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DINNER IS A QUIET AFFAIR. It is Wednesday and Violet's face is still flushed from skating at break-neck speed from La Push all the way home and her father sits at the head of the dining table scrolling through emails on his phone. Between them, the silence is thick, but it's not a silence from the lack of words, rather, too many words that need to be said, though neither of them knew how. And so, in true Korchak fashion, they leave it for another more coherent day where the fragile diplomacy between father and daughter isn't so thin.
It is two in the morning when Violet calls Wren. Or, rather, leaves about fifty voicemails until Wren picks up when she gets out of bed, which is exactly how she sounds—groggy and disoriented—when she answers Violet's guiltless greeting.
"What." Wren groans, voice muffled. There's some shuffling in the background, static leaking through the receiver, as Wren drags herself out of slumber to entertain her vicious older sister. "It's six in the morning, you absolute psychopath."
With a funny little half-smile, Violet envisions her sister jamming her face into the pillow like an ostrich staking its head into the dirt—and is that the slightest twinge of a little London accent creeping into Wren's words...? Violet shudders to think it. Kicking the wheels of her skateboard as she paces around her room, unable to sleep because there were shadows moving in periphery and now that her heart rate can't seem to settle and the lights in her room all turned up to the maximum brightness to stave off the darkness, force them back out into the hedges below her window, sleep had sped off, miles away into the inevitable sunrise, leaving her in the dust. Restless and clocking into hyper-awareness of her surroundings, Violet's left to her own devices. It didn't seem fair to wake her friends up, especially when they were too far away to do anything, and Kit had a soccer match later in the evening. Plus, she'd done the math. It's about nigh time for Wren to get up for school, anyway.
—YOU HAVE OTHER WAYS TO DISTRACT YOURSELF—
Fingers flying to her wrist, to the cuts that'd begun to scab and itch, red tally marks stuffed with plasma and blood, Violet winces. The iron voice in her head had taken to mocking her, enticing her back to old habits.
—THEY'RE IN THE BATHROOM, VIOLET, IN THE CUPBOARD BEHIND THE SINK. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS...—
No, she'd thought, firmly, as her hands began to shake and her resolve began to falter at the edges, a flickering mirage. She couldn't. Even though the compulsion was there, to feel the metal biting into her flesh, to feel the sting sliding against her porcelain skin. Count her vices and lay out her weaknesses so she could excise it from her body, watch it all bleed out in her sink, turn the water rose pink with vengeance. No, I won't, she'd thought. Sage had seen her scars by accident. The scars she kept so carefully guarded under long sleeves and sharp stares. Nobody touched Violet Korchak. Not unless you could feel the same afflictions too. It's a lonely world, up here in her ivory tower. Now that Sage knew, she had to be more careful not to slip up again.
