The Understorey Read online

Page 1

  Book One

  Prologue

  Please, Not Her

  It was a handgun. Black and sleek and screamed the word finite. The butt of it dripped silky red drops of her still living blood on the stone at his feet. Each drip was a dagger to my heart. Each splash to the ground ricocheted in my ears. Another drop and I’d be deaf, deaf to the world that was crashing down around me. My very own, very exclusive Armageddon.

  In the short time that I’d loved her, I knew somehow it wouldn’t last. I cheerfully ignored the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The feeling that let me know I didn’t deserve her and I would never get to keep her.

  There was nothing in my character that would have ever justified my getting to love someone so wholly better than myself. Yet, it still did not seem fair. I wanted more. I needed more, in fact. Even so, I was not at all bitter. I was forced to admit, that although I knew I’d be starved of her for the rest of my life and that that life would go to pieces when she left, it didn’t make me any less grateful. For the short time we did have, I was acutely aware I did nothing to deserve what had been given to me in the first place. Because of her, because of Jules, no soul could have been happier than the soul that resided in my body and I was thankful, truly thankful.

  In that moment, I was living a nightmare and I watched as he raised his gun and laid it flush against her temple. I readied myself for the inevitable. The inevitable everythings. Inevitable loss. Inevitable battle. Inevitable death.

  Don’t worry Jules, I thought, I’ll be with you again and from the looks of it, probably very soon.

  Chapter One

  The Riot And The Fret

  Ever been in a hurry and can’t find your keys? Frazzled, you check the door, making sure you didn’t leave them in the lock earlier. You check the freezer because apparently that’s where everybody leaves them. You even ask your little sister if she hid them because you wouldn’t put anything past the ten year old. You’ve checked every conceivable place you could possibly think of and they are nowhere to be found and once you’ve given up completely, resigned to your inescapable fate, you realize they’ve been in your hand the entire time. I’ve been looking for that hypothetical key my entire life it seems and that key’s name just happens to be Julia Jacobs.

  Jules, as I called her, was remarkable. An untarnished heart, cool and pristine without the slightest hint of selfishness, tall and slender with dark black hair, long and full of large loose curls and eyes as green as the moss that laid sleepily on our creek bed. Her skin was soft and sweet and matched her honeysuckle-orange scent absolutely. She had the best laugh her side of the Mississippi and was the most adventurous girl I’d ever known.

  What made Jules extraordinary though, was that her heart was made of the most curious fabric. It could bend and stretch to fit every single person she’d ever met. I could not have loved her anymore deeply. She and I were predetermined. It had been designed and without her gravitational pull, I was spiraling out of control, deeper and deeper into the kind of blackness that not any one person can return from sane.

  Ironically, Jules and I saw each other practically every day growing up with barely a thought invested in the other. She lived across town from my parents, my little sister Maddy and I but I’d see her on Main along with all the other Bramwell kids. Most days, I would throw dirt at her and she would retaliate with a punch to the gut. On others, we’d ride our bikes down by the creek to catch tadpoles.

  In junior high, we had long forgotten about one another, with only the occasional smile in the hallways, and grew even further apart as we approached high school. Needless to say, to each other, we were just another warm body roaming the hallways. Until, that is, the first day of classes our senior year, when something extraordinary happened.

  A sightless lightning bolt stuck us to one another forever.

  I was mucking around with my best friend Jesse Thomas outside Mrs. Kitt’s Geometry class when I saw Jules for the first time that day, or ever really, because this time she wasn’t Julia Jacobs. This time, when our eyes met, she was Julia Jacobs and a clash of feverish tension grew amongst us, illuminating the invisible line that had clearly, now, always tied us as one.

  “What’s wrong with you dude?” Asked Jesse, moving to lean against the tiled wall.

  “What?” I said, not able to tear my eyes away from Jules. “Ju, just a second Jesse. ”

  He turned to face Julia, looked at me and back at Julia. A scowl of disapproval grew evident across his face.

  “What are you doing Gray? I know you’re not looking at that. Do you know who that is?” He scoffed, shifting his weight against the wall.

  “Yeah. ”

  “Are you sure?” He joked. “I’m not so sure you do. In case you haven’t heard, Julia Jacobs is a freak man. ”

  “What the hell are you talking about Jesse? Why is she a freak?”

  He was starting to infuriate me. Apparently, Jules was mine to get infuriated for.

  “Okay, so I admit, she has a nice body, but seriously dude she looks like a freakin’ gypsy and crap. She always has those ridiculous buttons of bands no one has ever heard of on her bag like she’s so much more cultured than us. She acts like she has nothing in common with the rest of us when she comes from the same small town we all do. ”

  “You’re wrong dude. She doesn’t act like that. She’s just different is all and you, and the rest of this stupid town, don’t understand her. Besides, did it ever occur to you that maybe I like different?” I paused, a grin of realization growing on my face. “You know what I think?” I asked, not waiting for his answer. “I think you think she’s hot and probably cool too, but you’re afraid of what others would think. Plus, you know you could never get her. You’ve built a rep in this school and the good girls go running the other direction when they see you coming. ”

  “Whatever Elliott. Say whatever you want if it makes you feel better. Nothing you can say excuses the fact that she’s a freak. Just look at the way she dresses. She’s always wearing those torn up jeans and her fingernails are always dark as night. Everywhere she goes, you can hear her coming. She jingles. She’s just weird. ”

  When I didn’t give in to his peer pressure he threw up his hands.

