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Автор Christine Johnson
Grim
Edited by Christine Johnson
The Key by Rachel Hawkins
Figment by Jeri Smith-Ready
The Twelfth Girl by Malinda Lo
The Raven Princess by Jon Skovron
Thinner Than Water by Saundra Mitchell
Before the Rose Bloomed: A Retelling of
Beast/Beast by Tessa Gratton
The Brothers Piggett by Julie Kagawa
Untethered by Sonia Gensler
Better by Shaun David Hutchinson
Light It Up by Kimberly Derting
Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tongue by Christine Johnson
A Real Boy by Claudia Gray
Skin Trade by Myra McEntire
Beauty and the Chad by Sarah Rees Brennan
The Pink: A Grimm Story by Amanda Hocking
Sell Out by Jackson Pearce
About the Authors
THE KEY
High school is hard enough without having a psychic for a mom.
And no, I don’t mean she has that uniquely Mom-like sixth sense. I mean she’s literally a psychic. Reading your palms, telling you your future, all for the bargain price of fifty bucks a session (a hundred if you want a full hour, but no one ever does).
Momma runs her business out of our trailer. I know there are people who say that trailers can be nice, fancy even.
Those people had never been to our trailer.
It isn’t even a double-wide, which would have at least given us enough space for more than one ratty couch. I think the couch had belonged to my nana at some point. I knew whoever had had it before us had smoked on it, though. It carried the scent of thousands of cigarettes, millions even, deep inside every cabbage rose on its stained and burned cushions.
Momma’s “studio,” as she liked to call it, was in the second bedroom. When she wasn’t reading people’s fortunes, I slept on an air mattress on the floor in there. It was either that or share with Momma, which no, thank you. And like I said, the couch stunk—and was haunted besides—so I made do with the air mattress, no matter how big a pain in the ass it was to pump it up every single night, only to roll it back flat every morning.
The studio was the one nice room in the whole trailer. In there, the linoleum didn’t have duct tape over the cracks. In fact, you couldn’t see the linoleum at all. Momma had bought a real nice rug from Walmart years ago. It was a little too big for the room, curling up against the walls, but Momma kept it so dark in there that no one ever really noticed.
There had been a beaded curtain separating the studio from the rest of the trailer, but I’d talked Momma into getting rid of it. It looked cheap and trashy. I realized that was kind of an ironic statement, considering the rest of our place, but I had some limits. She’d hung a paisley shawl in the doorway instead, and while that wasn’t great, at least it didn’t rattle every time you walked past it.
Momma was standing in front of that shawl on Saturday morning, yawning as she cradled a cup of coffee in her hands. I stood at the sink, washing last night’s dinner dishes and looking out the window. On the porch of the next trailer over, a little girl with hair nearly the same white-blond as mine was playing with a water hose, giggling as she sprayed the vinyl siding. I was smiling at her and nearly missed what Momma was saying. Only when she said, “So you’ll need to stay close by today,” did I turn around, frowning at her.
