Luminosity (Gravity Series #3) (The Gravity Series) Read online

  “He’s out of town tonight. If anyone was watching those cameras, they would have come immediately. I’ll be there and back before anyone misses me.”

  “What if those shadows are still there?” I asked with a shiver, thinking of the unnatural, evil way they moved. The red, glowing eyes boring into my soul.

  “Then I’ll run.”

  I looked him over, smiling appreciatively at him as we turned back around towards Hell. “You’re turning out to be a pretty good boyfriend.”

  Henry rolled his eyes and laughed. “Well, thanks. I’m trying to make up for the early days of being a jerk. I figure I’ve got a lot to make up for. Just know that it will take me a while to come to terms with this. It’s a lot. Do you see those shadows all the time?”

  “No, those are new. But it seems like there are more of them.”

  “You said you see Jenna. Do you talk to her?” He sounded curious, but I still couldn’t help but think I came across as a crazy person. I clenched and unclenched my aching hand again.

  “Yeah, sometimes. She’s still my friend, after all.”

  “Isn’t that hard?”

  “It gets harder when I think about it too much.”

  He smiled a gentle, sad smile at me.

  “Did you get your necklace back?”

  I patted my pocket to show him. “Yep. It’ll get Claire off of my back.” I almost told him about what had happened to me, but I felt like I’d already dumped enough for him to sort out. Better to save some of the revelations for later.

  Henry went around and turned back on to the expressway. We rushed through the night back towards Hell and Henry’s hand sneaked over the console and grasped mine.

  ###

  I felt hungover for days. Whatever the necklace had done to me had fried my nervous system. When Monday rolled around, I had to stay home from school. I had a low-grade fever, so it wasn’t too hard to convince Claire to let me before she went off to work.

  The burn on my palm was pretty severe. I held frostbitten Flavor-Ices from the freezer on it for hours, wrapped in a washcloth. A dorky solution, but we didn’t have an ice pack and the cold worked. Every time I tried to take it off, the nagging, burning pain rushed back the moment the numb chill wore off.

  Did your father find out about the cameras yet? I texted Henry a day later.

  Yep. He blew his top. But he didn’t accuse me of anything. He thinks its vandals.

  Too bad my house no longer felt comfortable. With my father gone, there wasn’t much conversation exchanged.

  Claire had gone into a cleaning frenzy now that she was under the stress of trying to impress Thornhill. I wasn’t allowed to sit in the living room or place stray fingerprints. I felt like an interloper and was just happy I had my space downstairs.

  I spent the time I was sick lying in front of the TV in the basement. The necklace was safely stored away in the bottom of my jewelry box. I thought about it all the time, but didn’t have the nerve to go over and take it out.

  Jenna didn’t return. At first, it didn’t seem like a big deal. She often went off on her naps for long stretches. When she finally showed herself a few days later, she stepped into my room as though no time had elapsed.

  “It’s evil.”

  “What?” I looked up from the make-up homework I was scrawling through. She was leaning against the door frame, her narrow eyes glued to the box on the dresser.

  “That necklace is evil,” Jenna said again. “You shouldn’t have brought it home with you.”

  “You think so? Why?” Maybe she could sense something I didn’t.

  She shrugged. “It feels too powerful to be good.”

  “Why did you run off on me?” I asked, shutting my textbook. “I was worried about you.”

  “I remembered what it was like. When they cut me.” Her voice was hard and bitter. “And I could feel waves of hatred hitting me. For a moment, I could feel my heart shutting down again. I couldn’t have gone in if I wanted to; there was a wall there. It was invisible, but I could feel it. Almost like a force-field, shoving me back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the sting of sadness. I hated the fact that the trip had stirred her bad memories.

  “It is what it is.”

  “Alyssa said the same thing about a wall. She was killed in the basement below the school. Do you think that maybe the building where you were sacrificed below keeps you out?”

