Eliza’s jade eyes widen. A short laugh of disbelief cracks her perfect rosy lips.
“She didn’t tell you?” She seems genuinely surprised. She’s lying, I think. My mother would have told me something that important about herself.
A cruel voice inside my head mocks: Like she did about everything else?
“Next thing you know, she’ll say she’s never heard her mother was the Catalyst,” Eliza says under her breath.
“All right—” George says at the same time that Chase says, “Bold words from a Patton,” but Mrs. Percy has stopped the music and is walking toward us.
“Wasn’t that helpful?” she chirps. “Let’s thank the upperclassmen for joining us today. We can learn so much from those who have gone before us.”
“It’s always such a pleasure,” Eliza says, raising an eyebrow. “I love teaching people things they never knew before.” With a final wave, she and Chase leave, buoyed by the applause of the class.
Something acidic is rising in my throat. I gulp down a breath, trying to pull out the seeds Eliza has left scattered behind her.
But I can already feel them sprouting as I practice steps with George for the rest of class. “Don’t listen to her,” George says, attempting to cheer me with spot-on impressions of Principal Cleary. I smile weakly at him, but by the time gym is over, Eliza’s seeds have sprouted roots and split into branches: one of doubt, the other of bitterness. For Mother. For Eliza.
For me and my endless naïveté.
I am standing in front of the tournament sheet when George catches up to me. He wisely doesn’t say anything about the tears running down my cheeks. I dab at them angrily with the heels of my hands.
Aila Quinn, I write at the bottom of the list under “Stars.”
Chapter Fourteen
That night at dinner Miles and I are both quiet. We push the food around on our plates and give such halfhearted answers that soon Mrs. Cliffton stops attempting to draw us out. Will stayed late at the library to work on a group project, so he is not there to fill our gaping silences. I find myself wondering when he will be back. And if Eliza is there, too.
“Well, I have some work to catch up on anyway,” Dr. Cliffton says in response to our silence. “Maybe we’ll hold game night tomorrow.” So we each retire to our rooms as soon as dinner is over.
I brush my teeth in front of the blank wall, thinking about Miles’s silence at dinner and wondering if someone at school has gotten to him, too. I throw on my bathrobe, tie the sash firmly around my waist, and head down the hallway to rap on his door.
“Who is it?” he calls.
“It’s me. Can I come in?” When he doesn’t answer, I push the door open anyway.
He is sitting on the floor, drawing.
“Is . . . everything okay?” I close the door behind me.
“Yeah.”
The tip of his pencil is flaming orange, but the lines that appear beneath it are nothing but a sooty gray. He keeps drawing more lines, as if the color will start seeping out after a rusty start.
He tosses the orange and pulls out a deep teal, the one he always uses for the ocean or mixes with gray when he’s drawing my eyes. It leaves a smear down the page as dingy as old, dirty snow. The red pencil yields something more like smoke.
“Those aren’t the ones Will bought for you at the Marketplace, are they?”
He shakes his head. “No. These are from home.” He reaches his hand under the bed and retrieves a wooden box. “These are the new ones.” He opens them and pulls out a red. He uses his old pencils to draw the stick figure of a girl, then opens the new one and gives her deep red hair. Mother’s hair. The Variant pencils are brighter than I ever remember the original colors being.
“You want to talk?” I ask.
He shakes his head again.
“Okay. Come find me if you change your mind.”
He doesn’t look up. “’Night.” He’s returned to his old pencils, drawing streaks of gray over and over across the page.
But it’s Miles’s knocking that wakes me in the morning.
