Free The Third Grace by Deb Elkink Page B

those she met at conferences. The classroom had become her social pool. She’d tutored countless girls exactly like Whitney Wadsworth, insecure and transparent—needy girls who molded themselves beneath her supervision in compliance, so eager to please for the moment, for the grade. Clay she could remake in her own image.
    Perhaps that was another reason for her attraction to Aglaia, Lou thought, returning to her best prospect for success in the issue of tenure as she walked out to her car in the parking lot. Aglaia, older and slightly wiser, was a fascinating proselyte who didn’t throw herself at Lou. There was an enigma about her, a recalcitrance even. Introspective with a bittersweet melancholy about her, Aglaia needed someone to rescue her from the banality of her life. Lou hadn’t quite figured out what got Aglaia’s blood up, but she was enjoying chipping away the exterior to expose the heart that beat beneath.

Six
    A glaia bit off the end of the knotted thread after her last stitch on the costume despite the proximity of her scissors lying within arm’s reach on her office worktable. She’d been role-playing her arrival—how to catch the train to Paris from Charles de Gaulle airport, how to ask in French for directions to her hotel. And, of course, how to find a guy in Paris! This trip was a coming-of-age thing for her, and Paris was the ultimate escape into glamor.
    Even aside from her hopes to look up François, she needed a diversion from the humdrum of her life.
    There! She admitted the city wasn’t all she hoped for back when she was fresh off the farm, dazzled with the lights and a long way from gravel roads. When she first moved, it was enough just to hop a bus to a mall full of name-brand jeans she could never find in the Sears catalogue. That catalogue was the best shopping she got before she acquired her license, if Dad or Joel wouldn’t drive her the ninety miles into Sterling or—even better—all the way to Denver.
    The village of Tiege, population 392, was where the paved road began, three miles from the Klassens’ gate. It offered only a small general store that sold wilted lettuce, stale candy, and pails of udder balm. The village’s chief attractions were the post office, church, and K-12 school—oh, and the service center for tires and fuel.
    Her intentions even then, when she first moved, were farther reaching than the shopping mall. Once she’d found an apartment and part-time work doing alterations at a local menswear store, she enrolled in her first university courses and thought her future was set. She got to know a small group of fellow students but, when the cash ran out and she had to get a full-time job, she dropped out of the loop. Aglaia was lucky to find employment at Eb’s shop ten years ago, and she never left. Now this position Lou talked about might offer her another step up.
    So, all in all, the move to the city had been good for her, a springboard to bigger things. She was ready for the challenge of international travel, and this week in Paris would nourish the inner woman, as Lou might say. Sometimes Aglaia doubted there was anything alive in there, other than her art and her memories and her hopes to one day meet François again.
    Until recently, she’d held that daydreaming was creative—a lubricant to her design process, the oil of imagination. But lately she felt as though she were drying up and her voice becoming muted—her own physical voice if not her interior dialogue. People were asking her more often to speak up because they couldn’t quite make out what she was saying.
    It wasn’t timorousness; she was daring enough. It was as if she were being shuttered, closed up within her own skin, calcifying from the outside inward like a hardening mask at the aesthetician’s. Would she even bleed anymore if she pricked herself?
    Aglaia rolled the needle between her fingers, thread