The Veil (18 page)

Luc will make me feel better
, I thought as I opened the passenger door of his Honda.

It was, after all, part of his job.

——

I tried hard to convince Luc that my conversation with Nate hadn’t bothered me, but I could tell he knew something was wrong. He offered to come inside, to take me to get coffee, to take me back up to the Headlands, but I said no to everything and let myself out of the car as soon as he pulled up in front of Gran’s house.

I didn’t want fake solace, even though the distressed look on his face as I walked away from his car looked real enough.

Annorasi mind trick
, I reminded myself, even though Luc had made it quite clear to me there was no such thing. I pushed the rational thoughts in my brain aside. At that moment, I wanted him, and my feelings for him, to be fake as fake could be. I could only deal with one messed up relationship at a time.

I trudged up the stairs to my room, suddenly feeling very tired, but as soon as I closed the door behind me I started to pace. I wanted
to
do
something—anything. I was sick of just stewing around with a million thoughts inside of my head—thoughts I could share with only a few, chosen people who weren’t really the people I wanted to share them with anyway. At least, they weren’t the
only
ones I wanted to share them with.

As I paced in front of my desk, a bit of pink plastic caught my eye. It was the Jest Jewel’s bag, wedged between my desk and the leg of my desk chair. My hand flew to my neck; I was wearing the horseshoe necklace Nate and Olivia had bought for me—I hadn’t taken it off since the night of my birthday—but I’d forgotten there was a second gift.

I yanked the bag free and overturned it onto my bed. A wad of pink tissue paper came tumbling out, along with the leather journal.

With a sudden flash of inspiration, I picked up the journal and hunted for a pen. I tried to remember the last time I’d written in a journal—it had to have been before my birthday. How unusual for me—usually, I keep my life fairly well documented. It was beyond time to catch up.

If I couldn’t tell Nate everything I wanted to tell him to his face, at least I could write it all down. Who knows—maybe someday, when the rules changed and it wasn’t dangerous, I could give him the journal and tell him I’d been saving it all up to tell him.

I found a pen, sat down at my desk, and began to write.

——

I
DIDN
’
T WAKE UP UNTIL
two o’clock the next afternoon, which would have been embarrassingly lazy if I wasn’t for the fact that I had only gone to sleep at four o’clock that morning.

Once I’d started writing, I’d found it impossible to stop; the entire story just poured out, starting with the morning of my birthday and ending with last night’s painful conversation with Nate. When I had gotten everything down on paper, and slipped the journal into my messenger bag to read through later and add any details I might have forgotten, I’d crawled into bed. And for the first time in weeks, I slept peacefully, with no dreams of the Others or Nate’s disapproving scowl. I woke up feeling peaceful.

I also woke up starving, so I padded downstairs in my sweats and an old T-shirt, without so much as trying to tame my wild hair.

This turned out to be a bit of a blunder. When I entered the kitchen, the first person I saw was Luc.

I hastily retreated behind the swinging kitchen door. The tentative hand I ran through my hair found it sticking up in several, very odd directions. My mouth tasted like sandpaper, and I was pretty sure my pillow had left a long crease line down my left cheek. Great.

I peeked back around the door, hoping he was a figment of my imagination.

Nope. There he stood next to Gran, behind the island in the center of the kitchen, feeding dough into the pasta maker. It just didn’t seem right that someone so attractive in an otherworldly sort of way should be doing common kitchen chores, like the rest of us (or, like I would have done if Gran had ever let
me
help her out in the kitchen—apparently Luc was the exception to every rule except curfew).

“You didn’t have to get all dressed up just for me,” he remarked. He smiled in my direction but kept his attention on the pasta maker. An invisible hand cranked the machine, spitting out long strips of spaghetti-shaped pasta. A knife dangled in midair beside the machine and cut the strips to their proper length. The noodles then floated serenely over to the counter underneath the window and arranged themselves neatly on folded paper towels.

“Good morning, Addy!” Gran greeted me from the stove. In front of her, several different pots bubbled and stirred themselves.

“Hi,” I said, trying to smooth my hair down and failing miserably. “I was . . . just going to jump in the shower.”

