These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall

Author:Kate Alice Marshall [Marshall, Kate Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

17

THE HOLIDAYS WERE a blur of tradition and ritual. Thanksgiving came and went, and my cousins disappeared back to Atwood School. Christmas planning started the instant they were gone and didn’t let up. It left me exhausted. I dragged myself through every day, pretending to have opinions on trees and ornaments, menus and mistletoe. Every night I collapsed into my bed and hardly dreamed at all.

Bryony hadn’t kissed me since that night, on my hand or anywhere else. I hadn’t dared ask if she wanted to. But we walked by the lake and ate lunch at the folly and talked about things other than figments and shadows. It had been nice for a while to pretend that things were normal.

“You look terrible,” Bryony informed me the week before Christmas.

I leaned back against the folly’s half-built wall. A faint headache scrabbled at the back of my skull. “I feel terrible,” I admitted. “All this party planning is going to kill me.”

“It’s not like anyone but your family even comes,” Bryony said with a snort.

“You don’t understand how hard these people work to impress themselves,” I replied.

“You’re one of those people,” she reminded me, and I groaned. “At least it’s just Christmas.”

“No, it isn’t,” I told her. “It’s Christmas Eve and Christmas and Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve and a formal New Year’s Day brunch. Who does that? The whole point of New Year’s Day is to be asleep because you got trashed the night before.”

“Sure, miss never-had-alcohol-before-last-month,” Bryony teased me. “I bet you go to bed at nine on New Year’s Eve.”

“12:01 on the dot,” I countered. She laughed, her nose scrunching up. I could watch her laugh forever. I could stare at her until I memorized the constellations of her freckles, and I was well on my way to doing so. I wanted more than anything to lean forward and kiss her—

But I was a Vaughan, and she was the Harrow Witch, and she hadn’t kissed me, not really, and so I didn’t lean forward. Not even when she looked at me and bit her lower lip and shook her head a little like I’d done something to amuse her.

The next day, she flew out to St. Louis to spend Christmas with family, and mine started to arrive. Desmond was in Switzerland with his dad, but Celia proved a welcome distraction, attaching herself to me like a particularly chatty barnacle.

I floated through the parade of holidays. Christmas Eve: A string quartet playing, a sumptuous dinner, Mom and Simon and me drinking cocoa and singing off-key carols after bedtime. Christmas: lavish, impersonal presents stacked high. New Year’s Eve: the whole house blazing with light to hold back the night for just long enough to ring in the new year before we all retreated to our rooms.

Almost all of us. As I got into bed just past one, I glimpsed a light heading off among the trees. Someone was out after dark.

It was New Year’s Day. I had been at Harrow for over three months.

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