It takes me a second to unwedge the words from the small, dim place I’ve been keeping them. “Did you know her last name? My name?”22
Bev doesn’t answer, but she goes very still. My cheeks sting as if I’ve been slapped. “You did. The whole time, and you never—” I stop speaking before my voice can do anything embarrassing, like crack or wobble.
Bev scrubs her hand hard over her face and says, “Hon, everybody knew.” She sounds almost gentle. I wonder how bad I must look, to squeeze pity out of Bev. “Everybody knew Old Leon Gravely, and everybody knew his little girl. The day she got that Corvette was the last day of peace and quiet in this town.”
I swallow the phrase everybody knew. It ricochets around inside me, bruising bones. “Did Charlotte know?” The question feels desperately important.
Bev shakes her head quickly. “I never said anything, and she didn’t grow up around here.”
A tiny ray of relief, that at least one person in my life wasn’t lying to me. I lick cracked lips. “So then do you know why my mom didn’t—how she wound up here?”
“Your mama had a wild streak a mile wide. Eventually I guess she finally crossed the line and her daddy threw her out. She dropped out of school, left town, and when she came back—there you were. With that Gravely hair.” Bev’s eyes flick up to my greasy red curls.
“And Old Leon.” The man in the mansion, the reason there’s no luna moths or unions in Muhlenberg County. My granddaddy. “He didn’t take her back?”
Bev shakes her head once. “He might have, if she turned respectable, begged a little bit. But your mama was stubborn.”
She says it admiringly, but it sounds to me like Mom was just a rich-kid rebel, one of those spoiled children that break rules out of boredom. And then she wound up with two kids and too much pride to ask for help. Instead, she taught us to scrabble and steal. She raised us in parking lots and motel rooms, hungry and lonely, chased by Beasts we couldn’t see.
And nobody in this whole damn town did anything about it. They turned their backs and looked away, just like they always have and always will.
Even Bev, who could have told me the truth anytime, who I trusted.
She’s not looking at me now, tonguing the tobacco in her jaw. “Listen, I should have—”
“Did Charlotte bring my library holds by?” My voice is cool, serene.
I see Bev flinch a little from whiplash. “Charlotte’s not—” She clears her throat, falls back into her usual aggression. “If you want your smut you’ll have to walk your ass over to the library just like everybody else.”
“Okay,” I say calmly, and then I slam the door in her face.
“Opal, hey, come on.” I hear her feet shuffling on the other side of the door. “Fine, be like that. But I’m not turning the internet back on until you take out the trash.”
Her boots scuff the pavement as she stomps away.
I go all the way under, after that. No longer drifting but diving down, kicking hard toward the riverbed. I lose track of the days and nights, existing in the changeless twilight of deep water. I don’t have to dream because I never sleep; I don’t have to think because I never wake up.
At some point, the door opens. I don’t roll over, but I can smell the warm blacktop of the parking lot, feel the aggrieved tumble of air disturbed after a long stillness. I hear Jasper’s voice. “Hey,” he says, and then, after a while, “Okay, whatever.”
I think he leaves then, but he comes back later, and then again. He gets louder and more annoying each time. Opal, are you sick? Opal, what’s wrong with you? I feel like one of those eyeless fish who lives in the deep pools of Mammoth Cave, too canny to be caught and dragged out into the light. I stay safe and deep, even when I feel the ghastly chill of blankets torn away, even when I hear the shift in his voice, the teenage crack at the end of my name. Opal, what the fuck? Opal, why are your ribs that color?
He keeps at it for a while, but eventually he gives up and leaves me to decompose in peace. Some small, wakeful part of me wants to feel sad about that—is this how it feels, to be crossed off somebody’s list?—but most of me is relieved. It’s easier to fall apart when no one is watching you.
Arthur Starling becomes aware—gradually, in reluctant stages—that someone is watching him. His first clue was the nervy shiver at the back of his skull that told him there was a stranger on Starling land. He ignored this on the grounds that it was impossible, as he was in possession of all the keys again, and as the only person who could theoretically gain entry without a key was never coming back.
His second clue was the physical sound of his front door opening. He had ignored this on similar grounds. The House had been displeased since Opal left—none of the faucets worked and the windows were all jammed, and everything in the fridge had molded to spiteful green sludge overnight—but it wouldn’t yet betray him by opening for his enemies. And, furthermore, Arthur had been drinking with such unflagging dedication that he was simultaneously still drunk and already hungover, and couldn’t be sure he’d heard anything in the first place.
His third clue is the sound of a bourbon bottle shattering several inches away from his head. This, he finds, he cannot ignore.
Arthur opens his eyes—a process not dissimilar from prying open a pair of crusted paint cans—to find himself on the library floor, which is something of a surprise. The afternoon air is gluey and hot because none of the windows will open, and there’s a young man watching him. Glossy curls, rangy brown limbs, a surplus of eyelashes. There’s nothing even slightly familiar about him—except for his expression.
Only one person has ever regarded Arthur with that particular canny, cornered-animal fury.
“Oh God, there’s another one.” The words come out smeary and flat, which tells Arthur that his face is still adhered to the floorboards. He closes his eyes again and hopes Opal’s little brother will leave, or perhaps dissipate, like a bad dream.
A second bottle hits the floor, a little closer.
“Is there something,” Arthur asks the floor, “I can do for you?”
“I’d say ‘die in a ditch,’ but it looks like you’re halfway there.”
From the way she talked about him, Arthur had formed an idea that Jasper was a sheltered, delicate creature, in need of constant protection. But he is, in fact, a sharp and resentful sixteen-year-old from Muhlenberg County, whom everyone else needs protection from.
Arthur detaches himself from the floor in unpleasant stages, pausing several times to reacquaint his stomach with vertical gravity. Eventually he achieves a slouched sitting position, his back braced by a bookshelf, and tries again. “Why are you here?”
Jasper, who had apparently grown bored while Arthur wormed himself upright, is leaning over a desk, perusing Arthur’s notes and folders. They’re in a state of fantastic disarray, folders emptied, papers crumpled, his yellow notepad teetering precariously on the edge with half its pages torn out. Arthur has an embarrassing suspicion that he removed them in a fit of impotent temper.
“Opal left her favorite hoodie here,” Jasper says, without looking away from the desk.
Arthur grunts. “Your sister’s a better liar.”
“Yeah, but I’m smarter.” Jasper looks away from the notes and meets Arthur’s eyes, flatly threatening. “I came to tell you to leave her alone.”
Arthur feels infinitely too old for this conversation, and also too drunk, too sober, and too wretched. “I’ve been trying. You’re the ones who keep turning up at my House.”
“Tell it to leave us alone, too.”