Page 16 of Persephone's Curse
I’d never really thought about Henry visiting my sister after-hours, but I felt very grateful for that little system. It felt incredibly decent to me. I nodded.
“Anyway, he came out and sat on the edge of my bed, and I was really tired, but I could tell something was wrong. He wasn’t saying much, he was sad. So I kept asking and asking, and finally… He said, ‘Happy birthday, Evie.’ And I said, ‘This is about my birthday?’ And he said, ‘You’re seventeen now.’”
“And he was sad because you were finally leaving him behind,” I finished. “Getting older while he stayed the same, forever.”
“It had honestly never occurred to me until that moment,” she continued. “I had never looked at him and realized… But of course, I loved him. And he loved me.”
“Love,” I said. “Wow.” Which wasn’t the most elegant contribution I’d ever made, but this was all still very new to me.
The northern façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was just coming into view. Evie saw it and quickened her pace, leading us along the great wall of slanted windows. Through the glass we could see the Temple of Dendur, taken apart brick by brick in Egypt and painstakingly pieced back together here. It was imposing and slightly weird in its urban setting; we were in the middle of Central Park in New York City, and this was the most-visited Egyptian temple in the entire world.
Evie stopped walking abruptly. We were as close to the glass as we could get.
“The ancient Egyptians knew a lot more about death than we do,” she said.
“Okay…”
“They understood the changeability of death. The thin veil that separates our world from their world. The processes a human might go through, to…”
“To…?”
She turned to me. Her eyes were wide.
“He found a way to stay here,” she said. “To live forever.”
I was definitely going to miss history.
“Well… to bedeadforever… if we’re being technical.”
“Don’t be crass, Winnie.”
“I think I’m being realistic,” I said. All that talk about death was making my teeth hurt.
Evelyn smiled, and truth be told, her smile looked a little bit terrifying.
“Persephone came to New York once,” Evelyn said, beginning to walk again. I knew all the same Persephone stories that my sister did, could recite them line for line, but I let her talk, a little bit afraid of her in that moment. “She used to wander the earth in spring, ushering in the new growth, shaking off the cobwebs of the Underworld.”
We reached Fifth Avenue and turned right. The expansive front steps of the Met were mostly empty, save for a few small clusters of people eating breakfast or drinking coffee.
“They say she came to Manhattan before it was even Manhattan. That she planted a jasmine bush on a plot of bare land. They say her descendants would forever be drawn to it, like moths to a flame. They say that her footsteps left fragile places in the earth, places you could crawl from one world to another…”
“Although I’ve never actually found myself tripping into Hell while walking around the brownstone, you know?”
Evelyn shot me a perfectly withering look, then reached over and took my hand.
“I understand that you’re not in a place to receive this information,” she said quietly, infuriatingly.
“Exactly what information are you hoping I’d receive?”
“Forget it,” she said. She let go of my hand, and it couldn’t help but feel like a metaphor I wasn’t quite smart enough to understand.
Evelyn was quiet on the walk home from school, and when we got back to the brownstone, she went right upstairs to her room.
I went into the kitchen to get an apple and paused only slightly when I saw Bernadette already there, at the kitchen table, writing in her journal.
“I know you’re avoiding me,” she said. “It’s very obvious when you avoid me because you eat your food quickly so you can get up to your room sooner, and I’m always afraid you’re going to choke.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and even I could hear the lack of conviction in my voice. I grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and took a very slow, purposeful bite, chewing it extra slowly. Bernadette rolled her eyes so far back in her head that I could only see white, then she shut her journal and got up from the table.
