Page 5 of The Luminaries
“I know,” he says, and Winnie hates that he actually sounds like he does. “I was just trying to help, Win.” He turns to go. At the tree line, though, he pauses long enough to call back, “Happy birthday,” before the forest swallows him whole.
“See you at school!” Bretta shrieks into the pines, but no answer returns.
She deflates; Winnie’s front teeth start clicking. She’s glad Jay is gone and annoyed he remembered her birthday. Most of all, though, she’s annoyed that in the five seconds he was here, he managed to poke a hole in her vampira theory. He said he had followed tracks to the body, but vampira don’t leave tracks. Their stilt-like legs end in needle-sharp points that barely graze the ground.
She scans the forest floor, eyes squinting behind her glasses. What did Jay see that she missed? Did a sylphid do this? Or maybe a kelpie?She supposes she could chase after him and ask. She supposes sheshouldchase after him and ask. After all, it would be the responsible thing to do as corpse-duty leader—and what a future hunter would do too.
But she isn’t going to. Not in a million years.
“He never notices me,” Bretta says mournfully. Then almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Or anyone else, really.”
“Huh?” Winnie shoves her glasses up her nose and blinks at the other girl.
“Jay Friday,” Bretta explains. “Me and Emma might as well be invisible whenever he’s around. He’s, like,soin his own head.” The way she says this makes it sound like an appealing trait. “We go to every one of his shows at Joe Squared, you know, but he always leaves right after performing.”
Winnie doesn’t know. She avoids the local coffee shop like a nightmare avoids running water. Shehasheard that Jay’s band plays there on Saturday nights, though. And shehasnoticed that half of Hemlock Falls seems to be in love with him.
It makes no sense, really, since Jay seems to have absolutely no interest in—or even awareness of—anyone in town.
Then again, maybe that’s part of the appeal.
Against her better judgment, Winnie takes pity on Bretta. “He doesn’t perform for attention, so I’m not surprised he leaves after the show. If you want to talk to him, try going to Gunther’s after school.”
“The non gas station? Outside Hemlock Falls?”
Winnie nods. “He’s there pretty much every day working on his motorcycle.” Or his aunt’s motorcycle, but Winnie doesn’t see the point in specifying.
Bretta’s eyes widen, her dimples crease inward, and Winnie can practically see her connecting thoughts one by one.Gunther’s gas station leads to motorcycle leads to Jay leads to time with Jay leads to getting noticed…
She claps her bloodied cornflower hands. “Oh, thank you, Winnie! I…wewill definitely do that today. But how do you know so much about him? Are you two friends or something?”
“No.” Winnie tugs off her gloves. Theythwack!like gunshots across the forest. “Jay is not my friend.”
CHAPTER4
He used to be, though.
That’s why Winnie knows about him. That’s why Winnie hates him. Because the truth about Jay Friday is that he and Winnieusedto be friends, along with Erica Thursday. They were an inseparable trio. A triad. A triangle. Anything with “tri” in it, they had declared themselves to be at some point or another over their seven years of friendship.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.A perfect arrangement of clans that made the initialsWTF,which never failed to make them laugh.
Jay was a year older when they all met, but their respective parents (or in Jay’s case, his aunt) were all buddies, so a carpool had been born. Every afternoon, they had ridden together to the sprawling Sunday estate, where all the Luminary classrooms and training halls are housed. After enough time spent debating Pokémon, then debating nightmares, and finally debating which professors were the scariest, they forged a bond that they truly believed could never be broken.
But that’s the thing about the forest: it can break just about anything.
And it did. When Winnie’s family became toxic because of her dad,Jay and Erica ditched her like everyone else in Hemlock Falls.Hard.Jay fell in with a bad crowd; Erica fell in with the most popular.
Just like that, the inseparable trio, triad, triangle was split in two: A right angle on one side, still welcome in the world of the Luminaries. A lost hypotenuse on the other, cast adrift, floating and alone.
CHAPTER5
As the eldest on corpse duty and the driver of the four-wheeler, Winnie delivers the bodies to the Monday estate after everyone else has gone home to prep for school. There’s a trail through the forest that will spit her out onto the Monday lands. It’s covered in tire tracks from the Tuesday clan the day before. Winnie always tries to drive in their grooves when she sees them. As if by following what they do, she’ll be like them.
Everyone loves the Tuesdays.
This part of corpse duty—the drive to deliver bodies—is Winnie’s favorite part of the day: the time when she’s all alone and can sketch out new nightmares in her mind.
Today, they retrieved an intact earth sylphid. Winnie has never seen one before; she hadn’t realized quite how…humanthey are. Like miniature people with bark for skin and stone for teeth and horns. She’ll need to redraw it in her Compendium. She can already see how she’ll do it too, small hatch marks for the texture on their faces, a thicker pen to capture the full blackness of their eyes.
