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Authors: Brenna Yovanoff

BOOK: The Replacement
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Her room was a mix of personalities. She had posters all over the place, Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie and Sammy Sosa. Everything was neat, but not really how you'd think of a girl's room. The dominant color scheme seemed to be communist gray, except for a ludicrous flowered bedspread.
When Tate sat down on the bed, I stopped in the doorway, crossing my arms over my chest. She leaned over to unlace her shoes.
"Tate?"
She raised her head and looked at me. "Yeah?"
"Why are you doing this? I mean, is this just what happens when I tell you what you want to hear?"
She was shaking her head as she peeled off her shirt. "No one tells me what I want to hear." She had on a very generic bra, off white, plain. Her body was thinner and harder than I'd imagined, but the tops of her breasts curved up soft and round like fruit. God, God, God.
She dropped her shirt on the floor and held out a hand. "Come here."
I sat next to her, feeling awkward and too warm, and she put her arms around my neck. Then she kissed me and I was kissing her back and nothing was awkward at all anymore. Outside, there was a flash of lightning. The storm was moving in, whipping up in gusts as the sky got darker.
Tate was yanking at my hoodie, sliding my T-shirt up. I elbowed it over my head and got stuck in it and then unstuck. We were both laughing and I knew my hair must be all over the place because she smoothed it down.
I reached behind her to unhook her bra. The clasp was wire and it stung my fingers, but after a few tries, I got it. She slipped out of the straps, leaning into me, letting me slide my hands along her ribs and back.
When I touched her, she sucked in her breath. Her skin was prickling all over with little goose bumps. My heart was beating like crazy and I couldn't tell if I was more excited or more nervous, but it didn't matter. Both feelings were equally satisfying.
The wind picked up and branches rattled against the window. There was another flash of lightning, followed immediately by thunder.
Tate's eyes were squeezed shut, like against bright sunlight. I leaned down and kissed her along her jaw, just below her ear. She turned her face against my shoulder, my bare skin, and I had the feeling of rightness again, like I could just be this, now, and everything was where it should be.
There was a flurry of banging on the door. "Tate?" The knob rattled. "Tate, open the door."
Tate sighed and pushed me away, sitting up, reaching for her bra. Then she turned toward the door. "Is it an emergency?"
"Tate, I mean it--just let me in."
"Connie, is this an
emergency
?"
"Yes!" Her voice sounded high and panicked. The next words were almost lost in the rising wind and the thunder. "Smoke--at the church! Something's on fire!"
Tate was already hooking her bra, wriggling back into her shirt and throwing mine at me. I put it on in a fumbling rush and we pounded downstairs and out onto the porch.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
OUR TRESPASSES
T
he smoke was oily black. It rose in a column, a hundred feet, two hundred feet over the town, like the Israelites' pillar of fire.
"Shit," I said, and my voice sounded completely flat. "
Shit.
The church is burning."
Tate was on the porch next to me. She put her hand on my arm, but I barely felt it. Thunder rumbled above us and the wind gusted, but under it, I heard the low roar of flames. I bolted down the steps and took off toward the blaze.
On Welsh Street, the whole block was in chaos. Even as I turned the corner, I could feel the heat pulsing out in waves, smell the sharp, dry smell of smoke and ashes. The street was full of lights and sirens, trucks parked at angles blocking off traffic. The church was a surging ruin of flames. They licked up the sides of the building in orange tongues, blackening the brick. There was a jagged hole at the base of the steeple, and smoke was pouring out in billows.
The gutters still ran, but the water came from the hoses and not the sky. It spilled along the sidewalks and into the street, black with soot, glittering with sparks and loose embers.
Firefighters were jogging back and forth on the grass, leading people out in twos and threes away from the building.
I found Emma on the lawn of the courthouse. She was standing by herself, hugging her elbows and watching as the Sunday school burned. I came up next to her, reaching for her, pulling her toward me. When she looked up at me, her face seemed to crumple.
"How did it start?" I asked, keeping my arm around her and letting her hang on to me.
"I don't know--lightning, maybe--there was lightning. The chapel caught before the trucks could get here. I don't think they can save it. The roof's gone."
"Where's Dad?"
Emma shook her head. Her mouth was open, but not like she had anything particular to say.
"No, Emma, where's Dad?"
"I don't know, I don't know. There were so many people--women's choir and Bible study and the cleaning crew." She was shaking her head, not stopping. "There had to have been at least thirty people in there."
I splashed through the street to the church and crossed the police line, ducking under tape and around stretchers through the crowd to the service driveway, where EMTs loaded choir members into the ambulances, oxygen masks strapped over their mouths. I looked for him in the coughing crowd of people wrapped in fire ponchos and blankets, and when he wasn't one of the stragglers filing out, I looked for him on the stretchers.
One of the gurneys was covered, and my chest tightened with a deep, wordless dread, but even before I got close, I knew it couldn't be him. The body was small and delicate under the sheet. The body of a woman. Or a girl.
I came up to the driver and grabbed his arm. He wasn't part of my dad's congregation, but his face was familiar from years of hospital picnics, Brad or Brian--some safe, pleasant name--and I held on, turning him toward the sheet. "Who is it?"
