Lena picked up her backpack. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Macon ignored her, smoothing open the first of his newspapers. “Earthquakes in Paraguay.” He snapped open the next, which appeared to be written in French. “The Seine is drying up.” Another. “The polar ice cap is melting at ten times the predicted rate. If one is to believe the Helsinki press.” A fourth paper. “And the entire southeastern coast of the United States appears to be afflicted by a curious plague of pestilence.”
Lena closed his newspaper, revealing a plate of white bread sitting directly in front of him. “Eat. The world will still be on the brink of disaster when you finish your breakfast. Even in your smoking jacket.”
The darkness in Macon’s expression lifted, the green eyes of an Incubus-turned-Light-Caster blazing a bit lighter at her touch. Lena gave him a smile, the one she saved only for him. The smile that said she had noticed all of it—every minute of their life together. What they had, they knew. Since Macon had basically come back to her from the dead, Lena hadn’t taken a minute they shared for granted. I never doubted that, though I envied it.
It was what I’d had with my mom—and now I didn’t. I wondered if I had smiled differently when I looked at her. I wondered if she’d known that I had noticed it all, too. That I knew she’d read every book I was reading, just so we could talk about it over dinner at our old oak table. That I knew she’d spent hours at the Blue Bicycle bookstore in Charleston, trying to find the right book for me.
“Come on!” Lena motioned, and I shook loose the memory and picked up my backpack. She gave her uncle a quick hug. “Ridley!” she called up the stairs. A muffled groan floated down from one of the bedrooms. “Now!”
“Sir.” I folded my napkin and stood up.
Macon’s relaxed expression vanished. “Be careful out there.”
“I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wate. I know you will.” He lowered his cup. “But you be careful yourself. Things are a bit more complicated than they might seem.” The town was falling apart, and we’d pretty much broken the whole world. I wasn’t sure how things could get any more complicated than that.
“Careful of what, sir?” The table was quiet between us, even though I could hear Lena and Gramma arguing with Ridley in the hallway.
Macon looked down at his pile of newspapers, smoothing open the last one, in a language I’d never seen and yet somehow recognized.
“I wish I knew.”
After breakfast at Ravenwood, if you could call it that, the day only got weirder. We were late for school because when we got to Link’s house to pick him up, his mom caught him dumping his breakfast in the trash and made him sit through a second one. Then, when we drove by the Stop & Steal, Fatty, Jackson’s faithful truant officer, wasn’t sitting in his car eating a sticky bun and reading the paper. And there were half a dozen buns left in the bakery section. That had to be the first sign of the apocalypse. But even more unbelievable, we walked into the administration building twenty minutes late, and Miss Hester wasn’t at the front desk to give us detention. Her purple nail polish sat in front of her office chair, unopened. Like the whole world had somehow rotated five degrees in the wrong direction.
“This is our lucky day.” Link put up his fist, and I tapped his knuckles against mine. I would have gone with freaky.
It was confirmed when I caught a glimpse of Ridley wandering toward the bathroom. I could’ve sworn she had changed into a regular girl, wearing weirdly regular-girl clothes. And finally, when I slid into my seat next to Lena, on what should have been Mrs. English’s Good-Eye Side, I found myself in the Twilight Zone of classroom seating charts.
I was sitting where I always did. It was the room that had changed, or Mrs. English, who spent the whole period grilling students on the wrong side of the room.
“ ‘This is a sharp time, now, a precise time—we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.’ ” Mrs. English looked up. “Miss Asher? How dusky a time would Arthur Miller think we live in today?”
Emily stared at her, shocked. “Ma’am? Don’t you mean to be asking—them?” Emily looked over at Abby Porter, Lena, and me, the only people who ever sat on the Good-Eye Side.
“I mean to be asking anyone who expects to pass my class, Miss Asher. Now answer the question.”
Maybe she put her glass eye in the wrong side this morning.
Lena smiled without looking up from her paper.
Maybe.
“Um, I think Arthur Miller would be majorly psyched that we aren’t all so messed up anymore.”
I peeked over my copy of The Crucible. And as Emily stammered to condemn a witch hunt not much different from the one she had all but led herself, that glass eye was staring straight at me.
As if it could not only see me but see right through me.