Beautiful Chaos by Kami García, Margaret Stohl Read Free Book Online

pulled on the one piece of yarn that tied up all of Gatlin County, above and below the surface.
    “I Claimed myself.”
    “You had to. You should be proud of that.”
    “I am.” She hesitated.
    “But?” I watched her carefully.
    “But I’m going to have to pay a price, and I’m ready to.”
    I closed my eyes. “Don’t talk like that.”
    “I’m being realistic.”
    “You’re waiting for something bad to happen.” I didn’t want to think about it.
    Lena played with the charms on her necklace. “It’s not really a question of
if
but
when.
”
    I’m waiting. That’s what the notebook said.
    What notebook?
    I didn’t want her to know, but now I couldn’t stop it. And I couldn’t pretend we could go back to the way things were.
    The wrongness of everything came crashing down on me. The summer. Macon’s death. Lena acting like a stranger. Running away with John Breed, and away from me. And then the rest of it, the part that happened before I met Lena—my mom not coming home, her shoes sitting where she’d left them, her towel still damp from the morning. Her side of the bed not slept in, the smell of her hair still on her pillow.
    The mail that still came addressed in her name.
    The suddenness of it all. And the permanence. The lonely reality of the truth—that the most important person in your life suddenly ceased to exist. Which on a bad day meant maybe she had never existed at all. And on a good day, there was the other fear. That even if you were a hundred percent sure she had been there, maybe you were the only one who cared or remembered.
    How can a pillow smell like a person who isn’t even on the same planet as you anymore? And what do you do when one day the pillow just smells like any old pillow, a strange pillow? How can you bring yourself to put away those shoes?
    But I had. And I had seen my mother’s Sheer at Bonaventure Cemetery. For the first time in my life, I believed somethingactually happened when you died. My mom wasn’t alone in the dirt in His Garden of Perpetual Peace, the way I’d always been afraid she was. I was letting her go. At least, I was close.
    Ethan? What’s going on?
    I wished I knew.
    “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. No one will.” I said the words even though I knew I wasn’t capable of protecting her. I said them because I felt like my heart was going to rip itself to shreds all over again.
    “I know,” she lied. Lena didn’t say anything else, but she knew what I was feeling.
    She pulled down the sky with her hands, as hard as she could, like she wanted to rip it away from the sun.
    I heard a loud cracking sound.
    I didn’t know where it came from, and I didn’t know how long it would last, but the blue sky broke open, and though there wasn’t a cloud in sight, we let the rain fall on our faces.
    I felt the wet grass, and the raindrops in my eyes. They felt real. I felt my sweaty clothes dampening instead of drying. I pulled her close and held her face in my hands. Then I kissed her until I wasn’t the only one who was breathless, and the ground beneath us dried and the sky was harsh and blue again.

    Dinner was Amma’s prizewinning chicken potpie. My portion alone was the size of my plate, or maybe home plate. I punctured the biscuit crust with my fork, letting the steam escape. I could smell the good sherry, her secret ingredient. Every potpie in our county had a secret ingredient: sour cream, soy sauce,cayenne pepper, even parmesan cheese straight out of the shaker. Secrets and piecrust went hand in hand around here. Slap a piecrust up top and all the folks in town will kill themselves trying to figure out what’s hiding underneath.
    “Ah. That smell still makes me feel about eight years old.” My dad smiled at Amma, who ignored both the comment and his suspiciously good mood. Now that the semester had started up again at the university, and he was sitting there in his collared teaching shirt, he looked downright normal. You