Beautiful Creatures, Page 3

  I listened to the steady patter of rain on the roof. There wasn’t another sound in the room. Amma rapped her pencil on the table.

  “Nine letters. Confinement or pain exacted for wrongdoin’.” She shot me another look. I shoveled a spoonful of potatoes into my mouth. I knew what was coming. Nine across.

  “C. A. S. T. I. G. A. T. E. As in, punish. As in, if you can’t get yourself to school on time, you won’t be leavin’ this house.”

  I wondered who had called to tell her I was late, or more likely who hadn’t called. She sharpened her pencil, even though it was already sharp, grinding it into her old automatic sharpener on the counter. She was still pointedly Not Looking at me, which was even worse than staring me right in the eye.

  I walked over to where she was grinding and put my arm around her, giving her a good squeeze. “Come on, Amma. Don’t be mad. It was pouring this morning. You wouldn’t want us speeding in the rain, would you?”

  She raised an eyebrow, but her expression softened. “Well, it looks like it’ll be rainin’ from now until the day after you cut that hair, so you better figure out a way to get yourself to school before that bell rings.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I gave her one last squeeze and went back to my cold potatoes. “You’ll never believe what happened today. We got a new girl in our class.” I don’t know why I said it. I guess it was still on my mind.

  “You think I don’t know about Lena Duchannes?” I choked on my biscuit. Lena Duchannes. Pronounced, in the South, to rhyme with rain. The way Amma rolled it out, you would have thought the word had an extra syllable. Du-kay-yane.

  “Is that her name? Lena?”

  Amma pushed a glass of chocolate milk in my direction. “Yes and no and it’s none a your business. You shouldn’t be messin’ with things you don’t know anything about, Ethan Wate.”

  Amma always spoke in riddles, and she never gave you anything more than that. I hadn’t been to her house in Wader’s Creek since I was a kid, but I knew most of the people in town had. Amma was the most respected tarot card reader within a hundred miles of Gatlin, just like her mother before her and her grandmother before her. Six generations of card readers. Gatlin was full of God-fearing Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, but they couldn’t resist the lure of the cards, the possibility of changing the course of their own destiny. Because that’s what they believed a powerful reader could do. And Amma was nothing if not a force to be reckoned with.

  Sometimes I’d find one of her homemade charms in my sock drawer or hanging above the door of my father’s study. I had only asked what they were for once. My dad teased Amma whenever he found one, but I noticed that he never took any of them down. “Better safe than sorry.” I guess he meant safe from Amma, who could make you plenty sorry.

  “Did you hear anything else about her?”

  “You watch yourself. One day you’re gonna pick a hole in the sky and the universe is gonna fall right through. Then we’ll all be in a fix.”

  My father shuffled into the kitchen in his pajamas. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took a box of Shredded Wheat out of the pantry. I could see the yellow wax earplugs still stuck in his ears. The Shredded Wheat meant he was about to start his day. The earplugs meant it hadn’t really started yet.

  I leaned over and whispered to Amma, “What did you hear?”

  She yanked my plate away and took it to the sink. She rinsed some bones that looked like pork shoulder, which was weird since we’d had chicken tonight, and put them on a plate. “That’s none a your concern. What I’d like to know is why you’re so interested.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not, really. Just curious.”

  “You know what they say about curiosity.” She stuck a fork in my piece of buttermilk pie. Then she shot me the Look, and was gone.

  Even my father noticed the kitchen door swinging in her wake, and pulled an earplug out of one ear. “How was school?”

  “Fine.”

  “What did you do to Amma?”

  “I was late for school.”

  He studied my face. I studied his.

  “Number 2?”

  I nodded.

  “Sharp?”

  “Started out sharp and then she sharpened it.” I sighed. My dad almost smiled, which was rare. I felt a surge of relief, maybe even accomplishment.

  “Know how many times I sat at this old table while she pulled a pencil on me when I was a kid?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question. The table, nicked and flecked with paint and glue and marker from all the Wates leading up to me, was one of the oldest things in the house.

