“What happened today is normal,” she says. It reminds me of when she told me about my period, or how she approached the topic of sex, all clinical and rational and perfectly spelled out for me, like she’d been rehearsing the speech for years.
“Um, hello, how was today normal?”
“Okay, not normal,” she says quickly. “Normal for us. As your abilities begin to grow, your angelic side will start to manifest itself in more noticeable ways.”
“My angelic side. Great. Like I don’t have enough to deal with.”
“It’s not so bad,” Mom says. “You’ll learn to control it.”
“I’ll learn to control my hair?”
She laughs.
“Yes, eventually, you’ll learn how to hide it, to tone it down so that it can’t be perceived by the human eye. But for now, dyeing seems the easiest way.”
She always wears hats, I realize. At the beach. At the park. Almost any time we go out in public, she wears a hat. She owns dozens of hats and bandanas and scarves. I’d always assumed it was because she was old school.
“So it happens to you?” I ask.
She turns toward the door, smiling faintly.
“Come in, Jeffrey.”
Jeffrey slinks in from my room, where he’s been eavesdropping. The guilt on his face doesn’t last long. He shifts straight to rampant curiosity.
“Will I get it, too?” he asks. “The hair thing?”
“Yes,” she answers. “It happens to most of us. For me the first time was 1908, July, I believe. I was reading a book on a park bench. Then—” She lifts her fist up to the top of her head and opens her hand like a kind of explosion.
I lean toward her eagerly. “And was it like everything slowed down, like you could hear and see things that you shouldn’t have been able to?”
She turns to look at me. Her eyes are the deep indigo of the sky just after darkness falls, punctuated with tiny points of light as if she’s literally being lit up from within. I can see myself in them. I look worried.
“Was that what it was like for you?” she asks. “Time slowed down?”
I nod.
She makes a thoughtful little hmm noise and lays her warm hand over mine. “Poor kid. No wonder you’re so shaken up.”
“What did you do, when it happened with you?” Jeffrey asks.
“I put on my hat. In those days, proper young ladies wore hats out of doors. And luckily, by the time that wasn’t true anymore, hair dye had been invented. I was a brunette for almost twenty years.” She wrinkles up her nose. “It didn’t suit me.”
“But what is it?” I ask. “Why does it happen?”
She pauses like she’s considering her words carefully. “It’s a part of glory breaking through.” She looks slightly uncomfortable, as if we can’t quite be trusted with this information. “Now, that’s enough class for today. If this kind of thing happens again, in public I mean, I find it works best to just act normally. Most of the time, people will convince themselves that they didn’t really see anything, that it was a trick of the light, an illusion. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to wear a hat more often now, Jeffrey, to be safe.”
“Okay,” he says with a smirk. He practically sleeps in his Giants cap.
“And let’s try not to call attention to ourselves,” she continues, looking at him pointedly, clearly referring to the way he feels the need to be the best at everything: quarterback, pitcher, the all-star varsity kind of guy. “No showing off.”
His jaw tightens.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. “There’s nothing to go out for in January, is there? Wrestling tryouts were in November. Baseball’s not until spring.”
“Maybe that’s for the best. It gives you some time to adjust before you pick up anything extracurricular.”
“Right. For the best.” His face is a mask of sullenness again. Then he retreats to his room, slamming the door behind him.
“Okay, so that’s settled,” Mom says, turning to me with a smile. “Let’s rinse.”
My hair turns out orange. Like a peeled carrot. The moment I see it I seriously consider shaving my head.
“We’ll fix it,” Mom promises, trying hard not to laugh. “First thing tomorrow. I swear.”
“Good night.” I close the door in her face. Then I throw myself down on the bed and have a good long cry. So much for my shot at impressing Mystery Boy with his gorgeous wavy brown hair.
After I calm down I lie in bed listening to the wind knock at my window. The woods outside seem huge and full of darkness. I can feel the mountains, their massive presence looming behind the house. There are things happening now that I can’t control—I’m changing, and I can’t go back to the way things were before.
The vision comes to me then like a familiar friend, sweeping my bedroom away and depositing me in the middle of the smoky forest. The air is so hot, so dry and heavy, difficult to breathe. I see the silver Avalanche parked along the edge of the road. Automatically I turn toward the hills, orienting myself to where I know I will find the boy. I walk. I feel the sadness then, a grief like my heart’s being cut out, growing with every step I take. My eyes fill with useless tears. I blink them away and keep walking, determined to reach the boy, and when I see him, I stop for a minute and simply take him in. The sight of him standing there so unaware fills me with a mix of pain and yearning.
I think, I’m here.
Chapter 3
I Survived the Black Plague
The first thing that catches my eye as I drive into the parking lot of Jackson Hole High School is a large silver truck parked in the back of the lot. I squint to see the license plate.
“Whoa!” yells Jeffrey as I nearly rear-end another much-older, much-rustier blue truck in front of me. “Learn to drive already!”
“Sorry.” I try to wave apologetically to the guy driving the blue truck, but he yells something out his window that I’m pretty sure I don’t want to understand and screeches away across the parking lot. I park the Prius carefully in an empty space and sit for a minute, trying to get myself together.
Jackson Hole High doesn’t resemble a school so much as a resort, a large brick building framed by a series of huge log beams along the front, kind of like pillars but with a more rustic feel. Like everything else in our new hometown, it’s postcard perfect, all shining windows and evenly spaced, white-trunked trees that are beautiful even without leaves, not to mention the gorgeous towering mountains in the background on three sides. Even the fluffy white clouds in the sky look deliberately placed.
“Later,” says Jeffrey, jumping out of the car. He grabs his backpack and swaggers toward the front door of the school like he owns the place. A few girls in the parking lot turn to check him out. He flashes them an easy smile, which immediately starts up the whisper/giggle thing that always trailed him at our old school.
“So much for not calling attention to ourselves,” I mutter. I apply another coat of lip gloss and inspect my reflection in the rearview mirror, cringing at my humiliating hair color. In spite of my mom’s and my best efforts over the past week, it’s still orange. We’ve tried everything, re-dyed it like five times, even tried to dye it jet-black, but the color always washes out to the same horrendous, eye-stabbing orange. It’s like some kind of cruel cosmic joke.
“You can’t always rely on your looks, Clara,” Mom said after failed-attempt number five. Like she’s one to talk. Like she’s ever looked less than gorgeous a day in her life.
“I’ve never relied on my looks, Mom.”
“Sure you have,” she said a bit too cheerfully. “You aren’t vain about it, but still. You knew that when the other students at Mountain View High looked at you, they saw this pretty strawberry blonde.”