Envy (Fury) (3 page)

A gust of wind finally shook the flag loose. It flapped open, its edges whipping her face.

“Ow,” Em said to no one, putting her hand to her cheek. But she dropped it and gasped as the flag came into full view. Through the center of it, there was an ugly gash, as though it had been knifed by an animal’s claw. Years of play had never even frayed the material, but here it was, practically shredded.

And then, out of nowhere, the soft chimes of female laughter. Em whipped around, wriggling free as the flag wrapped around her wrist.

“Melissa?” she called out into the dark playground. “JD?”

No answer.

Em swallowed hard. Only a short while ago, in December, she’d been sitting on the swings when she’d found a note in her pocket.
Sometimes sorry isn’t enough.
A note from the Furies. The thought made her palms tighten in fear.

There it was again. That eerie, beautiful laughter.

She knew that sound. She would know it anywhere.

The Furies. They were here.

Why were they back? She’d already been punished. Why show up here, why now? Would they reappear in her life whenever they felt like it? She thought of the fragments of the story she’d shared with JD in the parking lot. Did the Furies know? Had she brought them back?

She swung her head in all directions, but the laughter seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. She started to retreat, moving backward slowly at first and then faster, faster. She turned, leaving the flag. Breathing hard in the night air. She moved toward the park gate, not daring to look behind her.

Suddenly, just before she reached the chain-link fence that bordered the park, a sharp icicle fell from above, soundlessly. Em yelped as it scratched her arm like the tip of a knife. And then icicles were raining down on her, piercing and deadly. Making no sound save the smallest
whoosh
.

She sprinted down the street but then tripped on a branch, landed on all fours, and skidded on the ice. She heard her jeans rip and felt tiny bits of dirt and salt cut into her knee. Her bag
fell from her shoulder. And all the while there was that laughter, shimmering and bouncing like light on a lake. She couldn’t
see
them, but they were here. She could
feel
them.

“Don’t you dare come back here!” she shouted as she shakily got to her feet. “I stopped myself! I kept my promise!” She grabbed her bag from where it had fallen and frantically retrieved the stuff that had tumbled out of it. She could feel how panicked she looked, scrambling around on the dark street for her phone, her powder compact, her keys. It made her angrier. She yelled into the night air, “I’ve paid enough!”

She stumbled the last few yards to her driveway, then in through her front door, slamming it behind her, breathing hard. Only inside, away from the moon and the snow and the tree branches that seemed to grab for her, did the echoing laughter diminish.

Em pulled herself upstairs.
I didn’t do anything wrong this time. I didn’t say too much
, she told herself.
I’m safe.
But somehow she didn’t feel reassured. This was a warning. She put her cold hands to her face in an effort to ease her burning cheeks. Either the flag or the wind had lashed her skin raw.

In the dusky tower of her aunt Nora’s old Victorian on the corner of South Main and Maple streets, Skylar McVoy was unpacking the last of her things from a purple duffel bag. She plugged her iPod charger into the wall, arranged a small collection of nail polishes on the rickety dresser in the corner, then draped a few scarves over the edge of the mirror. She surveyed the room—its hardwood floorboards, the bay window that looked out onto the street below, the full-sized bed with its curved metal frame. Her new home. It would take a while to get used to. The whole place was so . . . New England—wooden, salty, and cold. Nothing like her old home in Alabama, where the wall-to-wall carpeting and cheap plastic furniture seemed to radiate with heat. She shivered, tucking her shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair behind her
ears before pulling the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head. Maybe she’d ask Nora for a space heater.

As if on cue, there was a knock on the bedroom door.

“Come in,” she said, surprised at her aunt’s respect for her privacy. With her mom and Lucy, there had been no knocking, no boundaries.

“How are you settling in?” Nora cast an eye at the scarves, the lineup of Skylar’s shoes at the foot of the bed, the empty suitcases waiting to be shoved into the closet. Skylar was struck, as she always was, by how little Nora looked like her mom. Where her mom was skinny and hard and fake blond, Nora was soft and rounded, with wavy hair that showed just a few streaks of gray. And she smelled of plants. Dirt. In a good way. “Is there enough room in the dresser for your clothes? I put the flannel sheets on the bed—it can get pretty chilly up here.”

