Perfect Glass
by Laura Anderson Kurk
Copyright 2013 by Laura Anderson Kurk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Angela Llamas
Cover image by Jenny Livingston
Published in association with MacGregor Literary Inc.,
Portland, Oregon
For Mara Schasteen, friend and artist, because she sees me.
Contents
Author’s Note
Epigraph
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Playlist Fiction
Sneak Peek – The Unlikely Debut of Ellie Sweet by Stephanie Morrill
Author’s Note
This book is the sequel to Glass Girl, originally published in 2010, then revised and released in April 2013. If you’ve only read the original Glass Girl (2010 edition), you might find yourself confused while reading Perfect Glass.
Important things changed when Glass Girl was revised in 2013. Big things (like what happens in the cave and how Meg relates to her mom) and little things (like how Thanet and Mr. Landmann are spelled) could trip you up. I recommend you download the new Glass Girl and read it first, just so we’re all on the same page.
I’m thrilled to put this second story in your hands. Thank you for hanging out with Meg and Henry for a while longer.
How wisely fate ordain’d for human kind
Calamity! which is the perfect glass,
Wherein we truly see and know ourselves.
—William Davenant
ONE
meg
I’d only seen a picture of her, taken in the sixties, as far as I could tell, by some famous photographer. In the fading image, she wore a blue, shapeless dress and stood at her easel, looking at a canvas like it contained all the answers to all the questions. A hip cocked out. One arm hugging her waist, intersecting with her other arm, which ended in a loose hand supporting a smoky cigarette. A knowing look and a raised eyebrow. I’d memorized the lines and curves and shadows.
I sat in the Jeep staring at her old house. It leaned sharply to the left and had three front doors—each one painted a bright color. The swerving path of sidewalk to the porch only confused the eye more.
Wiping damp palms on my jeans, I moved into that ancient human ritual of cracking knuckles. Once. And then twice. But even that didn’t settle my nerves one little bit. Certain words did help stem the panic, though. Like these—
Henry Whitmire is worth every bit of this and more.
Henry Whitmire is worth a metric ton of gold.
The three doors, all closed and go away, mocked me until the cherry red one in the middle opened slowly. Was that a gun? I jerked down below my steering wheel. I tried to fill the space usually taken up by knees and ankles, and sometimes bags that shouldn’t be there because they might slide under the brake pedal.
I hummed a little to calm myself.
My mom talked about Jo Russell, an artist of international fame, like she walked on water. Her paintings—the ones with horseflesh and weatherworn faces—had come to represent the West. But locals knew Jo as much for her unpredictable behavior as her art. At eighty-seven years old, she gave new meaning to crazy—a word I didn’t throw around carelessly.
Half closing my eyes, I imagined her pulling her coat around her, smiling indulgently, and dancing to the Jeep to welcome me. I didn’t let the fantasy go far, though, because fantasies had never served me well.
As mean as this woman was rumored to be, she had to be a person. And a person can be known and understood.
I peeked over the dash. She leaned into the doorframe. She had the advantage, the higher ground. She looked nothing like the picture in my head. She waved, so I grabbed my bag and keys and jumped out of the Jeep. Better to introduce myself while she was lucid. Halfway up her walk, I realized she wasn’t waving. She was shooing.
“I have a shotgun, little lady.” Her words were steady and unapologetic—just delivering a bit of information I might need in the near future.
I froze in place and put my hands in the air.
“I’m Meg, Ms. Russell.” My voice sounded small, surprisingly childish for my seventeen years. I’d overcome some intense experiences in the last few of those years. I’d lost my brother, Wyatt. I’d moved fifteen hundred miles from the only home I’d ever known. I’d lost my mom and then found her all over again, deeper this time. I’d fallen in love with a boy, then said goodbye to that boy. This…this meeting a new person, an artist, shouldn’t even get a rise out of me.
“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying.”
I forced myself to make eye contact and look pleasant. She wore a rainbow-colored wool cap, camouflage ski pants, and a stained white sweatshirt that said I DON’T EAT YELLOW SNOW.
“I’m not selling anything, ma’am.”
“Why are you trespassing?” Her steely-eyed stare unnerved me.
“My mother spoke with you yesterday about letting me help you around the house a little…or interview you. Did I come at a bad time?”
“‘Did I come at a bad time?’” She laughed and cursed at once. “Honey, they’re all bad times.”
She hadn’t let her guard down yet. One hand stayed hidden behind the door, probably grasping that shotgun.
My resolution wavered. I needed to actually survive this to go to the University of Wyoming with Henry the way we planned. My mom, knowing I needed documented volunteerism on my UW application, had talked me into rehabilitating the crown jewel of Chapin. She related to Jo in ways I couldn’t begin to understand.
