Independence (39 page)

Me: Yes

I got to a divider in the binder and it was marked “Abel”. I didn’t know who or what Abel was but I was ecstatic that I didn’t have to sit through more of rules explaining more rules.

I got up to wash my cereal bowl and through the window above the sink, saw an antique truck pulling up in the driveway. I put the bowl down and headed to the side door to see who it was.

The first thing I saw was a navy blue ball cap covering wheat colored hair and the shoulders and profile of a guy. That was enough to make me a nervous wreck and I quickly jumped back into safety and shut the door behind me. I heaved deep breaths in and out with my back against the door. I finally relaxed and hit the back of my head against it.

Way to act like a spaz Corinne.

Let’s face it. I had been in a boarding school for girls since I was six years old. I hadn't had very much contact with the opposite sex.

I opened the door again and was suddenly face to face with a six feet tall guy with eyes that nearly identically matched his hair. His eyelashes were so long I swear I felt a breeze when he blinked. A breeze blew in from behind him and wafted a smell towards me of pine trees and smoke, like a campfire. What I wouldn’t give to camp in that. He looked as surprised as I did.

“Hey, um, I’m Abel Collins. I’m taking care of the painting this summer. I just wanted to say ‘Hi’ so I didn’t scare you being around.”

I hesitated, still entranced by his eyelashes.

“Hi, I’m Corinne. If you need any help, let me know. There’s not much to do around here.”

He chuckled at me. I didn’t know what he thought was funny but the sound of him chuckling brought nerve endings to life in me that I didn’t know existed.

He descended the steps and I stood in the entrance for way too long watching him. He reached into the back of his truck and pulled out what looked like scrapers and sand paper. He stilled and then looked back to me. I’d been caught.

Busted
!

I smiled and looked down at the ground bashfully before walking back into the house. When Angela said there’d be a boy working here for the summer, I’d pictured a boy whose mom dropped him off in the morning and who sat on the porch eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a Spiderman lunchbox and drinking Juicy Juice. She lied. No—this was no boy.

You can find Lila at her website

http://www.authorlilafelix.blogspot.com/

And now, an excerpt from Airicka Phoenix's YA novel, Touching Smoke, available now.

“What’s the matter?” Mom honed in on my mood before I even realized I was chewing anxiously on my thumbnail.

“Nothing.” I quickly wiped the spit off on my jeans and stuffed my hands into my lap. My torn and bloody thumbnail glared up at me, a sick mockery of my lie.

“Fallon…” The warning tone was in effect.

“Nothing.”

It was a risk telling Mom when something was wrong. Her tendency to overreact was legendary. I spent a great deal of time and effort practicing to lie convincingly.

“Don’t lie to me.” But even practice didn’t help sometimes.

I gave my head a shake, fixing my attention out the passenger side window in clear avoidance. Pale sunlight splashed over blooming treetops. The golden rays spilled through the knotted branches in splinters that lay broken across the forest floor. Birds flittered from tree to tree; I could hear their elated chirping over the Rust-Bucket’s roaring engine.

“Fallon!” My mom seemed to think that the more she said my name in that I’m-your-mother-and-you’ll-answer-when-I-ask-you-something tone, I’d cave.

Usually, it worked. I may have been sixteen, but I feared my mother’s wrath like nothing else. She was downright sadistic when she wanted to be.

“It’s nothing!” I insisted, already knowing even before the words were out that she wouldn’t believe me.

“Okay.” Her sigh resounded of feigned remorse, as if she really didn’t want to have to do it and it hurt her more than it would hurt me — as if I believed that. Her hand wandered off the steering wheel and inched towards the radio.

I caved faster than a house of poorly placed cards in the wind. There was nothing worse than country music, and not just any country music, the old western kind that only played when you’re in the middle of nowhere and only two stations worked on the radio: ancient western and some guy ranting about the end of the world and demons.

Give me the crazy guy any day. Unfortunately, he only came out at nights, when he knew he could give you nightmares.

“Okay! Fine!” I grabbed her wrist before she could touch the knob. “I’ll talk!” I would have made a lousy spy. If I were ever captured, all the bad guy would have to do is threaten me with country music and I’d sing like a canary.

She didn’t actually smirk — my mother didn’t do that — but there was a satisfied tilt to her lips as she sat back and waited patiently for me to begin.

I faltered in my explanation. Every thread I grabbed proved to be the wrong way to start. My jumbled emotions kept knotting up inside me like yarn, tying up my tongue, making every attempt to speak impossible. Mom never interrupted me. Maybe because she knew how hard it was for me to talk about things I didn’t understand myself. I knew she would sit there, for hours if she had to, waiting, never breaking my concentration, until I was ready to speak. Just so long as I told her, she would wait.

“I had another dream,” I finally said, staring down at my lap as if the rest of my courage was somehow sitting there, waiting to be plucked up. But the only thing there was my hands, clenched together between my jean-clad thighs. Sweat squished between my palms. I wiped them on my jeans.

“What was it about?” she asked, casual with a tense undertone she was failing miserably to conceal.

Her knuckles blistered white around the steering wheel and there were slight pinch lines on either side of her lips. She stared with such fierce determination out the windshield that I half expected there to be scorch marks on the glass.

