Gravity, a young adult paranormal romance

GRAVITY

By ABIGAIL BOYD

Published by ABIGAIL BOYD at
Smashwords

Copyright 2011 ABIGAIL
BOYD

Smashwords Edition, License
Notes

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Upcoming Books by Abigail
Boyd

Twirl (Blood Dance,
#1)

A beautiful, forlorn vampire falls in
love with the only boy in town who hates her, in the middle of the
coldest winter the town has ever known.

Uncertainty (Gravity,
#2)

Ariel Donovan copes with the changes in
her life, not knowing who to turn to next.

Lacuna

When Katie moves into an old house, she
realizes that she's not alone, a phantom song coming from the wall
in her bedroom.

Check out http://www.boydbooks.com for
release dates and the latest details on these titles and
more.

Chapter 1

Fifteen candles set the top of the
cake on fire. Another year disappeared.

"Make a wish, Ariel." I sucked in all
the breath my lungs could hold and blew the candles out. I wished
for my year back.

My family was holding a small birthday
party for me at the house I'd lived in my entire life. Just my
parents, Claire and Hugh, and my Aunt Corinne. Corinne and Claire
are twins, although vastly different in many ways. Claire is all
business at work and at home, where she sees herself as the person
missing in the pictures of a glossy design magazine. She is the
invisible hand that fluffs embroidered pillowcases and sets the
perfect table.

I'm her plain, too-ordinary daughter,
who sometimes smudges makeup beneath my hazel eyes and doesn't
realize it for hours. Once I walked around school all day with gum
on the seat of my pants. No one told me until I got
home.

I looked around at the hesitant faces
that gathered in my honor. Atop each head was an ugly brown and
yellow polka dot party hat, clearance from the birthday section.
The strap on mine pinched my chin and I slid my finger beneath it.
That was the extent of the decorating. 

I woke up that morning feeling
strange, as if a veil hung over the world. The happy jitters I
normally had on my birthday were nonexistent. It could have been
any other day on the calendar. But the nagging feeling that the
world had changed, shifted ever so slightly, plagued me through the
hours. Maybe the way I looked at it had changed. I put it down to
being older, and tried not to think about it. I seemed to be the
only one who noticed.  

"Remember, I need to be getting home
soon," Aunt Corinne said, shifting from foot to foot. The fifth
reminder she had given us already. Life had to revolve around her
time schedule. In that way, both she and my mother were the same.
  

Claire glared at her, the whites of
her eyes reddened from fatigue, but Corinne was oblivious. Claire
stepped in to cut the store-bought cake, making delicate little
slivers with her engraved cake server. Always the hostess, even
when nobody important stood by to grade her skill.

"There are four people here, honey.
Who are you saving cake for?" Hugh asked gently.  

Claire's smile was a red line. She
scooped two small pieces on each of the china plates she only
brought out for special occasions and handed them out.
 

Ever since I could remember, I called
my parents by their first names, at their insistence. I think they
thought it kept them young. Especially with Claire, "mom" was
verboten, and would earn me a scolding.

We picked at our cake around the
dining room table, none of sitting. I bit down on the white plastic
fork with my teeth. Why the formality of a birthday party seemed
necessary to Claire was beyond me. But I would do anything to make
her happier for a day.    

"Present time!" Corinne said after a
minute, clapping her hands so the thin bangles on her wrists
jingled. She seemed intent on running the show now. We shifted over
as a unit to the brightly-wrapped objects on the kitchen counter.
Although I held my hands poised to start unwrapping, inside I
wished for the whole ordeal to be over. I wasn't in the celebrating
mood. I drifted somewhere behind myself, like watching my life
being acted out by someone else.  

"Start with mine." Claire handed me a
charming gift-wrapped box. I undid the shimmery lilac paper. The
box contained an old-fashioned necklace on a silver chain, from
which hung a rectangular, emerald-colored glass pendant. At least,
I assumed it was glass. I held the pendant up to catch the light on
the ceiling fan. A bit formal for school and not something I would
wear often, but lovely nonetheless.  

"That necklace belonged to Grandma
Eleanor," Claire informed me. "I've been keeping it in my jewelry
box until I felt the time was right."

"Thanks," I said, laying it carefully
back on the strip of cotton inside the box. It meant a lot to have
a token from my Grandma's life, not just something she'd given me;
I had barely seen her in the final year before her death. "It's
really beautiful. I'll keep it safe."

"I know how much you miss Grandma,"
Claire said. She pushed a stray strand of hair out of my eyes.
 

"We all miss Mom," Corinne
interjected, as if it were a contest. Who's the best daughter? Even
now that the mom could no longer receive handmade cards or runaway
threats scribbled in crayon. 

Hugh handed me a bag stuffed with
tissue paper. "Here you go kiddo. Happy birthday. I hope you like
it."

Inside was a fitted gray and black
coat. Claire had probably picked it out, but I thanked him for his
good taste. It seemed like something I would have picked out
myself, as my wardrobe consisted entirely of muted colors.
 

