Paperquake by Kathryn Reiss Page B

She went down for dinner, relieved to find that her sisters had been invited to eat pizza with Casey and Brett at Brett's house and wouldn't be home until bedtime. Although she was eager to tell them about the letters' ability to foretell her future, she did not want to hear comments about her purple hair. And she did not want them to know about the stolen letter but couldn't quite trust herself not to tell.
    Over dinner Lily and Greg asked whether she was coming down with something—her face looked a little flushed. And why was she wearing that scarf on her head? Violet pushed back her chair and said she thought she'd do her homework and go to bed early.
    She lay across her bed, poring over the letters from the past, looking for more clues to her own life. There were connections she hadn't caught at first that leaped out at her now.
    I look at the flowers in the garden...
    Flowers. And Violet had imagined flowers in the back concrete yard so clearly she could almost
see
them. Not to mention the fact that her parents were florists. And the very garden bench and birdbath she'd envisioned turned up in the cellar.
    Is your heart still aching? I ache myself when I think of the pain you have been in....
    This was clearly a reference to her open-heart surgery.
    No one ... keep us apart.... help you ... the window...
    She glanced at her bedroom window. It gave her delicious shivers down her back to think that Hal—no, how could it be Hal?—that
someone
might come for her. She'd never thought to try it, but a person probably could climb up the front porch pillars, right up onto the porch roof and over to her window.
    And what about the earthquake? Hal had been writing the letter to V when he was interrupted. Violet shivered and slipped under her quilt. Could all the quakes they'd been having recently somehow be tied to the letters? She quickly pushed that thought away.
    Your raven hair! aglow with lights—
    Aglow now with highlights. Purple highlights.
    Violet pulled another pillow under her head and lay back, thinking. Could it really be just as Mr. Koch kept saying in class? That nothing is coincidence, that there is a reason for everything that happens. That history and science are connected. That the past leaves clues for the present, and the role of scientists is to decipher those messages to better understand how the world works.
    She tossed and turned until she heard her sisters come up to bed, and then her parents. Still sleep wouldn't come. The glow of the street lamps outside shone through her windows like a beacon from the past on which, she imagined dreamily, someone might fly in to take her away with him....
    When the wind rattled the panes of her window, she sat bolt upright in bed. Was Hal here for her now? At last she slept, dreaming first of the face in the needlepoint portrait and then, as the mournful
whoooo
of the wind insinuated itself into her dreams, of howling shadow children. She slept fitfully, jerking awake whenever the clock chimed on the mantel downstairs.
    Â 
    At breakfast the next morning, Violet glanced across the table at Jasmine and Rose and her tired muscles relaxed with a small glow of satisfaction.
Too bad we don't wear school uniforms,
she thought. That would make looking alike much easier. But at least today her sisters had put on the clothes she'd selected and laid out on their beds. They were all three of them wearing jeans, blue sweatshirts, and white running shoes. They were all wearing their hair in ponytails tied back with blue elastic scrunchies. She was the only one, however, who wore the blue hood of the sweatshirt pulled up over her head and tied tightly under her chin.
    "I knew it was true about our poor sweet Baby," Jasmine said to Rose as she poured herself a glass of orange juice from the carton, "but I didn't think it would manifest itself until she was older."
    "All the signs have been there a long time." Rose shook her head sadly and reached for the carton.