Page 10 of The Witches of Cambridge

“Who does he think he is?” Ava said, flustered and attracted at the same time.

“He thinks there are buildings named for his family, and that makes him better than everyone. See the gold watch he’s wearing? Who can afford that? Ignore him,” Maureen advised. “Don’t go over there.”

Ava felt the color rise in her face. She’d had enough of snobbery and bad manners. This was what the local girls had done at her school, humiliating her simply because they could. She wasn’t about to allow that to happen now. She didn’t care when Maureen whispered that Jamie’s ancestor Increase Mather had been the president of Harvard, and that his son Cotton Mather had written extensively about the evil ways of women and their natural inclination to follow Eve’s sins.

Ava walked toward him through the hushed room. “Did you want something?” she asked.

Jamie did want something, something he would never admit to anyone. He wanted to be someone brand-new. “Could you pick up the silverware?” He knew he was reckless and often behaved badly. The truth was he wanted this girl to hate him and maybe then he wouldn’t have to worry that she was the girl he always dreamed about. Maybe then she would go away. People said you couldn’t make someone love you, but Jamie knew for a fact that you could make someone hate you. He’d done it time after time. You just had to sacrifice who you really were, you had to be vain and cruel and then they would leave you alone. That was what he wanted, for no one to know him or see inside him.

“Are you incapable of picking it up yourself?” Ava was still flushed and could feel the heat in her face and throat.

“It’s not my job,” Jamie Mather said. “It’s yours.”

“Maybe you’re too inept,” Ava tossed out in a cool tone even though she was burning up.

Ava wouldn’t have thought he had a heart if she hadn’t heard it pounding. She’d been taught to hear such things at Sunday meeting at Lilith House. Listen carefully and it was possible to hear the heartbeat of the world. The sound of Jamie’s heart was quite loud, almost as if he were having a heart attack. Ava hunched down and collected the knives and spoons and forks, all of which immediately tarnished, turning black at her touch, the sign of a witch. She was glad no one seemed to have noticed, and she quickly wiped the utensils down with her apron so that they gleamed once more. Boys all around were laughing at her, and one or two had applauded when she bent down for the silverware. “That’s the position we like to see you in,” they called rudely.

Ava tossed the handful of silverware onto the wooden table. The clatter was so loud people could hear it in the corridor. It sounded like a bell, the echo of an unmasked heart.

Maureen, always the protective sort, arrived and linked her arm through Ava’s. They were two of a kind after all, Radcliffe or not. “You’re a bunch of asses,” she told the boys in her sweetest voice. “Go jump in a lake.”

Ava refused to move when Maureen tugged on her arm, even though there was still Boston cream pie to serve and their own dinner to eat and dishes to wash up, and after that the dining hall would need to be swept.

“Are you happy now?” Ava said to Jamie.

He laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “Happy? When am I ever not happy?”

“You’re a complete fake,” Ava told him, softly, so that only he could hear. “You’re not one bit happy.” When she let her mind go free, as she’d been taught to do during their weekly meditations in the library at Lilith House, she could see Jamie standing in the shade of a dark wood, a cobalt blue lake before him. Crickets were calling and he was all alone, a hurt look on his face. He walked into the water, and then he stopped, too fearful to go on. Despite his bad behavior, Ava’s heart went out to him. He was not what he appeared to be.

“Insult another waitress from now on,” Ava told Jamie. She had the sense that if she didn’t get away from him right now, she might never have the chance to do so. “I’m quitting.”

Ava had already turned from Jamie but now he stood up and leaned in close. She could hear the watch he wore counting off seconds. “I dreamed of you and here you are,” he said.

He might have said more, but all at once there was a ruckus. Everyone turned to look upward, and there were shouts all through the room. Twelve crows had descended through the open windows, the very same crows that had followed Ava from Maine. Maureen pulled Ava into the kitchen, while in the dining room people shouted, with many ducking under the tables and still others running for the doors. Black feathers fell from above. When the crows swooped toward him, Jamie held his hands over his face to ensure they wouldn’t peck out his eyes.

His mother had told him a story he never forgot. A crow had fallen in love with a woman, but they inhabited two different worlds, and their hearts had been broken. Sometimes, though, her story had a different ending, one Jamie had almost forgotten. Just when they thought their love was impossible and it seemed they would always be divided by air, by water, and by land, the whole world changed. That was when it no longer mattered if one had wings and the other had arms.

Once they were back in the kitchen, Ava removed her apron and tossed it onto the counter. “I’ll find someplace to work where I’m not treated like a servant.”

She took a plate of Boston cream pie from the row of leftover desserts and began to eat, filling her mouth with the sugary stuff. She was ravenous, perhaps because she was in a fury, was so famished that she took a dinner roll and stuck it in her pocket to have later on. “You were right. That Jamie Mather is worthless.”

All the same, Maureen saw the rapt expression on her new friend’s face; the attraction Ava felt for Mather was there plain as day, poor thing. “You could have him if you wanted him,” Maureen said. “But would you really want all the baggage he comes with? That dreadful family?” The instant their eyes met, Maureen knew the truth. “Oh, no. Tell me you don’t.”

“I have zero interest,” Ava insisted, but it sounded like a lie, even to herself.

Maureen shook her head. “Love is chemistry. If it weren’t, people wouldn’t do such stupid things in the name of love. His family judged us and murdered us, that is a fact. And you know what they say: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

But actually, apples often did fall far from the trees where they’d grown. Ava had often found them in the oddest places, amid the woods and among the pines, on the shore of the pond, at the end of the dirt driveway where the chain was meant to keep people away. Perhaps the apples had been taken up in gusts of a chill wind, or crows had dropped them as they flew above the rooftops; all Ava knew was that apples scattered far and wide. She thought of those nights in Maine when she couldn’t sleep, when a woman in a hooded coat stood outside the window, tapping on the glass, leaving black apples on the sill. She should have been afraid, but she wasn’t then, and she wasn’t now.

Maureen hugged Ava goodbye before Ava headed down Dunster Street. “I wish you were at Radcliffe with me,” Ava said.

Maureen shook her head. “It’s not for everyone. Not every witch is a legacy.”

“I’m not,” Ava insisted.

“As far as you know,” Maureen called over her shoulder. “Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Ava laughed. Maureen was so brave, Ava couldn’t imagine something she wouldn’t be willing to do. “I’ll try my best,” she called back. Even though the evening had been a disaster, at least she had made a friend, one who had set her to thinking there might be a reason she had been chosen by the Lilith Society.