Fallen - Lauren Kate [81]
Sheepishly, her father held up a colorful patchwork quilt and a large briefcase-style contraption made of wicker that Luce had never seen before. Usually when they picnicked, it was a much more casual affair, with paper grocery bags and an old ripped sheet thrown down on the grass by the canoe trail outside their house.
“Pickled okra?” Luce asked in a voice that sounded very much like little-kid Lucy. No one could say her parents weren’t trying.
Her dad nodded. “And sweet tea, and biscuits with white gravy. Cheddar grits with extra jalapeños, just the way you like ’em. Oh,” he said, “and one more thing.”
Luce’s mom reached into her purse for a fat, sealed red envelope and held it out to Luce. For the briefest moment, a pain gnawed at Luce’s stomach when she thought back to the mail she was accustomed to receiving. Psycho Killer. Death Girl.
But when Luce looked at the handwriting on the envelope, her face broke into an enormous grin.
Callie.
She tore into the envelope and pulled out a card with a black-and-white photograph on the front of two old ladies getting their hair done. Inside, every square inch of the card was filled with Callie’s large, bubbly handwriting. And there were several pieces of scrawled-on loose-leaf paper because she’d run out of room on the card.
Dear Luce,
Since our phone time is now ridiculously insufficient (Can you please petition for some more? It’s downright unjust), I’m going to get all old-fashioned on you and take up epic letter writing. Enclosed you will find every single minuscule thing that happened to me over the past two weeks. Whether you like it or not …
Luce clutched the envelope to her chest, still grinning, eager to devour the letter as soon as her parents headed home. Callie hadn’t given up on her. And her parents were sitting right beside her. It had been way too long since Luce had felt this loved. She reached out and squeezed her father’s hand.
A blaring whistle made both her parents jump. “It’s just the dinner bell,” she explained; they seemed relieved. “Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
As they walked from the hot, hazy parking lot toward the commons where the opening events of Parents’ Day were being held, Luce started to see the campus through her parents’ eyes. She noticed anew the sagging roof of the main office, and the sickly, overripe odor of the rotting peach grove next to the gym. The way the wrought iron of the cemetery gates was overcome with orangey rust. She realized that in only a couple of weeks, she’d grown completely accustomed to Sword & Cross’s many eyesores.
Her parents looked mostly horrified. Her father gestured at a dying grapevine winding its decrepit way around the splintering fence at the entrance to the commons.
“Those are chardonnay grapes,” he said, wincing because when a plant felt pain, so did he.
Her mother was using two hands to grip her pocket-book to her chest, with both elbows sticking out—the stance she took when she found herself in a neighborhood where she thought she might be mugged. And they hadn’t even seen the reds yet. Her parents, who were adamantly against little things like Luce getting a webcam, would hate the idea of constant surveillance at her school.
Luce wanted to protect them from all the atrocities of Sword & Cross, because she was figuring out how to manage—and sometimes even beat—the system here. Just the other day, Arriane had taken her through an obstacle course-like sprint across the campus to point out all the “dead reds” whose batteries had died or been slyly “replaced,” effectively creating the blind spots of the school. Her parents didn’t need to know about all that; they just needed to have a good day with her.
Penn was swinging her legs from the bleachers, where she and Luce had promised to meet at noon. She was holding a potted mum.
“Penn, these are my parents, Harry and Doreen Price,” Luce said,