Envy (Fury) (12 page)

Em was in the kitchen too; Skylar had seen her when she first came in. Em had been friendly enough, but Skylar couldn’t help feeling that Em didn’t like her very much. She just wasn’t very warm. Nothing like Gabby. Skylar had a hard time understanding their friendship. One so bubbly, the other so . . . dark. It was like Em carried a heavy weight with her everywhere she went. Aunt Nora would say Em’s aura was off.

Not that she wasn’t absolutely beautiful. Tonight, with her flawless skin glowing against a dark-purple-and-black silk robe, which she’d worn over black leggings, Em looked sophisticated, urban, and lovely. Effortlessly cool.

“I’m going to go see if Gabby needs help in the kitchen,” Skylar told group. She didn’t want to hover, but she was dying for a chance to talk to Pierce, who hadn’t even said hello when he walked in the door. “Do you guys want the rest of my cards?”

In the kitchen Skylar found Gabby laughing and picking up a popcorn explosion from the tiled floor. “Whoops! Men overboard!”

Skylar squatted down to help Gabby, tugging on the back of
her shorts to make sure she wasn’t showing her crack to the rest of the room.

Just then Em came up behind them.

“Here’s a dustpan,” Em said, holding out a little pan and broom. “Might be a bit faster.”

Of
course
Em would come to the rescue,
Skylar thought, feeling unreasonably resentful. Like Gabby couldn’t have found a dustpan herself.

“Thanks, Emmy!” Gabby swept the rest of the mess up quickly. “Much better. Now, should I try some cayenne on the next batch?”

“The spicier the better, Gabs,” Em said. “But you’ll have to tell me how it turns out. I’m heading home.”

Em never stuck around, Skylar noticed. She was always leaving early—when she showed up at all.

“Already? But Em, it’s only, like, nine p.m.!” Gabby pouted. “Guys, should Em leave yet?” she asked the whole kitchen.

“Thanks, sweetie, but I’ve really gotta go. I have a ton of studying to do tomorrow.” Em started to wrap her scarf around her neck.
“À beintôt, escargot.”
She gave Gabby a hug and a kiss on the cheek and smiled at Skylar. And then she was gone, to a chorus of “Bye, Winters!” before Gabby could protest any more.

“What’s that
‘bien escargot’
thing?” Skylar asked, feeling the need to fill the air left in Em’s wake.

“Oh, it’s Em’s special way of saying bye to me,” Gabby said with a smile. “We’ve been doing it forever.”

How nice.
Skylar made her way to the fridge. “Do you want me to make one more batch of the toffee-peanut kind?” she asked Gabby, desperate to be helpful. Gabby responded with a thumbs-up before running back into the living room, where someone had just called her name.

“Need help opening that?” Pierce suddenly appeared next to her, motioning to the jar of toffee sauce. She looked dizzily back and forth between him and the jar, so giddy at his approach that she didn’t immediately grasp what he was talking about. Then she understood: He was being chivalrous.

“Sure,” she said, heart leaping, even though she’d watched her mother crack open beer bottles on countertops more times than she’d care to admit. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said, towering over her and tensing his muscles as he twisted the lid. “Having fun?”

“Totally,” she said, nodding eagerly. “And I’m excited for my party next week too.”

“Oh yeah.” Pierce looked like he was just remembering it. “That’ll be fun.” He handed her the bottle and her brain spun as she tried to think of what to say next.

“So . . . are you guys, like, practicing?”

He looked at her, puzzled. “Practicing?”

“I mean, I know it’s not football season, but do you guys
practice during the off-season?”
Shit.
She sounded like a total tool.

“Oh. Um, a little. We do once-a-week gym sessions on Saturday mornings,” Pierce said, before turning to go. “Be right back—bathroom break.”

Great. Her sparkling conversational skills had done it again. She wondered if she should join the poker game so she could spend more time with him when he got back. But the table full of guys was intimidating. . . . And she barely knew how to play poker.

As Skylar went to get a mixing bowl from the cupboard, she saw herself in a small mirror that hung next to the kitchen doorway. She stopped short. She was a mess. Her forehead was shiny, her bouncy curls had fallen flat, her eyes had the dull glaze of someone who’d had beer for dinner. She saw herself in a whole different light. The skimpy spaghetti-strap top, the booty shorts. The garish green. The lace. She looked like she was trying too hard. No wonder Pierce had avoided her like the plague all night!