Twenty minutes later, I reentered the kitchen—clean, with normal hair, wearing jeans and a dark sweater.

Gran was alone, chopping basil leaves, while a second knife chopped parsley leaves by itself.

“What happened to Luc?” I asked.

“Oh, he went to go get some coffee. I don’t understand why you kids are unable to get through the day without caffeine of some kind.”

“You drink tea,” I pointed out.

“That’s
tea
,” she sniffed haughtily. I sighed inwardly. Everyone thinks their addiction is different.

“Anyway,” I hunted for a change in subject, “Luc doesn’t drink coffee.”

Gran didn’t look surprised. “Well, I suppose he must have gone just for you then.” She gave me a knowing look.

I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the nearest counter. “It’s not like that, Gran. We’re just pretending.”

“Mm-hm. If you two were that good at acting, you’d be starring in the play tonight instead of just messing about with props.”

I shook my head. “Believe me, Gran. We just don’t want people to think it’s strange that we’re together so much.”

“People?” she looked around the kitchen, as though expecting to find a crowd gathered over by the refrigerator. “What people? I don’t see anyone in this kitchen he needs to be putting on a show for. And he’s been here since seven thirty this morning.”

“Seven thirty—” I clapped a hand over my mouth. “School! I totally forgot about school!” High school seemed so trivial now, given my newfound ability to fly, but I felt bad that Luc had shown up to drive me, and I’d slept right through it.

Gran smiled indulgently. “You were out cold when I tried to wake you this morning. I thought you could use the rest. Luc agreed, but he didn’t seem to want to leave. I don’t flatter myself it’s because he had a sudden desire to learn how to make pasta.”

“What?”

“He’s worried about you, Addy,” Gran put the knife down and looked at me seriously over the cutting board. The second knife also paused in midair. “Do I need to be worried too?”

“No.”

She came around to my side of the kitchen island. “It can be lonely, hiding who you are. Especially when you have to keep people you love in the dark. Believe me, I know.”

I looked up at her and, for the first time, saw the past eleven years from her perspective; the fear she must have felt hearing her best friend and her best friend’s daughter had been murdered, the feeling of suddenly being saddled with a little girl, and having to run away and leave everyone behind—friend and foe—in order to protect her. I wondered who she had left behind for me. She must have been lonely all of these years—alone with the constant worry that we’d be found out, a worry so strong she decided to confine herself to this old, drafty house for fear she would be recognized and give us away. This woman had given up so much for me. And she wasn’t even my blood grandmother.

I reached up impulsively and hugged Gran tightly. She seemed startled at first but eventually her arms went around me, and she pulled me in close.

“Thank you,” I whispered in her ear. “For everything.”

“You are very welcome, my dear. I had a hunch you were going to turn out to be an extraordinary person. I’m glad to see I wasn’t wrong.”

I laughed and let go of her to wipe away a stray tear.

“Coffee?” came Luc’s voice from the doorway. He was holding only one cup—he
had
gone out only for me. A very large part of me wanted desperately to believe that Gran’s observations were true. After all, she really was never wrong.

But the smaller, more forceful, part of me stuffed the hope away. Whatever strange mix of real and pretend emotions we felt for each other, I was not going to be the one to break this comfortable pattern we’d fallen into. I wouldn’t be able to bear it if once we finally got through the pretense I found myself standing alone.

“We should probably get to the theater,” I said, smiling at him as I took the coffee.

He smiled back, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Sure, let’s get going.” To Gran, he said: “Thanks for letting me help out. I hope I didn’t mess things up too badly.”

As we left through the kitchen door, and as I swung my book bag over my shoulder, I distinctly heard Gran mutter: “And the Oscar goes to . . . ”

——

It was five minutes before curtain. The lights in the auditorium began to blink, signaling to the audience members that it was time to take their seats. Principal Chatsworth had just made the rounds backstage to wish us all luck (an odd move, I couldn’t help but think, from our usually reluctant principal). Most of the cast was absorbed in last minute makeup and costume adjustments, and Mrs. Grimsby rushed around frantically, reminding everyone to
annunciate
.

I had my hands full keeping Olivia calm.

