Tripping Back Blue by Kara Storti

Author:Kara Storti [Storti, Kara]
Format: epub
Tags: Addiction, Birds, Drug gangs, Drugs, Alcohol, Substance Abuse, Family, Fantasy & Magic, Fiction, Fiction-Young Adult, Heroin, Indigo in D-Town, Kara Stori, Love, Magical Realism, Parental Abuse, Siblings, Social Issues, Teens, Violence, Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 9781512407631
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

In the dank atmosphere of the crypt, Orah tells me about the flower that has no name, even after years of research in trying to identify it. She urges me to never tell a soul—not Stacey, not her father, not Faith—about this place, to never utter a word, because it is the only location on earth where indigo—in all its delicate glory—is protected from the outside elements.

“How the heck are these flowers growing without sunlight?” I ask.

“It’s part of the magic. They’re fueled by the dead.” The idea of this gives me the creeps, but at the same time it’s a damn good representation of the circle of life. We die; we are born again.

“So you just came across it here and decided to snort it up your nose? That makes no sense.”

“It wasn’t like that at all,” she says. There’s a small bench up against the wall where she sits. She pats the empty space next to her. Why not take a load off? If she’s not weirded out by this place, I’m not going to let it get to me either.

She continues after I sit. “When my daughter died—Stacey’s mother—I was in a terrible state of mind. I thought God had already taken too much away from me when he took my husband at such a young age. But then he went and took my daughter too.” Her sadness is palpable. It seems like the flowers are shimmering different versions of blue in response to her emotions. If Faith were here, she’d compare their petals to mood rings.

“Stacey told me she died of a virus.” I sense that she might want to tell me more about this.

“You know how we realized something was really wrong?” she asks.

I shake my head, and I’m more than curious to know. It hits me—the yearning to learn about Stacey and what has shaped her into the person she is today.

“It started out with the flu. But then Page’s fingernails began to turn a shade of blue and so did her toenails. We thought that they were bruises until the whites of her eyes turned a pale blue. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. They ran test after test and couldn’t figure it out. Everyone was baffled. No one knew what to do.”

“Talk about inconclusive,” I say, looking at my own chewed-to-the-quick fingernails.

“The closer she got to death, the darker blue the whites of her eyes became, to the point where you could barely see where the blue disease ended and the black pupil began. It scared Stacey. Billy tried to be brave, but all he wanted was his daddy.”

“Poor kids,” I say, but the comment falls flat. What do I know about kids? About families in general? About what it’s like to want to be with your daddy?

“The more I thought of it, the more I wondered if it was something in our genetic makeup. I’d heard over and over again from my mother about the Klaski blood being ‘contaminated.’ There was a story about an infection on a farm of my great-grandparents in the Adirondacks.

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