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Authors: Brenna Yovanoff

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BOOK: The Replacement
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Emma took a deep breath and turned to face me. "I'm
tired
of not talking about it. Have you not noticed that everyone in this town is desperately committed to pretending that nothing is
wrong
?"
I nodded, but I had to resist an urge to point out that sometimes it's just so much easier that way. I scraped at the shingles with my fingers and didn't say anything.
Emma crossed her arms over her chest. "You looked a lot like him."
I hunched my shoulders without meaning to. She was talking about the brother she should have had, and everything about him, even the little things, made me feel heavy and sort of numb.
She just went on in a soft, dreamy voice. "He was blond, I think, like you. I know that he had blue eyes because you did too, for a while. But then it was like the blue just wore out. Or trickled off or something. Maybe there was a spell or a charm, but it faded, and one day the blue was gone, and there you were."
"But you don't actually remember what he was like?"
Emma looked down at the backs of her hands, scowling like she was trying hard to picture something. "I was really young," she said finally. "I can't always tell the difference between before and after. I'll remember some detail and I can't even tell if I'm remembering him or you. The thing I remember best is a pair of scissors. Mom had a pair of scissors that she tied on a ribbon over the crib. They were pretty."
I thought about all the Old World superstitions. Tricks to guard the livestock and protect the house. It was obvious, more and more. They didn't work.
Emma sighed. "I guess I don't remember him at all," she said finally. "I just remember the things Mom did to keep him from being stolen."
She pulled one knee up so she could hook an arm around it. Her hair was starting to come down from the knot and she tugged at it, looking lonely and sad as a lighthouse. Sad as a nun.
I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.
She sighed and glanced over at me. "What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
I shrugged. The feeling was easy, but the words wouldn't come.
She looked at me a long time. Then she touched my cheek. "Good night, ugly."
She flopped headfirst through the window, landing on the bed with her feet sticking out over the sill. Her slippers were grimy from the shingles and I almost reached out and tweaked her ankle, but I didn't.
Below me, the neighborhood was sleepy and still. I leaned on my elbows and looked down into the street.
Gentry was two different things, and at night, I could always see that second thing better. The town was its green suburban lawns, sure, but it was also its secrets. The kind of place where people double-checked the locks at night or pulled their kids closer in the grocery store. They hung horseshoes over their front doors and put up bells instead of wind chimes. They wore crosses made from stainless steel instead of gold because gold couldn't protect them from people like me.
Maybe the brave ones buried quartz and agate in their gardens or left a saucer of milk out for luck--a little backyard offering for whatever might be waiting in the shadows. If someone called them on it, they'd shrug or laugh, but they didn't stop doing it because hey, we lived in a place where people kept their porch lights on and didn't smile at strangers. Because when they set out a few pretty rocks with their marigolds, early snow never took the branches off their trees and their yards looked nicer than other people's. Because mostly, more than anything, night was about shadows and missing kids, and we lived in the kind of place where no one ever talked about it.
After a long time, I climbed back into my room and got into bed. I left the window open so I could breathe. The house wasn't bad, but still, it was hard to sleep with the air smelling like screws and brackets and nails.
When the breeze came in, I shivered and crawled deeper under the covers. Crickets were shrieking out in the yard, and the trees creaked against each other. Down by the road, in the tall stands of grass, there were mice rustling, night birds chirping away like spinning gears.
I put my pillow over my head to shut out the sound. The noises from the yard were muffled, and I wondered if this was what things sounded like to Roswell. To anyone who wasn't me. He could walk into class and not get distracted by the rustle of paper or the ventilation system. I had to remember not to flinch when someone closed a door or dropped a book, in case the sound hadn't been loud enough to startle anyone else.
This was life in Gentry--going to school every day, blending into a world where everyone was happier to ignore the things that didn't fit, always willing to look away as long as you did your part.
Otherwise, how could they go on living their neat suburban lives?
Maybe it wasn't that hard. Kids died. They got sick and then sicker, and no one could figure out what was wrong. Someone somewhere lost a son or daughter. Maybe they measured pollution or blamed it on the groundwater. Lead, maybe, or toxic seepage from the slag heap.
Natalie Stewart was just another casualty, buried in the Welsh Street graveyard with my dad standing over her, and that was a sad thing. I knew the script, the normal responses, but when I tried to feel some kind of sorrow or grief, even the polite kind, I just saw Tate sitting alone in the cafeteria. And when I thought of her there, the feeling I got wasn't sadness, it was loneliness. When I pictured the circle of empty seats around her, I wasn't mourning for her sister. It was just the same dull ache I felt every day.
The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just another part of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SCARLET LETTER
F
riday was chilly and gray. The blood-draw station had been cleared away, but I was still feeling kind of rickety and made it a point not to go in the cafeteria. In the atrium at the main entrance, rain coursed down the windows so that the glass looked like it was melting.
I spent the morning avoiding things. Crowds and conversations and anyone who might ask me why I was wandering around like a zombie--so, mostly Roswell--but by fourth hour, I was running out of excuses for my lack of school supplies and had to go by my locker. It wasn't something I was looking forward to.
Freak
was gone, though. Instead, there was a weird spiral pattern, covered in thin, snaking lines. The paint had been scraped away in a kind of spiderweb, leaving a network of bare metal that radiated out from what had been one accusatory word inlaid with blood. Some of the areas had been shaded in, black in places and a thick lumpy white in others.
