What the Waves Know by Tamara Valentine

Author:Tamara Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

It was seven o’clock when Remy finally set the last bowl in the sink. “Well, I guess that about does it for tonight.”

The darkness beyond the kitchen window, and Grandma Jo at my side, erased any chance I might have had to sneak back up to Witch’s Peak to look for my Yemaya Stone.

“I’ll see you bright and early to bring you down to Herman’s,” Remy said.

I pushed the stool, which I had managed to cover with flour, under the butcher’s block and began to shove in the one beside it when Remy stopped me. For a fleeting second, her eyes seemed to burn right through me, then the look was gone and the lilt returned to her voice, leaving me wondering if my mother was right about Remy being a raving lunatic.

“Here.” She shoved three fives and five ones into my hand. “Give your mom fifteen dollars toward Mr. Herman’s window.”

I held up the five ones questioningly.

“Those are for you.” She closed my fingers around the money, looking over at Grandma Jo. “Josephine, maybe you’d like to bake some of your biscuits for the festival? The ones without curds.”

“It would be my honor. But only if you promise to try the macaroni and cheese I brought you.”

Remy lifted an eyebrow then sighed. “Fine.”

Tucking the money into two separate pockets, I picked up Remy’s book and the stack of flyers, glancing once more at the stool Remy had nearly bit my head in two for touching, and walked out the door. By the time Grandma Jo and I made it to the Booth House, my mother was locked in her room, dictating prices into her handheld recorder:

“Bradley Museum Cavanaugh Collection. Oil-based, fair condition. Eighty-five hundred dollars.. Michael Scott Lasser sculpture, fifteen hundred dollars.”

I laid the fifteen dollars on the counter and slipped upstairs to wash the dough from under my nails in the bathroom. Flicking on the light, I stared at the girl watching me in the mirror with an expression of curiosity on her face. The honey had mostly washed free of my dark strands, but the curls still spiraled down to my breasts in smooth loose springs that reminded me of coils of chocolate shaved from the brick. Maybe Remy was right, that honey was conditioning, or maybe it was the best hair spray in the universe.

Running the water until it warmed, I used one nail to scrape the piecrust paste from the other until tiny clumps littered the porcelain then splashed my face. It was almost as pale as the basin, as if God forgot to color it in altogether, then realizing his mistake, tossed a handful of freckles across my nose just to make sure people could see me. It would be easier, I often thought, if they could not—if I could just slip from shadow to shadow through the universe, unseen and unheard. Even my eyes were lacking real color. The dim tint of a perfect storm, that’s what my father used to say. But, really, they were the pale gray of a day that a pending storm had snuffed all the light from.

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