Meadowlark: A Novel by Melanie Abrams

Author:Melanie Abrams [Abrams, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

Then time seems to pass very slowly. Simrin takes a lot of pictures, but none of Juniper, none of River, and none of Blaze. Juniper watches Simrin from afar. She has two cameras hanging from a belt-like thing that crisscrosses her chest, and she shifts from one to the other without even looking. Juniper remembers the story her father told her about how the people at the place he grew up took Simrin’s camera away from her and how he rescued it. Even though everyone at Meadowlark rolls their eyes at fairy tales, Juniper always imagined him with a sword, triumphing over the bad guys. It’s a stupid thing to believe, she thinks now. Of course he didn’t have a sword. But he did triumph; that’s the word he uses—triumph.

Most of the stories he tells are about Jaishri, Simrin, and him triumphing over the people at the place he grew up. Those are the other words he uses: the people at the place I grew up. She’s never thought about it before, but now she does. Who were those people? And what was the place? She knows it was a bad place for kids. There were a lot of rules and things they had to do, but was it a bunch of houses on a street like in town or a place like Meadowlark? Juniper looks at Quinn and tries to imagine her as a young Simrin, tries to imagine what her father would look like standing next to her, but she’s never seen a picture of him when he was younger than sixteen, and Blaze is too much a baby to be a stand-in.

And then she thinks about something else. If Quinn can really do all this cross-sensing stuff, how did she learn to do it if she didn’t grow up at a place like Meadowlark? The thought is so surprising that she actually says “yeah” out loud. Was Quinn just born this way? And what is “this way” anyway? Juniper wonders if Quinn can do the other stuff, too, the stuff that only some of the grown-ups talk about, like call on the oncoming. Ever since this brouhaha started, there have been way more adults than usual trying to get the kids to call up their world wisdom and call on the oncoming, which is just a sideways way of saying what she heard Brandon say much more clearly when he asked Gavin, “What the fuck is going to happen?” And it makes her think her mother is right. That this brouhaha is in fact not just a brouhaha. It is bigger and badder than a “noisy and overexcited reaction to something unimportant.” It is something important. Very important. So important that there are now a number of adults (her mother definitely not included) who think that the kids should be able to see the future. But no one can do that, she thinks. At least she can’t. And she’s pretty sure none of the other Meadowlark kids can.

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