Fury by Rachel Vincent

Author:Rachel Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2018-08-16T19:02:45+00:00

June 1991

Grandma Janice closed the front door behind the last of the mourners and headed into the kitchen to put up the leftovers. Rebecca followed her. “Why don’t you go lie down and let me do that,” she said as she pulled a stack of Tupperware from the cabinet to the right of the stove.

“Thanks, hon, but I’d rather stay busy.”

Rebecca sat at the table in the dining nook, fiddling with the lace hem of her new black dress while she watched her grandmother stack the refrigerator full of casseroles and Jell-O salads as precisely as Grandpa Frank had ever loaded the trunk of his car for the road trips they’d taken, in an effort to give their granddaughter a normal life.

Grandma Janice wasn’t crying. She’d hardly shed a tear since that night in the hospital three days ago when they’d said goodbye to her husband of forty-six years. But Rebecca could see that she was in pain. That much was clear in the glazed look of exhaustion in her eyes. In her refusal to leave anything undone. In the way she kept glancing at Grandpa Frank’s cane, propped in the corner by the back door, where she’d set it the night they’d come home from the hospital.

“Ouch!” Grandma Janice held her finger up to the light, and Rebecca saw a single drop of blood welling from the pad. She had cut herself while she was dicing the leftover tomato slices.

“Grandma, let me do that.” Rebecca stood.

“I’m really fine, hon. Why don’t you get some sleep? Or go out? You’ve hardly left the house all summer.”

She’d hardly left the house because she had no one to go out with and no desire to go out alone. The friends she’d had in high school were really just acquaintances, and since graduation, she’d had no organic reason to see them and—to her own surprise—no real urge to call them.

She’d always felt like a charity case around them, anyway. The girl who survived the reaping. More a symbol—someone it wasn’t okay to exclude—than an actual friend.

In her room, Rebecca flopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, listening as her grandmother puttered around in the kitchen. Then she rolled over, and her gaze caught on a stack of unopened envelopes on her dresser.

Letters from her mother.

Rebecca’s dad only wrote once a month, but her mother still wrote a letter to her every Saturday afternoon, and though Becca had spent her freshman year of college on campus, the letters had always come to Grandma Janice’s address.

She’d decided not to give her mom the dormitory address, in part because she wanted to at least pretend to be a normal college student, unscathed by the pain of two—possibly three—murdered siblings and two incarcerated parents. But also because she didn’t want anyone at school to see her getting mail from prison.

According to a special report CNN had aired on the fourth anniversary of the reaping, only six children had escaped the slaughter. All six of them had been out of the home during the murders.

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