“Jo Russell is hurting,” she’d said, with tears in her eyes. “You could take her mind off her problems and convince her to do one last show at the gallery.”
So I would prove myself with Jo, threat of buckshot aside. My teeth chattered, and I pulled my jacket tighter against the biting fall wind.
“Ms. Russell, are you really pointing a rifle at me?” I hadn’t meant for that to sound as cheeky as it had.
“Do I look like someone who’d lie about that?”
Yes? No? “I’m not here to bother you. I just…I’m trying to get into a university writing program and my application is kind of boring.”
“One-dimensional.”
“Pardon?”
“What you mean is your application is one-dimensional.”
I smiled because I love people who can’t resist clarifying, esp
ecially when they hit the high points with heavy emphasis like they’re accustomed to talking to imbeciles.
“Yes, ma’am, but I heard you might be able to help me.” I knew better than to tell her I was also there to help her with basic daily activities—like washing her greasy hair and eating enough to see tomorrow.
“Who in the world told you I would help you with a blasted college application?”
“My mom…Adele Kavanagh. She’s an artist, too.”
“Never heard of her.” The hand that was supposed to be holding a shotgun slipped from behind the door to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
Ah. Immediate relief. “She’s with the Kaelin Gallery, downtown. She’s met you a few times and you mentioned needing some help with your house.”
“Why would I say that? I don’t want anyone in my house.” She looked me up and down. “Especially do-gooders like you.”
“Oh.” I tried to keep the hurt from registering on my face.
“I’m old, for crying out loud. People think they’re going to come up with something new to tell me. Stupid, stupid, stupid….” Her words dissolved into muttering only she could understand.
“I could just paint your porch there, where it’s peeling a little, or help clean up in the yard. I wouldn’t have to come inside.”
Jo shook her head, then waved both arms in the air in an exaggerated attempt to get me to stop talking.
I scratched my head. “So…no?”
“No.” She gave me a sarcastic smile.
“Okay, thank you, Ms. Russell. I’m sorry I disturbed you.” I turned to go back to the Jeep. Before I could open my door, I saw Henry’s face in my mind and his brown eyes pleaded with me to give it one more try. “Laramie,” he said. “Together.”
“I think I gave you the wrong impression,” I called from the drive. “The thing is, I need a creative mentor and you’re the best. I want to write about you on my application for UW because I’m trying to get into a graduate creative writing program as an undergraduate. I’m not qualified, but I want it.”
This time she didn’t shut me down or argue. I gathered steam. “Did you have help when you became an artist?”
Jo raised one eyebrow, picked at a scab on her forearm, and stepped down from her porch to examine my Jeep.
“I know this Jeep. From Wind River Books.”
“I work there after school. I want to work with you, though. I admire your paintings a lot.”
A deep chuckle rumbled in her chest, along with a raspy wheeze. “Yeah, I bet.” She lifted her face to the sky. “You ever heard the phrase ‘suck-up’ before?”
My face burned. Because it was sort of true.
“What’s your favorite one then?” She turned her back to me and peered through my Jeep windows.
“The one of the old rancher. The man with freckles.”
“Sun spots. That’s Clifton Weatherby. I don’t know what people see in that painting. It’s not any good. He couldn’t hold still or he’d go stiff from arthritis.”
“It’s his eyes.” I’d studied this painting in a book at our library for so long one day that I could call it up in my mind at will. “I think he looks lost.”
“He was lost, poor old Clifton. He was a week from expiring when he sat for me. Already stank with decomposition.” She watched my face and dared me to react.
Stepping toward her, I raised a hand, mitten palm up, the way my former counselor, Robin, did when she thought I’d had a breakthrough. “I’m sure he was a friend.”
She closed her eyes. “I couldn’t stand him.”
She started toward a shed behind her house. I followed her, not sure if I’d been dismissed.
“You’re Whitmire’s girl, aren’t you?”
I trotted along at her heels like an eager dog. “Yes. Henry’s my…we’re dating.”
She entered the shed and rummaged through a stack of tools, finally picking an old broom to hold out to me. I took it and waited for instructions.
“Where is he? In college?”
I cleared my throat. “No, ma’am. He’s living in Nicaragua, helping with the orphanage that his sister and her husband run. He’ll be there for a year.”
“A year?” she scoffed. “Being a humanitarian? What kind of teenage boy does that? He oughta be tomcatting around on some college campus.”
I felt my spine stiffen, ready to defend Henry’s choices. “He graduated last May and he wanted to do something important before he went to college.”
“Important.” She rolled that word around in her mouth, testing it.
“Yes. Important.”
She shrugged. “Well, I guess an orphanage in a dirt-poor country fits that bill.”
I nodded. “After that, he’ll be going to the University of Wyoming. With me, hopefully.”
