The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

It was as though I’d aged ten years in three days.

Indigo nudged me with an elbow. “Hey,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

“I know,” I replied, but I didn’t. I examined my hands, looking for some glow of magic, some ripple of light or some mysterious fizzing feeling in my fingertips.

Nothing. Just hands.

The house was quiet when we got back. We didn’t have much to say to each other, either, except Adrian, who always had unnecessary things to say to everyone, particularly Lilac. Ginger glared at him over Lilac’s shoulder.

That would have to be figured out sometime.

Indigo gave me a significant look as the other three ducked into the library in front of us. He took my elbow and nudged me down an adjoining hallway before I could reach the library door.

He propped an arm on the wall next to my shoulder and leaned down to whisper, “We’re going to have to take care of that, aren’t we?”

“Take care of—” I cut myself off. “Yeah.” What the hell did he think he was doing?

“Any strategies?” He was awfully close. This was going to be an inconvenience.

“Uh,” I said. “Uh…no?”

He nodded encouragingly and waited for me to say something. Was he expecting a snarky remark? A legitimate suggestion? A cookie? I shot him a skeptical look and ducked under his arm to head back to the others.

He sighed as I turned the corner.

What was up with that? I wished he’d go away for a day or so in order to let me figure this stuff out, but then I’d have to explain it to him, and besides, Vivi disappeared when he was around, and that was more of a relief than getting wasted every time I couldn’t sleep with her around.

Wait.

“Vivi!” I shouted, clambering up the ladder to the third floor of the library. I met the other three there, crowded around books and scribbling notes. All of them started when they saw my dishevelled self hoisting myself up the ladder at a speed that was only appropriate for fleeing.

“Did the ghosts get into the house? Did you have a psychotic break?” Adrian called over.

“Neither,” I said. “Well…sort of.”

“Pick one or the other. Explain.”

“Vivi,” I said, but it took a long moment for me to realize I’d never mentioned her to them. Of course I hadn’t. What was I supposed to say? On some unconscious level, I’d thought her a hallucination until today. I’d never thought to bring her up to them because after so many years of thinking I was crazy about magic, I couldn’t start thinking I was sane about ghosts.

That would be too much.

“Vivi,” I repeated a third time, now trying to catch my breath after the climb. Boy, was I out of shape.

“You keep repeating that,” Lilac said. “Is there some meaning to it, or are you just stuck on a loop? Did Indigo scramble your brain or something?”

“What? No. I’m sorry. It’s...so, uh.” When it came down to it, I had no idea how to explain Vivi to anyone. Indigo climbed up the ladder at long last, looking a little sheepish. Had he been blushing like that back in the hallway? Maybe I’d just been too distracted to notice.

Ginger looked between us and strategically said nothing. It must have been hard for her.

“Vivi is a ghost,” I said. “My ghost, I guess. She’s around most of the time, but sometimes—” I glanced at Indigo because I couldn’t stop myself from it “—sometimes she goes away. She’s been around since she died. She’s...she’s the person who died when we were little.”

“Oh, we’re having that talk,” Lilac said. “Okay.”

“I thought it was just me,” Ginger added, fiddling with a book that was coming apart at its spine.

“You what?”

“I thought it was just me. Who had a ghost.”

I took a long look at her, then at each of the others. None of them looked at me as though I was crazy.

What had he said when we’d gone to visit his sister’s grave?

I see her often. When I was little, I would talk to her. I imagined she talked to me, too.

“Oh,” I said at last. “You all have ghosts, too. We all see them, don’t we?”

A collective sigh filled the air, quiet and memorable. I’ve never heard relief quite like that in my entire life.

“I’ve never told anyone before,” I said. “Not a single person. Not even Claire, my sister, when she asked why I was talking to the air when I was little. I read books that said that sometimes you see people the way they were because you can’t process them being gone. So I stopped talking to her after about a year.”

Ginger nodded mutely. She reached over and clasped my hand in a grip tight enough to shatter stone.

Adrian stared at his feet. Lilac took deep breaths at Ginger’s side. And Indigo...he looked like he wanted to do something, to move, but he just sat there looking at me.

I stared back. There was nothing else to do when a secret like that had just been shared. That secret felt too precious for the library, too delicate to be tossed over into an open space where someone might come along and step on it.

“Vivienne,” I said at last. “Mine’s name is Vivienne. Vivi. She looks like an angry eight-year-old, but she doesn’t act the way she did when we were eight. I’ve never heard her talk, but children aren’t so…”

“Wry?” Indigo offered.

“Yeah. Wry.”

Nobody tells you secrets are so difficult to hold once they’ve been shared. They feel like water—like you have to keep telling yourself that it’s a secret to keep it from being too real. You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s a secret so that it doesn’t just become...information.

Now, five people knew the one thing I hadn’t told anybody about, ever. Claire knew about the magic stuff, even though she thought it was one of those phases kids go through. But Vivi was the only secret I kept behind lock and key, and