Fallen in Love Read Online Free Page A

to hers, dubious. “You really want to know?”
    “Does the pope wear Prada?”
    Now he smiled. “Lupercalia was really just a pagan celebration of fertility and the coming of spring. All the eligible women in the town would write their names on strips of parchment and drop them into the urn—like that one there. When the bachelors drew from the urn, whoever’s name they pulled out would be their sweetheart for the year.”
    “That’s barbaric!” Shelby cried. No way was some urn going to tell her who to go out with. She could make her own mistakes, thank you.
    “I think it’s sweet.” Miles shrugged, looking away.
    “You do?” Shelby’s head swiveled back to him. “I mean, I guess it could be cool. But this urn tradition comes before the festival had anything to do with Saint Valentine, right?”
    “Right,” Miles said. “Eventually the church gotinvolved. They wanted to bring the pagan celebration under their control, so they attached a patron saint. They did that a lot with old holidays and traditions. Like it wasn’t a threat if they owned it.”
    “Typical males.”
    “Now, in his life, the real Valentine was known as a defender of romance. People who couldn’t legally get married—soldiers, for instance—came to him from all over and he’d perform the ceremony in secret.”
    Shelby shook her head. “How do you
know
all this stuff? Or rather,
why
?”
    “Luce,” Miles said, not meeting Shelby’s eyes.
    “Oh.” Shelby felt like someone had just stuffed a stiff fist into her gut. “You learned about the history of Valentine’s Day to impress
Luce
?” She kicked the dirt. “I guess some girls dig nerds.”
    “No, Shelby. I mean”—Miles gripped her shoulders and pivoted her to face the platform with the urn. “It’s
Luce
. Right over there.”
    Luce wore a light brown dress with a wide skirt. Her long black hair was braided into three thick plaits, held together with narrow white ribbons. Her skin looked paler than usual, with a frosty pink flush dotting her cheekbones. She was circling the urn in slow, meditative steps, standing apart from the other girls. In the chaos of the square, Luce seemed to be the only person who was alone. Her eyes had that soft, unfocused look they got when she was in the trance of her thoughts.
    “Shelby—wait!”
    Shelby was already halfway across the square, almost running toward Luce, when Miles clasped a tight hand around her wrist. He pulled her to a stop, and she turned, ready to lay into him.
    Except his expression … 
glowed
with something Shelby couldn’t decipher.
    “You know this is the Lucinda of the past. This girl is not our friend. She won’t
know
you—”
    Shelby hadn’t thought about that. She pretended she had. She turned and took another hard look at Lucinda. Her hair was dirty—not greasy, but something beyond greasy, really
dirty
—one thing Luce Price would never abide. Her clothes fit her strangely, from Shelby’s modern standpoint, but Lucinda seemed comfortable in them. She seemed comfortable in everything, actually, which was also not very Luce Price. Shelby thought of Luce as chronically—though charmingly—maladjusted. It was one of the things she loved about Luce. But this girl? This girl seemed comfortable even in the desperate sadness saturating every movement she made. As if she was as accustomed to feeling glum as she was to the sun rising every day. Didn’t she have friends to cheer her up? Wasn’t that what friends were for?
    “Miles,” Shelby said, grasping his free wrist in her own hand and leaning close. “I know we agreed to let Daniel find our Lucinda Price, but this girl is
still
the Lucinda we care about … or an earlier version of her.And the least we can do is cheer her up. Look how bummed she is. Look.”
    He bit his lip. “But—but—everything we’ve learned about Announcers says you shouldn’t mess with—”
    “Hiii there!” Shelby said in a singsong, pulling Miles along until