She changed her course immediately and left the kitchen, sneaking up to Gabby’s bathroom on the second floor. She needed to clean herself up.

In the bathroom’s harsh light she ran a comb through her hair and blotted away the oil with a piece of toilet paper. She took a deep breath and drank a Dixie cup full of water. When she got
downstairs, she would put on her sweatshirt. It didn’t match, but who cared? At least she’d maybe feel more comfortable.

She was on her way back to the staircase when she heard Gabby’s voice, and another muffled one, coming from Gabby’s room. Skylar listened more closely. There was no mistaking it. That was Pierce’s voice. What were they doing up here? Her stomach flipped. Were they talking about
her
?

She tiptoed down the hall and tried to peer through the crack in the door, which wasn’t fully closed.

Everything froze: her heart, her blood, her thoughts.

There was Pierce, leaning toward Gabby for a kiss. And Gabby reaching her arms toward his chest, as though she wanted to pull him closer. . . .

Skylar was about to burst into the room—she couldn’t control herself—but then she saw that Gabby wasn’t pulling Pierce in, she was pushing him away. She stopped herself just in time to watch Gabby say, “No, I’m sorry. Pierce, I just don’t like you that way.”

She scurried away before either of them could see her. Blinded by disappointment, she stumbled down the stairs. Of course Pierce liked Gabby. Could anything be more obvious? She had to get out of here, but she didn’t know how she would get home. She couldn’t walk—it was at least five miles from Gabby’s house to hers, it was already after ten o’clock, and she was dressed in her ridiculous pajamas. Calling her aunt would be
humiliating. She thought about calling Meg; she was certain that Meg wouldn’t judge her, no matter how stupid she felt.

As if on cue, her phone beeped from the tiny pocket in her shorts. It was a text from Meg:
Hope ur having fun taking over Ascension’s social scene! Just remember—if they can have it all, so can u!

It reminded Skylar of what they’d talked about on that first day, in the ice cream shop.

I’d do anything to be one of them
, Skylar had said.

Anything. And so she took a deep breath; planted a brave, giant, pageant-style smile on her face; and stayed.

As she left Gabby’s pajama party Em wrapped her silk robe tighter around her. The heat must have been cranked in there; the cold air was a shock. She felt bad taking off, but she was feeling too restless to enjoy it.

As she pulled up to her house, she glanced next door out of habit. JD’s Volvo was in his driveway, parked next to the Mustang, which had a tarp pulled over it. His metal toolbox was sitting out in the open. She shook her head. It wasn’t like JD to leave things lying around.

Upstairs, she put her long hair into a braid and sat down at her desk, which she was finally using for its assigned purpose, and not just for clothing storage. She looked for the millionth time toward JD’s window. The window where they’d once hung
a string across to her window to transmit messages. The window where his blinds had been down for three weeks. Where his light was glowing warmly from behind the shade. She wanted to reach out and touch the glass.

The week had been quiet—no creepy messages left on her windshield, no deadly icicles launched by unseen demons. She’d spent much of the week driving around with Drea, listening to what Drea called “math rock”—long, intricate songs that switched gears frequently, never able to settle on one theme or rhythm—and waiting for the Furies to appear. But nothing happened. Em was starting to wonder if she could make the Furies disappear simply by the force of her will.

She surveyed the piles of books and photocopies and maps that she’d borrowed from Drea—their collection of disparate and confusing anecdotes. How was it possible to have so much information but so few answers?

She started flipping through the journal, rereading some old entries. A few days ago she’d made a list of everything she knew about the Furies. She was tracing the chain of events, to figure out when, and why, the Furies had suddenly appeared. This week Em had gone to the local library and tried to find evidence of the story Skylar had told—the one about three sisters burning in the Haunted Woods. On ancient microfiche, she’d found a mention of a fire in the early 1700s, set by townspeople, in which three “disreputable” local women died. She wondered if
she should talk to Skylar’s aunt and try to find out more about this piece of Ascension’s history. But she was wary of digging deeper. The slightest slip could enrage the Furies even further. When she’d
almost
blurted out something to JD about what had happened that night at the Behemoth, the Furies had come back with a vengeance to torture her. She couldn’t put anyone else at risk. She had to do this herself.

