I sobbed, and Marsha’s arms were around me, and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was, how good it was, to have a home.
She held me until I got to the hiccupy end of my tears. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re a mess. You don’t want your friends to see you looking like that, do you? Go on, wash up.” She shooed me toward the bathroom, and I went.
Some people’s eyes change color when they cry, but not mine. I splashed cold water on my face and patted it dry with one of Marsha’s purple hand towels, looking at myself in the mirror. My skin had gotten red and puffy, but my eyes blinked back at me, black as ever. Steady and unchanging.
I happened to glance at the plaque hanging over the toilet: Desiderata. I began reading it again for the millionth time, and stopped when I reached a certain line:
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here.
Those words were like brushstrokes inside me, painting a picture. A portrait.
It was a portrait of myself.
I looked in the mirror. This is me, I thought.
I smiled.
“Darcy,” Marsha called. I heard the front door opening, and footsteps, and the high and low voices of Lily, Jims, Raphael, and Taylor. “Your friends are back.”
“I’m coming!”
* * *
WE TORE INTO THE THAI FOOD, and the sunlight from the living room windows stretched and lengthened and faded. The sun was going down early, as it always does during winter in the Midwest. It was almost dark when there was a knock at the door.
One by one, everyone in the room turned to me.
They knew who it was. I knew who it was. My entire body did. My pulse quivered.
There was a second knock, but no one said anything. It was as if we were afraid to speak.
Except Jims.
“Look, Darcy.” He dropped his white fork into an empty take-out carton. “I’m not going to list the ways in which I don’t like your boyfriend.”
“He’s not—”
“—all I’m going to say is that I don’t think you two are going to traipse off into the sunset and have fat, happy babies.”
“Jims.”
“But that’s not what everyone wants. The question is: what do you want?”
I took a shallow breath. It didn’t seem like my lungs were working properly. Or the rest of me. Certainly not my heart.
I stood and opened the door.
Conn.
“Hi,” I said.
He was framed by the deepening sky. Night was falling around him in smudges of lilac and gray. “I came as soon as I could,” he said.
“Oh. Um.” I glanced back at the warm yellows of the brightly lit living room, at Marsha and my friends. “Do you want to come inside?”
“No. I mean, I’d rather talk to you out here.” His face was arranged into my least favorite expression. The completely unreadable one.
I didn’t bother to get my coat. I stepped outside, and we walked to the edge of the driveway. He stood in the dry gutter and I stood on the curb. That way he wasn’t so much taller than me.
“There was a lot to mop up after the fire,” Conn said. “I decided to listen to what you told me, the night you came over to my place. That I could do some good if I stayed in the IBI. That’s what I want to do.”
I had a hard time responding. “Good.”
“But that meant I couldn’t leave the crime scene. There was a search for Meridian, Orion, and the others—that didn’t go anywhere—and then there was Fitzgerald, and the mayor, and…” He trailed off, looking at me searchingly. “What’s wrong? I said I would come later. I thought you wanted me to.”
“I did. I do.”
“Really?”
It occurred to me that it might always be like this with Conn. I might always be searching for my courage. But I said what I wanted to say. “Very much.”
He let out a nervous breath. “You looked so … strange.”
“So did you. And I felt strange. You said you’d see me later, but I didn’t know how much later, like weeks, or months, or years—”
“Darcy,” he chided, “when I said that, the only kind of later I wanted was a second later. A millisecond later. A nanosecond. Faster than the speed of light.”
“Oh.” I smiled.
He studied me through the darkness. “You’ve been crying.”
“Happy tears.”
Conn’s hand lifted my chin, and he gently kissed my eyes. I shivered.
He began unbuttoning his coat. “You’re cold.”
“Not really.”
Conn pulled me inside his coat and wrapped it and his arms around me. I pressed my cheek against his chest, burrowing into the cocoon we made together. “You know,” I said, “there is such a thing as a long-distance relationship.”
“And an interdimensional one?”
“I think it could work.”
“I think so, too.”
I pulled away and looked at him. I don’t think I had ever seen pure joy on his face before. I saw it then.
He chuckled. “I’m a little disappointed. I hoped you were going to ask me again what I said to the Shades. How I convinced them not to fight.”
“Slightly off topic, but all right. Tell me, Conn. What did you say?”
He gazed down at me, and his eyes were the color of heavy weather. “That I love you.”
When I kissed him, his mouth tasted like warm rain. My heart crashed, and I knew that this would not be easy. It never would be easy. It would be rough and stormy.
And beautiful. Beautiful, too.
Like a tornado spinning down from the clouds.
I know. Most girls want their skies to be sunny.
But I’m not most girls.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to—
Mark Beirn, Cathy Meyer, Nina Orechwa, Becky Rosenthal, and Dan Wolfe, for helping me get through high school.
The teachers of Bolingbrook High School 1991–1995, especially E. J. Bronkema, who was very kind and influential.
Brian Shallcross and Brooke Tafoya, for discussing the Department of Children and Family Services with me.
David Moré, for an excellent talk about painting with oils.
Dave Elfving, for suggestions about how to incorporate Chicago history, particularly the Couch Mausoleum (though I fudged some details, since the cemetery the Mausoleum used to be part of was moved after the Civil War, not the Great Fire).
Doireann Fitzgerald, for Irish names.
Cat Keyser, for discussing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with me.
Lila Davachi and Kevin Ochsner, for giving me the term “priming.”
Marilyn Rutkoski, because I love your raccoon painting and spoon collection.
Andy Rutkoski, for advice about motorcycles and the kinds of tools Conn might use.
Robert Rutkoski, for explaining Lake Michigan cloudbanks.
Thomas Philippon, for helping me invent the hypercycle and suggesting Shades cast shadows.
My son, Eliot, who was a newborn in my arms when I began this story, and his babysitter, Shaida Kahn, for giving me time to write it.
My stellar editor, Janine O’Malley.
The wonderfully supportive Charlotte Sheedy, Meredith Kaffel, and Joan Rosen.
All those who read drafts or portions of drafts: Betsy Bird, Heather Duffy-Stone, Gayle Forman, Daphne Grab, Jenny Knode, Mordicai Knode (who influenced the character of Jims and let me crib from our conversations), Marilyn Rutkoski, Jill Santopolo, Eliot Schrefer, Rebecca Stead, Natalie Van Unen, and especially Donna Freitas, for encouraging this project, reading it as it grew, giving great suggestions, and saving me from plenty of mistakes.
And last, to Chicago and Bolingbrook, Illinois, with love.
Also by Marie Rutkoski
The Cabinet of Wonders
The Celestial Globe
The Jewel of the Kalderash
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth
Avenue, New York 10010
Text copyright © 2012 by Marie Rutkoski
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2012
eBook edition, October 2012
macteenbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Rutkoski, Marie.
The shadow society / Marie Rutkoski. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Darcy Jones knows little about her past except that she was abandoned outside a Chicago firehouse at age five, but when the mysterious Conn arrives at her high school she begins to discover things about her past that she is not sure she likes.
ISBN 978-0-374-34905-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-374-36757-2 (e-book)
[1. Identity—Fiction. 2. Foster home care—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Illinois—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R935Sh 2012
[Fic]—dc23 2011033158
eISBN 9780374367572
The Shadow Society Page 29