  Jenna shook her head. “I can’t go into the school, either. Or the library. Same wall. Only it’s the strongest at Dexter. At least with school and the library, I can almost get as far as the doors.”

  I stared at her. “Why did you never tell me this?”

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why I didn’t go to school?” she countered defensively. “Believe me, I’d love to go inside, to see my old friends, all the people I’ve missed. Even just to spy on the people I hated. I’d love to see this Harlow girl take Lainey down a peg. But some cosmic force says I’m not allowed.”

  “It’s got to be the symbols,” I said. “Or at least the spots on which they were, before Warwick and I destroyed them. There was one beneath the shed on Dexter’s property, and one below the school. But the library, too?”

  “Yeah, I would watch out for that place. Something’s not right about it, either.”

  It made sense. The place had been adopted by Thornhill. After all, it was Cheryl Rhodes’ own project.

  ###

  Later in the week when I could finally go back to school, I came home and made yet another dinner by myself. Necessity forced me to try and do better. I watched the butter start to melt in the pan, but two seconds later it was burning. I’m so bad at this. Tears welled up behind my eyes and I wept into the back of my hand.

  I finally spoke to Hugh on the phone that weekend.

  “How are you holding up, kiddo?”

  His voice filled me with heartache, but I didn’t want him to hear me cry.

  “Claire is going crazy. She’s at those Thornhill meetings all the time now. She’s at one tonight for some flower planting thing they’re doing next week.”

  “She’s not making you come along, is she?” Hugh asked.

  “No.”

  The rest of the conversation was clipped and brief. I hung up the phone and sat on the floor, cradling my knees.

  It was amazing how different everything was now. No more hovering helicopter parents. I’d wished for more responsibility since I’d hit puberty. But I didn’t know if I liked all the free space, now that I knew what shadows lurked in it.

  I grabbed my coat and rushed over to Theo’s. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the safe, bright lights of the arcade. She didn’t ask me what was bothering me and I did the courtesy of the same, but to an onlooker we probably both seemed lost in another world.

  ###

  Theo and I had begun the long and tedious process of college applications. Alex had too, but he bowed out after only a couple sessions. On Theo’s living room floor, we sat in a circle penning in answers to the forms. Alex got frustrated and chucked the paper across the room.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as he was tearing out his hair.

  “I thought I was going to get a scholarship, but my playing has sucked so bad the past couple of seasons, it’s never going to happen,” he ranted. “I waited until the damn deadline to really realize it.”

  “You can’t stay in high school forever,” Theo said gently. “You wouldn’t want to anyway. Another year and this will all be over.”

  Alex glared at her

  “You sure about that?” I whispered to her.

  “We can’t all be geniuses,” Alex grumbled. “I didn’t have my college of choice picked out at birth.”

  “If I get into the art institute, there’s no reason you couldn’t get a job there,” Theo said. “There is so much going in Chicago, Alex. You’d like it there if you gave it a chance.”

  “You know I wouldn’t fit in. I’m not going to be a busboy or a delive
ry man.”

  “Those aren’t the only options,” Theo said in exasperation.

  “I’m through talking about this.” He stumbled to his Nikes and stomped out of the room.

  “What’s his major malfunction?” I asked when he was out of hearing range.

  Theo set the envelope and stamps she had on her lap on the table. One of her cats hopped up next to her and she scooped her into her lap. “He’s not happy that I want to get into the SAIC.”

  “You’ve been talking about going to art school since I met you,” I said, raising my eyebrow.

  “Yeah, I know.” She rubbed her chin against the cat’s fur and the feline protested, digging her claws into Theo’s knee.

  I grinned. “Well, to be fair and give you my selfish perspective, I don’t really want you to go out of state, either. We’ll miss you. But I won’t stop you.”

  “That’s the thing—he is trying to stop me.” She kept her voice down, checking to see if Alex was peeking back in. “He’s trying to change my mind so I’ll apply to school locally. But if I get in, I’m not giving up my dreams and jumping into a community college. Relationship or not.”

