The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel by Jennifer Vanderbes

Author:Jennifer Vanderbes [Vanderbes, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439167007
Amazon: 1439167001
Barnesnoble: 1439167001
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-02-03T18:30:00+00:00

It was not what she had expected. It hurt and it was messy and now she felt sticky and cold between her legs. But the sharpness of it, the insistent bluntness, the strangeness of his body inside hers, made her feel like an entirely different person. Juliet would never do this, she kept thinking. And soon everything else fell from her thoughts except this idea of the her before the act and the new her. She had thought little about Beau. It seemed that being so close to another human being, you would have to think about him, but she hadn’t. She had closed her eyes and thought about herself, her body, what was happening inside her body, as though she were entirely alone.

After Gunderson was sent back to sleep, Beau settled on his elbows, readjusted his rifle, and looked at the stars.

Juliet leaned back beside him and wished she could tell him what had just happened to her, as though he hadn’t been there.

He kissed her head and let his lips linger on her scalp.

“I’m gonna ask you something, Juliet. . . . How do you save the world from evil?”

“No idea.”

“You take out an ad in the classifieds. Wanted: brave young men to defeat the forces of evil in the world. Every boy in every high school across the country is going to sign right up. What you don’t say in the ad? Expect to live in mud and shit and freeze your asses off while you watch your friends bleed to death. Expect frostbite, crappy food, bad attitudes, no sleep, shitty maps, old weapons, and lousy leadership, all while a psychotic enemy pursues you night and day. If you manage to survive, you get the honor of knowing you helped save the world from Nazi maniacs. But you think that anyone fifty years from now will bat an eyelash over it?”

“They’d better,” said Juliet.

“Growing up I never thought about all those guys who fought in the Great War. Not once. But I think about them now, all the time. All of Italy, all of Europe, the ground we’re sitting on, is filled with the bodies of guys just like me, who did exactly what I’m doing, thirty years ago.”

His eyes were red, fixed on a point outside the cave. His nose had begun to run, and he wiped it clean. The stars clustered thickly overhead like coins in a wishing pond. Had all those men, decades earlier, once made wishes?

“I really hope Tuck is alive,” Beau said.

Juliet was silent.

“I’d just like to make it out of here so I can get home to my grandma,” Beau said. “She’s eighty-eight. I’d like to get home so she doesn’t have to sit in that house by herself for what’s left of her life.”

“You’ll get home,” said Juliet. “You will.”

Beau nodded firmly. He clutched his rifle close and blinked with intense alertness.

“Goddamn straight I will.”

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