The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton Page A

his thick bottom lip jutting past his weak chin, and told my mother she was lucky to be so good-looking. She wondered if that was just something all homely men said.
    While she waited to hear word, Viviane spent her days in the drugstore, imagining a life that looked nothing like the one she had once planned to share with Jack. Viviane often paused in her daily activities, while adding an extra serving of whipped cream to an already-dripping ice-cream sundae or dropping cherries into a full glass of cherry Coke, and thought,
If this is life without Jack, then life without Jack suits me just fine.
Soon, she told herself, her days would begin and end in the blue uniform of a United Air stewardess, the tiny gold wings pinned just below the lip of her Peter Pan collar.
    But then in late August, while taking a bathroom break at the drugstore, something prompted Viviane to recall the day she had turned thirteen and awoken to a dull ache in the lower pit of her stomach; it was just strong enough, she’d thought at the time, for her mother to allow her to stay home from school. When she’d walked downstairs, however, planning to fake illness, she’d discovered that her mother already knew what was ailing her.
    This was hardly a surprise. Emilienne was always getting strange messages from equally strange places. If she dreamed of keys, a change was on its way. Dreaming of tea implied an unforeseen visitor. A birdcall from the north meant tragedy; from the west, good luck; and from the east, it announced the arrival of good love. As a child, Viviane wondered if her mother’s gifts stretched further into the supernatural realm — perhaps she could communicate with the dead. But Emilienne had dismissed Viviane’s theory with a wave of her hand.
    “Ghosts don’t exist,” she’d said, glancing furtively into the far corner of the room.
    Emilienne had handed Viviane an elastic sanitary belt, which gave her a circle of red welts around her waist. Viviane was allowed to stay home from school that day and was even given a note that excused her from gym class for the rest of the week.
    But in the two months since the night of the solstice celebration, Viviane realized, she hadn’t felt that now-familiar ache in her abdomen.
    While still in high school, Viviane had sat next to a girl whose cousin had gotten pregnant. The girl swore that the cousin had solved it by sneezing. At the time Viviane wondered why this girl had thought to tell this story to her. But now she went to the back of the store, ripped open a package of black pepper, grabbed a handful, and tossed it under her nose. After her eighth try, she realized that the only thing sprinkling pepper in her face was going to do was irritate a retina.
    Next Viviane tried coughing particularly hard. That gave her a sore throat. At night she spent the hours willing that dull ache to reappear — in her stomach, in the small of her back, in the tops of her thighs — and praying for a miracle.
    While at work, Viviane took trips to the bathroom six times every hour. It was after a particularly distressing break that Jack Griffith walked into the drugstore.
    Perhaps it was out of decency, or maybe it was just out of shame, but Jack had made a point of keeping away from Viviane that summer. He’d taken a job at an army supply depot along the Seattle port, working alongside women twice his age who had sons and husbands overseas. On his days off, Jack drove to the coast with his fiancée, who was spending her summer in Seattle too, to be closer to him. To Jack, the air that summer always seemed to stink of fish.
    Jack hadn’t lied when he told Viviane that Laura Lovelorn was nice. She was. She was nice and good, and Jack knew he was supposed to love her. How could he not? Everyone loved Laura Lovelorn. She was everything everyone wanted her to be. But sometimes, on their trips to the coast, Jack would forget she was even there. He’d be thinking of that last night on Pinnacle Lane, and