  It was crazy to think about college; I felt like I had a dual life again. The thought of moving out of Hell, going to a university, living by myself in a dorm with a roommate, working to pay bills…it didn’t seem like that time could almost have arrived. The drama of the past few years had encompassed my thoughts so completely that a normal life seemed surreal.

  I wanted to make an attempt at something in the medical field, but I didn’t have a specific school of choice. Henry, on the other hand, was being pushed by his parents to apply to ritzy schools on the East Coast.

  The four of us hadn’t known each other for that long, considering our tumultuous relationship, but still the idea of all of us being dropped randomly around the country saddened me.

  Two years from now, we would drift apart, like islands in the sea.

  ###

  Months passed without a chance to use the necklace. Frankly, its power scared me, as did the aftermath. Luckily, everything seemed to remain calm in town. There were no more missing girls, no sign of trouble under the cheery facade.

  Finals passed and school was out before I knew it. I spent a few weekends over at my father’s new apartment, a tiny two-bedroom close to his studio. I peeked around in the drawers while he was making my bed in the guest room, looking for signs of Callie. I found nothing. It was the quintessential bachelor’s pad—no decorations, no holder for the toilet paper and empty microwave dinner boxes stacked up in the trash. I noticed with a little hint of amusement that he’d abandoned recycling now that Claire wasn’t nagging him to do it.

  At least we went back to spending time together and a fragile sense of normalcy crept in. We even laughed and joked together again. The fact that we weren’t at home, that our lives had been ruptured and put back together crooked, always hung in the air.

  Theo and I started the search for jobs in earnest. Alex wasn’t worried because his parents gave him a hefty allowance. Even though his family wasn’t involved in Thornhill, Alex was pretty spoiled.

  I had little in the way of spending money. Claire was spending a lot of her own paycheck on clothes and supplies for her Thornhill activities. I wanted to confront her all the time on whether she knew of their dark side, but I didn’t have the courage. The more time she spent with them, the more intimidating she became.

  The picture from the prayer group flashed in my mind on several occasions. I went to the library, wary of either shadows or Cheryl Rhodes, and looked through the microfiche files of the local newspaper. The year that my parents had graduated, a young girl named Stephanie Laylon had suffered a serious accident, falling down the basement stairs at the school. It struck me as very suspicious.

  I scrolled farther forward in time, the screen flashing across my face, watching events unfold. Stephanie had survived, but had moved out of town before graduating. There were no more articles about her. It was like she had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  I gathered my coat to leave and rushed out of the small alcove. A tall man was standing by the drinking fountain. I noticed in quiet, stunned shock that it was Roger, Cheryl’s assistant. His hands were folded politely, but his hollow eyes bored into me. I rushed past him and didn’t look back.

  ###

  I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. Two weeks later, after a quite period on both the home and the spook front, Theo had asked (practically begged and totally pulled out old favors) me to come over for a dinner between her parents, Alex and herself.

  Richard Weaver’s table manners weren’t much better than his social graces. He slopped his food all over his shirt and kept his mouth open the entire time he chewed. I couldn’t see for the life of me what pretty, kind Ms. Vore saw in him.

  Alex was sitting next to me, stiff as a reed. It seemed like he could barely keep himself from slugging Richard the instant he said a word.

  “Have you had any luck finding a job at a dealership like you were talking about?” Lucy asked in her pleasant teacher voice.

  “I stopped looking,” Richard said flatly.

  “Dad, how could you stop looking?” Theo asked, dropping her fork like her appetite had disappeared.

  Richard started to light a cigarette. Lucy’s face went hard and she shook her head at him. Richard rolled his eyes and stubbed his cigarette out on his plate, right in the rice pilaf.

  “I have enough to get by with my business,” Richard said. “This is a slow time, that’s all. I wouldn’t talk about money, if I were you. Just because you have a job now doesn’t mean you’re some kind of financial expert.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek hard, trying to keep my words in. I stabbed fork into the vegetables on my plate, imagining each one to have a little, ugly Richard face.

