“I don’t care what you tell them,” he said. “It isn’t safe. Not after what happened today. Fifty miles, Kristina.”
Gemma felt as if her chest had been filled with wet concrete. She couldn’t breathe.
“Oh, Geoff. Fifty miles is a lot. You can’t really believe—”
“I don’t believe, Kristina. I know.” He rounded on her, and Kristina drew backward several inches. Gemma felt a sudden wave of hatred toward him, stronger than anything she’d ever felt. For one awful second, she wished for him to die, struck down by an invisible force. But that was too cruel. She wished instead that he would simply vanish. Blip. As if he’d never existed at all. “Those nutcases have been swarming the beach for months. Last week, they attacked one of the orderlies on her way to the ferry.”
“But you said yourself they’re nutcases,” Kristina says. “No one actually believes them. Besides, they don’t know anything. Half of them think Haven is home to vampires, for God’s sake. They’ll get tired soon enough and find another cause. And what does that have to do with Gemma? No one could possibly know—”
“Someone does know,” he said, cutting her off. “That’s the point. I’m not sending her into the middle of that mess. She can go on spring break next year.”
Gemma opened her mouth and let out a long, silent scream. She imagined the sound shattering the chandelier, blowing out the windows, exploding all of her father’s priceless porcelain antiques.
“Fine.” Kristina stood up, swaying a little on her feet. Gemma couldn’t tell if it was the lingering effects of the sleeping pills, or because of the physical effort of standing up to the great Geoffrey Ives. “But you have to be the one to tell her. It’ll break her heart, and I won’t do it.”
“Fine,” her father said, and then, to Gemma’s horror, he flung open the door and stomped into the foyer.
She turned quickly and slipped down the hall again, her heart beating out the word unfair, unfair. In her room, she shoved Rufus aside and climbed under the covers, mounding a pillow over her head as if it could smother the sounds of what she had just heard. She waited, tight with anxiety, to hear her father’s footsteps outside her door. How would she face him now? How would she face him ever again?
But minutes passed, and he didn’t come, and slowly the tension in her body dissipated, replaced by the heavy sensation of lying at the very bottom of a pit. She was filled with a gnawing sense of injustice, of anger, of flat-out grief. Unfair. She didn’t understand half of what her parents had said. All she knew was that yet again, she was trapped. Unfair. She was like an insect in her father’s hand; maybe he got pleasure just from squeezing, from watching her squirm.
She didn’t think she would ever fall asleep again. But she did, eventually, hours later, when the light in her room had turned the color of dark chalk. And when she woke up, her father had been called away to Shanghai on business, and so it was Gemma’s mother who broke the news after all.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Lyra’s story.
FOUR
SHE DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL on Friday, claiming she was sick, and her mom didn’t even bug her about what was wrong—a sure sign she knew Gemma was faking.
Gemma was glad her dad was once again traveling. Glad they were separated by time zones and a big ocean. She couldn’t have faced him. If she had, she thought she would have spit at him, or kicked him in the shins, or finally said some of the things she’d been meaning to say for sixteen years.
The great Geoffrey Ives, cofounder of Fine & Ives Pharmaceuticals, Master of the Universe, total fucking asshole.
April called her during homeroom, a useless fifteen minutes of time between second and third periods when random juniors got shuffled together to suffer through announcements about basketball games, prom, and Tolerance Week.
After the third time Gemma didn’t pick up, April resorted to texting, flooding Gemma’s phone with scowling selfies. What the shit is going on?? Are you okay?
Gemma felt a sudden surge of viciousness, a desire to cause pain, since she had been caused pain. Maybe this was how Chloe and the wolves felt: maybe somewhere deep in their lives, someone was nipping at them, trying to make them bleed. No, she wrote back. Then: not going tomorrow.
There was a five-minute space between messages. Gemma wasn’t sure whether April was stunned or just pretending to pay attention to her homeroom teacher.
Her next message said: This is a joke, right?
She could have written back, explaining. Better yet, she could have called. She could already imagine April shoving the phone deep into her pocket while she hurried into the nearest bathroom stall, then perching, knees to chest, on a toilet seat and pressing the phone to her ear while Gemma sobbed. She could have explained about the broken window, and her father’s terrible words: This was a message for me. . . . It had all come true: her crashing fears, the strange terrors that had always infected her. Her father hated her. She might someday leave, but she would never escape—not him, not that truth, not really.
But she had already cried—had woken, in fact, with her throat raw and the taste of salt on her lips, and realized she’d been crying in her sleep—and today she felt nothing but a strange, bobbing sense of emptiness, as if she was a balloon untethered from the earth, slowly floating away into nothingness. She wondered whether her mom felt this way when she took pills.
So she wrote back: not a joke.
And, after a minute: sorry.