Page 47 of The Light Between Worlds

“You never gave me an answer about reciting in the winter concert, so I put you on the program. All the St. Joseph’s boys will be coming. I expect you to be there, Evelyn, and it would be kind of you to invite your parents, like the other girls do.”

The scarf wrapping her hair today is rust-red, and a waft of her perfume hits me as she walks out the door.

“Max,” I call after her. “I’ll recite, but I don’t want my family here. When is it?”

Her voice drifts back down the hall. “The concert’s tomorrow night, Evelyn, the flyers are all over school. Read something off a page if you have to, so long as you’re there.”

I will be. All my lives in all my worlds have led me to this place.

The refectory has been emptied of tables and lined with chairs. A makeshift stage stands at the front of the room. Bunting hangs from the ceiling in incongruous spring colors: blue, pale green, pink, and gold. I sit next to Georgie as the room fills and try to breathe through my nerves, try to keep my hands from shaking. The dull roar of voices washes over me like waves, punctuated by the scrape of chairs or outbursts of laughter.

“Alright, Ev?” Georgie asks, reaching over to squeeze my hand.

“I will be,” I answer. “Whatever you hear, Georgie, I will be, I swear.”

Georgie turns to me with a question in her eyes, but before she can say anything more the Curmudgeon gets up on stage and silence falls. There are the usual performances—a string quartet, recitations, and one of the girls even juggles. I’m hot and anxious and yearning for the woods by the time my name is called.

Though I’m seated near the front, the walk to the stage seems inordinately long. My footsteps sound loud, echoing off the ceiling, and my heart pounds in my chest. A white chalk line marks the place where we’re meant to stand, and when I reach it, I turn.

A hundred pairs of eyes watch me. Out in the crowd, someone clears his throat expectantly.

I search the waiting faces, looking for just one. When I find Tom, he gives me a smile and waves, the movement small andcontained. This is for him—the only gift I have to give. I let out a long breath and begin.

“They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars,

Like petals from a rose,”

Beloved Dorien and a score of other Woodlanders, dead upon the forest floor.

“When suddenly across the June

A wind with fingers goes.”

The Woodlands, Palace Beautiful, the girl I used to be.

“They perished in the seamless grass,—

No eye could find the place;”

Charlie and Fred Harper, brothers of my friend. Millions of people, across all of Europe, all the world.

“But God on his repealless list

Can summon every face.”

Venndarien Tarsin, killed by my own hand for my sister’s sake.

I miss you, Philippa. Come home to me.

I miss you, Cervus. Take me home.

The applause when I finish is muted. It’s only five years since the war, and we all hide wounds that will never really heal.

Instead of taking my seat, I walk out of the refectory, and into the cold night air. Sleet mists down, and I let it bead on my hair and the wool of my school cardigan. Leaning up against the refectory wall, I wait outside the circle of light that beams from the doorway.

When the concert ends, people spill out of St. Agatha’s front doors, once again happy and laughing, a transformation I’ve never managed to master. They vanish down the lane, and it isn’t until most of them have gone that Tom appears, having dodged thechaperones from St. Joe’s. He stands uncertainly in the light spilling from the building, looking this way and that. I watch him for a moment, and then call softly, unwilling to step out of the shadows.

“I’m over here.”