The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton Page A

that summer, Jack best remembered the feel of the cool dirt beneath his fingernails and the weight of potential discovery brought on by each bucket of dirt. Viviane remembered how her muscles ached from spending so many hours perched in the tree’s branches. She remembered the smudges of the darkest brown dirt across Jack’s cheekbones and his grimace as he lifted large rocks from the deepest part of his excavated hole. She remembered his hair, slick with sweat, wet against his forehead. And she remembered, more than anything else, the twinge in her stomach that compelled her to leap down from that tree, ripping the hemline of the pint-size wedding dress as she did, and walk to the edge of that large hole.
    The boy standing at the bottom of the hole peered up at Viviane, his eyes squinting in the sunlight. “Want to know what I’m doing?”
    “Yes,” Viviane said, trying not to knock more dirt into the hole.
    “Okay. But you have to wait. Until I’m done, that is. Then you’ll be able to see it for yourself.” He picked something out of the dirt, cupped it lightly in one of his hands before placing it in one of the buckets near his feet. “You don’t mind waiting?”
    Viviane shook her head. No, she didn’t mind.
    He smiled then, bringing back that twinge in her stomach, something that she only later recognized as the pangs of desire.
    I often wish I knew my mother as she was then — wild and unruly and running, always running with her hair trailing behind her and her mouth open in a gleeful scream. And I wonder what her life might have been had she never met Jack Griffith, the son of Beatrix and John Griffith. Would she have developed a talent for baking, as my grandmother had?
    I’ve been told things happen as they should: My grandmother fell in love three times before her nineteenth birthday. My mother found love with the neighbor boy when she was six. And I, I was born with wings, a misfit who didn’t dare to expect something as grandiose as
love.
It’s our fate, our destiny, that determines such things, isn’t it?
    Perhaps that was just something I told myself. Because what else was there for me — an aberration, an untouchable, an outsider? What could I say when I was alone at night and the shadows came? How else could I calm the thud of my beating heart but with the words:
This is my fate.
What else was there to do but blindly follow its path?
    Viviane and Jack were inseparable throughout the rest of the summer and well into the school year. The neighborhood boys teased Jack mercilessly until learning that Viviane Lavender could outrun and outspit any one of them. She also came up with the best games to play — it was my mother’s ingenious idea, for example, to wage a school-yard battle against the kids who were bused down from Phinney Ridge. It was a rivalry that would last for seven years — until America entered the Second Great War. The teams were then briefly recast as American soldiers versus the Japs, but that was deemed little fun since the grown-ups were playing their own version of that game.
    The neighborhood girls barely acknowledged the friendship between Jack and Viviane Lavender. Viviane was hardly the type other girls sought for a friend. She never seemed to do any of the things other girls did. She had never thrown an imaginary tea party, would not, in fact, have known what to do at a tea party where there wasn’t any actual tea. Their interest in Jack grew with time. By that point, they hardly wanted him as their
friend
, and each figured she could easily pull him away from Viviane Lavender — if it came down to that.

IN REGARD TO Emilienne Lavender, John Griffith had made up his mind long ago. And John Griffith was not the kind of man who changed his mind. If anyone had paid closer attention, they would have guessed that John Griffith’s feelings toward Emilienne Lavender maybe stemmed from something much more potent than hatred.
    It was the way he watched her. At the post