“Are you
sure
we’ve got everything covered?” she kept asking as she walked in nervous circles around the prop table. She looked absolutely beautiful, dressed as Victoria Goodrich, in a long crimson-colored dress with white lace at the sleeves and the neckline. As she fretted, she fiddled nervously with an ivory pendant near her throat.

“Everything will be fine,” I assured her, nudging her toward a chair.

She got away from me and continued to circle. “We’ve got the lamp, the bottle of wine, and the cigarette case,” she started listing off props on her shaking fingers. “And both guns, right?”

I pointed irritably to the table. Right in front of her was the starter pistol and the black case containing her father’s flare gun. Mrs. Grimsby had made me swear to keep it in its case until the very last minute, and God help us if Chatsworth ever found out we were using an actual gun and not a toy—it was a good thing neither of them knew there were actually five live flares inside the case that Olivia had forgotten to remove when she’d borrowed (er, stolen) it from her father’s boat.

“Is your dad going to be mad I painted his gun black?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I doubt he’ll recognize it on stage tonight. When the play’s over, I’ll sneak it back onto the boat. I don’t see
why he should ever need to open the case . . . unless he gets lost at sea.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully with her forefinger, then shrugged. “But if that ever happens, he’ll probably just be happy to have a flare gun—I doubt he’ll care what color it is.”

There was a burst of static from the walkie-talkie attached to the waist of my jeans. Tonight, Nate, Terrance, Luc, Mrs. Grimsby, and I were all wearing them, and bulky headsets too.

“I’m turning the house lights off.” Nate’s voice sounded garbled in my headset. “Places for Act 1, people!”

He was at the back of theater with the lighting board. Luc and Terrance were positioned on either side of the stage, ready to raise the curtains.

I had no particular job at the moment, so I hugged Olivia and wished her luck. (I was careful, of course, not to say the word
luck
out loud—apparently that actually brings on bad luck in the theater. Hanging out with Olivia, you learn things.)

The play progressed smoothly through its first two acts as Olivia’s masterpiece unfolded on stage. Everyone seemed to be remembering their lines (although Mrs. Grimsby was camped out backstage with a flashlight and a script, just in case), and the audience seemed to laugh or gasp at all the right places.

During intermission, I picked up the starter pistol and took the flare gun out of its case, double-checking that the former was loaded and the latter was not. I crept onto stage behind the closed curtain and hid the flare gun behind the lamp on stage right, where Casey could easily reach it at the end of Act 3, when it was time for her to shoot Olivia. I tucked the starter pistol into the waistline of my jeans, feeling a bit like a cowboy.

I had to kneel behind the living room wall from the end of intermission all the way through Act 3, because there was no way for me to sneak back there unseen once the curtains were open. As Olivia’s death scene approached, I shifted uncomfortably on the ground and checked (for the tenth time) that the starter pistol
was within easy reach of my right hand. I had taken it out of my jeans, after a moment of fear that if I left it there, I would accidentally shoot myself in the butt. I was pretty sure even blanks would sting.

The wall I hid behind was a little bit left of center stage. I was probably the only person in the theater who could see everything going on at once. As usual, I was most aware of Luc, who stood backstage left, ready to lower his half of the curtain as soon as Olivia died and Nate dimmed the lights on her dead body. Terrance was backstage right, in charge of the other half of the curtain. Mrs. Grimsby was beside him, script in hand. Olivia and Casey were on stage; I could see them through a narrow slit between the two panels of the wall. I knew Nate was in the back of the auditorium at the light controls, even though I couldn’t actually see him.

As the moment of Olivia’s big death scene approached, I carefully removed my headset and my glasses, setting them both carefully on the ground beside me. I picked up the starter pistol and peered back out at the stage, through the slit.

It was then I noticed the tall, thin man lounging against the table where I’d hidden the flare gun. It was the same figure, edged in silver, who I’d seen following me around school, until I had started to wear the glasses that filtered him out. I blinked to make sure he was really there, and a feeling of intense unease began to uncurl itself inside my middle. This close, I could see it wasn’t just some strange, Annorasi creature like Sonya. He was a man; an awkwardly tall man with long, straggly hair and a very prominent nose.