Pretty Dead Read Free

before, when Emily was alive, but I had denied it then. It was as if he could see beyond my surface to what lay beneath. As if he could see the layers of darkness and, way beneath that, the last flicker of light that might still be there.
    “Can I sit here?” I asked, and he nodded, so I sat beside him on the sand. He was unshaven and looked as if he hadn’t bathed in days.
    “I’m so sorry,” I said. Together we looked out tothe horizon. I couldn’t meet his gaze. The intensity was too much.
    He hung his head between his knees.
    “I know how you must feel,” I told him.
    Then he looked up at me and I couldn’t look away. His eyes were flashing like the light on the water. For a moment I could not breathe. “You don’t know,” he said.
    In his upset, Jared had loosened his grip on the piece of fabric in his hands. I saw that it was a white cotton bra. He shoved it into his sweatshirt pocket and his face reddened.
    “I loved her, too,” I said.
    “You don’t understand any of this,” he replied, and suddenly he was not seeing into me anymore. He was not seeing me at all.
    Jared Pierce was wrong about me not understanding. Before I was this thing I am now, I was a girl, like Emily Rosedale. I was a person, like Jared Pierce, and I had also lost the one person I loved most.

The Twin
    C harles and I cantered over the meadow like wild horses, whinnying uncannily; we both had that talent. I had violets in my hair. The wind blew the clouds across the high blue.
    Charles was my twin, long-limbed and blue-eyed like me. But his hair was black, like my mother’s. Black Irish. And I had my father’s hair. He was from pale Puritan stock. They burned witches at the stake in Salem. Think of the irony! How I would later wonder—as a descendant of those who would have ripped my kind to shreds—what would become of me?
    The day shone; if the wind had a color, that day it would have been light green. That was before I could see the true colors of things, before I could smell so keenly. But even then there was the scent of meadowlands and streams, violets and grape hyacinths; my brother.
    Charles and Charlotte. The beautiful ones who had everything. Who had each other. I had something else then. I had the ability to feel what Charles was feeling; to know what he was thinking, what he did when he was away from me; to see what might happen even when he was out of my sight. When he cut himself, my skin throbbed. When he missed me, my heart fluttered. If I stood close enough to him and closed my eyes, I could see images of things that he had done when he was away from me. If I concentrated hard enough, I could even send him psychic messages. Meet me in the garden. Meet me in the woods, under the biggest white oak by the brook. And Charles had the same empathic and psychic abilities as I did. Our thoughtswere powerful in an almost supernatural way, but we never thought anything of it; it was as natural to us as the color of our eyes. And this power never worked on anyone except the other.
    We lived in a large stone house with a tower from which my father surveyed the planets. My mother created what she called her “pageants,” decorations for every season. In winter there was a fir tree covered with candles, and holly wreaths on every door. Handmade stockings hanging from the mantel, silver paper snowflakes dangling from the beams, feasts of goose and plum pudding. In spring there were baskets dripping with flowers, and young animals birthed in the garden, in the henhouse—kittens in my mother’s linen drawer. She made me a May Queen gown and I danced around the maypole with ribbons in my hair. Charles teased me; he would only dance alone with me in the meadows when no one was looking.
    One summer day, when we were thirteen, the humidity was so high it soaked our hair, our clothes.
    “Let’s swim!” Charles announced.
    “I don’t have my bathing costume.”
    “It’s too hot for that!”
    He took my hand and we ran