Volition (7 page)

Now

FOR THE NEXT six days, I couldn’t think of anything for too long without drifting back to what Hayden said about meeting me in my favorite place in New York at sunset.

“That’s so romantic!” Catherine tells me as she flops down on her bed. “Sunset is in an hour, so you’d better get going.”

She’s eating a lollipop, which annoys me to no end because I can hear her slurping on it from across the room.

“I’m not going,” I tell her, not bothering to look up from the thousands of tabs I have open on my computer.

“Yes,” she says, sliding off her bed, “you are.”

She stands in front of me with her arms crossed, and when I make no move to get up from where I’m sitting, she starts slurping incessantly.

“I’m going to keep doing this,” she says. “I’m going to keep doing this until you leave because you need to go meet Hayden Rockefeller at your favorite place at sunset.”

I move my eyes but not my head or my body.

“I think I can handle it until you’re done with that lollipop. So, no, I’m not going.”

I think I’ve won this argument until she traipses back over to one of her drawers near her tiny little kitchen.

“Oh,” she says from across the room, “I have
hundreds
of lollipops.”

She slides the drawer open for me to see and gives me a look to tell me that I am not going to win this argument in any capacity.

I slam my computer shut. “Fine.”

It takes me ten minutes to pull myself together and look presentable enough to go outside. I’m not really going to see Hayden Rockefeller, so it doesn’t matter. I’m simply taking a sunset walk by myself, but Catherine doesn’t need to know that.

“Have fun,” she says to me in a singsong voice like we’re in fifth grade.

I wave to her but roll my eyes as I slam her door shut.

I’m almost smug as I walk four blocks to the subway. There’s a breeze, and my hair keeps blowing around my face, which is making it difficult to see. I want to put it up, but I like using my hair to hide from people that I don’t want to deal with. I want to watch them, but I don’t want them watching me.

I walk down the steps, and immediately, I’m in another world.

I drop a dollar I’ve had crumpled into my hand for three blocks into a tin cup that a grimy homeless man is holding.

He calls out after me, “You stay beautiful, you hear?”

I can’t help but smile.

I get in line behind a mother and her child and swipe my MetroCard through the machine. It’s a cage, and I hate these. I’m always afraid I’ll get stuck in the middle, and I won’t be able to get out. The turnstiles are so much easier and less anxiety-ridden. I push through, and I’m on the other side. The little boy is watching me intently, and I wonder what it would have been like if I had grown up in this city.

Maybe my parents wouldn’t have been driving a car.

Then, they would have been in the subway.

Maybe the subway would have been bombed. Maybe my mother would have fallen over the tracks, and my father would have jumped down to help her.

You can’t cheat death.

You just can’t.

I’m pulled out of my dark reverie when the train arrives. It’s standing room only, but I don’t care. I don’t even wince anymore when I touch the disgusting poles that thousands of people have touched. I barely even need to hang on because my legs have learned how to balance the bouncing of the train. It’s just for comfort.

I’m on the green line uptown to 86
th
Street.

There’s a man walking through the subway cars, asking for money. I swallow, and my heart clenches because I want to give money to everyone who asks, but I know I have to save some for myself because I don’t have a justifiable future yet. Running away from the Hale family fortune isn’t reversible.

I almost miss my stop as I watch the man cross between the cars, and then he walks on the tiny platform that connects them. I hate it when people do that because I just imagine them falling off and under the train.

I hop off the train and follow the crowd up the stairway. This subway is not direct to where I want to go, so I brace myself for the heat as I walk the few blocks. As soon as I see greenery, I know I’m close. The winding paths of Central Park call to me, but I don’t have time to follow them.

People completely cover the steps, making it hard for me to climb up them. I brought only myself and what I can carry in my pockets, so there is no reason for security to check me.

The woman at admissions knows my tricks when I hand her a dollar. It’s much less than the suggested admission price, but only the seasoned New Yorkers know that you can truly donate any amount of money and get in.

I quickly run up the main staircase to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European paintings, and I wind around the walls to the gallery I know so well.

I bypass the Monet and the Van Gogh and go straight to my favorite. The room is empty other than myself—as it usually is. Not many people see the beauty that I see in this room.

I stand in front of it, taking in every brushstroke. I’m not entirely sure why I like it so much. I just do. I’ve always liked it. It was as if my eyes saw it, and my heart sent out strings into the very canvas of this painting, and the closer I am to it, the happier it is.

A museum employee comes to tell me that I’ll need to clear out in the next fifteen minutes, and I nod.

I stand there for what feels like hours as people trickle out, and their voices leave me in silence.

Someone else walks into the room, and I assume it is the woman telling me I need to leave.

“Sorry. I’ll just be a minute.” I half-turn, but the words die on my lips when I see who is standing a mere three feet away from me.

“Pissarro,” Hayden says. “Interesting choice.”

Then

I WAS ENTIRELY responsible for smashing Lara Hale’s most prized pair of vases from 1853.

I was forced to stay at the Hale Plantation the summer before my senior year because I had been barred from staying at school over holiday breaks after Casper crashed his car into the library. I was guilty by association.

I sat at the table with two strangers who supposedly brought my mother into the world. Ironically, neither of them bore any resemblance to her body or soul. I never contributed to dinnertime conversation even though I was required to physically be present if I wanted to eat at all.

“If only she hadn’t married that McKenna,” Lara said wistfully as she pushed her squash around on her plate.

