“No.” She set aside a phone bill, picked up an invoice for detailing on her father’s car—it went on the stack with the telephone bill.
“I don’t care what other people think. Or what they say,” Nathan said, nobly enough. She knew it wasn’t true, but she imagined he believed it. Few people cared as much about what other people thought as Nathan Gates. He wanted to be liked—or rather, he was desperate not to be disliked. So much that he whittled down every edge that he had, in case someone should find them distasteful.
She had never before thought she could be another piece of him that needed to be carved away.
“If you didn’t do it, who did?” Nathan asked, musing out loud.
“I have no idea,” she said, not looking at him. She picked up another bill. Doctor’s visit for Daphne. Memories eddied through her mind.
Daphne with her wheezing breath, face pale, eyes panicked. Her mother, face like stone, holding the inhaler out of reach.
Daphne with her sleeves soaked in blood, blinking away sleep.
Daphne seizing Emma’s hand, and whispering four words.
“No one can know.”
6
DAPHNE
Then
Daphne is aware that she is a peculiar child. Her grandfather told her as much, when Daphne stood beside the bed that smelled of rubbing alcohol and musty blankets and the less-pleasant scents of a body that could no longer tend to itself. His skin sallow, his breath rattling, Grandpa looked at Daphne by letting his eyes fall to the side, not even turning his head because it took too much effort.
“You’re a peculiar child, aren’t you? Always watching,” he said, with a kind of revulsion that made Daphne go still. She’s never forgotten that tone in her grandfather’s voice. She has listened for it ever since, and heard it a handful of times, sneaking around the edges of syllables from her teachers, her parents, even from Juliette.
Emma is different. “You’re weird. It’s cool,” she tells Daphne, when she talks to her at all, and lets Daphne babble about fungi and poisonous plants and the ancient Roman practice of divining the future in the entrails of sheep. Daphne is twelve, and somehow both an “old soul” and “young for her age,” which means she doesn’t have many friends. She has her sisters instead. Sometimes she thinks about them leaving someday and she is filled with a formless, all-powerful fear, a scuttling thing like insects under her skin that makes her want to scream or to hit things. But today that fear is far away. Tomorrow she will sit in a cold room across from Chief Ellis and lie, but today she’s with Emma at the park, and everything is perfect.
Emma sits alone under an oak tree, perched on a root. She wears black jeans and an off-the-shoulder black shirt with flowing sleeves and a half-dozen silver rings on her fingers. She’s sketching, as she so often is; her walls are covered with her drawings and paintings. The best, she has labored over all year, to prepare for her art school applications in the fall. Daphne doesn’t like to look at them. The rabbit with its leg twisted backward, caught in a snare. The church breaking open, people rushing out with expressions of frightening ecstasy.
Even the ones that should seem normal, like the portrait of Juliette at the piano, her head bent. The colors are wrong. Like rotting things. The tendons of her fingers stand out, and her hair is pulled back in a bun so tight, the skin at her hairline looks bruised. Her parents can’t seem to see that there is something wrong with the painting. They smile and say that it’s lovely, not like the rest. They don’t see that it’s the worst of all of them.
Emma hasn’t spoken to Daphne since they arrived in the park, which is typical and doesn’t bother Daphne—it’s not like they have much to say to each other. Except that now Daphne, who has been walking along the riverbank, setting each foot precisely in front of the other to make a perfectly straight line with her footprints, has remembered what they’re called. The ancient Romans with their sheep guts. Haruspex. She is about to go tell Emma this vital piece of information when Emma suddenly stands up and grins.
It’s rare to see Emma smile. A grin is unheard of. Daphne stands still and watches as Emma raises a hand and waves, then picks up her canvas messenger bag and hurries her way over to a man leaning against a picnic bench. He has a long face and full cheeks, with short, unruly hair. Daphne can’t read the look he gives Emma. Half-resigned and half-cheerful. He shakes his head and gives her a friendly fist bump.
Daphne creeps along the edge of the river, getting closer. The breeze carries the sound down toward her, and neither of them looks her way. She’s used to this. She is happiest when invisible. Getting noticed is never good for girls like her, peculiar girls who say the wrong thing and walk the wrong way and don’t want the things they’re supposed to want.