Rosebush

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rosebush

 

RAZORBILL

 

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Young Readers Group

345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Copyright © 2010 Michele Jaffe

All rights reserved

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47512-6

 

Acknowledgements

Writing a book is always a thorny proposition, and I was beyond lucky to have the guidance, support, help, and patience of—

—in cajoling the manuscript into blossom. Thank you all immensely.

 

Anything that came out smelling like a rose is because of them.
Everything else is my doing alone.

Prologue

The image is
stark yet beautiful.

It’s just before dawn, at that moment when the world turns monochrome and everything is subsumed under a blanket of blue-gray light. The streetlights have gone off, the street is a still gray ribbon scarred with two black marks trailing from the upper left of the picture to the lower right. In the background, blurry, large houses hunker down, streaked dark from rain. In the foreground and slightly to the right, set in blue-gray grass, is a fantastic bush. It looks like something from a fairy tale, a witch cursed into an alternate form, gnarled fingers reaching for the sky. At the center lies a girl.

Shreds of her tulle skirt are tangled among the branches blowing in the morning breeze like tiny flags. A ceramic rabbit, a mother duck followed by five tiny ducklings, and a squirrel playing the flute stand silent guard around her. One of her legs is bent up; the other juts out of the bush dangling a platform shoe, Cinderella after the ball gone bad. Her left hand is under her and the right one, with a friendship ring on the index finger, reaches up as though to pluck the single deep-red rose that hangs above her—the only spot of color in the image. Her face is lovely, dark hair feathering over half of it. Her body is covered with angry gashes and a magenta river of blood trickles from her head. Her lips part, as though she’s about to say something.

But then you see her eyes and know it’s impossible. They are wide open, pupils fully dilated. And sightless.

It looks like any one of a dozen photos I’ve taken for my Dead Princesses series, with two crucial differences.

The girl in this photo should have been dead. And I didn’t take it.

I’m in it. I’m the girl.

It was the police who shot it, responding to the 911 call from Mrs. Doyle reporting a dead body in her front yard on Dove Street. They arrived three minutes after the call. It took them five minutes to stabilize my breathing and thirty-two minutes to cut me out of the bush.

When I woke up, I had no memory of how I got there or what led up to it, which is apparently normal. All I remembered was pain and the single thought
I must not let go
.

But slowly pieces of it have been coming back. An intensive care unit is a good place to do a lot of deep thinking—or a bad one, depending on what you’re thinking about. I stare at the photo in my hand trying to see myself as an object, another clue. In the past three days, much of the puzzle has been filled in and I’m not sure I like the picture that is emerging.

“Hello, princess,” says a cheery voice from the door of my room.

I look up and see an unfamiliar man in scrubs walking in. I miss Loretta.

Loretta’s the regular nurse in the ICU, the one I was used to seeing. Plus she was on duty when I first opened my eyes, and even though I was only in the ICU three days, I felt like she and I knew each other well. Time passes in strange ways in the ICU, allowing you to form unusual relationships.

“Oh, that’s ICU time,” Loretta had explained to me.

“ICU time?”

“It’s like how they say dogs age seven years for every one of ours? Well, every minute in the ICU feels about an hour long. Time here either crawls or flashes by, and let me tell you, sweetheart, you’d rather it was crawling. Flash-forwards never mean anything good.”

The new guy is now saying, “I’m Ruben. And from the looks of this room, you’re Little Miss Popular.”

Ruben,
I repeat, mentally cataloging the name. One thing Loretta likes to do is gossip, but I can’t remember her saying anything about him.

He fingers several bouquets on the windowsill, ending up with the two dozen red roses. “This must have set someone back plenty. I wish I could find a boyfriend as generous.”

“They’re not from my boyfriend,” I tell him.

“
Woo-hoo
, then you’re doing something right. What about this guy?” He picks up a teddy bear wearing a muscle shirt that says GET WELL BEARY SOON! “Not sure if that’s from a friend or an enemy.”

“Me either.” I’m thinking about how that’s true in more ways than one as he moves on to study the rest of the get-well presents covering every surface of my room, so I only half pay attention as he asks about the card with the puppies on it playing instruments from David and the balloon bouquet from Nikki with the card that says CHEERS.

Now Ruben is standing in front of a heart-shaped wreath of roses that’s flanked by a figurine and a doll. “What are all these over here? ‘From your secret admirer,’” he reads aloud from one of the cards. “All this?” He gestures. I nod. “So let me see—you’ve got a boyfriend, a
not
boyfriend, and a secret admirer.” He shakes his head at me. “Girl, no wonder someone tried to run you down.”