailed like a banshee. Hailstones clattered against the roof with a sound like military drums.

Old Mathilde set my mother gently on the bed, paused to catch her breath. Then she summoned Susanne, who worked in the kitchen, instructing her to bring hot water and soft towels. But when Mathilde went to stir up the coals, the wind got there first, screaming down the chimney, putting out the fire. Not content to do this in my mother's room alone, the wind then extinguished every other fire throughout my father's great stone house by the sea, until not so much as a candle remained lit. All the servants quaked in fear. The women buried their heads beneath their aprons, and the men behind their arms, for nobody could remember such an event ever occurring before.

And so it was first in shadow, and then in darkness, that Old Mathilde and my mother strove to bring me into the world. Just before midnight, I arrived. At my coming, the storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun. A great silence filled the great stone house. Into it came the loud voice of the sea, and then my mother's quiet voice, asking Old Mathilde to place me in her waiting arms. She asked this just as the clocks throughout the house began to strike midnight: the only hour in all the world that begins in one day and ends in another. This was the moment I knew my mother's touch for the first and only time.

And this is the story Old Mathilde has told me each and every time I asked her to: that, with my green eyes, I gazed up, and with her green eyes, my mother gazed back down. She ran one hand across my head, her fingers lingering on my bright red hair, for this, too, was the exact same shade as her own. Then she bent her head and pressed a kiss upon my brow. I carry the mark of it to this day, the faintest smudge of rose just at my hairline.

“Mathilde,” my mother said then, and with the sounding of her own name, Old Mathilde understood what my coming into the world before my time would cost. For she recognized the sound my mother's voice made—a sound that was both less and more than it had ever been before.

No one is better at understanding the world than Old Mathilde, at being able to see things for what they truly are. This is what makes her such a good healer, I suppose. For how can you mend a thing, any thing, if you cannot truly see what is wrong? Some things, of course, cannot be healed, no matter how much you want them to be, no matter how hard you try. Old Mathilde was not a magician. She was simply very good at helping wishes come true.

“Will you hear a wish?” my mother asked now.

Just for an instant, Old Mathilde closed her eyes, as if summoning the strength to hear what would come. For my mother was asking to bestow the most powerful wish there is, one that is a birth and death wish, all at the same time. Then Old Mathilde opened her eyes and gave the only answer she could, also the one that was in her heart.

“I will grant whatever you wish that lies within my power, Constanze, my child.”

Constanze d'Este. That was my mother's name.

“I wish for you to be my daughter's godmother,” Constanze d'Este replied. “Love her for me, care for her when I am gone, for I fear her father will do neither one. When he looks at her, he will not find joy in the color of her hair and eyes. He will not see the way that I live on. Instead, he will see only that she came too soon, and that her arrival carried me out of this life.

“Besides, he is a man and a great lord. He wished for his first child to be a boy.”

“What you wish for is easily granted,” Old Mathilde said. “For I have loved this child with all my heart since she was no more than a dream in yours. As for Etienne . . . ” Etienne de Brabant. That is my father's name. “I suppose a man may be a great lord and a great fool all at once. What shall I call her, while I'm loving her so much?”