Perfect Ruin Read Online Free PDF Page B

would follow her around the apartment and on her weekend errands, coaxing her to take me shopping for new jewelry and to tea shops, throwing my arms around her without warning on shuttles and while she was cooking dinner.
    Lex won’t have anything to do with pharmaceuticals now. In studying medicine, he used to help manufacture the elixirs that precede the termination procedures, among other things.
    Pen is still musing about the queue. “You do have nice eyes,” she tells me. “Blue isn’t very dominant against brown, though, is it? Well, still, Basil isn’t
un
attractive.”
    We’re standing in front of her apartment door now.
    “You should come to the play with us tomorrow,” I say. “Bring Thomas.”
    “Maybe,” she sighs. “If my mother is having one of her headaches, she’ll want me out of the apartment anyway. See you later.”
    In my apartment, I find my mother sleeping on the couch, curled in Lex’s blanket. There’s a hot plate waiting in the stove for me, but I’m not hungry. I work on my homework for a while, but the silence feels crushing and it doesn’t take long for me to get restless enough to go upstairs.
    As always, there are signs of life in Lex and Alice’s apartment. Alice is standing on the kitchen table in impractical black heels, trying to change a lightbulb.
    “Morgan’s here now,” Lex says before I’ve even stepped into the apartment. “Let her help you. You’re going to fall and break your face.”
    “I am not going to break my face,” she says, cursing when she burns her fingertips on the bulb.
    I grab a new bulb from the package at her feet and hold it up. “You’re a peach,” she says, stooping to take it.
    “We’re going out in a few minutes, you know,” Lex says. “It’s Friday. Jumper group.”
    “I was hoping you’d let me tag along.”
    Alice climbs down from the table and dusts her hands on her shirtfront. “I don’t see why not,” she says. “It’ll give me someone to talk to, at least. I’m always left waiting in the hallway. They don’t even offer me any of their snacks.”
    “Tell Mom so she doesn’t worry,” Lex says.
    “She’s sleeping. Already left a note.”
    Alice runs the tap and smoothes water over some defiant strands of hair. She’s done it up in elaborate curls held in place by bronze clips that compliment her curls’ many shades of red. She’s wearing a blue dress that curls and billows around her knees and elbows as she moves through the mundane tasks of putting away the bulbs and straightening an image on the wall. Sometimes she’s unreal. Something that floated down from the sky.
    Before the incident, she and Lex were seldom home. She had a dress for every color the sun illuminates and there was always cause to wear one. Even when I was a child, I admired the love they had, the way every outing, every dinner party or hike through the woods was an adventure. Now Alice dresses up only for weekend errands, and Lex’s jumper group every Friday, even though the only people to see her are the shuttle and train passengers. Her job in the gardens requires a drab uniform that I’ve always thought looked like it was trying to smother her.
    I feel underdressed in my academy uniform, yet I know that I won’t have time to change. Alice, reading my mind, disappears to the bedroom and returns, pressing silver earrings into my palm; they’re shaped like stars cascading down little chains.
    “Better get moving,” she says, jostling the back of Lex’s chair. “If we miss the train, we’ll have to walk.”
    Outside, the sky has become a deeper blue, filling fast with stars. As we step onto the train platform, Lex crushes a daisy that’s growing between the cobbles. I wonder if he remembers what flowers are, not only what they look like, but that they exist at all. He’s knocked over plenty of Alice’s vases, and he has no idea what the shattering glass was before he ruined it. He’s told me that he can’t remember how