  I smiled. My dad picked up his cereal bowl and waved his spoon in my direction. Amma had raised my father, a fact I’d been reminded of every time I even thought about sassing her when I was a kid.

  “M. Y. R. I. A. D.” He spelled out the word as he dumped his bowl into the sink. “P. L. E. T. H. O. R. A. As in, more than you, Ethan Wate.”

  As he stepped into the kitchen light, the half-smile faded to a quarter, and then it was gone. He looked even worse than usual. The shadows on his face were darker, and you could see the bones under his skin. His face was a pallid green from never leaving the house. He looked a little bit like a living corpse, as he had for months now. It was hard to remember that he was the same person who used to sit with me for hours on the shores of Lake Moultrie, eating chicken salad sandwiches and teaching me how to cast a fishing line. “Back and forth. Ten and two. Ten and two. Like the hands of a clock.” The last five months had been hard for him. He had really loved my mother. But so had I.

  My dad picked up his coffee and started to shuffle back toward his study. It was time to face facts. Maybe Macon Ravenwood wasn’t the only town shut-in. I didn’t think our town was big enough for two Boo Radleys. But this was the closest thing to a conversation we’d had in months, and I didn’t want him to go.

  “How’s the book coming?” I blurted out. Stay and talk to me. That’s what I meant.

  He looked surprised, then shrugged. “It’s coming. Still got a lot of work to do.” He couldn’t. That’s what he meant.

  “Macon Ravenwood’s niece just moved to town.” I said the words just as he put his earplug back in. Out of sync, our usual timing. Come to think of it, that had been my timing with most people lately.

  My dad pulled out the earplug, sighed, and pulled out the other. “What?” He was already walking back to his study. The meter on our conversation was running out.

  “Macon Ravenwood, what do you know about him?”

  “Same as everyone else, I guess. He’s a recluse. He hasn’t left Ravenwood Manor in years, as far as I know.” He pushed open the study door and stepped over the threshold, but I didn’t follow him. I just stood in the doorway.

  I never set foot in there. Once, just once, when I was seven years old, my dad had caught me reading his novel before he had finished revising it. His study was a dark, frightening place. There was a painting that he always kept covered with a sheet over the threadbare Victorian sofa. I knew never to ask what was underneath the sheet. Past the sofa, close to the window, my father’s desk was carved mahogany, another antique that had been handed down along with our house, from generation to generation. And books, old leather-bound books that were so heavy they rested on a huge wooden stand when they were open. Those were the things that kept us bound to Gatlin, and bound to Wate’s Landing, just as they had bound my ancestors for more than a hundred years.

  On the desk was his manuscript. It had been sitting there, in an open cardboard box, and I just had to know what was in it. My dad wrote gothic horror, so there wasn’t much he wrote that was okay for a seven-year-old to read. But every house in Gatlin was full of secrets, just like the South itself, and my house was no exception, even back then.

  My dad had found me, curled up on the couch in his study, pages spread all around me like a bottle rocket had exploded in the box. I didn’t know enough to cover my tracks, something I learned pretty quickly after that. I
just remember him yelling at me, and my mom coming out to find me crying in the old magnolia tree in our backyard. “Some things are private, Ethan. Even for grown-ups.”

  I had just wanted to know. That had always been my problem. Even now. I wanted to know why my dad never came out of his study. I wanted to know why we couldn’t leave this worthless old house just because a million Wates had lived here before us, especially now that my mom was gone.

  But not tonight. Tonight I just wanted to remember chicken salad sandwiches and ten and two and a time when my dad ate his Shredded Wheat in the kitchen, joking around with me. I fell asleep remembering.

  Before the bell even rang the next day, Lena Duchannes was all everyone at Jackson could talk about. Somehow between storms and power outages, Loretta Snow and Eugenie Asher, Savannah’s and Emily’s mothers, had managed to get supper on the table and call just about everyone in town to let them know that crazy Macon Ravenwood’s “relation” was driving around Gatlin in his hearse, which they were sure he used to transport dead bodies in when no one was watching. From there it just got wilder.

