Paradox - Progeny Of Innocence (bk2) (Paradox series) by Patti Roberts

Angela, wistfully. Angela had just smiled and nodded and said, yes, you never know.
    Grace categorizes her life in two distinctly different parts. Part one, before her father’s death. And part two, after her father’s death. People do this, I have learned. People who have had significant events change their lives forever. For Grace, for now, it is before her father’s death and after her father’s death that define her , define the light and the dark, the good and the evil.
    She slowly closed the journal and traced her fingers along the gold letters on the cover that spelt her name. She brushed her tears away and replaced the leather-bound journal beneath the mattress, where it would stay concealed for another day.
    She doesn’t know why she stows the journal secretly away. But I do.
    I know why certain smells, particular sounds, tastes, and images can send her spiraling down into her bottomless black hole to hell. And why at other times the same provocations can fill her entire being with unequivocal joy.

CHAPTER 7 – How Did I Get Here?

     
    "How did I get here?" Grace asked as she sat slouched at the kitchen table dressed ready for another day at high school. She was spinning a piece of half-eaten toast around on the plate in front of her with her finger, a remnant of her breakfast. She peered at Angela sitting opposite her at the kitchen table; Angela almost always had an answer before she had finished asking the question.
    She frowned when no answer was forthcoming, and she was greeted instead by silence and the top of Angela’s head. She studied a blob of Vegemite on the end of her index finger. Vegemite, she realized, was the identical color to Angela’s satiny black hair, a stark contrast to her pale skin.
    Grace continued to mull over the persistent questions that had taken up permanent residence in her head. How did I get here? Why am I here? Why are they trying to kill me? There were a growing list of other questions - who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here? Who is Juliette? Who is Juliette? Who is Juliette? Grace shook the relentless questions from her mind. Sometimes she felt like she was going to go crazy.
    Angela’s head, as usual, was hidden in what Grace considered another dreary textbook. Angela’s lack of interest in the topics that most sixteen-year-old girls immersed themselves in continued to bemuse Grace, but not as much as it once had. She had eventually accepted the array of oddities that personified Angela. Like her headstrong eagerness for acquiring knowledge in the most profound subjects imaginable. But regardless of Angela’s many oddities, Grace was drawn to the girl like a moth to a flame. She was both entranced and calmed by the soothing presence that radiated from Angela’s tiny elf-like frame.
    If Grace was Yin, Angela was undeniably Yang. Together they seemed to balance each other out perfectly, and Grace’s life desperately needed a good measure of balance.
    Angela’s head snapped up to peer at Grace over the rim of her book. She wondered if she should continue reading or indulge Grace with an answer? She mulled over the short list of options in her head.
    One: To answer Grace, which she figured would be a total waste of time, considering Grace’s current state of mind. Nothing more than unorganized chaos bouncing off the walls of her skull, she surmised.
    Or two: Simply ignore Grace, and continue reading.
    Angela sighed then lowered her book gently on the table in front of her; she was finding it hard to read anyway, with the constant flow of random thoughts that were flowing endlessly from Grace’s mind on fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward. Her thoughts were almost always in a perpetual state of disorganization now. The right angular gyrus of her brain was randomly misfiring, and was spitting out tangled thoughts and images like a blender on high-speed without the lid on. She was becoming increasingly more difficult for Angela to read,