I weave more plans as I practice hurling Stars at the target.
“Miles is driving me crazy,” I tell Beas the next day, and then George the day after that. “Would it be all right if I came over for dinner?”
Each night I return home and head straight to my room, so that I manage to barely even glimpse sight of Will for five days.
I pull the covers straight up over my head and feel utterly exhausted. Knowing, stomach curling, that there is only so long I’m going to be able to keep this up.
Solving the Curse has reached a critical level now. More urgent even than the tournament, which is less than a week away. I throw Stars at the school target until my arms burn, then take Miles to town and ask Mr. Fitzpatrick to order a new Shakespeare biography for me: the most detailed one he can find. I know better than to hope that Dr. Cliffton will solve this voice Disappearance quickly. He hasn’t spent years preparing for it, the way he had when the music disappeared. So each night I rush through my homework and then find myself falling asleep in the early-morning hours with Mother’s Shakespeare book open in my lap.
I’m so tired by this routine that three days before the tournament, I doze off in the middle of Dr. Digby’s lab and Beas has to elbow me awake.
I open my eyes to glimpse the quote she has written across her knee.
Affection is a coal that must be cooled;
Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire.
“Like that one?” Beas asks when she notices me looking at it. “I wrote it partly in your honor.”
I half choke, thinking that she’s somehow guessed about Will, until I recognize the words. They’re not about my Will. They’re by Shakespeare. I sit up and rest my chin in my hands. “Is it getting easier?” I ask hopefully, gesturing at her knee. “Getting over Thom?”
“No,” Beas says simply, and covers the words with her skirt. “It’s not.”
Then she kicks me under the table: “Find anything to tie Shakespeare to this one?” she asks.
I pull out a piece of notebook paper.
Speak low, if you speak love.
CLAUDIO: Silence is the perfectest herald of joy. . . .
BEATRICE: Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss and let not him speak either.
—?Much Ado About Nothing
There are problems with my theory, gaping holes that can’t be explained, but I just know I’m on the right track. I feel it like a string vibrating. As if my mother were whispering in my ear. And if I fill my thoughts with Shakespeare, they won’t be filled with Will—?and maybe, if enough time passes, my feelings will dim.
But I feel a surge of euphoria, terrifying and addictive, every time I think of him. It’s almost like being hit with a Variant: a pure shot of joy, bottled and shimmering, multiplying even as I try to empty it from my hand. I doodle lumoava in the margins, wondering at how the Curse can dull every one of my senses.
Yet somehow love still makes them feel more alive than they’ve ever been.
I’ve completely forgotten about the interview I had with Daisy from the newspaper until the day before the tournament, when I finish my final practice with Mrs. Percy and swing by Fitzpatrick’s to pick up the biography I ordered. It’s one more excuse to stall before going home to help the Clifftons prepare for tonight’s party.
Mr. Fitzpatrick rings me up and nods toward the display case. “Don’t you want a paper?”
I turn, and my own face confronts me from above the fold. The headline screams NEW RESIDENT AILA QUINN SETS SIGHTS ON STARS.
I’m hurling one of my Stars directly at a picture of Eliza brandishing her epee, as if we’re getting ready to do battle.
I pick up a copy and can tell by the first paragraph that it’s steeped in small-town drama, a story that aims to pit us against each other, with a current of subtext running just beneath the surface. Two girls with something to prove.
The perennial favorite versus brand-new blood.
It’s apparent from the photographs whose side the paper has chosen. Eliza is cast in a soft light that makes her look so gorgeous she almost glows. The shadows on me are positively garish, and I look as though I’m getting ready to break into a snarl.
“They could have found a better photograph,” Fitzpatrick acknowledges, echoing my thoughts. I put the paper back so the images are hidden, hoping that Will never lays eyes on either one of them. When Fitzpatrick gives me my change, he whispers, “But my money’s still on you.”
“Thank you,” I say, surprised, and his words make my veins light with renewed confidence. “Are you coming to the Clifftons’ party tonight?”
“I think so.” He pushes the Shakespeare biography across the counter.
“I really wouldn’t miss it,” I say with a meaningful look. “It’s going to be one to remember.”
Then I tighten my grip on the book and run the whole way home.
Chapter Forty-Six
Date: 3/5/1943
Birds can sense storm patterns before we can.
By the time we even start to sense brewing danger, they have fled their nests and disappeared.
I slide into the booth at a back-alley diner in Corrander that’s filled with the sort of people who are too busy looking for their next fix to care who I am or what Larkin and I are discussing.
Victor holds out a stained menu. “Do you want eggs?”
“No.” My head throbs. “Anything but eggs.”
He orders bacon. I order burnt toast and coffee.
“Thought you’d like to see some of our potential customers,” he says as he nods toward the rest of the diner. He takes a sip of coffee. “Partner.”
I survey the people around us. Heavy-lidded. Dead-eyed and gray-skinned, slumped against cracked leather seats and walls coated with old smoke. People for whom the natural world doesn’t hold any more beauty or promise.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Stefen?” When Victor smiles, every angle in his face sharpens, like a mirror breaking. He slides an envelope bursting with money under the table. “Even that meager hit of Peace from the maid worked. The father is eternally grateful. We have to get more.”
“It worked?” I ask. The diner suddenly brightens around me. The smoke peels clean from the walls. Success. Glory. Eureka. Malcolm Cliffton has never done anything so big and so meaningful. What I have done dwarfs the Variants by comparison. I echo Larkin’s smile and scrape off the blackened surface of my toast. “Breakfast’s on me, then,” I say, and he laughs.
“I have another already lined up,” Victor says. “He’s ready as soon as you get your hands on some more.” He turns to his papers. “Good timing, with the tournament this weekend. While everyone’s distracted.”
My eyes fall to the front of his newspaper. I take a bite of my toast, and flakes of it fall like black snow on my plate.
I immediately start to choke.
“Can I see that?” I rip it from his hands.
AILA QUINN, the headline shrieks. Right there on the blasted front page.