  There are two things you can always count on in Gatlin. One, you can be different, even crazy, as long as you come out of the house every now and then, so folks don’t think you’re an axe murderer. Two, if there’s a story to tell, you can be sure there’ll be someone to tell it. A new girl in town, moving into the Haunted Mansion with the town shut-in, that’s a story, probably the biggest story to hit Gatlin since my mom’s accident. So I don’t know why I was surprised when everyone was talking about her—everyone except the guys. They had business to attend to first.

  “So, what’ve we got, Em?” Link slammed his locker door.

  “Countin’ cheerleadin’ tryouts, looks like four 8’s, three 7’s, and a handful a 4’s.” Emory didn’t bother to count the freshman girls he rated below a four.

  I slammed my locker door. “This is news? Aren’t these the same girls we see at the Dar-ee Keen every Saturday?”

  Emory smiled, and clapped his hand on my shoulder. “But they’re in the game now, Wate.” He looked at the girls in the hall. “And I’m ready to play.” Emory was mostly all talk. Last year, when we were freshmen, all we heard about were the hot seniors he thought he was going to hook up with now that he’d made JV. Em was as delusional as Link, but not as harmless. He had a mean streak; all the Watkinses did.

  Shawn shook his head. “Like pickin’ peaches off the vine.”

  “Peaches grow on trees.” I was already annoyed, maybe because I’d met up with the guys at the Stop & Steal magazine stand before school and been subjected to this same conversation while Earl flipped through issues of the only thing he ever read—magazines featuring girls in bikinis, lying across the hoods of cars.

  Shawn looked at me, confused. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  I don’t know why I even bothered. It was a stupid conversation, the same way it was stupid that all the guys had to meet up before school on Wednesday mornings. It was something I’d come to think of as roll call. A few things were expected if you were on the team. You sat together in the lunchroom. You went to Savannah Snow’s parties, asked a cheerleader to the winter formal, hung out at Lake Moultrie on the last day of school. You could bail on almost anything else, if you showed up for roll call. Only it was getting harder and harder for me to show up, and I didn’t know why.

  I still hadn’t come up with the answer when I saw her.

  Even if I hadn’t seen her, I’d have known she was there because the hallway, which was usually crammed with people rushing to their lockers and trying to make it to class before the second bell, cleared out in a matter of seconds. Everyone actually stepped aside when she came down the hall. Like she was a rock star.

  Or a leper.

  But all I could see was a beautiful girl in a long gray dress, under a white track jacket with the word Munich sewn on it, and beat-up black Converse peeking out underneath. A girl who wore a long silver chain around her neck, with tons of stuff dangling from it—a plastic ring from a bubblegum machine, a safety pin, and a bunch of other junk I was too far away to see. A girl who didn’t look like she belonged in Gatlin. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Macon Ravenwood’s niece. What was wrong with me?

  She tucked her dark curls behind her ear, black nail polish catching the fluorescent light. Her hands were covered with black ink, like she had written on them. She walked down the hall as if we were invisible. She had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, so green they could’ve been considered some new color altogether.

  “Yeah, she’s hot,” said Billy.

  I knew what they were thinking. For a second, they were thinking about dumping their girlfriends for the chance to hit on her. For a second, she was a possibility.

  Earl gave her the once-over, then slammed his locker door. “If you ignore the fact that she’s a freak.”

  There was something about the way he said it, or more like, the reason he said it. She was a freak because she wasn’t from Gatlin, because she wasn’t scrambling to make it onto the cheer squad, because she hadn’t given him a second look, or even a first. On any other day, I would’ve ignored him and kept my mouth shut, but today I didn’t feel like shutting up.

  “So she’s automatically a freak, why? Because she doesn’t have on the uniform, blond hair and a short skirt?”

