Hex: A Novel Read Online Free

shifting part of me unequivocally knew, but before I could stop myself—without wanting to stop myself, with a wild glee like one gets from breaking a window—I shot out my hand and dropped the tiny ball in the pocket of the Sainte Maria’s tatty fake leopard fur coat.
    “So,” said Thalia, nodding, laying her heavy hand on my shoulder. “That’s the kind of girl you are, is it? I can’t say I’m too surprised, though I might not have made the same decision.”
    Thalia bent down again, swooping very close to my face as if she wanted to kiss me. “Still,” she said, scanning me from chin to forehead and back again, each time managing to avoid looking into my eyes, “now at least you know what you are, don’t you, Alice?”
    “No,” I said, “I don’t,” but it was a lie. It was clear to me something had changed. I felt flushed all over, an ache in my armpits and at my groin as if I suddenly had a fever. In the back of my throat I could feel a hot plug as if something in my body had surfaced and was bobbing just behind my teeth. I felt as if I was still touching the tiny ball of wax where it caught in the lint of the Santa Maria’s pocket, or could feel without touching it’s dead, plastic surface, could sense somehow the particular, nasty quiver of the root.
    “Mmm-hmm,” said Thalia. She straightened up and backed away. Just then the Nina came into the hallway and yanked me back by the arm.
    “I’m so sorry, Ms. Lutrell,” she said, her voice high. “I was doing the cash drawer. Is she bothering you?”
    “Yes,” said my aunt. “Yes, she is,” to which the Nina responded by giving me a hard shake and pulling me back into the darkening store. A storm was blowing in, the clouds tinted green as they streamed past the windows. Thalia stood in the hallway a moment longer, twisting the last sheet of her hair up with slow, thoughtful motions, and watched us. Her niece and her shopkeep. Two sullen girls surrounded by relics for sale from another century, ugly and stooped in the sudden dottering glare of lightning over the mountain. She paused after the last pin, patting the top of her bun reflexively, and smiled before turning into the kitchen already shouting at the Pinta for letting the soup bubble over onto the stove.
    I don’t remember what happened the rest of that day. I suppose the Sainte Maria gathered Luke and I up as soon as the lunch shift was over and took us home. She probably packed the kitchen leftovers into Styrofoam take-home boxes, as the girls often did at the end of the week when my father hadn’t yet given them money for groceries. At home, around our kitchen table, she fed us the gritty soup and fatty ham, cutting Luke’s meat into small bites while a cigarette burned in the ashtray next to her. Later that evening, just before the Pinta came on to take the night shift, she gave us both our baths and, as was her habit even though she was the one who ran the washcloth over my body and wrung it out over my head, shut the door to my bedroom quietly behind me to give me privacy as I changed.
    Probably, the Sainte Maria took her jacket home with her that night and hung it in her own front hallway. The ball was so small and her pockets so cluttered with thread and coins andstones and all the usual detritus of a girl with busy hands that I doubt she even noticed the thing was there until much later when she may have drawn it out, examined it with brief curiosity and tossed it away. One more inexplicable object that had been drawn to her. One more tiny satellite at orbit around her fickle moon.
    I still don’t quite know what the object meant, but I know that I marked her and I know that Thalia—moth white, moth red—watched and made note of the marking. That I was a child is no excuse. A child can smell smoke on the wind, after all. Even today, with so few people left in the world who can do me any harm, I am cold when I think of Thalia’s smile, mean as a cut, opening across her