Chapter Twelve
Ms. LaPlant and Mr. Stephens had left, so there was no one to pester her about whether she and Lily had apologized. Chrys loaded her bike into the back of her mom’s car, and they drove home in silence. Chrys wished her mother had yelled, but that wasn’t her mom’s way. In the silence, Chrys felt all her rage bottled up inside, tensing every muscle, scalding her veins, creating a pressure inside her skull that begged for release.
Days—weeks—ago, she’d have laughed if Lily had called her a demon. Would have laughed at how self-centered Lily was to believe Chrys had spent the last couple of years plotting against her. Now, Chrys was just pissed off. Lily thought Chrys was the one who was obsessed? What bullshit. Lily had painted a target on Chrys’s back from the moment she’d set foot in Thornhaven.
Being ignored no longer felt like a slight. That you don’t belong! was malicious.
It wasn’t until they got home that her mom broke the silence.
“What happened?”
Lily had happened. The move to Thornhaven had happened. Her grandparents had died. She was perpetually a freak. Everything crappy happened, and eventually it all happened to her.
Chrys tugged off her boots, wishing, as she often did, for a bigger apartment, for more than a cheap wood door and five feet of hallway to separate her from her mother’s disappointment when she would finally be able to retreat to her bedroom.
“Chrys?”
Chrys scowled.
“Lily Allerton is a stuck-up bitch who enjoys blaming me for her problems.”
Chrys’s stomach growled. The tension she’d been carrying all day because of the hex meant she hadn’t eaten much. She needed food, only she didn’t feel like eating.
“What was the part about a book?”
her mom asked as Chrys got out a bowl for cereal.
“It was nothing. I made Lily drop a book she was holding while she was talking to some boy she likes.”
“First you’re accused of hexing the Allerton girl, and now I find out you’re using your talent at school?”
Samantha leaned against the half wall that divided the kitchen from the living room.
“It’s not like he knew what happened.”
Besides, there was magic everywhere on the island. What was a little more? Most of it was subtle—the way there were rarely traffic accidents, the fact that storms mostly passed harmlessly by, the plants that bloomed a little more fiercely and held their blossoms for a bit longer than nature intended. Some of it was less subtle, like the way drinks at Black Cat Coffee stayed the perfect temperature until you finished them, or how the item you fell in love with at Second Chance Romance—the thrift store boutique—always happened to be in your size. So the Society’s rule that witches shouldn’t use their magic at school? Chrys was realizing how hypocritical it was. But saying so wouldn’t help her case, so she swallowed down the words with a mouthful of store-brand cornflakes.
“That’s not the point.”
Her mother rubbed her hands along her cheeks.
“And a feud with an Allerton? They might be the single most powerful family in Thornhaven, in every sense of the word. Not that I’d want you fighting with anyone, but of all the people around here whose bad side you don’t want to get on …”
She sighed, and Chrys would have sworn she felt that sigh in her own chest.
“How long has this been going on, really?”
Chrys stifled a groan.
“Just what you heard tonight.”
“It has nothing to do with being upset that you tied with her in the magic fair last spring?”
Ugh. She hadn’t thought about that in a while, and the memory prickled like a scrape across her brain.
“It’s not my fault Lily’s been my only real competition for anything.”
She wondered, though, for the first time, how much of that was true. She’d told herself time and time again that she wanted to excel to prove herself, but how much of proving herself was actually just about a desire to put a frown on Lily’s beautiful-but-snooty face?
Had she needed to perfect a secret ink spell for the last magic fair? No. But when she’d learned Lily was doing a spell with ink, she’d known entering something similar would irritate her. Same with Chrys volunteering to take the yearbook photos for the music department the last two years. Sure, it was something she could put on her college applications, but Lily was on the yearbook committee, and this way Chrys got to insert herself in Lily’s domain and exert some power. It was revenge for the cold, persistent exclusion from Lily and the witches who followed her.
These realizations only fouled her mood further.
“I’m tired. Can we discuss this later?”
“This isn’t like you. You’ve always been responsible.”
“Maybe I haven’t.”
Chrys turned for the hall and those pathetic five feet of space.
“Maybe I’m a quote-unquote ‘demon.’ Lily thinks so.”
Still carrying the cereal, she closed her door tightly, hearing her mother sigh again.
“We’ll talk about this tomorrow!”
Samantha called out.
“Don’t think we’re done, but we both need to get to bed.”
Chrys closed her eyes, hating the exhaustion in her mother’s voice. Her mom had worked today, and she worked tomorrow, too. Her alarm would be going off all too soon so she could be at the Shop-n-Go bakery by 6:00 a.m. That was the only reason Chrys was getting this temporary reprieve. And yet her mom wouldn’t rest easily tonight. She’d be worried about Chrys, wondering if she’d done something wrong in her raising and possibly fearing what the Allertons could do to them.
Damn Lily all over again. The last thing Chrys wanted was to make her mother’s life more stressful. And yet she was being pushed and pushed and pushed to her limit.
Chrys had once felt rejected by Lily. Bitter. Sad. But she’d never truly hated Lily. Even after the seagull attack, when she’d been angry and wanting revenge—even then when she’d thought she hated Lily—that hadn’t felt like this did. Like she might burst if she didn’t let out her emotions. Like not even screaming would expel them.
But she tried because she had to. Before she broke. Not a scream but a whisper, a deep breath in and an exhalation of all her fury.
“I hate you.”
She didn’t have to say Lily’s name or that she hoped Lily would suffer. Every syllable of that simple sentence was backed by her intent.
A shiver ran down Chrys’s spine. A kind of soothing emptiness followed, as though she’d really managed to release some of her rage. Chrys blinked in surprise, confused by this unexpected outcome. But she wasn’t going to question it. If it meant she could sleep, or finish her cereal without her stomach in knots, all the better.
Because her room was so dimly lit, she didn’t notice the cloud of blue tinge dissipating through her window.