Amma hadn't gone this dark since my mom died. She'd known Macon Ravenwood a lifetime longer than I had, even longer than Lena. No matter how unlikely or unpredictable their relationship was, it had meant something to both of them. They were friends, though I wasn't sure either of them would've admitted it. But I knew the truth. Amma was wearing it al over her face and stacking it al over our kitchen.
"Got a cal from Dr. Summers." My dad's psychiatrist. Amma didn't look up from the waffle iron, and I didn't point out that you didn't actual y need to stare at a waffle iron for it to cook the waffles.
"What'd he say?" I studied her back from my seat at the old oak table, her apron strings tied in the middle. I remembered how many times I had tried to sneak up on her and untie those strings. Amma was so short they hung down almost as long as the apron itself, and I thought about that for as long as I could. Anything was better than thinking about my father.
"He thinks your daddy's about ready to come home."
I held up my empty glass and stared through it, where things looked as distorted as they real y were. My dad had been at Blue Horizons, in Columbia, for two months. After Amma found out about the nonexistent book he was pretending to write al year, and the "incident," which is how she referred to my dad nearly jumping off a balcony, she cal ed my Aunt Caroline. My aunt drove him to Blue Horizons that same day -- she cal ed it a spa. The kind of spa you sent your crazy relatives to if they needed what folks in Gatlin referred to as "individual attention," or what everyone outside of the South would cal therapy.
"Great."
Great. I couldn't see my dad coming home to Gatlin, walking around town in his duck pajamas. There was enough crazy around here already between Amma and me, wedged in between the cream-of-grief casseroles I'd be dropping off at First Methodist around dinnertime, as I did almost every night. I wasn't an expert on feelings, but Amma's were al stirred up in cake batter, and she wasn't about to share them. She'd rather give away the cake.
I tried to talk to her about it once, the day after the funeral, but she had shut down the conversation before it even started. "Done is done. Gone is gone. Where Macon Ravenwood is now, not likely we'l ever see him again, not in this world or the Other." She sounded like she'd made her peace with it, but here I was, two months later, stil delivering cakes and casseroles. She had lost the two men in her life the same night -- my father and Macon. My dad wasn't dead, but our kitchen didn't make those kinds of distinctions. Like Amma said, gone was gone.
"I'm makin' waffles. Hope you're hungry."
That was probably al I'd hear from her this morning. I picked up the carton of chocolate milk next to my glass and poured it ful out of habit. Amma used to complain when I drank chocolate milk at breakfast. Now she would have cut me up a whole Tunnel of Fudge cake without a word, which only made me feel worse. Even more tel ing, the Sunday edition of the New York Times wasn't open to the crossword, and her black, extra-sharp #2 pencils were hidden away in their drawer. Amma was staring out the kitchen window at the clouds choking the sky.
L. A. C. O. N. I. C. Seven across, which means I don't have to say a thing, Ethan Wate. That's what Amma would have said on any other day.
I took a gulp of my chocolate milk and almost choked. Sugar was too sweet, and Amma was too quiet. That's how I knew things had changed.
That, and the burnt waffles smoking in the waffle iron.
I should have been on my way to school, but instead I turned onto Route 9 and headed for Ravenwood. Lena hadn't been back to school since before her birthday. After Macon's death, Principal Harper had generously granted her permission to work at home with a tutor until she felt up to coming back to Jackson. Considering he had helped Mrs. Lincoln in her campaign to get Lena expel ed after the winter formal, I'm sure he was hoping that would be the day after never.
I admit, I was a little jealous. Lena didn't have to listen to Mr. Lee drone on about the War of Northern Aggression and the plight of the Confederacy or sit on the Good-Eye Side in English. Abby Porter and I were the only ones sitting there now, so we had to answer al the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde questions in class. What prompts Dr. Jekyl to turn into Mr. Hyde? Were they real y any different after al ? Nobody had the slightest clue, which was the reason everyone on Mrs.
English's glass-eye side was sleeping.
But Jackson wasn't the same without Lena, at least not for me. That's why after two months, I was begging her to come back. Yesterday, when she said she'd think about it, I told her she could think about it on the way to school.
I found myself back at the fork in the road. It was our old road, mine and Lena's. The one that had taken me off Route 9 and up to Ravenwood the night we met. The first time I realized she was the same girl I'd been dreaming about, long before she ever moved to Gatlin.
As soon as I saw the road, I heard the song. It drifted into the Volvo as natural y as if I had turned on the radio. Same song. Same words. Same as it had for the last two months -- when I turned on my iPod, stared at the ceiling, or read a single page of Silver Surfer over and over, without even seeing it.
Seventeen Moons. It was always there. I tried turning the dials on the radio, but it didn't matter. Now it was playing in my head instead of coming out of the speakers, as if someone was Kelting the song to me.
Seventeen moons, seventeen years,
Eyes where Dark or Light appears,
Gold for yes and green for no,
Seventeen the last to know ...
The song was gone. I knew better than to ignore it, but I also knew how Lena acted every time I tried to bring it up.
"It's a song," she would say dismissively. "It doesn't mean anything."
