The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. Estele Magritte 1642–1719

and small white flowers tumble from her hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in her wake, almost like the one across her cheeks.

Seven freckles. One for every love she’d have, that’s what Estele had said, when the girl was still young. One for every life she’d lead. One for every god watching over her. Now, they mock her, those seven marks. Promises. Lies. She’s had no loves, she’s lived no lives, she’s met no gods, and now she is out of time.

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.

Toby said that he was in love with a girl named Jess—he simply hadn’t met her yet. So now, she is Jess.

She catches her reflection in the hall mirror and notices what everyone notices: the seven freckles, scattered like a band of stars across her nose and cheeks.

Her own private constellation.

A relic of a late-night trip to the grocery store, a boy and a girl wandering the aisles, hand in hand, because they couldn’t sleep.

Addie could have left—should have left—slipped out when he was still asleep, when their morning was still an extension of their night, a moment trapped in amber.

This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can’t leave her own mark, but if she’s careful, she can give the mark to someone else. Nothing concrete, of course, but inspiration rarely is.

She hates this part. She shouldn’t have lingered. Should have been out of sight as well as out of mind, but there’s always that nagging hope that this time, it will be different, that this time, they will remember.

But it won’t be any easier when it ends, and if she has to start over, she’d rather be a meet-cute at a bar than the unremembered aftermath of a one-night stand.

She knows where it is, of course. That is where they met for the first time, and the fifth, and the ninth. And when she agrees to come, his smile is dazzling. It always is.

“I’ll see you there,” he says, the words full of hope as she turns and steps through the door. She looks back, and says, “Don’t forget me in the meantime.” An old habit. A superstition. A plea. Toby shakes his head. “How could I?” She smiles, as if it’s just a joke.

March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.

and Adeline feels a little wild and a little scared as she turns back to look at the shrinking picture of Villon,

the words feel smooth as river stones, and she wonders if he tells these stories when he is alone, if he carries on, talking to Maxime in this easy, gentle way. Wonders if he tells stories to the wood as he is working it. Or if they are just for her.

Stone ridges rising in the distance, a many-patterned spine along the hills. It is a hundred times the size of Villon—or at least, it is that grand in memory—and Adeline holds her breath as they pass through the gates and into the protected city.

Adeline stands on the bench and marvels at the marketplace, the heady smell of bread and sugar on the air, and people, people, everywhere she looks. She has never seen so many of them, let alone ones she does not know. They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words. It feels as if the doors of her world have been thrown wide, so many rooms added to a house she thought she knew.

ummm I NEEDED to share this quote almost as much as i need to breathe.... stunning, absolutely stunning.

It is a ring.

She wears it on a leather cord around her neck, a delicate band, the wood ash gray, and smooth as polished stone. He carved it when she was born, made for the girl she’d one day be, and Adeline wears it like a talisman, an amulet, a key. Her hand goes to it now and then, thumb running over the surface the way her mother’s runs over a rosary.

but in the end, she settles on a journal, parchment bound with waxy thread. It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.

and for the first time in her life, Adeline will sleep in a foreign bed, and wake to foreign sounds and smells, and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.

And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.

But she prays the way her father turns loaves of bread upright, the way her mother licks her thumb to collect stray flakes of salt.

Estele, who belongs to everyone, and no one, and herself.

Estele, who grew like a tree at the heart of the village by the river, and has certainly never been young, who sprang up from the ground itself with gnarled hands and woody skin and roots deep enough to tap into her own hidden well.

Estele laughed her dry-leaf laugh and said there was no such place, only the cool dark soil and the promise of sleep.

“You are not a child anymore.” And Adeline understands—and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up. She is so angry then that she wants to run away. Wants to fling her mother’s needlework into the hearth and break every half-made sculpture in her father’s shop.

“But why did you give them your cup?” “Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”

“Spells are for witches, and witches are too often burned.”

“The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.”

“There are rules.” Adeline hates rules, but she knows that sometimes they are necessary.

“You must humble yourself before them. You must offer them a gift. Something precious to you. And you must be careful what you ask for.”

“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

But if the gods hear, they do not answer. She never goes to market again.

No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.

Left alone to grow. And dream.

She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman’s form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.

You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

What she needs are stories.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

The selection is always a medley of discordant notes. Thrillers, biographies, romance, battered mass markets, mostly, interrupted by a few glossy hardcovers. She has stopped to study them a hundred times, but today she simply tips the book on the end into her hand, the gesture light and swift as a magician’s. A piece of legerdemain. Practice long given way to perfect. Addie tucks the book under her arm and keeps walking.

The old man never looks up.

The market sits like a cluster of old wives at the edge of the park.

Rise and Shine is a coffee and pastry stall run by a pair of sisters that remind Addie of Estele, if the old woman had been two instead of one, divided along the lines of temper. If she had been kinder, softer, or perhaps if she had simply lived another life, another time.

“Hey, sugar,”

Mel, all broad shoulders, and wild curls, and the kind of sweetness that makes strangers feel like family. Addie loves that, the easy warmth, wants to nestle into it like a well-worn sweater.

A mouthful of memory.