Opal would have smiled or lied or cheated her way out of the question. Jasper just lowers his head, a boy with the bit in his teeth, and ignores it. “She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. I don’t even think she’s reading.” The slightest, most awful break in his voice. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
The weight that has been hovering above Arthur for days now—the suffocating guilt he’s been holding off with sheer volume of alcohol—descends upon him then. It lands like cannon shot, smashing through him. “Is she—someone should look at her ribs—” He hears an unhealthy wheeze in his own voice, swallows twice. “Is she alright?”
Jasper is perfectly cold, not scathing so much as searing. “It’s none of your business, because you’re never going to speak to her again, are you?” Jasper steps closer, crouching among the glittering teeth of broken bottles until his face is level with Arthur’s. “I don’t know what happened. But if I see another bruise on my sister, I’ll know who to blame.”
It occurs to Arthur, with the painful clarity that follows a long period of stupidity, that Jasper would be entirely correct to blame him. The mist could have risen any night in the past week and the Beasts would have found the Warden insensate, mired in self-pity. They would have been free to roam as they liked, sowing their bad seeds, perhaps sinking their teeth into a pale throat, raking their claws across a freckled face.
The fumes from the bourbon bottles make Arthur suddenly, violently sick.
Jasper watches impassively. He stands, looking down at Arthur with a disgusted, almost pitying expression, before turning away. His shoes crunch across the glass.
“Jasper.” Arthur’s eyes are closed, his head propped against the bookcase. “You should leave. Get out of Eden.”
Jasper turns slowly back, hands jammed deep in his pockets. Arthur can see the outline of fists through the denim, but his voice is flat and bored. “People have told me that my whole life, you know that? People who love me, people who hate me. All of them seem to agree that I don’t belong here.”
Arthur begins a garbled, embarrassed denial but Jasper cuts him off. “The hilarious thing, the real fucking joke of it all, is that my family’s been here longer than any of them, and they know it. I think it drives them crazy, actually.”
Arthur tries to imagine how the son of a part-time dealer living in a motel and a migrant worker could have a claim on that kind of old Kentucky legacy; he fails. “What do you mean?”
“Opal always got by on forgeries and bullshit and everyone feeling sorry for her, and never once wondered what it was like for me to walk around with faked papers. I used to have these nightmares . . .” Jasper’s flat affect has cracked. Through the fault lines, Arthur sees something familiar: a lonely, tired boy who is too young to have this many secrets. “But did you know if you write the Department of Health they’ll email you an index of every birth certificate in the county? If Opal had ever really wanted to know where Mom came from, she could’ve figured it out, too.”
He asks, carefully, “And where did your mom come from?”
“The same place everything in this town comes from.” And then Arthur knows, oh Jesus, why didn’t he guess? No wonder the mist had risen so often this spring; no wonder Opal and her brother had such accursed luck. The only surprise is that their mother made it as long as she did.
Jasper shrugs, a hard jerk of his shoulders. “The goddamn Gravelys.”
Arthur pushes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, pressing until fireworks burst in the black. “Jasper. You have to get out of this town. Now. Tonight.”
“I literally just told you how sick I am of hearing that.”
“You don’t understand. The Beasts—the curse—” Arthur pauses to reflect on all the poor life choices that led him here, sitting in his own sick, speaking freely of his family’s secrets to a boy who wants him dead, or at least maimed. He swallows. “Haven’t you ever wondered why no Gravely stays longer than a night or two in this town? Even if they don’t know the whole truth, they know what happens to the ones who stay.”
Jasper’s eyes have widened, very slightly. Arthur can almost see the machinery of his mind working, recalling every near-miss and brutal accident, all the times the mist rose and he felt the weight of black eyes on the nape of his neck.
Then Arthur watches him gather it all up and shove it someplace cold and private. He arranges a sneer on his face. “You think it’s news to me, how much my life has sucked?”