“He’s got a nice family,” she said, like it answered any lingering questions in her mind. “Known them a long time.” She turned back to a shelf along the wall and started stacking rusted coffee cans full of nails and screws. “If the Whitmires think you’re good enough, I suppose you can tidy up my work shed. My tools are scattered everywhere and half the yard blew in here last week during the storm.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I assume you’ll want me to sign something for your school.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll just write an essay later about my experiences with you. You know, what I’ve learned from our time together.”
She snorted at that. “It’ll be a short essay.”
Jo walked through the yard to her back porch and disappeared, a purple door banging closed behind her. She stared at me through a window for a minute before she closed the curtains.
I glanced at the sky. Rain was moving in so I might have an hour before I’d be sweeping mud out instead of dirt. When I was sure Jo wasn’t sneaking glances out the window, I eased into a perfect warrior pose, because, according to my old yoga teacher in Pittsburgh, it promoted patience and strong thighs.
Holding it, holding it, holding it, I whispered my mantra, “Ohm…Henry Porter Whitmire.”
The purple door creaked open and Jo poked her head out.
“Do that on your own time!”
TWO
meg
“What’s with the red today?” Thanet said, tugging at my jacket with fingers stiffened by his cerebral palsy and the ever-present chill in the hallway. “It’s brighter than your normal palette of grays. You’re not blending.”
“Hands off. It was Wyatt’s.” I’d found the jacket last night when I snooped through boxes of Wyatt’s things Mom and Dad had brought to Wyoming for sentimental reasons. It hadn’t occurred to me before to wear his clothes.
“Ah…sorry. I don’t know how to respond to that.” He swallowed and looked sincerely apologetic.
“Then don’t respond. You know that’s okay.”
We try to spare each other the statements of pitiful. When Thanet was twelve, his dad died of cancer. He told me it had exhausted him to watch people struggle to Say the Right Thing.
Lately, he and I been eating lunch in the hallway connecting the cafeteria to the gym. Our lunch group had been decimated by schedule conflicts so Thanet and I were usually alone. We sat on the floor and had the hallway to ourselves. It was just us…and Abby O’Neill, the girl of Thanet’s dreams.
She was a new junior and quiet, and she preferred reading in the chairs scattered around in the hallway to pretending to be sociable in the cafeteria. Her brother, Quinn, a senior, usually brooded near her on the floor or in a nearby chair. He looked like he’d walked off the set of an indie music video—tall and lanky, short black boots with dark skinny jeans, a ratty dark wool coat, and a black cap pulled low. He was in my English class so I’d seen him without the cap—his hair was glossy black and his eyes were bright blue. He couldn’t possibly look more Irish.
“Go, Thanet. Talk to her.” I’d whispered this every day since I’d caught him staring at Abby. I was getting tired of hearing myself say i
t, actually. “You’re so in like with her.”
“I don’t want to embarrass her.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said, keeping my voice quiet. “What’s she reading today?”
“Murakami. Making her, in fact, perfect. Mura-flippin’-ka-a-a-a-mi, Meg….”
When he started moaning, I knew this was a serious crush. Thanet chewed on his pinkie fingernail when he felt nervous. I reached up and slid it from his mouth. “See? You know her language. You could talk to her about underground worlds and implantable flippin’ electrodes.”
“Har, har. She’s half a mile down the hallway. I’d fall trying to get to her and she’d be traumatized forever by the creepy leg-dragger.”
I glared at him for using the nickname he’d been given when he moved to Chapin. “I could go with you. We could walk by, turn around, and talk to her like ‘Oh, wow, didn’t know you were there.’ She needs a friend, Thanet.”
“Are you sure you’re not looking for an excuse to talk to Quinnly O’Ballivan O’Neill?” he said.
“What?”
“Stop it. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed him. You love Irish music.” He leaned back so he could see my face. He was only smiling a little.
“He’s not Irish music. He’s made of cheese and I’m not trying to talk to him.” I discovered it’s hard to whisper when you’re defensive.
Thanet studied my face for a minute so I stuck my tongue out. I didn’t watch Quinn O’Neill. It wasn’t why we sat here. We sat in this hall before Quinn ventured out here with his paperback of the day. He’d perfected the benched, loner vibe we were trying for, which meant he was better at rejecting stale high school society than we were. He was reading Look Homeward, Angel, and that was…just…loaded with meaning.
“Okay, Than, spill it. What’s whirling around in that brain of yours?”
“Nothing.” He rolled his shoulders and jammed his other pinkie nail into his mouth.
“What’s Henry up to?”
I sighed. “See, that line of thought is wrong. Don’t try to connect dots from Quinn to me to Henry. He’s worried about a kid he’s working with, so that’s got him down. He wants to come home, I think.”
Perfect Glass (A Young Adult Novel (sequel to Glass Girl)) Page 1
