The Rush (The Siren Series) - By Rachel Higginson Page 0,42
give for Nix to pamper me like that!”
Evaleen squealed with laughter, “No kidding. Six months of constant relaxation and spoiling. It sounds amazing! Was it amazing?”
“No, obviously not.” I looked at these two girls that had just as much influence in raising me as my mother did and could not believe how far gone they were. They were five years older than me, which was an insane amount of time in my life. It was the difference between fighting fate and accepting it. They were almost finished with college, about ready to enter our society completely and they were going on and on about spa time? Everything in their lives was already a vacation from reality and still they wanted more? I wondered who they were at the core of their beings; how far down the morally deluded they had really fallen.
Evaleen once pulled me aside at a garden party when I was thirteen and slipped comfort inserts into my four inch pumps when she could tell I could barely walk straight anymore. She whispered in my ear when I turned fourteen and had to go to dinner with Nix for the first time by myself that I would be Ok, that I was strong enough to handle a four course meal and when dessert was over to simply tell him that I was exhausted and had school in the morning and couldn’t be out any later. She had shown me one of Nix’s greatest weaknesses, that he was a gentleman to a fault in public and nothing would come between him and keeping up appearances.
And Anaxandra had been the closest thing to an older sister I ever had. She tweezed my eyebrows for the first time, taught me the tricks of well-placed duct tape and Band-Aid placements and never let me cry in public. Never. She would somehow see tears form in my eyes from across entire ballrooms, race to me, scoop me up and hide me in the nearest bathroom until the tears stopped and she could reapply my makeup. I was gone six months and came back to invasion of the body snatchers. I came back to sell-outs. The reality of that epiphany was like a slice to my already battered heart. What if that was me one day? What if I forgot all my moral high ground and coveted convictions and allowed the idea of spas and vacation to completely cloud my judgment? That was the scariest question of all.
“I was still processing Sam…. It was kind of the opposite of a vacation.” I breathed out in a shaky whisper.
“Oh my god, Ivy, get over it already. It’s not like he died. You are being so dramatic about the whole thing!” Anaxandra rolled her huge blue eyes in an exaggerated circle and then removed her attention from me completely, looking down at her nails as if they held the solution to world hunger.
Exie smacked the back of her sister’s head with a sharp satisfaction. “God, Ana, that is the ugliest thing you have ever said! What is wrong with you?”
“Ow!” Anaxandra rubbed at the back of her head and scowled at her little sister. “What is wrong with you? And you know that Ivy is the only one upset about the accident. Everyone else seems to think it’s a good thing…. a sign of things to come!” Her face lit up with an expectant smile. “You’re a good omen, Ivy. Stop worrying about Sam and enjoy what this means for you!”
The bile rose higher in my throat and I lunged forward, throwing myself in Sloane’s bathroom. I didn’t have time to reach the toilet, so I stood at the sink, dry heaving the non-existent contents of an empty stomach. A weighty pressure landed on my lungs and my vision blurred at the edges, threatening my consciousness altogether. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.
Sloane appeared behind me and turned me away from the mirror where I had been unconsciously staring daggers into my own, hated reflection. She pushed roughly on the back of my head until the top half of my body hung upside down and my face was awkwardly placed between my knees.
“It’s Ok, Ivy,” Sloane murmured sweetly to me. “Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Slowly, that’s it, slowly.” Sloane’s voice held a gentle authority that I responded to immediately. This wasn’t the first time we had been through this routine.
The world started to come back into focus even as all the blood rushed