Free I Am Her Revenge by Meredith Moore Page A

soccer game in nothing but his underwear. A few elderly women sit outside on a bench, shaking their heads as their quiet town becomes overrun with Madigan students.
    I head for the charity shop first, where they sell ratty old clothing and broken pieces of pottery and other strange treasures all jumbled together on rickety racks and wooden shelves. I don’t find any art supplies, but I do discover a blue and white china teacup with the handle missing. If I fill it with water and place some small flowers in it, it will brighten up my desk. Or, I can break it into pieces and make a mosaic. That little teacup, sold for only fifty pence, makes me hum with anticipation.
    I also find a pair of beaten-up combat boots that will be perfect for stomping around the moors. They fit well enough, and I put them on as soon as I pay for them.
    The drugstore has charcoal pencils, brushes, and adequate- quality paints, and in the bookstore, I find a little journal hidden away in the sales rack. It’s made of worn brown leather and filled with blank, rough-cut pages. Perfect for an impromptu sketchbook and much better than the lined notebook I’ve been using. I’ll just tell Mother these expenses were for seductive clothing or some other necessary purchase.
    Suddenly I hear the nasal twang of Arabella’s voice before I see her. I creep around the bookshelves until I spot her with several of her hangers-on, laughing at the covers of cheesy romances. Her friends all laugh the way she does: their hands covering their mouths, the gleeful giggles escaping through the space between their fingers.
    I wait until they move toward the teen fiction section in the back before paying for my new sketchbook and slipping out of the store.
    I explore for the next hour, wandering around the village in my new boots and peering into more windows. All the buildings are made of stone, built to last. The windows are tiny, some with warped glass panes that must have survived at least a century.
    Before I even realize it, I wander into a cemetery. I survey the graves, covered with slate and rising crookedly above the ground, all jammed together under the watchful eye of the church clock tower. The day is gray and misty, and I shiver in the gloom as I shuffle through the plots, reading about infants and women and men who died all too young. My feet sink into the muddy ground, but I hardly notice. I’m too caught up in the depictions of angels and skulls and crossbones on the headstones around me. I have never been in a cemetery before, but I can’t help but be enchanted by its bleakness. It reminds me of home.
    And yet Loworth is nothing like the concrete-and-brick towns I’m used to back home. History seems to shimmer on the air here, and I wonder if I can capture that feeling in a drawing.
    I meander out of the cemetery and behind the parsonage, where I come upon a house. It’s a freestanding stone structure, narrow and tall. The gabled roof is pockmarked and missing several of its stone shingles. It rises high above me, and when I crane my neck, I see a flock of ravens shooting into the air, their caws sending shivers down my spine as their giant black wings flap wildly. The gardens surrounding the house are overgrown, their vines strangling a dying tree and climbing up the gray stone walls. The windows are shuttered and dark.
    I stop for several moments, staring, as if I expect the house to shake off its stillness and reveal its secrets to me. Or maybe I’m expecting it to sink into the earth that seems to be trying so hard to claim it.
    I hear a muffled sound behind me and whirl around. Two people are having a whispered conversation somewhere in the graveyard, and I head toward it. Because there’s one voice I recognize. And it belongs to someone I need to talk to.
    G-Man stands in a secluded corner of the cemetery, half-hidden by a straggly tree and a tall obelisk over a grave. He’s handing something to a boy I faintly recognize from the halls, and the