Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,82

had no quality I could easily complain about. It would be a sin to whisper discouragement in his ear. And so they were wed when he was twenty-three and she twenty-one. I taught myself to ignore the pangs I felt when he would tickle her while driving in the car or when she would rest her feet in his lap during breakfast. The intimacy hurt because it wasn’t for me. I was Mr. Brown’s and he was mine, but not the way she was his. Not the way he was hers.

I taught myself the new rules to survive. Move out of the room when they kiss, enter the bedroom only when it is silent, cherish my time with Mr. Brown when he is at work. I obeyed these rules, and one day I was rewarded. Mr. Brown brought out his old tattered box, put it in his briefcase, and drove us to work an hour early. For more than a year now, Mr. Brown had been spending an hour each day, before his first students arrived, working on his novel with me beside him. Feeling inspired by this gift, I had tried to warm myself to his bride by whispering recipes in her ear while she was baking cookies or a cake. I thought I was being as gracious as her own mother might be, until a package arrived from her grandfather, an album of photographs of Mrs. Brown as a baby. The cub-ear curls of her hair and the dimpled backs of her tender hands bit at me like sleet. I couldn’t look at them, coward that I was. I wasn’t her mother. I had chosen Mr. Brown. And he had chosen her.

Now I was afraid that the rules of my world were changing again. I had been seen by a human. Sitting on the sloped roof of Mr. Brown’s small house while he and his wife slept and dreamed below, I studied a crescent moon hung crooked in a plum purple sky and thought about what it would be like to truly be seen. I imagined standing before the young man who seemed to see me and letting him look as long as he wished. How was he doing this? Had he somehow chosen me? I had two strong and seemingly contradictory sensations. One was a fear of being seen by a mortal—as if beheld naked when you know you are clothed. The other was an almost indescribable sensation of attraction—the vine curling toward the sun’s light in slow but single-minded longing. I wanted to see him again, to see whether he really was that rare human who saw what others could not. Nothing was more disturbing to me, and yet nothing compelled me more.

By the next school day, when the same group of students entered Mr. Brown’s classroom, I deliberately stood in the back corner of the room. I wanted to know whether the boy could see me and not have to wonder whether he was looking through me at a map of the world or a grammar lesson. I stood still as marble in the far corner between the window frame and the cupboard door. I remained calm so that nothing, not even a speck of dust on the floor, would shift from my presence. And I watched the students enter, one by one, dragging their feet, pushing each other and laughing, listening to private music with wires in their ears, and then, finally, the boy with the pale face, moving, almost gliding to the desk he always sat in, near the back, in the middle.

I moved not an inch and waited. The shuffling died down, the murmurs ceased as Mr. Brown began to speak. The boy sat leaning back, his long legs in denim stuck out in the aisle, his white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, shirttail out, his dark green bag of books lying under the chair. I waited.

And then he moved. He let the paper that had just been passed back to him slip off the desktop on purpose; I was sure it was on purpose. And when he sat up and bent to retrieve it from the floor, he turned his head and looked back into the corner of the room where I stood. His eyes met mine for one moment, and he smiled. I was shocked, shocked again though I had longed for it. He sat back up and pretended to read the page, just as the others were doing.

How is this happening? I thought. He couldn’t be as I was, Light. I had never seen another like myself. I felt that it was impossible—an instinct told me so. I had never truly believed in mediums, but perhaps this strange boy was some sort of seer. He seemed to have no interest at all in sharing his knowledge of my presence with his fellow classmates or Mr. Brown. It made no sense, and although I was still nervous and full of longing about him, now I was also angry. How dare this chimney sweep of a boy shatter my privacy so matter-of-factly and so completely? What made it worse was that in that moment when he smiled at me, his face flushed. He looked alive and healthy for the first time. It was as if he’d stolen something from me. I felt humiliated, for some reason, and I stormed straight out of the room, without looking back, making a flock of papers flutter off the front row of desks.

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About the Author

LAURA WHITCOMB grew up in Pasadena, California, where she lived in a mildly haunted house for twelve years. She is the winner of three Kay Snow Writing Awards and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit her website at www.laurawhitcomb.com.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Epigraph

PART 1

Jenny

PART 2

Helen

PART 3

Jenny

Helen

Jenny

Helen

Jenny

Helen

Jenny

Helen

Jenny

Helen

Sample Chapter from A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT

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Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,82

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