“Done early?” Nancy raises her brows. “Can’t wait to read it.”
“I think you’ll like it,” James says. “It’s my most inspired piece.”
“Don’t lose your inspiration.” She leans back to open a filing cabinet and hands him a stapled packet. “Here’s your next piece. I want it Thursday.”
James drops into his desk chair, plugs in his laptop, flips through the packet, and starts researching the new auditorium under construction at Lincoln High School.
Nelle can’t take another bite. She stares at her half-eaten oatmeal, the two remaining blueberries like Father’s eyes, snake scales rubbing bare skin. She hates him the most when he sits across from her, puts his cold fingertips on her hand, and says, “Now, again.”
She always loses her appetite after he cuts her. After he funnels her blood into the vials he keeps lined up in his study. Ready to dip his pens into.
Nelle shivers, thinking of the gashes in her palm knitting themselves back together, skin lacing skin.
But how can someone like me feel pain?Why does she ache for the outside world, full of rapists and murderers? Father warned her endlessly about the dangers of the world, but he never prepared her for its beauty. For fireworks. For corn dogs. Forpeople. Laughter. Mindless, meaningless, beautiful chatter. Birds communicate for fun. People, too. Nelle wants nothing more than to be a part of their flock.
But in order to leave, she would have to write for herself, and that is the one rule Father’s drilled into her skull harder than any other. If she tries to write for herself, she will die.
Her rendezvous with James was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She had approached Father on a calm day and asked if he would take her to the festivities. He used to speak fondly of attending town gatherings with his wife and daughter.
Hisfirstdaughter. Eleanor.
Father hates going into town now, so she expected him to say no. To admonish her for suggesting such a careless idea. But he said yes, he’d write for her to go until ten. By herself.
Nelle didn’t ask why he wouldn’t be chaperoning her and didn’t want to poke the beast, so she waited until the Fourth before bringing it up again.
“You’ll feel the pull to come back a quarter before ten,” he explained before she left. Then his voice dropped lower. Colder. “Do I need to go over your rules?”
She hadn’t heard them since her first trip to the library three months ago, but she knew them like they’d been branded onto her.
Don’t look at anyone. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t say anything.
So of course she broke all three at the first chance.
Nelle’s fist curls under the table, silver spoon digging into her raw scar.
Father shuffles in the room behind her—the room he calls his study, the room full of bookshelves that hold the tales of her life—his pen scratching out what she will do tomorrow. When she was eleven, she caught a glimpse of one transcription:Tomorrow, on the sixteenth dayof May, Nelle will wake up at eight o’clock and make oatmeal. She will eat, then return to her room until three, when she will come out to play cards.The memory makes her shudder. She always knew her actions were predetermined, but seeing it written altered her perception of reality.
Her life is meaningless. Governed by Father.Hebuys her the books and brushes and paintheapproves of. He decides when they go to the library for the first time. He picks out her meals, her movements, where she goes, evenwhatshe does. As far as she knows, if he wrote that she stabs herself in the throat, she would have no choice but to obey.
She wouldn’t die, though. Again and again, he has told her there are only two ways for her to die: if every last scrap of writing in her blood is destroyed, and if she writes with her own ink.
Maybe she should try it. Open her veins over a palette, mix the ink with paint, create a canvas of blood. Death doesn’t seem too harsh a consequence. Some days even preferable to the torture she endures with her self-proclaimed father.
Yet she is still too scared of death to try to write.
At breakfast this morning, Father called her a burden. She has grown a second skin to fend off his insults, but this one stung. The Fourth of July was her first taste of freedom, of not being chained to his will, and now she craves more.
Since she was a child, Nelle has watched the horses in the neighbor’s field, through the trees beyond her bedroom window. They gallop together, necks thrashing, manes luminous under the moon and sun. They are muscular, passionate creatures. They’rewild, despite the fact that they’re trapped, too.
If I’m a burden, why not release me?
But he won’t. He can’t. As her creator, he alone can write her instructions, and deep down, she knows that she needs him. His pen, her ink, and the shelves of leather-bound journals in his study. Shehatesthat she needs him.
But without him, she would not exist.
The sun is hot when James gets off work. He climbs into his old truck, a hand-me-down from his grandma, and starts the cranky engine, wheels munching asphalt as he pulls off the square.
He takes a right down curvy River Road, where tree branches hang low and scatter shadows over the street, and then a left onto Blackwood. Mailboxes whiz by. It’s a dead end, and the last metal mailbox hasQuill23 printed on its side in tall white letters.
