BEFORE
Ethan Wate
Principal Harper was trying to rap. Those are five words I never thought I’d say. Everything has got an end, so toss those caps and let’s hit Send. Try getting that out of your head.
As I sat there on the bleachers at the Stonewall Jackson High School graduation—Ethan Wate being uncomfortably alphabetized between Savannah Snow and Emory Watkins—it didn’t feel all that much like the end of anything.
I wished it would end. Graduation, at least.
But it wouldn’t—not until the fat lady had sung. Or, in my case, not until the skinny lady, Miss Spider, had conducted the school orchestra. According to the folded paper program, it was going to be a Celine Dion medley.
Featured solo by Emily Ellen Asher, “Her Heart Will Go On… and On and On and On.”
Of course it would. Even though her heart could give the Titanic a run for its money in a downward-spiral contest. I tried not to catch her eye, but I could see Emily looking at me, all the way from the A’s.
I could take it, one last time. It felt like torture, but I’d faced worse. This was Gatlin-style torture, not Otherworld-pile-of-bones-maze-that-goes-nowhere or damned-waters-of-the-undead torture.
Principal Harper rapped something about facing the world around us by standing up with courage—mostly, trying to rhyme courage with scourge, which didn’t really work. Besides, I was pretty sure his approach to “facing the world” didn’t include a whole lot of standing up for anything.
He was more of a sitting-it-out kind of a guy.
I was relieved when he finally did sit down after a good twenty-two minutes, but who was counting? But then our class president, Savannah Snow, went on about how she’d miss teasing Link, and how excited she was to get on with being the most popular girl at the University of South Carolina, over in the big city of Columbia, and how her daddy was going to buy her a new Dodge Charger for graduating without getting knocked up, and how she could finally admit that she really had been better than Emily and Charlotte and the rest of the cheer squad all along.
That’s probably not exactly what she said, but it’s close enough to what she was thinking. None of us were actually listening anymore. It was too hot and too late for that.
On the plus side, Savannah wasn’t rapping.
With crushing heat like this, it was hard to believe that the Order of Things had been restored—that the curse and the chaos that had almost ended the world as Gatlin knew it was all behind us now. A debt had been paid. We’d lived so long with it all hanging in the balance, it felt weird to be only worrying about the heat wilting the flowers our families had ordered from Gardens of Eden, cooking the blooms until they looked like a bunch of dead broccoli clumps.
I squinted to find my dad. He hadn’t let me wear sunglasses; he said Amma would have rolled over in her grave, if she’d had one. But I knew Amma couldn’t give a crap about whether or not I wore my aviators with my cap and gown, not where she was now. She was probably too busy sassing all my Aunt Prue’s husbands, or yelling at my mom about her fried green tomatoes, or hanging out on the porch with Uncle Abner. That was the Otherworld for you, but I couldn’t expect my dad to understand.
When I finally found him, he was sitting with my Aunt Caroline, who had driven up from Savannah for the occasion. His new girlfriend, Mrs. English, had to sit with the faculty, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to kiss up to her today. Or watch him kiss her, for that matter.
We all had to take this slow.
On the other side of my dad was my girlfriend’s family: Lena’s cousin Ridley, wearing a black straw hat as big as a hubcap, and a little black dress as small as a handkerchief; Aunt Del, fanning her face with a peacock feather fan; and Lena’s cousins Reece and Ryan, in matching round sunglasses. Uncle Macon was back home, since the whole town still thought he was dead. Long story. But our friends John Breed and Liv Durand were there to report the whole thing to him—what little of it, that is, that Boo Radley couldn’t report himself, from where he sat on the grass near the stage, wagging his tail in time with the band.
John waved from the crowd when he saw me, even though Liv elbowed him. I didn’t wave back.
Could this go on any longer? Lena Kelted to me, sounding as grouchy as I was, even in my mind. There were some drawbacks to having a Caster girlfriend, like a nasty curse and an even nastier mother (now in the Otherworld, another long story), but there were benefits, too. She had lots of unique abilities—including allowing us to hear each other’s thoughts.
I craned my neck to see her, down in the front row with the A’s through the D’s. Duchannes, Lena, was seated perilously close to Asher, Emily.
I smiled. I’m just trying not to pass out, L.
Five more minutes of this and I’ll join you, Ethan.
A louder thought shoved past the others. You think we can hide beneath the bleachers without anyone noticin’? Which would be Link, my best friend and former Mortal, now one-quarter Incubus. Lena and I always managed to forget that he could Kelt, too, ever since he Turned. As a result, he found a way to pop in at the most awkward times.
Get out of my head, butt wipe, I Kelted back.
Down on the bleacher in front of me, he shook his head. Hey, don’t lose it on me. Tell your girlfriend there to squeeze out a little rain. I’m not wearin’ anythin’ under this gown, and my cheeks are sweatin’ so hard it looks like I peed my pants.
I burst out laughing. Savannah Snow glared at me.
Shut up, both of you. They’re starting. We may actually get home before midnight.