Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 101168 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 337(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101168 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 337(@300wpm)
When three months had passed with no word or sign, she’d seemed to realize that he wasn’t coming back. That was when she got sad. She told them their father was a good man, a caring man, and he’d left them because he’d been jealous of what they shared. That he’d felt left out of his own family. Edgar hadn’t missed him much. Hadn’t missed wondering which version of his father he’d get—the distant, scornful shadow who only wanted to be left alone, the jocular dad who wanted an audience for his stories, or the furious bully who berated them for being like their mother. Allie hadn’t wanted him to return either.
Poe had mourned his loss deeply though, and looked for him everywhere, convinced that if he could just tell their father that he was welcome, then maybe he’d come home. Edgar and Allie didn’t tell their mother about Poe’s search, and they told him not to say anything either. Because that had been when the sadness had given way to something more confusing.
In the last few weeks before her breakdown, she’d begun to talk to Edgar and Allie fervently after Poe was asleep, warning them of threats she’d never mentioned before, about shadowy figures and arcane conspiracies and people—no, things—that meant them harm. Her drinking and drug use, always robust, had intensified since her husband had left. Whether the substances were the cause of her paranoia or the result, Edgar didn’t know.
His father was gone; his mother was blinking in and out of sanity; Allie had just graduated. So for the next year, before Poe started high school, Edgar would be alone at school for the first time in his life.
He hadn’t said much about any of that to the friends he’d come to the party with. Charles and Babette had befriended Edgar after winter break, and he’d gratefully let them. They were the kind of friends who told him where they were going and when to show up and assumed he’d be there. And he always was. Because he hadn’t had real friends since Cameron and Antoine…and he didn’t like to think about them anymore. Not after what had happened.
Charles and Babette had hugged him and pulled him inside. His classmates were gleeful, having cast off the mantle of the academic year with nothing yet to replace it. They drank, they danced, they celebrated, and Edgar tried to lose himself in all of it. Caught between carefree Charles and confident Babette, he’d drunk whatever they gave him, the world blurring around the edges.
Was this how his mom felt—floaty and detached and able to forget? Was this freedom from fear or responsibility worth leaving her kids on their own?
He could see how it might feel that way.
The party raged until the wee hours of the night, and when Edgar had stumbled outside, the air had been thick with unspent rain and the streets dark, the streetlamps in Tremé much farther apart than they were in the Bywater. Babette had made pronouncements to the moon, grin effulgent and curls painted silver. Charles bubbled with laughter. Edgar felt vaguely ill but optimistic, the latter a feeling he hadn’t had in a long time. They’d walked, arm in arm, in the neutral ground on Ursulines Avenue and hurried beneath the I-10 where a woman with a sweet smile had collapsed onto a mattress with a needle in her arm and an old man waltzed with no one.
Babette and Charles danced to the music pouring out of the bars as they crossed Frenchman Street, then peeled off at Esplanade, waving their goodbyes and gleefully promising to meet for beignets and coffee the next morning to plan all the things they’d do that summer.
Edgar’s face hurt from smiling so much, but there was a lightness in his bones and looseness in his joints, like gravity was acting on him less than usual. He could imagine how tomorrow would go: he’d wake late, make his way lazily to the café where he, Babette, and Charles would take their pastries to go, sunglasses firmly in place, then find a spot in the rocks by the river. They’d sip coffee weedy with chicory and dust the rocks with powdered sugar from every sweet bite. They’d make plans. They’d dream up adventures. They’d laugh. Friends.
But Edgar never made it to the café. He didn’t leave the house for the next month.
Because as he drifted drunkenly home, his future before him like a bowl of sugar cubes waiting to melt on his tongue, something moved in his periphery. Edgar cocked his head. The Friday night merriment in the Quarter and along Frenchmen Street drifted downriver some nights, mixing with locals on street corners and outside bars, so Edgar assumed it was a tourist who’d wandered away from his group.
An explosion of hydrangeas made Edgar sneeze, and when his eyes opened, something was right in front of him.