“It’s fine, Aunt Nora,” Skylar said, smiling. “Thank you.”

Nora had bought Skylar’s plane ticket the very night her mom had landed in jail for driving drunk—for the third time. “You’ll spend the rest of the school year here,” Nora had said on the phone that evening, “and we’ll see what happens after that.”

But Skylar and Nora had both known the truth: Skylar was moving to Ascension for good. Life in Alabama was bad enough before Lucy’s accident, but over the past year it had gotten unbearable. Her mom had been drinking more than ever, raging around the house when she wasn’t smoking cigarettes listlessly
in front of the television. She’d been bringing home random guys who didn’t even pretend to want to learn Skylar’s name. The emotional distance Skylar had felt for years became physical distance too. She would go days without even seeing her mother; sometimes she didn’t even miss her. Her life had become a nightmare.

In effect, Nora had rescued Skylar. And so Skylar was determined to overlook and grow accustomed to all of her aunt’s oddities, like her eerily encyclopedic knowledge of Ascension’s history and her funny nervous giggle. Not to mention the fact that unlike Skylar’s mom, Nora had a steady job—she was a dental hygienist at a local clinic—and therefore a steady income and a stable routine. Skylar was not used to any of these things.

Before she turned to go, Nora asked, “Would you like some tea? I’m just brewing some downstairs.”

“No thank you,” Skylar said. “I’m not really a tea person. But thank you for offering.”

There she was again, eternally grateful. For so much. Because Nora hadn’t just gotten her out of Alabama. She was giving Skylar a fresh start, a chance to be someone new.

“I’ll drive you to the high school in the morning,” Nora was saying, “in case there’s any additional transfer paperwork we need to fill out. We should leave the house by seven o’clock, okay? Get some sleep, and let me know if you need anything else.” She wrapped her burnt-orange shawl around her shoulders as she left
the room. “Brrrr,” Skylar heard her say as she padded back down the stairs. “What a brutal winter.”

Skylar turned her attention back to her duffel bag, which was almost empty. There at the bottom was a large hardcover edition of
Aesop’s Fables
, one she’d had since she was a kid. She’d always loved these stories, and had once suggested to her mother that she recite one for the talent portion of a beauty pageant. Her mom had scoffed. “You think anyone wants to hear you run your mouth?” Skylar had tap-danced instead.

She opened the book and flipped through, looking at the familiar pictures inside. “The Fox and the Grapes.” “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” She smiled and leafed through more pages. She’d always found comfort in stories.

And then, horrified, she dropped the book to the floor with a loud thud. A photograph that had been wedged between its pages skittered out onto the floor. It was a picture of her and Lucy before last year’s statewide pageant, the terrible night when everything went wrong. Her: short and a little chubby, flat-chested, and looking off to the side. Lucy: tall, shapely, and gorgeous, beaming a smile at the camera with her painted red lips, her arm slung around Skylar’s neck.

As always, Skylar marveled at Lucy’s effortless beauty. “It’s too bad Lucy got most of my features,” her mom had slurred, more than once. Her mother had been a pageant queen too, before the smoking dulled her skin and the booze deadened her eyes. She’d
pushed both her daughters to fulfill the dreams she’d killed for herself, entering them into beauty contests and talent competitions as soon as they could walk. For Skylar, they’d been repeated exercises in humiliation and rejection. But Lucy had excelled, wowing the judges with her easy grace, assertive strut, and killer dance moves. Lucy had everyone convinced she was perfect.

Almost everyone.

Skylar shuddered. How had this photo ended up with her things? She looked up and saw herself in the mirror. Nothing about her glowed. Her forehead was crinkled in concentration, her shoulders tight, hair limp. She could find none of Lucy’s confidence in her own reflection.

No. The memory of that life was not going to follow her to Maine. Lucy couldn’t cast a shadow on her now—not this far away.

Things would be different here.

Skylar walked to the trash can in the corner of her new room. Calmly and deliberately, she began to tear the photo apart. She ripped it into tiny pieces, and then she shredded even those, until there was nothing but a pile of glossy confetti in her hands.

