State of Grace by Hilary Badger Read Free Book Online

the ones chosen on completion night. On top of following the Books, Fern’s always doing extra stuff to please Dot. Like right now, she’s making every single person in the garden a garland of flowers to wear at the completion party. You know, just because there’s a picture of someone wearing a garland in the Books and Fern’s decided that means Dot wants all of us to really wear them.
    According to Fern, weaving those garlands makes her feel closer to Dot. Which is so Fern. Everything about her is adorableness.
    I reach over and poke Fern’s arm.
    ‘Can you hurry up and fill your bag? I want to go riding after this.’
    Dot’s created horses for us to ride, which me and Fern like to do before we go swimming so we’re nice and hot by the time we jump in.
    I’m thinking about spending the whole afternoon having fun, smiling to myself when this voice goes, ‘Riding?’
    I look down and there’s Blaze standing down the bottom of my tree.
    ‘If Fern ever gets finished.’
    Blaze has a full picking bag slung over his shoulder. By the looks of it, he’s ready to empty his newfruit down the chute and go back to his hut or whatever exactly it is he does for fun. But he doesn’t.
    Instead he says, ‘Can I talk to you?’
    I give him this really big smile. The glowing pond is no big deal to me, not anymore, and I want him to know that. Just in case he’s thinking something big happened, or that the little rhyme he said in any way affected me. Or that I was obsessing over it or something.
    ‘Not if I’m riding. That would be kind of difficult, don’t you think?’
    Blaze doesn’t smile or anything, which is fair enough because I guess it wasn’t that entertaining a thing to say. It was just the quickest way I could think of to tell him that I don’t want to talk to him about what he said. Not now. Not ever.
    I’ve already spoken to Dot, which is all I need to do. She’s the only one who’ll ever know about the pictures in my head. The best thing now would be for Blaze to walk away.
    He picks that moment to put his bag down.
    ‘Move over,’ he tells Fern, ‘I’ll help you.’
    ‘She’s fine,’ I say as Fern starts making room for Blaze on her branch. He scales the trunk in that stiff way of his and starts picking newfruit twice as quickly as Fern could. Not even once do I see him touch a stem to check if the fruit is ripe. He hardly even looks at the newfruit before he slides it into Fern’s bag.
    I have to ask, ‘Wait. How d’you even know that one was ready to pick?’
    Blaze looks at his bare feet, huge against the branch of the newfruit tree.
    ‘Seemed dotly to me.’
    Am I imagining he sounds different from everyone else when he says dotly ?
    I feel like there’s a sourness to it, exactly like biting into an unripe plum. He reaches for a branch and ping-ping-ping, he twists the newfruit from their stems and rolls them into his picking bag. He’s so quick he sends blossoms and leaves showering through the air. The blossoms make this beautiful flickering shadow on the grass underneath us, which catches Fern’s attention right away. In her head, Fern’s probably already thanking Dot for putting on the display.
    Blaze grabs his chance. ‘I really want to talk to you.’
    ‘I’m kind of busy right now.’
    ‘After picking.’
    ‘I’m busy then too.’
    ‘Skip riding?’
    The way Blaze asks questions is the opposite of Gil. When Gil asks a question, you can tell he already knows the answer. With Blaze, it’s like he’s never sure about one single thing. Anyway, for once he’s looking at me. Not at my eyes or anything, but at my cheek, which kind of dilutes the impact of my favourite long, slow blink technique.
    ‘I’m not going riding. I changed my mind. I think I’ll go to the gazebo instead. There’s nothing in the Books to say I can’t go twice a day, right?’
    Blaze shakes his head.
    ‘Because I really want to tell Dot something.’
    Like I knew he would, Blaze asks,