The Dolls(6)

“Told you so,” she says. She sticks out her right hand to shake mine. “I’m Glory Jones.”

Her grasp is warm and firm, and she grins at me as I help her up. “So you must be starting school in Carrefour?” she asks as she brushes the earth off her dress. When I nod, she asks, “Pointe Laveau?”

“Not that I have much of a choice.”

Glory shrugs. “It’s not so bad. You get used to the uniforms. Plus, it’s fun to accessorize.” She jiggles her armful of bracelets and bangles.

It still sounds like torture to me, but I find myself smiling anyhow. “You go there too?”

“Yeah. Maybe we’ll have some classes together. Do you know what you have for first period yet?”

I shake my head. “I actually don’t start until next Monday.”

“How come?”

“I think the days off are my consolation prize for my aunt dragging me halfway across the country on my seventeenth birthday.”

“You’re seventeen?” she asks in a small voice. “Today?”

“Yes . . . ,” I say slowly.

“Oh.” Glory gives me an uneasy smile. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Eveny.” She’s already backing up. “I’ve got to go meet my friend Arelia now. I guess I’ll see you at school next week. And, um, happy birthday.”

I stare after her as she hurries away. I’m still trying to figure out what just happened when she pauses and turns to face me. “Listen, Eveny,” she says solemnly, “be careful.” And then she’s up and over the back wall.

I blink into the darkness, then shake my head. Glory Jones was weird. But I like weird.


By the time Aunt Bea arrives home a couple of hours later, I’ve called Meredith back twice, but her phone’s going straight to voice mail. I try not to feel hurt that she’s out celebrating my birthday without me.

Aunt Bea brings me a chocolate cake from the market in town, and although it tastes a little like cardboard, I’m grateful for the effort. “I wanted to bake you something special,” she tells me, “but my pans and mixing bowls haven’t arrived yet. I promise, I’ll make you whatever you want next week.”

She finds a single, dusty candle in a drawer, and she and Boniface sing “Happy Birthday” to me as she sets the cake down atop the little table on the back porch. Boniface flips a switch inside the house, and the garden is illuminated by a hundred little fairy lights overhead. I take a deep breath and prepare to make a wish, but a gust of wind sweeps in and snuffs the flame for me. I shiver, even though it’s not cold outside.

“Happy birthday, sweet girl,” Aunt Bea whispers into my hair. She walks away without another word, leaving Boniface and me to eat our cake in silence.

That night, I lie awake in bed for hours. The wind howls angrily outside my window, and I swear I can hear sirens in the distance. Finally, with Glory Jones’s odd words of caution ringing in my ears, I drift off to sleep.

I rarely dream, but the images that assault me tonight are as clear as the vision I had of my mother’s funeral. First, I see the hallway outside my bedroom door, then the stairway leading to the front hall. As I begin making my way down the steps. I’m hit with the sudden, powerful scent of rusted iron in the air, and that’s when I see it: blood beginning to pour out from beneath the closed parlor doors, pooling thick and nearly black on the marble floor.

I gasp and begin to run back up the stairs, but the crimson ocean is rising fast, and soon I can feel it, hot and sticky, licking at my ankles and then my legs. “No!” I cry out. The faster I retreat up the stairs, the faster the tide advances until there’s nowhere else for me to go. The whole house is filling with blood. . . .

I wake with a jolt, screaming. Aunt Bea rushes into my room and turns on the light. “What happened?”

“A nightmare,” I gasp as I try to catch my breath. My legs still feel wet and sticky. “There was so much blood. . . .”

“It was only a dream.” She strokes my back, and my heartbeat begins to return to normal.

After she’s gone, I stare at the ceiling for a long time. It’s not until the first rays of dawn begin to filter through my windows that I finally drift off into a dreamless sleep.





UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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3


Storms pound the bayou all week, making it impossible to venture out on one of the old bikes from the shed in thebackyard. Like many people who grew up in New York City, I never learned to drive, and Aunt Bea is too busy setting up her bakery to teach me now. She’s making several trips a day into town to prep her kitchen space, in hopes of opening sometime next week. I keep offering to help, but she insists this is something she has to do on her own.