  Earl’s face was easy to read. This was one of those times when I was supposed to follow his lead, and I wasn’t holding up my end of our unspoken agreement. “Because she’s a Ravenwood.”

  The message was clear. Hot, but don’t even think about it. She wasn’t a possibility anymore. Still, that didn’t keep them from looking, and they were all looking. The hallway, and everyone in it, had locked in on her as if she was a deer caught in the crosshairs.

  But she just kept walking, her necklace jingling around her neck.

  Minutes later, I stood in the doorway of my English class. There she was. Lena Duchannes. The new girl, who would still be called that fifty years from now, if she wasn’t still called Old Man Ravenwood’s niece, handing a pink transfer slip to Mrs. English, who squinted to read it.

  “They messed up my schedule and I didn’t have an English class,” she was saying. “I had U.S. History for two periods, and I already took U.S. History at my old school.” She sounded frustrated, and I tried not to smile. She’d never had U.S. History, not the way Mr. Lee taught it.

  “Of course. Take any open seat.” Mrs. English handed her a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The book looked like it had never been opened, which it probably hadn’t since they’d made it into a movie.

  The new girl looked up and caught me watching her. I looked away, but it was too late. I tried not to smile, but I was embarrassed, and that only made me smile more. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “That’s okay, I brought my own.” She pulled out a copy of the book, hardback, with a tree etched on the cover. It looked really old and worn, like she had read it more than once. “It’s one of my favorite books.” She just said it, like it wasn’t weird. Now I was staring.

  I felt a steamroller plow into my back, and Emily pushed through the doorway as if I wasn’t standing there, which was her way of saying hello and expecting me to follow her to the back of the room, where our friends were sitting.

  The new girl sat down in an empty seat in the first row, in the No Man’s Land in front of Mrs. English’s desk. Wrong move. Everybody knew not to sit there. Mrs. English had one glass eye, and the terrible hearing you get if your family runs the only shooting range in the county. If you sat anywhere else but right in front of her desk, she couldn’t see you and she wouldn’t call on you. Lena was going to have to answer questions for the whole class.

  Emily looked amused and went out of her way to walk past her seat, kicking over Lena’s bag, sending her books sliding across the aisle.

  “Whoops.” Emily bent down, picking up a battered spiral notebook that was one tear away from losing its
cover. She held it up like it was a dead mouse. “Lena Duchannes. Is that your name? I thought it was Ravenwood.”

  Lena looked up, slowly. “Can I have my book?”

  Emily flipped through the pages, as if she didn’t hear her. “Is this your journal? Are you a writer? That’s so great.”

  Lena reached out her hand. “Please.”

  Emily snapped the book shut, and held it away from her. “Can I just borrow this for a minute? I’d love to read somethin’ you wrote.”

  “I’d like it back now. Please.” Lena stood up. Things were going to get interesting. Old Man Ravenwood’s niece was about to dig herself into the kind of hole there was no climbing back out of; nobody had a memory like Emily.

  “First you’d have to be able to read.” I grabbed the journal out of Emily’s hand and handed it back to Lena.

  Then I sat down in the desk next to her, right there in No Man’s Land. Good-Eye Side. Emily looked at me in disbelief. I don’t know why I did it. I was just as shocked as she was. I’d never sat in the front of any class in my life. The bell rang before Emily could say anything, but it didn’t matter; I knew I’d pay for it later. Lena opened her notebook and ignored both of us.

  “Can we get started, people?” Mrs. English looked up from her desk.

  Emily slunk to her usual seat in the back, far enough from the front that she wouldn’t have to answer any questions the whole year, and today, far enough from Old Man Ravenwood’s niece. And now, far enough from me. Which felt kind of liberating, even if I had to analyze Jem and Scout’s relationship for fifty minutes without having read the chapter.

  When the bell rang, I turned to Lena. I don’t know what I thought I was going to say. Maybe I was expecting her to thank me. But she didn’t say anything as she shoved her books back into her bag.

  156. It wasn’t a word she had written on the back of her hand.