The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

you planning on sitting there all day or are you going to get out and pay your respects?” she said to the person in the passenger seat.

The passenger door opened and a very pretty girl got out, slamming the door behind her. She was probably about thirteen or fourteen, Stella thought, amber skin, long brown hair, lanky, a wise face, too much weight on the brow of someone so young. Her daughter. Stella remembered Grace at the hospital saying Seraphina had a daughter. In foster care. Dianne coughed and smacked her lips.

Seraphina spun around. She didn’t seem surprised at all to see them, as if for all the world she was a frequent graveyard visitor and at ease with whomever showed up. Seraphina bowed, a wild look in her eyes. She spoke on high speed. “Well, hello, ladies. It’s always a bittersweet symphony at the graveyard, isn’t it?”

Dianne looked around at the graves and then at Seraphina. “I reckon so.”

Seraphina smiled. She started singing again.

The girl crossed her arms. She was wearing a petal-pink tank top and very short denim shorts. She held a phone, the same as the ones the workers at the centre had and kept in the basket they ran to at their breaks. “God, Mom. God. I keep telling you you’re stuck in the nineties. I hate that “Bitter Sweet Symphony” song. How many times do I have to tell you? It’s all emo and angsty. So. Embarrassing. How about Beyoncé?”

Stella watched the teenager twirl as she sang about halos.

Seraphina was on overdrive. She answered the girl, speaking very quietly, but with her voice racing: “Time doesn’t really move, you know . . . Time is a state of mind . . . This is what most of you don’t understand. I. Aim. To. Have. You. Understand. Now look who we have here — Stella and Dianne, my friends from the Jericho Centre. We were just going to visit my mother’s grave. I thought maybe she might try to give me a sign but probably not. The dead aren’t much help, are they?”

It was exhausting trying to keep up with Seraphina. Stella was sitting on the ground and Dianne reached down to put her hand softly on Stella’s head while Seraphina foamed on: “My mother did try to help me. She had a hard life. She thought it all stopped in her generation. I don’t know why. She just turned and looked the other way. She hoped they would go away. They never do. Not until they’re stopped once and for all. They say Lucretia will soon appear again, over by the bay. It means it’s time. They’re coming for you, Stella. And maybe my daughter. She’s thirteen now. They came for me. They never stop.”

Dianne cleared her throat, checking behind her, narrowing her eyes. “What do you know about that?”

Seraphina continued to speak quickly, but now her voice rose: “I know that those fucking cocksuckers are on the loose. Back trying to clean stuff up. No one else remembers what happened forty years ago, but I do. It happened to me too. That’s why I picked up my daughter, to keep her safe. I tried to make her the potion, but she wouldn’t drink it.”

The young girl stared down at Stella with her hands flecked with pine needles, sitting in the red clay dust, as if Stella were a statue or grave marker. Then she started to whimper. “Mom, you’re scaring me. Who’s coming for me? I don’t want to drink that stuff you brew up.”

“You did when you were little.”

“I didn’t know any better. I would have done anything you said. You were my hero, Mom. I was just a kid. I’m still a kid. You’re off your meds. You aren’t making sense. You aren’t sleeping. I only came with you because I’m afraid you’ll have an accident. There’s no one taking care of you.” She let out a cramped scream and pounded her fists on her bare thighs. “I’m just so mad at you, Mom!”

Stella watched the thirteen-year-old wipe her nose on her arm, and then her eyes, trying not to cry. Seraphina didn’t acknowledge the girl’s distress.

“Aurora, this is Dianne and Stella. They live at the Jericho Centre just outside of town, in Blossomdale. Stella used to spend time over in Lupin Cove at Periwinkle Cottage with her uncle, not far from where we live.” Seraphina’s face gave no sign that her daughter didn’t live there anymore. “I heard he died. So sorry. It’s so peaceful here. You’d never know how much danger is about.”

“Only place you can find true peace and quiet, yes it is,” Dianne said softly, playing with her silver necklace.

“Dianne is just cracking the one-liners today.” Seraphina lit a cigarette and handed it to Dianne, who took it without hesitation. They smoked in silence.

Seraphina closed her eyes. “That’s how it used to be. Now they call it forest bathing and therapeutic gardening, for fuck’s sake.” She groaned.

Seraphina is not as she was when you first met her. Stella looked around. There was no one else, just the three women and the girl. Age was demolishing them all. Seraphina’s voice was fast, as it was in the hospital lobby. She was ramping, ramping, ramping up. Stella remembered the hospital. Tests. Tests for something, something caused by something bad. She wasn’t sure when it was. She waited for that whisper again, to tell her secrets, but there was only a dull ache behind her eyes. She brushed her palm over the soft tips of grass and picked a wild rose from a bush at her side.

Aurora lifted up her phone. Stella thought she was going to call someone but she held it up in front of her. Seraphina twirled her arms like a windmill. “You can’t film them. You can’t post pictures to Instagram all the time,” she shrieked. “They’re human beings. They’re the kind of human beings who are close to the edge, close enough to peek in and