Lauren Kate: Torment

He smiled kindly. “You’re doing well over there, I hear. Everyone says you’re doing very well.”

“Oh … n-no …,” she stammered. “I don’t know about that.”

“Well, I do. I also know your parents are very happy to get to see you. It’s good when these things can work out.”

“Thank you,” she said, hoping he understood how grateful she was.

“I won’t keep you but for just one question.”

Luce waited for him to ask her about something deep and dark and over her head about Daniel and Cam, good and evil, right and wrong, trust and deceit. …

But all he said was “What did you do to your hair?”

Luce’s head was upside down in the sink in the girls’ bathroom down the hall from the Sword & Cross cafeteria. Shelby carried in the last two slices of cheese pizza stacked on a paper plate for Luce. Arriane held out a bottle of cheap black hair dye—the best Roland could do on such short notice, but not a bad match for Luce’s natural color.

Neither Arriane nor Shelby had questioned Luce about her sudden need for a change. She’d been grateful for that. Now she saw they’d only been waiting for her to be in a vulnerable half-dyed position to begin their inquisition.

“I guess Daniel will be pleased,” Arriane said in her coyest leading-question tone of voice. “Not that you’re doing this for Daniel. Are you?”

“Arriane,” Luce warned. She wasn’t going there. Not tonight.

But Shelby seemed to want to. “You know what I’ve always liked about Miles? That he likes you for who you are, not for what you do with your hair.”

“If you two were going to be that obvious about it, why didn’t you guys come down in your Team Daniel and Team Miles T-shirts?”

“We should order those,” Shelby said.

“Mine’s in the laundry,” Arriane said.

Luce tuned them out, focusing instead on the warm water and the strange confluence of things flowing over her head, into her scalp, and down the drain: Shelby’s stubby fingers had helped with Luce’s first dye job, back when Luce thought that was the only way to start afresh. Arriane’s first act of friendship toward Luce had been the command to chop off her black hair, to make her look like Luce. Now their hands worked through Luce’s scalp in the same bathroom where Penn had rinsed her clean of the meat loaf Molly had dumped on her head her first day at Sword & Cross.

It was bittersweet, and beautiful, and Luce couldn’t figure out what any of it meant. Only that she didn’t want to hide anymore—not from herself, or from her parents; not from Daniel, or even from those who sought to harm her.

She’d been seeking a cheap transformation when she first got out to California. Now she realized that the only worthwhile way to make a change was to earn a real one. Dying her hair black wasn’t the answer either—she knew she wasn’t there yet—but at least it was a step in the right direction.

Arriane and Shelby stopped arguing over which guy was Luce’s soul mate. They looked at her silently and nodded. She felt it before she even saw her reflection in the mirror: The heavy weight of melancholy, one she hadn’t even known she was shouldering, had lifted from her body.

She was back to her roots. She was ready to go home.

When Luce stepped through the front door of her parents’ house in Thunderbolt, everything was just the same: The coatrack in the foyer still looked like it was about to topple under the weight of too many jackets. The smell of dryer sheets and Pledge still made the house feel cleaner than it was. The floral couch in the living room was faded from the morning sun that fell through the blinds. A stack of tea-stained southern decorating magazines covered the coffee table, favorite pages bookmarked with grocery receipts, for the distant time when her parents’ dream came true of the mortgage’s being paid off and their finally having a little extra money for remodeling. Andrew, her mom’s hysterical toy poodle, trotted over to sniff the guests and give the back of Luce’s ankle a familiar chomp.

Luce’s dad set down her duffel in the foyer, draping an easy arm around her shoulder. Luce watched their reflection in the narrow entryway mirror: father and daughter.

His rimless glasses slipped down on his nose as he kissed the crown of her back-to-black hair. “Welcome home, Lucie,” he said. “We missed you around here.”

Luce closed her eyes. “I missed you, too.” It was the first time in weeks she hadn’t lied to her parents.

The house was warm and full of intoxicating Thanksgiving scents. She inhaled and could instantly picture every foil-wrapped dish staying hot in the oven. Deep-fried turkey with mushroom stuffing—her dad’s specialty. Apple-cranberry sauce, light-as-air yeast rolls, and enough pumpkin-pecan pies—her mom’s—to feed the whole state. She must have been cooking all week.

Luce’s mom took hold of her wrists. Her hazel eyes were a little damp around the edges. “How are you, Luce?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

It was such a relief to be home. Luce could feel her eyes grow damp too. She nodded, folding into her mom for a hug.

Her mother’s chin-length dark hair was sculpted and sprayed, like she’d just been to the beauty parlor the day before. Which, knowing her, she probably had. She looked younger and prettier than Luce remembered. Compared to the elderly parents she’d tried to visit in Mount Shasta—even compared to Vera—Luce’s mom seemed happy and alive, untainted by sorrow.

It was because she’d never had to feel what the others had felt, losing a daughter. Losing Luce. Her parents had made their whole life around her. It would destroy them if she died.

She could not die the way she had in the past. She could not wreck her parents’ life this time around, now that she knew more about her past. She would do whatever it took to keep them happy.

Her mom gathered the coats and hats of the four other teenagers who were standing in her foyer. “I hope your friends brought their appetites.”

Shelby jerked her thumb at Miles. “Be careful what you wish for.”

It was just like Luce’s parents not to mind a carful of last-minute guests at their Thanksgiving table.

When her dad’s Chrysler New Yorker had rolled through Sword & Cross’s tall wrought iron gates just before noon, Luce had been waiting for him. She hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before. Between the strangeness of being back at Sword & Cross and her nerves about mingling such an odd Thanksgiving crew the next day—her mind would not settle down.

Luckily, the morning had passed without incident; after giving her dad the longest, tightest hug she’d ever given someone, she’d mentioned that she had a few friends without places to go for the holiday.

Five minutes later, they were all in the car.

Now they were milling around Luce’s childhood home, picking up framed pictures of her at different awkward ages, gazing out the same French windows she’d been gazing out over bowls of cereal for more than a decade. It was kind of surreal. As Arriane bounded into the kitchen to help her mom whip some cream, Miles peppered her dad with questions about the enormous piece-of-junk telescope in his office. Luce felt a swell of pride in her parents for making everyone feel welcome.

The sound of a car horn outside made her jump.

She perched on the sagging couch and lifted a slat of the window blind. Outside, a red-and-white taxi was idling in front of the house, coughing exhaust into the cold fall air. The windows were tinted, but the passenger could be only one person.

Callie .

One of Callie’s knee-high red leather boots extended from the back door, planting itself on the concrete sidewalk. A second later, Luce’s best friend’s heart-shaped face came into view. Callie’s porcelain skin was flushed, her auburn hair shorter, cut at a sleek angle close to her chin. Her pale blue eyes glittered. For some reason, she kept glancing back inside the cab.