The Night Garden Read Online Free Page A

their lives. All summer long, Olivia welcomed them and then watched them go. They were her family, her staff, and the closest thing she had to friends. Then in the fall, when the garden died away and the nights grew too cold to sleep in the barn, she did what she always did: she watched with a heavy heart as they left, not to return until the maze began to bloom again.
    Mei’s eyes seemed clearer now, cautiously hopeful. “You’re not going to, like, try to convert me to join some cult to save my immortal soul, or lock me in a peacock cage again, or turn me in to the cops?”
    Olivia laughed. “No. None of those things. But—there are some rules you have to follow.”
    “Of course there are,” Mei said. “Here we go. What are they?”
    Olivia cleared her throat, and for the first time since they’dstarted talking, looked away. “If you decide to stay, two things are off-limits. The first is the garden in the center of the maze, the locked garden behind the high stone walls. Don’t go in.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because that’s the rule,” Olivia said, in the tone of voice that she’d learned from her father when she was young, the tone that said No conversation allowed.
    “Okay … What’s the second thing that I’m supposed to steer clear of?”
    Olivia steeled herself. “That would be me.”
    And though she’d warned people off a hundred times, a thousand, she’d never quite been able to fully defend her heart against their reactions. It always cut her, always hurt, to have to build the same kind of wall around herself that she’d built around her garden. But she had no choice. For a very long time, Olivia had been stuck with a particular affliction: an accidental brush against her arm, a bump of summer-bare legs—anything—would inflict uncomfortable skin irritations on the person who touched her. The pain was not immediate, but it was inevitable. Within a few hours of directly touching Olivia’s skin, a person would begin to itch. Then he might see the first strawberry-colored smatterings of deep irritation. Soon the itching might turn into welts, and then welts into blisters, and no amount of calamine lotion or long baths in oatmeal could fully erase the angry burn or make it more quickly run its course.
    As far as Olivia knew, the secret of her condition had not spread far and wide; the very few people who had reason to suspect it kept the suspicion to themselves with a kind of soured reluctance, an unwillingness to outwardly admit a thing they could not inwardly believe. The best thing to do, Olivia had found, was to warn people to stay away from her right from the beginning. Olivia had hurt people, even when she tried not to.She’d hurt her father long ago when instinct had compelled her to grab him and stop him from falling into a manure pile (she would have been better off letting him fall). She’d hurt the occasional male who attempted to make love to her with friendly, hands-on offers of an oh-you’re-so-tense massage, or an eyelash brushed off her face and wished upon. She hurt her boarders even though she did her best to stay away from them; when she heard them complain of how they must have gotten poison ivy somewhere while hoeing weeds, she could only keep silent, her skin prickling with self-awareness and guilt, as she listened. She’d used to hurt children—back in the days before she stopped leaving the Pennywort property—and that was the worst: to feel the thump of a toddler just learning to walk as he crashed into her at the hardware store, and knowing the anguish and confusion the child’s mother would feel when the redness began to form on her baby’s skin. It was better for all of the Bethel hamlets if she stayed where she was: hidden, safe, minimizing her interactions and minimizing the damage she might do to the town she loved.
    Mei was looking at Olivia now with pointed distrust. “I’m supposed to stay away from you ?”
    “I don’t like people to touch me,”