Starseed by Liz Gruder Read Free Book Online

marveled at the iPhone. “How do you figure out this fancy equipment?”
    Kaila sighed, wondering why old people were so technologically inept.
    “Enough,” Nan said. “I made a big pot of gumbo, some fried chicken, and cornbread. Let’s eat and get this girl to bed. It’s a school night.”
    Kaila gulped the gumbo and nearly inhaled the chicken and cornbread. Everyone chattered about her new phone and clothes while she daydreamed about Jordyn.
    “Hey,” she asked, her mouth tingling with the gumbo’s cayenne pepper and filé. “You heard about that cult in New Mexico where they brought in some students to our high school?”
    “Sure,” Mike said. “It was all over the news.”
    “I remember,” Paw Paw said.
    “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” her mother said. “And stop feeding the dog under the table.” Lucy gobbled up a hunk of cornbread. Woofy nuzzled her knee for more.
    “Me neither,” Nan said, chomping on a chicken wing.
    “How could you not remember that cult?” Paw Paw asked. “I clearly remember us sitting together watching the news. We all watched and said how sorry we felt for those kids.”
    “Well, I don’t remember it,” Nan said.
    “Alzheimer’s, old woman,” Paw Paw said, shaking his head and pushing back his plate. He’d barely eaten a thing.
    “I don’t remember it either,” Kaila’s mother said.
    Kaila looked at her mother and grandmother, one wearing a navy baseball cap, the other an old pink Easter bonnet—with the black Velostat plastic hidden inside. She had this creeping feeling that everything was not what it seemed. She scratched the skin above her ear under the black plastic. She too, had never heard one word of this cult before today. Goosebumps lifted the hairs on her arms, her intuition prodding chills. She determined to remain watchful. She could figure out anything if she set her mind to the task.

    Kaila trudged upstairs. Her bedroom was in the front of the house on the second floor. Her room was spacious with wood floors, worn rugs, and floor-to-ceiling windows that led out to a balcony spanning the width of the house. The damask curtains, once royal maroon, had faded from too many years’ sun. A white wicker rocking chair sat outside on the gallery. In cooler weather, she could rock and look out over the wrought-iron railing to the pond, the fields, the barn, and the forest beyond. Now, it was too hot, the air sticky with humidity.
    Kaila neatly laid her new outfit for the next day on the antique velvet chair next to her canopied bed. Tomorrow she’d wear a new skirt and blouse. She yanked off the crappy hick jeans and t-shirt and hurled them into the closet. She tore off the wig and the plastic wrapped around her head and scratched her scalp. She often sat alone in her room without the plastic; it just felt so good. She changed into a comfy nightshirt.
    At the far wall opposite her bed was an old-fashioned roll-top secretary desk with many drawers and cubbyholes. On each side of the desk stood a heavy wooden bookcase filled with dusty books. Above the desk hung a gilded oil painting of some long-dead relative. She wore a floor-length gray dress and held a fan in her hands, staring demurely with gloomy eyes from another century.
    That painting has got to go, Kaila thought. She would replace it with a Star Trek poster of Dr. Spock in his powder blue Starship Enterprise crew shirt and red glasses (Spocktacles) with the slogan “Party like a Vulcan.” Not this old stuff. It was as if she had lived in one of those old black-and-white movies and now stepped into a new Technicolor life. She switched on her MacBook, the screen lighting an electric blue.
    Lucy and Woofy stared up at her, panting.
    “You’re right,” Kaila said to the dogs. “I have been ignoring you. I still love you though.”
    She gazed at Woofy, who would forever have one eye shut, having been in a dog fight and lost his left eye. She had cried when it happened and held him