  Alex didn’t have the luck or constraint to staying composed.

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” he growled.

  “Excuse me, you little prick?” Richard sneered, looking offended and surprised. “I don’t care what you are to my daughter, you don’t get to talk to me like that.”

  “I’ll talk to you however I want. It’s a free country. You’re an asshole and you need to leave now. Nobody wants you here,” Alex shouted.

  In one swift motion, Richard threw his plate against the wall, the scene of the red barn splitting in half and brown sauce oozing down towards the carpet. Lucy had buried her face in her napkin.

  Both she and Theo stayed eerily quiet and still, staring at nothing. It was a rehearsed look, like they had experienced this particular mood swing many times before.

  “I think Alex is right,” I said. “You should leave.” I knew I was probably overstepping my bounds, but at the moment I just wanted him gone.

  “I don’t listen to the likes of you,” Richard said, throwing his napkin on the table and puffing out his sagging chest. “I could just as easily tell you to leave. They are still my wife and my daughter.”

  I was standing by now, too, along with the two men. Alex sidestepped in front of me so that he was blocking me from Richard’s view.

  “Richard, you need to go home now. It’s been a long night and you need to rest,” Lucy commanded firmly. It was the first time she’d used that tone with him all night. For a second, it looked like Richard might retaliate. Then he stormed out into the night, slamming the door.

  Theo finally looked up, her eyes apologizing at both of us. It hurt to think that she blamed herself. “I’m sorry, please don’t think less of him. He has bad days, like I said.”

  “One of these times I’m going to show him a bad day,” Alex grumbled. He didn’t speak for the rest of the night.

  CHAPTER 15

  “I GOT A job at the Dollar Daze!” Theo told me excitedly at the end of June.

  “Congrats. Do you get a discount?”

  “30% off, baby. Can’t beat seventy cents for all the plastic crap I could ever need
.” She paused, her blue-tinted lashes fanning out across her cheek. “Had any luck yourself?”

  “Nope. I’ve put in applications everywhere. I wonder if it’s my technique? Maybe instead of merely handing them the application, I should tap dance on my way out the door.”

  “Don’t do that. They’ll call the cops,” Theo said, grinning at me. “You’ll find the right place. I’m just glad I can distract myself from drawing. I figure the time off will do me some good.”

  Theo’s words of encouragement did little to settle my racing mind. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. Most of the other kids I knew already had summer jobs. Theo and I had even rehearsed interview questions. She dressed up in a baggy suit with a little penciled-on mustache and pretended to be a manager. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time and it was hard to see the answers on my index cards through my mirthful tears. At least I got a few answers stored away, not like I got to use them.

  Putting in another round of applications, I stopped into the local gift shop. They sold cards and teddy bears, and I knew of a few kids at school that had worked there part time in the past.

  The owner seemed perfectly nice, a cheerful woman about my mom’s age who asked me about my experience. I left feeling good. But then I stopped outside, watching her through the window. Another lady who was working came up to the owner, pointed to my application, and said something that made the owner’s mouth twist into a frown. She crumpled my application up and tossed it in the trash.

  “She only had time to glance at my name,” I told my father that weekend.

  He was at the table, going over his own paperwork for Erasmus. “I think it’s time to consider that we’re being shunned. Between the sales at the gallery and your lack of finding a job, I don’t think it’s out of the question.”

  “Madison said something similar about her parents.” I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her much with school being out. She’d gone on vacation to Miami. “They own the Topps stores and they haven’t been making nearly as much money as they used to.”

  “I know,” Hugh said. “Erasmus is definitely being targeted, I can’t deny it. Even Callie noticed the dip in sales. My business is dropping every week. I’ve hardly sold four prints this month. Being my daughter, you’re an easy target. I might have to close up shop soon.”