Page 55 of Love, Magic and Misfortune
“Unexpected?” Jasper mocked. “Unexpected is when you get a package delivered a day early. Unexpected is when you buy something and it rings up for less than the price tag. Not a dark, malevolent curse on a family’s entire male lineage.”
“I mean no disrespect to the seriousness of your curse, Jas, but ‘dark’ and ‘malevolent’ don’t equate to ‘little gray mouse’ in my vernacular.”
“I’m arat.”
“I disagree. Have you seen yourself? Seriously, have you ever looked?”
He stared at Violet, shaking his head. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, folding her arms and sitting back against the couch. “To summarize, magic is real, you’re cursed—not sick, technically—and you don’t leave the house because you turn into a mouse?”
“Rat. And you're trivializing.”
“I’m not. I’m trying to understand.”
There was a long pause where neither moved or said a word. Eventually, Jasper spoke, his voice serious. “Can you imagine what would happen if people found out about this?”
If people found out…
Chaos. Unquestionably, Jasper would be dragged away, put under a microscope and studied in a lab somewhere. Examined and prodded with no concern for his actual, meaningful humanity. Maybe he’d be feared and loathed by everyone around him, or a relentless target for crude tabloid fodder.
She looked up at him, her eyes sincere. “I can’t imagine. Nothing good would come from it.”
“Right. Keeping my mother quiet was hard enough. Growing up, every day I waited for men in white coats to show up at the door and drag me out of the attic, kicking and screaming. I think the only reason they didn’t was because of Dad. He kept her calm enough until he gave in and they moved away when I turned eighteen.”
“Your mother, she wasn’t supportive about this?”
Jasper scoffed in a bitter sound. “‘Wasn’t supportive,’ is putting it nicely. She rejected me after I changed that first time—refused to be in the same room as me and made me go in the backyard whenever the change started to happen. Actually, the day you climbed that tree and fell? The last time we saw each other as kids? That was my third time changing. If you’d arrived about twenty minutes earlier, you would have gotten a real horror show.”
“Sh-She made you go outside in the yard? It was so cold that day.”
“Yes. Eventually Dad talked her into letting me change in the house. But I had to stay in the attic where she couldn’t hear my bones cracking and shifting, or me crying because it hurt so badly. She didn’t want anything to do with it and I don’t blame her. It’s horrifying.” Jasper shrugged, his arms folded as he watched her.
With that story, Violet’s perception of the entire situation shifted. Any “cuteness” was gone, replaced by something darker and weighted. Traumatic. She swallowed hard. “So, changing… it hurts that badly?”
“I’m used to it now,” Jasper said, matter-of-fact. “But back then, in the early days, yes. It was very bad.”
“And your momneverhelped you? She never came around?”
“No. She wouldn’t even look at me. Barely spoke to me. Dad sat with me as much as he could. But that created problems for the orchard and his business. He started spending all his time looking after me—making sure I was fed and clean, which of course drove a wedge between him and Mom. Eventually he let the business die off. He settled his debts, paid his employees what they were owed and sold some of the used machinery, but that left us in a kind of poverty. Mom wasn’t thrilled about that, either. She went from being at the top of the socioeconomic ladder to being near the bottom, and with a cursed son that she despised.”
Violet hadn’t realized. She’d known that things had changed and that the orchard had closed down by the time she was in high school, but she hadn’t known why. Of course, everything about the Laurents became shrouded in mystery after Jasper’s “sickness.” The orchard shut down, they stopped attending village events and Jasper was nowhere to be seen—never attending school or even having the occasional doctor’s appointment.
This thing… This curse had ravaged their family. It made a brilliant, curious boy who’d been full of life into an insecure shut-in. It led to his mother rejecting him, and pitted his parents against each other before driving them all into financial ruin.
“It’s not cute. None of it,” Violet said, speaking over the lump in her throat. “I’m so sorry I made light of the situation. I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through.”
Jasper shrugged again. “It’s a curse, Violet. It’s meant to do harm. That’s the nature of the beast.”
“But why? This all seems so… How did this happen? And whyyou?”
“I have ancestors who did some very bad things to the people who were indigenous to this village. They were greedy, condemnatory and selfish, so they paid for their sins. I’m still paying for them. It’s just the way it is.”
“Can’t—isn’t there anything that can be done?” Violet asked, her heart aching. “You didn’t do those bad things. Why do you have to pay generations later? Can’t this be broken?”
Jasper sighed. “Gloria tried—a bunch of things, actually. Weird things I questioned, but she felt so passionate about it—”
“Stop. Gramknewabout this? She knew you were cursed?”