The conversation almost always turned to placing blame on my father.

Of course, it was my father’s fault that my mother was dead.

It was my father’s fault that I was in this world.

Or so Lara Hale believed.

My grandfather, Julian, shot his wife a warning look from across the table. Then, not so subtly, he shifted his gaze to me.

“I’m only saying, she shouldn’t have married him. I told her not to. I would have paid him anything he wanted in order to keep him away from her.”

It was after that comment that I snapped. I calmly stood up, reached out, and threw one of the vases against the floor as hard as I could. In what could have been slow motion, I felt some of the pieces of glass nick my feet, and I held back a smile. It was oddly satisfying to see that many shards of blue glass everywhere. It took away from the perfection that Lara couldn’t stand to have ruined.

“Tate Evaline McKenna! That was a matching set!” Lara was livid.

I would have had to be dumb not to hear the way she put a disappointed emphasis on my last name.

I raised an eyebrow and reached out for the other vase.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said in a calm voice that came from a part of me I wasn’t familiar with. I wasn’t sorry at all.

In seconds, more blue glass was scattered all around the floor, and the crunch beneath my feet as I walked out of the room brought a slight smile to my face.

Mae, the main housekeeper, rushed into the room, looking alarmed. She stopped short when she saw the mess I had made, and she turned her attention to Lara.

“No,” I told her, “I don’t want you to clean it up. It’s
her
house. She knows where the broom is.”

I glanced at Julian as I walked past Mae, but he seemed unconcerned by my behavior. He always was. It was as if he simply expected it. Lara started shouting, and Mae shut the doors to the dining room as she followed me out to the foyer.

“Begging your pardon, Miss McKenna, but I don’t think she could find the broom if her life depended on it,” Mae muttered under her breath.

I was sure she was right, but Lara could always start to learn. I was the biggest mess in her life, and I refused to let her clean me up. I wanted to be the black stain on her family tree.

The sun hadn’t quite set yet, and the orange light on the trees made the drive in front of the plantation look magical. I skipped down the front steps of the house and followed a trail under artfully overgrown trees that made a tunnel over the road. Small amounts of light filtered through, and I felt like I was walking into another world.

I stopped when I reached the cemetery almost on the edge of the property line. The gate was already open, so I swung it shut behind me as I entered. There were headstones that dated back hundreds of years, and most of them were so weathered the inscriptions were unreadable. In the very center, two headstones stood out, gleaming bright white in newness compared to the archaic Hales of the past.

Denny Aidan McKenna.

Margaret Evaline Hale McKenna.

I brushed my hand over the words on my mother’s headstone, tracing each letter with my index finger. It was our standard greeting instead of what it should be.

My father was the first non-Hale to ever be buried inside the Hale pomerium, and it wasn’t without difficulty from Lara. In the end, I wasn’t sure how it happened, but I was grateful they had not been separated.

It could have been worse. There was a mausoleum that was built first before anything else because my ancestors had to worry about hurricanes washing all the dead out. For some reason, that wasn’t relevant anymore since no one expanded on it or built another when it was full.

I nodded to my father’s headstone and sat down in between the two plots. This was a strange custom for Denny, no doubt. His ancestors would have built him a boat, set him along the river, and fired flaming arrows that would have taken him to his watery grave. Here, I knew he would be listless, but he had Maggie. He would endure anything for her.

I looked to my left at my mother’s plot and then to my right at my father’s.

It annoyed me to no end that they were across from one another instead of side by side. This was no doubt Lara’s last act of vengeance against Denny. I could just imagine him trying to reach across to Maggie, never quite able to get there.

That pulled at my heart, and I couldn’t stand it.

The dark and twisty part of me saw an opportunity in a shovel leaning against the far side of the gate.

It was a lot heavier than I expected it to be, so dragging it back to my parents was more difficult than it was supposed to be. I lifted it and dug in deep, expecting to move a lot of earth.

Not much budged, but I had time.

Denny would want to go to Maggie, not the other way around.

“Here goes, Dad.”

I plunged the shovel deeper into the ground, disturbing the grass that grew on top like little strands of green hair.

I wasn’t making much headway, but after ten minutes, I had a small pile of earth dug out, and I was feeling satisfied with myself. It wasn’t like Lara was going to come find me to say good night, so I could stay out until dawn if I wanted to. The sun had mostly set, and I could feel the darkness creeping in with the chill of night.

The metal of the shovel was getting cold, too, and that was creeping into my hands.

I let it.

I braced myself to scoop more dirt when I heard a voice from behind me.

I didn’t move immediately because I was trying to decide whether it was real or a figment of my imagination. No one ever came out to the cemetery, except for me. Well, I knew the gardeners came to groom the shrubs and cut the grass, but I never saw them do it.

“What are you doing?”

This time, I stuck the shovel in the ground in front of me and turned around as I wiped the dirt that had crept up the handle and onto my dress. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

The figure approached, and I could see him more clearly as he stepped into one of the last patches of light the dying sunset provided.

He had shaggy dark hair with even darker eyes. His skin looked tan in a way that mine would never be even if someone sprayed me with chemicals.

He cleared his throat. “It actually looks like you’re digging up a grave, but I might be hallucinating.”

“You’re not,” I told him flatly, pulling the shovel out of the ground.

I didn’t have to look at him to know his eyes went wide, and his brain alerted him to my fifteen shades of crazy.