"Hopefully it's the right size. You've
grown so much taller since last year," he said, with a touch of
nostalgia in his voice that made me wistful. He exaggerated. I'd
gained maybe an inch, which barely put me over 5'5". But I knew
that inch seemed like the year to him, coming too fast and changing
me into a different person, one small aspect at a time. 
  

Aunt Corinne's present would have
obviously been hers, even in a pile. The paper was shiny purple,
dotted with silver crescent moons. One would never tell from her
uptight demeanor and plain clothing, but Corinne had an obsession
with the occult. Tarot cards and scrying mirrors filled the spare
room of her condo.

I pulled off the paper along the seam
and laid it flat, revealing three chunky hardcovers. I lifted the
books up one by one; they all had "ghost" in the title.

"Thanks, I needed something new to
read," I told her. "These are perfect."

She beamed, the look on her face
declaring she'd found me the best gift. I almost expected her to
stick her tongue out at Claire.   

I've always loved ghost stories, even
when they scare me. Maybe especially then. Truthfully, all my life
I've been a bit strange, with an interest in the macabre. When I
was seven, I made a shoebox diorama about the Donner Party,
complete with tiny clay body parts and half a bottle of red food
coloring. The teacher safety-pinned a note to my backpack that day,
asking Claire if we had any trouble at home. She pasted it in one
of her scrapbooks.

Claire grimaced, the bridge of her
upturned nose creasing.

"Really, when are you
going to give this up?" she asked Corinne, picking up
The Truth about Real Ghosts
. My mother hated even the mention of anything supernatural.
All scams, according to her, for gullible people. Her disapproval
of Corinne was the footnote to that assessment.

"Never," Corinne retorted, looking
insulted. She puffed her chest up a little. "How do you give up a
sacred truth about the universe? Would I ask you to give up number
crunching?" Claire set the book down as she pooh-poohed her under
her breath.

Hugh looked as uncomfortable as I
felt, a tight, unnatural smile tugging on his lips. Whenever the
twins got together it was a draining situation for everyone else
unlucky enough to be around. Aunt Corinne could suck all the energy
out of a room into herself, like a tornado, fueling her bad moods.
I didn't want to reach that point today. I didn't think I could
take it.    

I set the volumes aside, running my
index finger over the silver lettering on the top selection. Even
with the false cheery atmosphere, I could feel the creep of death
in the room, between my Grandmother's necklace and the subject of
the books.  

"Ariel, I really do need to get
going," Aunt Corinne said yet again, flipping her limp bangs. I
resisted the urge to clench my jaw, telling myself that at least
she would be gone. Pulling on her coat and mustard yellow scarf,
she lifted her hefty leather purse off of the table. Three cake
plates sat untouched beside it. Only Hugh had managed to eat
his.

"Happy birthday. Enjoy them while you
can," she advised me.

We exchanged a sterile hug, and she
clomped across the carpeted living room in her boots. I could
practically hear Claire's teeth on edge. Usually, no one was
allowed to come in or go out the front door because of the pale
living room carpeting. There was even a tidy print-out, complete
with a little border of vacuums, taped on the back of the front
door. Any time a mark appeared on the carpet, Claire got on her
hands and knees with the spray bottle, scrubbing long after it
became invisible to most human eyes.  

My parents followed behind Corinne out
to her minivan. I waved from the doorway. Occult bumper stickers
decorated the back beneath the tinted windows. I shut the door, and
headed back to the scene of the little party.

 
The remnants of the
gathering looked discarded and sad now that everyone had deserted
the room. I crumpled the leftover wrapping paper pile sitting on
the counter and deposited it on top of the recycling bin. Gathering
the books and the box with the necklace, I set them on the basement
steps to take down to my room.

The sliding glass door opened as Hugh
and Claire came back inside. True to form, Claire had insisted they
walk all the way around the house and come in through the back
door. Hugh walked past me, patting my shoulder as he continued to
the hall and disappeared upstairs. Probably to work in his studio,
I figured.

He owned an art gallery in town called
Erasmus, and these days he was always so buried in paperwork and
formalities he hardly had time to paint. He snuck in every
opportunity he could find, even if it only happened to be a spare
five minutes.  

Claire stacked the dirty plates from
the kitchen table on her arms like a waitress and carried them into
the kitchen. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes distant. She looked
as though she was watching a play inside her head. I wondered if it
was a comedy or a tragedy.  

"Do you want any help?" I asked.
Dishes were usually one of my few chores. My voice sounded too loud
as it rang out in the room.

"Of course not...it's your birthday,"
she said dismissively. She scraped leftovers into the trash. The
tines on the fork she was using snapped, and she flicked it into
the trash with an exasperated exhale. She grabbed a metal one from
the silverware drawer and continued her cleaning. We stood silently
for a minute; the only sounds those of metal against china, and the
soft thudding as the cake hit the bag.  

"Did you have a good birthday?" she
asked finally, looking into my eyes for the answer. I knew she
wanted me to say yes. I shrugged instead.

"I feel older," I admitted, managing
an expression close to a smile. I wiped a smudge off of one of the
cabinets with my finger.   

She smiled back, but undisguised worry
filled her eyes. "You are older," she said.