A hot, tight feeling seizes my chest.
“She hemorrhaged in labor.” I can’t bear to look at Gwenna as I speak. “It was very fast, very sudden. They said she took her last breath before I took my first.”
“Oh, Kingston.”
I realize I’m still holding my pen. I set it down, then hold the notebook firmly in place so I can tear out the ruined page along the binding.
Which reveals the page behind it.
Blood oranges = preferred fruit (winter)
Prefers skirts to pants (hard to find tall women’s inseams)
All fish except tuna salad = “gross”
Hopes to learn to ski one day
Ears pierced BUT: allergic to gold
Does not follow pro sports but does like the Phillie Phanatic (baseball mascot; he once gave her a balloon animal)
It continues from there. And onto the next page. I watch as Gwenna’s eyes go from the page to me to the page again. She blinks.
“Is that…about me?” she asks at last.
I can’t read the expression on her face.
It isn’t angry, though.
“It’s…” There’s no point in lying, I suppose. “Yes,” I admit.
“What?” She frowns. “How did…”
“I heard you mention things,” I say. “Mostly to the others. But sometimes here. I made a study of it. So I could know how to…treat you better.”
At that, Gwenna laughs.
I realize I don’t remember the last time I heard her laugh.
Ireallylike how it sounds.
“That’s so incredibly, immeasurably weird, Kingston,” she says, once she calms down.
I feel heat flare in my cheeks. “Listening when you say things? Knowing what’s important to you?” I say. “Is that not what people do?”
“It’s not,” she confirms. “Not like…that, anyway. You’re…” She laughs again, softer. “You’re so strange.”
Her eyes drift from the notebook up to me. Her gaze holds mine a long, long moment.
“I’m sorry it had to be you, too, Kingston.”
THIRTY-FOUR
GWENNA
Later,I wait for Morgan outside her Italian seminar so I can ambush her with the debrief.
“So it all jibes, is what you’re saying.” Morgan’s breath hangs in the air before her as we cut across campus, my escort—Lanz—a few feet behind us, the light purple and pink across the bricks of the path. “There’s a direct line from the Grail legends about healing the wasteland and whatnot to these mystical, powerful, occasionally cup-bearing women,andthere’s tons of Christian theology to back it up.”
