Waking Storms by Sarah Porter

Author:Sarah Porter
Language: es
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bullying, Social Issues, Love & Romance, Self-Esteem & Self-Reliance, Juvenile Fiction, Violence, Fantasy & Magic, Nature & the Natural World, Environment, Values & Virtues, Adolescence
ISBN: 9780547482514
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-07-03T05:00:00+00:00

14. Darkness

By late November the sun barely had the strength to heave itself in a low are above the horizon. Even at midday the light looked bluish and tired. The endless, somnolent dusk set in by early afternoon and slowly fell into the yawning nights. It was hard not to get depressed, to feel starved for scraps of daylight. Dorian got used to meeting Luce after dusk, to watching the dim glow of her body parting the smoke-dark water. It was a beautiful sight but also lonely somehow. And it made his time with her seem even more remote from the rest of his life. The rooms of his school and house seemed like brightly lit boxes sealed to keep out the darkness where dangerous secrets leaped and swam.

Today he'd lingered in the village's tiny library, and now he was running late. All the tenth-graders had been assigned a research paper on an environmental challenge of their choice, but Dorian hadn't been able to stop with one. He'd begun with problems that affected whales and gone on from there to a whole list of threats to the world's oceans: acidification, dead zones, global warming ... Already he had almost fifty pages of notes and he couldn't seem to stop collecting more information. When he glanced up from the computer it was already after four, and he hurried to stuff his books away, bundle himself into his hat and parka, and run to meet Luce.

Luckily she could read in the dark without any trouble, and he talked over his research with her. He'd started to bring her stacks of library books, too, tightly wrapped in layers of plastic so that they wouldn't get soaked as she carried them home. Even so he'd had some pretty serious fines for water damage, and the librarian had told him to stop reading in the bathtub. A little to Dorian's surprise, Luce wanted to read his school textbooks, too. But it was a good idea, he realized. That way if she ever turned human again she wouldn't be too far behind.

Maybe next year she'd even be in high school with him.

All they needed was someone they could trust and who could help them figure out how to change her back without killing her. Someone smart, like a scientist. Out in the street the air itself seemed to be tinted with bruise blue ink, and the cold bit into his face and bare hands. Stretches of dead grass separated the small brown-shingled houses. The printed red roses and blue plaids of the curtains glowed like lanterns, and at the bottom of the street the lights of a few boats tossed gently up and down. Dorian thought the dusk even had a smell; it was like the scent of clay, musty and dank.

“Dorian. Lindy said you might be here, so I thought I'd see if I could catch you.”

Dorian had already recognized the voice before he turned to look. It was Ben Ellison. Dorian hadn't heard from him for a few weeks.

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