Of Breakable Things by A. Lynden Rolland Page B

spun around with a wicked gleam in his eye.
    “Wow, Jonas, that was really nice of you to escort Alex through the festival.”
    Jonas studied the crowd indifferently. “I figured Alex always followed us around like a stray dog anyway. I gave her a break since it’s her first day after dying.” His posture, his tone, his expression—it was all back to the Jonas of old. Bored. Uncaring. Acerbic.
    “We were actually coming up to find you because we needed you in order to win a little wager.”
    “With who?”
    Gabe groaned. “Do you have to ask?”
    “Legacy kids?” Jonas flattened his mouth like a toad, disdainfully.
    “The Darwins, of course. Who else?”
    Alex raised her brows, but Jonas shook his head as if to say, You don’t want to know.
    “What did you wager?” he asked, snatching a new mask. “Nothing of mine, I hope.”
    Kaleb responded with a humorless laugh, leading Alex to believe that probably, yes, he’d risked something that belonged to his brother. “Doesn’t matter. Who cares about the Darwins now? This is a party! And now we really have something to celebrate!” Kaleb swung an arm around Alex and pulled her towards the commotion on Lazuli Street. His features were so similar to Chase’s that Alex could barely stand to look at him.
    He led the group, with Gabe and Jonas flanking his sides, just as they’d done as children entering the playground. Alex and Chase had always hung back together, and she was painfully aware of his absence now. She wanted to know why they were avoiding the topic. “Kaleb?”
    But her voice dissolved in the noisy ruckus. Kaleb took the hands of random girls, swinging them around, dipping them low, and kissing them on the cheeks. He traded masks and accepted a cup from a vendor, thrusting it at Alex.
    “What is it?” she asked, scrunching her nose. Yet another question no one could hear. It drowned in the sea of faceless color.
    Gabe mimicked drinking and urged her with a thumbs-up. Alex swirled the glass and a mist rose, carrying with it the scent of popsicles, chlorine, and sun-kissed skin. She sipped the weightless vapor, and it swaddled her in comfort. It was liquid summer.
    Kaleb and Gabe joined in the merriment, singing loudly and climbing the podiums to high-five the party-goers. They lifted Alex on their shoulders and made the disarray fun because they took charge of the chaos and made it their own. Jonas lagged, grumbling about how embarrassing his brothers were. It didn’t take long for him to disappear, a typical move once the shadows of his brothers were cast over him, so Alex was surprised when Gabe felt bothered enough to stop the group.
    While they waited for Gabe to locate Jonas, Alex tried to ask about Chase again. But Kaleb, who found it hard to remain sedentary for any long period of time, darted away and climbed a balcony to join a band singing “Only the Good Die Young.”
    Alex took a seat on a table of gold masks and watched the show.
    Two women approached. “They must be newburies,” one of them remarked with a grandmotherly tone of reprimand.
    “Music isn’t what it used to be,” the other woman agreed, examining the masks. “And in my day, costumes were much more elaborate. Now it’s all just plastic and feathers.”
    “Remember the year everyone impersonated the French royals?”
    The other woman chuckled. “Josepha and Johanna didn’t like that too much, did they?”
    “Not when the faux revolution began.”
    Even behind their masks, misleadingly, these ladies didn’t seem to look a day over twenty, and yet they sounded like finicky old women.
    “Why did you want to come over here with the newburies?” the first woman asked.
    “I was curious.”
    “Why?”
    “Change is in the air. Don’t you feel it?”
    “Not really.”
    “Then you haven’t been paying much attention. The trees have been talking, warning us that change is coming. And Maori told me that all of his sunflowers have been following the sun east to