  “You’re insane!” He continued, “Go ahead and ogle the freak. I’m just sayin’ is all. Jeez! Elliott! You could have any girl here and that’s who you eye on the first day?” He snorted a laugh. “Julia Jacobs. Huh. Why don’t you wait and see who got hot over the summer? What about Taylor Williams?” He asked, perking up. “We both know she wants you. ”

  I was barely listening to him now. Every inch that Julia grew closer to me felt like being in the presence of Aphrodite herself. I didn’t even know if she was real or not. Jesse’s own recognition of her was my only proof. I hunched my torso in preparation for something. The something, I knew not, but prepare I did. She appeared ethereal yet overpowered me with a very non-fictional smack to the chest. The expectation weighed heavily on my shoulders.

  The sensation of it brought back the memory of when I used to play with my dad’s old tape measure. I remember locking its little mechanism and stretching out the metal tape as far as it could go. I’d take a deep breath then press its release. Suddenly, the tape would fly furiously in my direction. It made me cringe as I half expected it to slice me but, instead, would wrap neatly into its little square encasement, a violent action with tidy results.

  With Jesse tugging at my shirt trying to distract me, I stood as still as a statue while she gently brushed past me, her eyes wide and in sync with mine. And she was mesmerizing. I remember everything about that moment down to the length of the tears in her favorite pair of faded blue jeans.
She had on black flip-flops and her toenails were painted the same dark cherry that was on her fingernails. She wore a white tank with something printed on the front, but all I could make out was the word ‘Future’ because her hair laid upon the rest. Her long hair was dark as night and the morning sun streaming through the doors veined shiny shades of white in its sheen.

  Across her chest laid the weathered canvas strap of her army-green messenger book bag with the myriad of tiny metal buttons of obscure little bands’ names that Jesse had been talking about. Not that I would have told Jesse this, I was such a coward, but ironically I knew at least half the bands on her bag.

  On her waist, she wore one of the many belly dancing belts she owned and the coins that fringed the layered garment danced against her legs. Around her neck, on a chain, was the first guitar pick she had ever learned to play on. It was green with flecks of gold and swayed to and fro with each one of her steps. Both of her arms were covered in assorted bracelets, at least ten on each arm and climbed the length of each. I wanted to touch the ones above her elbow just to feel the muscle pressed firmly against them.

  I did not know this Julia Jacobs. She was a stranger to me. The old Jules I’d grown up with my whole life seemed the caterpillar before this butterfly.

  Her eyes caught up with mine and if I hadn’t been paying attention I would have missed the slight hiccup in her steps, proving her reaction matched mine. She looked at me as if she had, too, never really seen me before and while her eyes burrowed through me, she ran straight into our geometry teacher, Mrs. Kitt, causing her to scatter the worksheets she had just printed onto the floor at her feet and breaking our trance for the moment.

  Mrs. Kitt bent to pick up her papers. She was a short, round woman with short brown hair. Her wardrobe was at least thirty years old and you could hear her coming from a mile away by the swish, swish, swish of the friction between her panty-hosed legs. She was a suspicious woman but, by far, the nicest teacher in the entire school. She may not have trusted everyone but she always gave them the benefit of the doubt. Oh, and she was Jules’ mom’s best friend. Yikes.

  I flinched when Jules went to help her but accidentally stepped on a sheet and went tumbling onto her back. Her hair tossed around her as she fell flat to the tile floor, perfectly framing her face. I bent over her. The Future Cast, I mouthed, reading her shirt, a sharp ping resonating in my chest. They were literally my favorite band.

  “You should do shampoo commercials, Jules,” I teased, holding out my hand.

  “Huh?” She asked, confused, but keeping her eyes with mine.

  “I said, you should do shampoo commercials,” teasing her by pronouncing each word with perfect clarity.

  “Yeah. Right. ”

  She refused my hand. Apparently, she didn’t need my help. When she stood, her honeysuckle-orange scent drenched my senses and I nearly fell over Mrs. Kitt.

  “Thanks for the compliment, though,” she contritely conceded, knowing how impolite she had been and trying to remedy how obviously uncomfortable that had made her.

  She bent to help Mrs. Kitt while I stood dumb and disabled by her unconscious yet incredible assault on my senses.

  Scrambling, Jules apologized, “I’m so sorry Mrs. Kitt! I wasn’t paying attention and. . . . . . . . ”

  “Oh darlin’, it’s no big deal,” Mrs. Kitt sang.