Ever Cursed by Corey Ann Haydu

Author:Corey Ann Haydu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published: 2020-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

13. JANE

They are eating roast chicken with apple stuffing, and I am trying to make the air be enough. The smell stops at my nose. I work to inhale it through my mouth, but even that taste isn’t allowed for me. Even that small almost-pleasure is forbidden.

But for once I don’t care.

My father didn’t do that, I think, watching him offer Grace an extra helping of potatoes.

My father wouldn’t do that, I think as he asks about our day.

My father isn’t like that, I think when he smiles at me with an unsaid apology for the food, like he does every night. A quiet moment between us that shows me he sees me; he knows my pain; he respects what I’m going through.

Not my father, I think, until he smiles at the newest attendant, and I watch her eyes dart to an older attendant, who makes a tiny come here hand gesture that I must be misunderstanding. The young attendant scurries to the older one, who grabs her elbow and doesn’t let go.

My body aches from the day. The walking. Drum’s wandering eyes. The hands that touched me. The words that were said. It’s all bruising me, and now I’m seeing things that aren’t really there: looks and movements and elbow squeezes that are probably the hallucinations of a very hungry princess.

Except: there is also the tingling in my fingers, the glow between my shoulder blades. The first good feeling my body has been allowed in five years. I don’t tell them about it. I barely let myself know it.

“To Ever,” Dad says, raising a glass of wine to our four glasses of berry juice and one glass of nothing.

“To Ever,” we echo.

And then there’s silence. He hasn’t asked us what we thought of the broken-down houses or the dirt roads. He isn’t making conversation about the spell, about Drum, about the friendship they used to have and why it ended. He isn’t seeing if we’ve made progress. It’s as if he doesn’t care. I make fists with my hands and try to squeeze that thought away, but it lingers. Repeats itself in my head until it sounds a little bit like the truth.

He is licking his lips from the chicken, a greasy sheen on his chin that makes me ill. I want to be outside with my mother, imitating her stillness. But Dad insisted we all stay together in these troubling times.

I look at my sisters, to see if they are thinking the same things I am, if they are working just as hard to remove Reagan’s words from their heads, from their bodies. Because what she said is now making my legs twitch and my heart beat and my mind circle around and around, no matter how sternly I tell it not to.

“I remember my first time stepping out in Ever,” he says as if one of us has asked. “It didn’t look anything like my home of Farr. Farr is icy. Cold in temperature, but also temperament. Not a friendly people.

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