She pronounced the word “autonomy” with extreme care.
“I like your teacher, kid,” I said. I vaguely thought that I should tell her not to bite people, no matter what the provocation, but that would be massively hypocritical coming from the girl who’d established her own right to bodily autonomy by threatening to send shocks through a boy’s collar to every nerve ending he possessed.
Carwyn still shouldn’t have touched me. And this boy shouldn’t have touched Marie. I put a hand on her back, as if I could protect her, when it was already too late.
“I’m never to do it again, because if he’d needed stitches I would be in a world of trouble,” Marie informed me.
“What’s this about trouble?” Penelope asked, coming in early from the hospital for a change and unwinding her scarf, subtly shining with Light embroidery, from around her neck.
Marie and I exchanged a look and chorused “Nothing” in unison as Penelope laughed.
We ate our grilled-cheese sandwiches and watched TV, Marie curled up in the space between my body and Penelope’s, fitting like a coin in a slot. I rested my chin on the top of Marie’s cornrowed hair and envied her this thoughtless security. Having a kid act like a kid was fine; having one of your parents suddenly turn into a child was terrifying.
“Hey,” said Penelope, looking at me, “you all right, Ladybird? Did your dad upset you? Or Ethan? Did Marie upset you? Because you should know that as her mother I have the right to beat her like a gong.”
She reached over and took my hand, her fingers strong and a little callused, skin clear dark brown, rings bright and the metal thin and worn from long and continual use. I wished I had hands as steady and kind as hers. I wished I could tell her everything I had done, but that would just have been laying the burden on her instead of me.
She’d done enough for me already, and she wasn’t my mother. My mother was dead, and I had betrayed her memory.
“Nobody upset me,” I told her. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”
She opened her mouth to argue with me, but just then Jarvis came home. He came home late so often, ever since Ethan had got him the job in Stryker Tower. He walked in the door with his face crumpled like a piece of office paper that had been tossed at the trash can but fallen short.
Penelope’s and Marie’s faces turned to his, and Jarvis’s expression smoothed. Marie scrambled off the sofa and ran to him, and he lifted her up to the ceiling, his Light-enhanced-for-perfect-vision eyes reflecting a golden rim. Marie laughed down at him, knowing for certain that her father would always protect her and always be there, his hold on her steady and strong.
The next day, I had to go to school. Nightingale-Evremonde did random checks on rings, sometimes, to see what the last spell you performed was. I used my rings to turn a traffic light red as I was walking to school, then ran across the street before anyone could leap from their car and yell at me.
Ethan and I had different classes on Tuesdays, and even different lunchtimes. It felt awful to be even a tiny bit glad about that.
I was punished for it. I was standing at my locker, staring and trying to figure out which books to take out and trying not to think about what I had done, when a hand ran possessively down the small of my back.
I started and spun around, knocking my elbow—skinned from climbing out the bathroom window at the club—hard into my locker door. Ethan held his hands up in mock surrender.
“Hey, Lucie, it’s just me. I’m not one of those locker muggers who have been plaguing the school.”
I’d been dreading seeing him, and yet unexpectedly it made me feel better. It was a relief to see this particular personality behind this face, to absorb all the bits and pieces that made up the person I loved: Ethan’s gold-touched eyes, the hair curling over the crisp white collar of his school shirt, the way he’d removed his hand fast when I jumped.
I reached out for one of his hands and pulled him back toward me. I was wearing heels, so we were standing at the same level, cheek to cheek. I smelled his clean, sharp aftershave and felt the faint scratch of a spot at his jaw that he’d missed.
“I heard they were locker highwaymen,” I said. “Stand and deliver your lunch money.”
Ethan’s free hand went to my waist, holding on. “Lucie,” he murmured. “I have something to tell you. You’re probably going to be angry, and you have every right to be.” He took a steadying breath. “The doppelganger’s disappeared.”
“I saw him,” I said. “The night before last. I went to see him.”
It wasn’t brave of me to confess that much. There’d been a guard at Carwyn’s door, a receptionist who knew my face, and probably cameras in the hotel.