It felt shockingly good to destroy the photo, in the same way that losing fifteen pounds, painstakingly, over the past year, had felt good; in the same way that the flight from Alabama to Maine had given her a guilty sense of relief. While she’d been flying through the air, her mother had sat behind bars.

Skylar gulped back a lump in her throat as she started laying out her outfit for the morning: a pretty white peasant blouse from Free People, a pink cardigan, her favorite dark-wash jeans, and gray ankle boots.

She had a chance to rebuild her life—no, to build a life, period. To be accepted. To be loved. Her eyes fell on a long silver necklace, and she smiled as she placed it next to the white blouse. Yes. At Ascension High, she would sparkle.

•  •  •

It wasn’t like she’d never walked up stairs before. But the next morning Skylar’s coordination was off, and at 9:18, between first and second periods, Skylar made her first big mistake: She tripped
up
a flight of stairs.
Boom.

She launched forward, catching herself on her palms but practically face-planting. She looked behind her—nothing but a sea of nameless faces, moving together toward their next class. Somebody’s boot struck her bag, and she scrambled to retrieve it before it tumbled down the steps. She got up and brushed herself off, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, her face burning with embarrassment.

Not that things had been going great before that. Her short meeting with Aunt Nora and the Ascension High principal had been less than reassuring. Principal Noyes had seemed doubtful that Skylar would be able to catch up in some of her classes; she’d suggested Skylar might have to take summer school. Then
Skylar had gotten lost trying to find math, first period. And now stairwell humiliation. She could have been wearing an invisible cloak and she still would have felt like she was being trailed by a spotlight.

After second period—French—Skylar found herself speed-walking through an otherwise empty hallway in what she thought must be the science wing, based on the fact that she’d just seen a portable skeleton dangling in one of the classrooms. The bell had sounded more than ten minutes ago, but she’d gotten lost making her way through the hallways. She was late for Honors Biology, if she could ever find it. She pulled out her crumpled class schedule, comparing the information there with the numbers on the doors. Finally she made her way to room 209. She opened the heavy wooden door with an apologetic expression, only to be greeted by twenty quizzical faces—and no indication that this was a biology classroom.

“Can I help you?” The teacher, a distracted-looking man with glasses and chalk on his wrist, turned away from the equation on the board to face her.

“Um, yeah, I’m looking for . . . is this . . . I think I’m in the wrong place,” she stuttered. The symbols scrawled on the board made it clear that this was a math class. She’d already had geometry first period.

The teacher didn’t say anything—he seemed to be waiting for her to leave. The other kids—who, Skylar noticed to
her embarrassment, looked older than her—kept staring at her blankly. Well, not just blankly. The girls looked her up and down. She was frozen with humiliation, and her cheeks were burning. She was sure they matched her pink sweater.

“Okay, thanks, sorry to interrupt.” She knew that she should ask for directions. If this wasn’t the science wing, then where was she? But she couldn’t stand the idea of being on display even a second longer. She felt as exposed as the skeleton she’d seen just a minute ago, as though she’d been cut open straight through the gut. She turned to go.

And then a perky voice rang out across the classroom. “Where are you supposed to be, anyway? Maybe I can help. Right, Mr. Marshall? May I be excused for a few minutes? I really
get
this section anyway.”

The voice came from a girl with a head of tousled blond curls. She looked just like an angel, Skylar thought, with a perfect, round face and sparkling blue eyes. The girl gave her a little wink, and Skylar breathed for the first time in what felt like minutes.

The teacher rolled his eyes. “I suppose so, Gabby. Just don’t use this as an excuse to meet Ms. Winters for a hallway powwow. I expect you back here in five minutes.”

“Obviously,” Gabby said with a grin and a roll of her eyes. “Em’s in English right now, anyway. She’d never bail.” There were some appreciative snickers as Gabby sailed over to Skylar.
“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing Skylar’s arm and tugging her out the door like they were on some kind of bonding mission, not complete strangers.

Out in the hallway Skylar fumbled for something to say. She was angry with herself for being nervous. Fortunately, the pretty blond girl saved her the effort of speaking first.