"Like Sixteen Moons didn't mean anything? It's about us." It didn't matter if she knew it or even if she agreed. Either way, it was the moment Lena usual y switched from defense to offense, and the conversation veered off track.
"You mean it's about me. Dark or Light? Whether or not I'm going to go al Sarafine on you? If you've already decided I'm going Dark, why don't you admit it?"
At that point, I would say something stupid to change the subject. Until I learned not to say anything at al . So we didn't talk about the song that was playing in my head, same as it was in hers.
Seventeen Moons. We couldn't avoid it.
The song had to be about Lena's Claiming, the moment she would become Light or Dark forever. Which could only mean one thing: she wasn't Claimed. Not yet. Gold for yes and green for no? I knew what the song meant -- the gold eyes of a Dark Caster or the green eyes of a Light one. Since the night of Lena's birthday, her Sixteenth Moon, I had tried to tel myself it was al over, that Lena didn't have to be Claimed, that she was some kind of exception. Why couldn't it be different for her, since everything else about her seemed to be so exceptional?
But it wasn't different. Seventeen Moons was proof. I'd heard Sixteen Moons for months before Lena's birthday, a harbinger of things to come. Now the words had changed again, and I was faced with another eerie prophecy. There was a choice to be made, and Lena hadn't made it. The songs never lied. At least, they hadn't yet.
I didn't want to think about it. As I headed up the long rise leading to the gates of Ravenwood Manor, even the grinding sound of the tires on gravel seemed to repeat the one inescapable truth. If there was a Seventeenth Moon, then it had al been for nothing. Macon's death had been for nothing.
Lena would stil have to Claim herself for Light or Dark, deciding her fate forever. There was no turning back for Casters, no changing sides. And when she final y made her choice, half her family would die because of it. The Light Casters or the Dark Casters -- the curse promised only one side could survive. But in a family where generations of Casters had no free wil and had been Claimed for Light or Dark on their own sixteenth birthdays without any say in the matter, how was Lena supposed to make that kind of choice?
Al she had wanted, her whole life, was to choose her own destiny. Now she could, and it was like some kind of cruel cosmic joke.
I stopped at the gates, turned off the engine, and closed my eyes, remembering -- the rising panic, the visions, the dreams, the song. This time, Macon wouldn't be there to steal away the unhappy endings. There was nobody left to get us out of trouble, and it was coming fast.
4.17
Lemons and Ash
When I puled up in front of Ravenwood, Lena was sitting on the crumbling veranda, waiting. She was wearing an old button-down shirt and jeans and her beat-up Chuck Taylors. For a second, it seemed as if it could've been three months ago and today was just another day. But she was also wearing one of Macon's pinstriped vests, and it wasn't the same. Now that Macon was gone, something about Ravenwood felt wrong. Like going to the Gatlin County Library if Marian, its only librarian, wasn't there, or to the DAR without the most important daughter of the Daughters of the American Revolution herself, Mrs. Lincoln. Or to my parents' study without my mom.
Ravenwood looked worse every time I came. Staring out at the archway of weeping wil ows, it was hard to imagine the garden had deteriorated so quickly. Beds of the same kinds of flowers Amma had painstakingly taught me to weed as a kid were fighting for space in the dry earth. Beneath the magnolias, clusters of hyacinth were tangled with hibiscus, and heliotrope infested the forget-me-nots, as if the garden itself was in mourning. Which was entirely possible.
Ravenwood Manor had always seemed to have a mind of its own. Why should the gardens be any different? The weight of Lena's grief probably wasn't helping. The house was a mirror for her moods, the same way it had always been for Macon's.
When he died, he left Ravenwood to Lena, and sometimes I wondered whether it would have been better if he hadn't. The house was looking bleaker by the day, instead of better. Every time I drove up the hil , I found myself holding my breath, waiting for the smal est sign of life, something new, something blooming. Every time I reached the top, al I saw were more bare branches.
Lena climbed into the Volvo, a complaint already on her lips. "I don't want to go."
"No one wants to go to school."
"You know what I mean. That place is awful. I'd rather stay here and study Latin al day."
This wasn't going to be easy. How could I convince her to go somewhere I didn't even want to go? High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional. I decided reverse psychology was my only shot. "High school is supposed to be the worst years of your life."
"Is that so?"
"Definitely. You have to come back."
"And that wil make me feel better how, exactly?"
"I don't know. How about, it's so bad, it'l make the rest of your life seem great in comparison?"
"By your logic, I should spend the day with Principal Harper."
"Or try out for cheerleading."
She twirled her necklace around her finger, her distinctive col ection of charms knocking against each other. "It's tempting." She smiled, almost a laugh, and I knew she was going with me.
Lena rested her shoulder against mine the whole way to school. But when we got to the parking lot, she couldn't bring herself to get out of the car. I didn't dare turn off the engine.
Savannah Snow, the queen of Jackson High, walked past us, hitching her tight T-shirt above her jeans. Emily Asher, her second in command, fol owed behind, texting as she slid between cars. Emily saw us and grabbed Savannah by the arm. They stopped, the response of any Gatlin girl whose mamma had raised her right, when faced with a relative of the recently departed. Savannah clutched her books to her chest, shaking her head at us sadly. It was like watching an old silent movie.