Mom was very pretty, much like those old black and white movie starlets they showed every so often on basic TV. She had beautiful cinnamon-colored hair that was naturally wavy when she didn’t cut it pixie-style and it always carried the lingering scent of citrus from her shampoo. She also had beautiful hooded, viridian-green eyes that seemed to always be shimmering like sunlight over a lake. Her complexion wasn’t as pale as mine, but porcelain, and she was willowy, not gangly like me, but… graceful, like a dancer. No one ever believed Erin Braeden was my mother. We were as different as night and day physically. My hair was thicker, curler and the highlighted with streaks of blue and it hung to my waist. It also had a life of its own, constantly creeping into my eyes when it was down, catching on things, and when the wind blew through it, the whole thing was one giant bird’s nest. I tried cutting it more than once, but it had a maddening way of growing back, longer and thicker than before. I eventually gave up and kept it in a tight braid down my back.

“Fallon?”

I averted my gaze. “I don’t remember.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire!
But it was either lie or tell her about Amalie. Lying was safer.

The dreams had begun six months before and I could never remember more than a few seconds of it. It was always dark with flashes of light, like someone spinning around and around with a camera in a room full of candles. Every so often I would see a flicker of a hand holding a pen over a faded journal, but the image would always dance away too quickly for me to read what was written. There were only two instances where I actually caught a glimpse of something tangible and both times it was a name:

Amalie Nicolette Dennison

I didn’t know who she was or why she kept popping into my dreams every night, or why I would wake up in the morning, dizzy with the salty scent of sea breeze hanging thick in the room, but I wished she would stop. I wasn’t sure my brain could take any more sleepless nights.

“Where are we going?” I asked, needing a change of topic.

Thinking about Amalie always creeped me out and I didn’t like it. I refused to believe that I was some pod for spiritual communication as I’d heard it once called on a TV show somewhere in Alberta a few months back. The whole show had been ridiculous. Spirits from the beyond had better things to do than wander into the minds and dreams of the living. Besides, Amalie hadn’t left me any subliminal messages or announced the name of her killer — assuming she was murdered. She just kept trying to make me nauseous with the spinning and the lights, or she was trying to drive me crazy from lack of sleep.

Honestly though, I blamed the whole thing on my mom. Would it have killed her to spend
one
night somewhere that didn’t
look
haunted? It was no wonder I was getting crazy dreams. My subconscious was begging for a hint of normalcy. But Mom wouldn’t see it that way.

“I was thinking we could just drive west for a while,” she answered, rhythmically tapping her unpainted fingernails on the worn leather of the steering wheel in a way that meant she was in deep thought but was answering because she believed children should always receive an answer when they ask a question. “What do you think?”

I thought I would like to head back to Nova Scotia, rent an apartment and stay there. But that answer would only earn me a deep sigh and a long speech about firsthand experiences and how every teenager in the world would have loved to be in my shoes and how I should enjoy it and blah, blah, blah. I’d heard it all before.

So, instead, I replied dryly, “West — fun. Nothing there we haven’t seen a million times before.”

She either didn’t pick up on my sarcasm, which was unlikely, or she chose to ignore it, which I was sure of, because nothing ever passed over her head.

“Actually, there’s a school I called the other day—”

Reflexively, I groaned. “Not another one…” I was ignored again.

“—they teach Latin and French.”

“Wow! Latin! That should come in handy, oh…
never!”

She spared me a glower from the corner of her eyes. “You will like this one and it’s only for a little while!”

Every time our funds began to decrease, Mom would stuff me in the most heavily guarded private school she could possibly find, while she worked herself silly earning more travel money. She claimed it was a good opportunity for me to make new friends and learn something new. It also gave her a chance to do what she needed to get done without having to worry about leaving me alone in a motel. But what I never confessed to was that I stopped trying to make new friends after leaving the fourth grade for the sixth time in one year. I learned everything I needed to know from the mountain of textbooks, worksheets and notes I carted around with me from all the schools I had left behind over the years, and there were tons of those. The number was mindboggling so I never kept count. But she always insisted.

“Can’t we just use the money dad left me?”

I knew it was useless to ask, even before she speared me with a dark scowl. Mom never touched that money, except to pay for all the high priced schools she thought I needed. I think it was her way of making it up to me for missing out on so much of my childhood to the open highway. Not that being stuck behind towering walls and iron gates was any better and I was sure dad would have told her so as well, had he not died when I was four.

“That money is for you to start your own life one day.”

One day.
I knew my dad would have wanted Mom to use the money instead of working herself to death, but Mom refused to touch a penny of it in any way that didn’t involve my education.

“How long are we staying there?” I sighed heavily.

Mom shrugged. “I don’t know yet.” In other words: until she had enough cash to keep us afloat for a few months. That could be anywhere from three to six months.

Well, maybe it would be different this time. Maybe Amalie would behave for once. Maybe she’d go away. I believed that nearly as much as I believed the sleek, black motorcycle racing to catch our fender was on its way to rescue me.

The sun gleamed off the rider’s black helmet, and as I watched, he raised a hand and gave me a two-fingered salute.