He shook his head. "We can't disclose that. She has to be pronounced." His voice was helpless and he stared at me with a stark, jacklighted expression. "I can't pronounce her. She has to be identified by the doctor or the coroner."
I let him go, staggered by the utter formality of pronouncing someone dead. I knew it already, and so did he, without confirmation from the coroner. Her body was there under the sheet in front of us, and what difference did it make who said it? Nothing would be different if it was a wide-eyed EMT who called her dead and not someone else.
I looked down at the covered body. The rain was just a fine mist, soaking slowly through the fabric. The shape of her profile was unclear. But I knew her shoes. The toes stuck out from under the sheet, just barely, just her toes.
The shoes were flat bottomed, made of black rubber and red leather, with little flowers cut out on the toes. I could see her socks through the openings of the petals. I'd noticed them at Stephanie's Halloween party. They'd looked so wrong with the rest of Jenna Porter's costume.
I raked my hands through my hair, trying to find the right set of feelings. She'd been nice. Thoughtless or shallow, maybe. But nice. She hadn't deserved to die like this, sucking down smoke until her lungs stopped. She'd said hi to me in class and lent me pens and stayed quiet when Alice said nasty, malicious things to other girls--and she did, I'd always known that, even when I was busy being awed by her eyelashes or mesmerized by her hair. But not Jenna. She'd never done anything to anyone.
I backed away from Brad, who was looking slack and shell-shocked, then turned in a circle, scanning the crowd for my dad, until finally I found him. He stood in the middle of the street, in the dark blue suit that he always wore for office hours. His hair was wet and his white button-down shirt wasn't all that white anymore but streaked gray with soot.
He stood with his arms at his sides and his face turned toward the church as it blackened and crumbled. His expression was bare and helpless, and he didn't see me. The only thing in his field of vision was the ruined church. It was a landmark, one of the oldest buildings in Gentry, and now it was nearly gone. I stood next to him and watched it go, thinking how strange it was that something could stand for so many things. It was Gentry, like Natalie was Gentry-- just a symbol of a town, the particular warm body that represented everyone else.
I watched the smoking church, the demolished Sunday school, feeling a kind of surreal tenderness for it. It had been built to withstand disasters and acts of God. There were lightning rods on two corners of the roof and one on the point of the steeple, and that was where the lightning had hit. The strike had made contact six inches from the tallest lightning rod. It had arced
away
from the metal, and that was not consistent with lightning, but pretty goddamn consistent with other types of disasters.
I turned away from the smoke and chaos of the blackened church, away from Jenna's covered body and my devastated father, and headed straight for the slag heap.
On Concord Street, the gutters ran high and fast, and the storm drains were clogged with leaves.
"Mackie! Mackie, wait." Carlina was hurrying up the sidewalk after me. She was wearing her coat and had wrapped a scarf over her head.
The rain was so thin it was almost fog, coming fine and sideways under the streetlights. It dripped off the bottom of her coat in a little fringe, splashing around her feet.
"Where are you going?" she said, stopping under the streetlight.
"Where do you think? I'm going down to ask the Morrigan where the fuck she gets off torching community property! The church is
gone
, Carlina. The whole thing, it's just gone."
She pressed her hands against her face, letting her shoulders slump. "It's not like that." Then she said it again. "It isn't like that."
"Tell me what it
is
like, then. Tell me what happened to the church. Did you burn my dad's church?"
"We're not monsters, Mackie. We didn't do this."
Her face was strangely plain, and I was struck again by how different she looked from the woman onstage. Carlina Carlyle meant smoke and colored footlights. This new woman was mysterious and still. In the street, the air was hot and used up.
"Who are we?" I said, and I sounded tired, like I didn't even care anymore.
"We don't really like names. When you name something, you take away some of its power. It becomes known. They've called us a lot of things--the good neighbors, the fair folk. The gray ones, the old ones, the other ones. Spirits and haunts and demons. Here, they never really named us. We're nothing."
It was a minute before she said anything else, and when she did, her voice sounded strange. "The Lady is the kind of person who likes to make the town hurt. She's the kind of person who sets fires."
"Where is she?"
"There's a door in the dump hill by the park. But you don't want to go there. She's incredibly dangerous, and the Morrigan will be furious."
"Then she can be furious."
Carlina turned and looked out over the road. "You need to think about what you're doing. You can be angry at the Lady for doing this, but it's not your job to stand up for them."
"Stop talking about
them
. I
am
them."
Carlina nodded, eyes huge and sad. "Then take a knife with you." Her voice was low. "Just a regular kitchen knife. Wrap it in a dish towel or a handkerchief if you have to, but take it and stick it in the ground at the base of the hill. The door won't open otherwise."
"And that's it, just stick a knife in the dirt and the door opens. What then? I just smile and walk right in?"
Carlina shoved her hands in her pockets. "Castoffs are always allowed to come home if they want to. She might be a nasty piece of work, but she owes you that much."
The rain was thin and constant.
Castoff
was like a slap when Carlina said it.
Maybe she saw something on my face because she folded her arms and looked down. "What I mean is, good luck."
PART FOUR
THEM

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