Before Ever After by Samantha Sotto Read Free Book Online Page B

in his jeans. She guessed that these leather-cuffed devotees were not searching for Oscar Wilde.
    As much as she liked the Doors, however, she could not fathom why anyone would come to Père Lachaise of his or her own accord. She loathed cemeteries. They broke her heart like posters for missing dogs and icecream cones dropped by little kids. But it wasn’t the yellow Labrador puppies, vanilla melting on the pavement, or the dead beneath the gravestones that made her sad. What tore her up was the thought of the people who lost them. That, and soggy grass—the kind your heels sank into after an hour of steady rain.
    Shelley could still feel the way the grass had squished under her feet that gray morning she stood at her mother’s side watching raindrops splatter over her dad’s coffin. She did not know at the time that she was attending three funerals: one for her dad, the second for her ruined ballet flats, and the third for the twinkle in her mom’s eye when her dad walked through the door.
    Shelley blinked back tears. She looked around, searching for dry and solid ground. Apart from the clicking of Brad’s camera, her little group walked in silence, their feet shuffling along the same path, their thoughts wandering on more distant roads. Dex seemed to have drifted the farthest away. He glanced toward her and caught her looking at him. He flashed her the same fractured smile he had when they had met in the van. It was bright, but it still made Shelley wonder if something less sunny was hidden beneath.
    “This way,” Max said as he grabbed Shelley’s arm. Leaves rustled above the thin dirt path, leading toward a stone wall. Shelley didn’t notice them. She was busy trying not to trip over their fluttering shadows. Walking arm in arm with Max had the unfortunate effect of making her knees wobble.
    “Has anyone here heard of the Bloody Week?” Max asked. “And just to be clear, I am not referring to that nasty union strike at the tube last month.”
    “If memory serves me right, I believe that was the week when the French government reclaimed Paris from the Communards who had taken over the city in the late 1800s,” Jonathan said.
    “Well done, Jonathan,” Max said. “That would be a somewhat sanitized definition, but, yes, technically correct. Although the twenty thousand men, women, and children who were brutally murdered that week might think that ‘mass indiscriminate slaughter’ was a more apt description. Semantics.” He shrugged. “Ah, there it is.” He pointed to the perimeter wall of the cemetery and doubled his pace, dragging Shelley along with him.
    A large cement plaque was affixed to the wall. It was engraved with the words AUX MORTS DE LA COMMUNE 21–28 MAI 1871 .
    “The Wall of the Communards, the final resting place of the doomed Bohemian dream that was, for two months in 1871, the Paris Commune,” Max said. “It is also the approximate site of the execution and mass grave of one hundred forty-seven souls who were rounded up and shot against this wall. They were the lucky ones.”
    “The lucky ones?” Dex asked.
    “Living among the dead and scavenging for food like wild animals could not have been a pleasant experience for the survivors who were forced into hiding here after the slaughter,” Max said. “But I am getting ahead of myself. I could begin our story on the day an overindulged thirteen-year-old named Isabelle debated with her father, Julien, on the merits of having a cat, but I’m afraid I might lose you somewhere in the midst of their frequent puberty-fueled quarrels. I have therefore decided to begin our tale with the far less complicated subject of the Franco-Prussian War. Any objections?”
    “Gee. Sounds like fun.” Brad groaned.
    “Hardly,” Max said. “War never is—especially when you are on the losing end—which is exactly where the French dangled precariously from, on January 28, 1871. They had lost their long war with Prussia over the Spanish throne.