Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) Read Free Page B

wine, truffles, and palaces,” Jenny said.
    “And the electro-techno-whatever music,” Seth added. “Please, God, make it stop.”
    “Come on, we’ve seen some great shows.  We just saw Pink at the Bercy.”
    “Want to get cheesecake?” Seth glanced over the dessert menu.
    “For breakfast?”
    “How many times are we going to have this conversation?”
    Jenny had a second coffee while Seth ordered his cake.  He had a great system for
     burning off calories.  He could eat cake for breakfast, then find an excuse to brush
     past an elderly or handicapped person on the crowded sidewalk, offloading the extra
     energy as a touch of healing.  Jenny couldn’t touch anyone, but her appetite was usually
     small and her metabolism left her scrawny, as if she suffered from a deadly wasting
     disease.
    They stepped out into the mid-morning sun and strolled along the Seine.  The trees
     had turned their autumn colors, tender reds and golds softening the regal but austere
     Second Empire architecture.  Jenny had mixed feelings about the magnificent and symmetrical
     look of the city.  On the one hand, it was breathtaking to see an entire city remade
     as a single work of art.  On the other, she missed the chaotic, twisting streets of
     the Paris she’d known centuries earlier.  There was something disturbing about the
     idea of smashing and rebuilding a city where people lived, of a single vision imposed
     on so many individuals, thousands of whom had their homes razed to make way for Napoleon
     III’s dream city.
    Jenny slowed as they entered the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air , a vast outdoor sculpture garden tucked alongside the river.  She loved this park. 
     Jenny had plenty of time to work on her pottery and clay sculpting, and even intended
     to take some informal classes, but she was rethinking her ideas about what sculpture
     could be. 
    Here, many of the large sculptures were abstract, depicting ideas and emotions rather
     than trying to look like copies of objects in the real world.  Some of them were low,
     dark masses of granite, reminding her of the enormous graveyard behind Seth’s house
     in Fallen Oak.  Others looked like colorful totem poles or twisted metals reaching
     toward the sky.  In the galleries of Paris, Jenny had seen sculptures that included
     all kinds of materials and found objects, and sometimes unusual lighting arrangements
     or glowing images and words cast from a projector or television screen, multidimensional
     art.
    Jenny was getting ideas for new kinds of sculptures, things that would express the
     love, guilt, and horror inside her.
    Seth sidled up next to Jenny and took her silk-gloved hand nervously.  It was an odd
     move for him.  They’d been intimate too long for him to be so uncomfortable approaching
     her.
    “Look,” he whispered.
    Jenny followed his eyes to a tiered, sunken semicircle of concrete right on the river,
     which offered three levels of seating.  Teenagers were using it to practice leaps
     with their skateboards.  Two of them, a boy and girl, sat apart from the others, much
     more interested in kissing than in streets sports.
    “How old do you bet they are?” Seth whispered.
    “Sixteen, seventeen.” Jenny shrugged. “Just kids.”
    “We were kids like that, a long time ago.”
    “Now we’ve reached the ancient age of twenty,” Jenny said. “Better make our reservations
     at the nursing home.”
    “I was thinking...” He squeezed her hand tight, which worried her a little. “Maybe
     we should get married, Jenny.”
    His unexpected words were like an electric shock to her heart.  She looked at him
     in surprise, but finally she laughed. “Seth!  We can’t get married.”
    “Why not?”
    “For one,  people who are officially dead don’t usually have weddings,” Jenny pointed
     out.
    “That could be our theme.  A zombie wedding, Day of the Dead stuff everywhere...”
    “Now you sound like Alexander.” Jenny heard herself