Of course, in their most recent incarnation, the Furies seemed to have been drawn to Ascension to punish Chase. But was he the first? And why had they been drawn to punish him? Surely there’d been other sinners in Ascension before him. Em knew that the gap in her knowledge about the Furies spanned centuries between the goddesses’ origin and their current presence in town. Why had they come back now? On whose order? And what would it take to make them leave?

With a groan, she leaned forward in her chair, resting her head in her arms on the desk. She was tired, but she didn’t feel like sleeping. So she sat up, grabbed her journal and a pen, and started writing.

The poem came quickly. Images and sensations—snow, skin, the light in JD’s window, the words scrawled on her car, the feeling of being trapped in a cycle that was cruel and unfair—swirled together and landed on the page. She could tell this one was good.

She titled it “The Fairest.”

It made her feel a little better. But still something was squirming inside of her. Some missing link was calling her, and she needed to find it.

As she started to close her journal, a phone number stood out among the scribblings—Crow’s. With a burst of inspiration, she remembered JD telling her when they were freshmen about a brilliant slacker in his computer science class. It was Crow.

Em stared at the number for a few seconds, pondering his rebelliousness and hatching a plan even as she dialed his number.

“Hello?” He answered the phone like she was waking him up from a deep sleep.

“Hey, Crow, this is Em.” Nothing. “Emily? Winters? Drea’s friend?”

He made a sound of recognition. “Your Highness! How may I serve you?” He chuckled softly at his own hilarity.

She pursed her lips and pressed on, ignoring him. “I have a favor to ask you,” she said. “It has to do with . . . information gathering.”

“Will you pay me?” Crow asked.

The question took Em by surprise. “Um, I guess,” she said, wondering how much she could borrow from her parents without raising suspicion.

“I take multiple forms of currency,” he said, his voice dripping with innuendo.

“That’s charming, really,” Em snapped. “How about the
currency of my respect, which you are currently not earning?”

Crow whistled. “Hoo-ee. We’ve got a live one! Okay, okay. What do you need?”

Em took a breath. What did she have to lose? “I need you to hack the USM library computers and retrieve one single piece of information. I need to know who was in the antiquities library on November fifteenth. There’s a book missing and I need to know who took it.”

“School assignments sure have changed since I, ah, removed myself from the system,” he said thoughtfully. “What book?”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?” Em sat down with relief, realizing as she did so that she’d been pacing her bedroom for the whole conversation.

“What book?” Crow asked again, insistently.

Exasperated, Em told him.

He was silent again. And then, “All right, I’ll do it.” She could have embraced him, right then and there. “But I need one thing from you in return.”

“What?” she asked warily.

“If I get caught, you don’t tell anyone I was doing it for you. Your Highness.”

She shook her head and hung up.

Thrilled to have put at least one plan in motion, she felt a sense of purpose that had been missing in her life for weeks. Her eyes went to the window again.

Knowing that JD was home made her ache with agitation. Was that a shadow in his window? Her legs shook, and she squeezed her hands together, trying to tamp down her energy.

In an attempt to create some order, she started organizing the papers on the desk. She shuffled them into piles: literary examples, local clippings, her personal run-ins with the Furies. As she did so a small scrap of paper floated to the floor. She bent down to pick it up. It was the note he’d left her in the wake of their fight a few months ago.
I just want to make you happy. Always. JD.
She remembered how she’d felt when she first read those words. Filled with desire and longing. She should have gone over and jumped into his arms right then and there.

Always.
The word inspired a sudden flash of hope. If JD had felt so strongly, those feelings couldn’t have just disappeared, right? She had to try again. She had to prove herself to him, make him realize that this was real, and that their connection wasn’t going to fade. It
couldn’t
fade. She could practically see him from her window. It would be pathetic not to try again, not to make him forgive her for the horrible things he seemed to think she had done. Somewhere, deep down, he must still know that they were meant to be together. She just had to uncover that buried feeling and bring it back to the surface.