"We fixed your locker," Danny said, coming up behind me.
Drew nodded and held up a marker and a bottle of Wite-Out.
I studied the tangle of spirals and circles. At the outer edge of the design, correction fluid had been carefully applied over the marker, then scratched away so the ink showed through in ghostly corkscrews. For a project limited by preexisting vandalism and involving only Sharpie and Wite-Out, it was nice work.
Danny leaned his elbow on my shoulder. "We weren't trying to squash your personal expression or anything. We just thought it might be a bad move to brand yourself too aggressively too early. It might, I don't know, set the wrong
tone
."
They both looked resolutely blank, like they were trying not to look too pleased with themselves. Drew was tossing the bottle of Wite-Out in the air and catching it again. They stood on either side of me and waited for my reaction.
I wanted to do something to show how relieved I was, how grateful, but all I said was, "Thanks."
Danny punched me. "Don't thank
us
. You're the one who owes the school sixty bucks to get it repainted."
If it hadn't been obvious yesterday, Tate Stewart was the new point of interest. She stalked through the halls, past clusters of people who whispered behind their hands. Their glances weren't the sideways glances of sympathy, but quick, furtive stares, full of curiosity.
They spent whole passing periods watching her and, at the same time, pretending not to. It didn't seem to matter. She moved through the crowd like she was alone. Like the gossip and the stares couldn't touch her. Her eyes were closed off, her expression was remote, but something about the set of her mouth made me feel sorry. She didn't look sad, which made everything a hundred times sadder.
The thing about Tate was, she didn't have any real interest in what people thought. She never tried to impress them or make them like her. Once, in seventh grade, she joined the boys' baseball team, even though the baseball team sucked, just to prove that the athletics department couldn't stop her.
As the morning went on, though, her mouth got thinner. There was a strange feeling coming off her, almost an electric charge. It hung in the air, like she was getting ready to explode, but things didn't really hit the fan until English.
We were finishing the unit on Romanticism and
The Scarlet Letter
. Mrs. Brummel was tall and thin, with bleached hair and a lot of different sweaters. She got very excited about the kind of literature that no reasonable person would ever read for fun.
She stood at the front of the room and clapped because she was always clapping. "Okay, today we're going to talk about guilt and how Pearl's very existence condemns Hester more effectively than the
A
. This is most obvious in the fact that some of the villagers believe Pearl is the child of the devil."
Then she wrote it on the board:
Pearl as a concrete manifestation of guilt
.
"Does anyone want to expand on this?"
No one did. In front of me, Tom Ritchie and Jeremy Sayers were flicking a paper football back and forth, mock cheering each time one of them got it between the uprights of the other one's hands. Alice and Jenna were still watching Tate, whispering and then covering their mouths like they'd just said something so shocking it needed to be contained and giving each other significant looks.
Mrs. Brummel was making bullet points with her back to us, waiting for someone to start filling them in.
I watched Alice. When she'd taken her seat at the beginning of class, her skirt had slid up far enough to show the tops of her thighs, and I was enjoying the fact that she hadn't adjusted it yet. Her hair was loose down her back and looked almost like bronze in the fluorescent light.
She propped her elbows on her desk and leaned forward so she could whisper into Jenna's ear. "I heard that her mom won't get out of bed since it happened. Like, not even for the
funeral
. I can't believe she's acting like nothing's wrong.
I
just wouldn't even come to school."
Apparently, that one was loud enough for Tate to catch some or possibly all of it because she stood up fast enough to send her desk screeching along the floor. Her gaze was hard, sweeping over us, and I couldn't tell if I was dizzy from the screws and wires in the walls or from the way she was looking at me.
"Oh," she said, in a clear, challenging voice. "Was this what you wanted? Did you want a good look? Take a good look--
I
don't mind."
And maybe no one had really been excited about Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, but they were paying attention now. I kept my head down, hunching over my desk, trying to get smaller. My heart was beating so fast that I could feel it in my throat and I kept telling myself that everything was fine, that I'd imagined she'd looked at me, because I had to believe that. I had to believe that no one in Gentry would ever hear the words
child of the devil
and then look at me.
No one said anything.
The room was so quiet that all I could hear was the buzz of the fluorescent light. I had the idea that it was buzzing right over me, like some kind of signal or alarm, but no one turned to stare accusingly. No one whispered or pointed.
Mrs. Brummel stood with her back against the whiteboard and the marker uncapped in her hand, staring at Tate. "Is there something you needed?"
Tate shook her head and kept standing. "Don't mind me. I'm just waiting for my big red
A
."
"This isn't funny," Mrs. Brummel said, putting the cap back on the marker.
"No," said Tate. "It's not. But we can all agree to smile anyway because it just makes things so much easier."
Mrs. Brummel retreated behind her desk and waved a box of tissues, even though Tate wasn't crying. "Do you need some time to pull yourself together?"
"No. Because I'm not unbalanced or grief stricken, okay? I'm pissed off."
"Would you like to go down to the counseling office?"
"No, I'd like someone to fucking listen to me!" Her voice was loud, unnaturally shrill. Suddenly, she hauled back and kicked the desk so hard that the whole room seemed to ring with the metallic clang of her work boot.
BOOK: The Replacement
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ads

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