Fall 2015 Penguin Teen Preview Sampler

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

CHAPTER 1

MARIN WALKED INTO THE WIND AND FELT IT GENTLY PUSH

back. A few more steps and she’d be at the edge of the cliff. Her focus was on the thistle, the prickly green plants that crunched beneath her feet. What would happen to these plants during the years of Night? Would they wither and die, or would they simply lie dormant, waiting for the first rays of sunlight to peek up from the horizon? She had asked those who had been through this before, but they refused to discuss it. No one talked about the Night, even though it was almost upon them.

She stopped near the precipice. The water below was dark, almost black, and it stretched everywhere, like a liquid version of the sky. In the last year, as the sun had begun its final descent, the water had gone from blue-green to iridescent blue, and from there it grew steadily darker. A hint of its fluorescence remained, but now it provoked a shiver instead of a smile.

Marin took a deep breath of the cold sea air. When the sun vanished, it would get even colder. Everything would freeze—at least that’s what people at school said. In any case, by the time that happened, she’d be long gone, along with everyone else in

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 1

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

Bliss. Only the buildings would remain, silent and empty, entombed in ice.

The wind flung Marin’s wavy black hair into her face. She was smaller than other girls her age, but she was stronger than most. Her arms and legs were long and well-muscled, the product of years spent climbing, hiking, and sailing. She had honey-colored eyes, long lashes, and bronze skin—a striking combination, which she inherited from her mother. Her clothing, however, was plain and purely functional: waxed canvas pants, a raw denim shirt, and leather boots.

“Has the tide turned yet?”

Marin spun at the unexpected voice. She had been waiting for her friend Line, but instead she saw Palan—a frail man with paper-thin skin and a bald head marked with brown sunspots.

Palan had lived through several Mornings and his skin bore the proof. His cobalt-blue robe rippled in the wind, revealing a left arm that ended in a stump just above his wrist.

“I’m not sure about the tide,” Marin replied. “What do you think?”

The old man faced Marin, his watery eyes looking past her, into the distance. “This is my fourth Evening,” he said quietly.

He tightened the heavy wool scarf wrapped around his neck.

“The sun seems to be moving faster and faster with the years.”

Marin followed his gaze. The sun had almost disappeared below the horizon. Only a sliver remained visible. The entire western sky was ablaze in magnificent shades of orange and red. A few degrees more and the sun would vanish completely, plunging the island into darkness for the next fourteen years.

They said this would happen soon, perhaps in a matter of days.

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 2

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

It sounded a bit like the end of the world to Marin, and she still found it hard to believe.

The wind blew gently and Palan sighed. “It saddens me that I will never see this place again. When I leave here—I expect I won’t return.”

Marin reached out and touched his arm. The old man turned away from the sea, back toward the island’s interior, and grasped her hand. “I’ve heard movement in the forest,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?” asked Marin, worried that Palan may have become lost in his mind.

Palan gripped her hand tighter but did not reply.

A muffled shout rang in the distance.

“MARIN!” They looked up and watched a teenage boy moving toward them. It was Line. If Palan hadn’t been there, she would have run to him, but now she just waved back.

When he arrived, Line appeared slightly confused. Palan studied them both, arched an eyebrow, and smiled.

Line’s dark brown eyes twinkled as he approached Marin.

He was handsome in the way that few boys of fourteen are.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with an unkempt shock of reddish-brown hair, high cheekbones, and a cleft chin.

“Elder Palan,” said Line. “Any news of the boats?” A gust of wind pressed his curly hair flat against his head.

Palan straightened, as if the use of the honorific—Elder— reminded him of his role and station. “Sorry, my boy, I’ve heard nothing of the boats,” said Palan. “But I am not here for that. Come—I’ll show you.”

3

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 3

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

He approached the cliff’s edge and pointed downward.

Marin and Line followed close behind him and peered over.

The face of the cliff was shrouded in shadow, but they could make out several thick white veins coming out of the cliff and running down its side, like a hardened trail of wax from a giant candle.

“It’s ice,” said Palan. It was colder at the edge of the cliff, and his shoulders began to tremble. “My father brought me to this place as a boy. The ice always begins here. It squeezes out of the rock and then, they say, it spreads . . . until it covers everything. The island turns to ice.”

Marin and Line stood close together, near Palan. Line’s fingers grazed Marin’s.

Palan leaned over several inches more. “Somewhere down there is the hag.” His voice turned hoarse. “At times, when the waves break just right, you can see her.”

He took a step back from the cliff and smiled with great contentment, as if recalling a particularly fond memory. Marin and Line looked down at the water. It seemed no different than before. Palan often spoke in riddles, in the manner that those of such age do.

“I’d like to get a better view of that ice,” said Line, taking off the coil of rope slung across his shoulder and pushing up the sleeves of his sweater. His forearms and biceps were tan and muscled from years of rock climbing.

“As you wish,” said Palan. “But be careful. Ice is much slicker than rock.”

Suddenly impatient, Marin and Line said good-bye. As Palan shuffled back to town, Line set up the rope, tying it

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 4

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

securely to a small brass ring jutting from the rock. Marin and Line had been climbing the cliffs that formed the island’s perimeter their entire lives, and recently, it had been just the two of them. Going off unchaperoned was frowned upon, but at the moment, the town was too consumed with other matters to pay them any mind.

Just before beginning, they checked to make sure they were each securely fastened to the rope. Marin faced Line. She tucked a lock of hair behind his ear so it didn’t dangle over his eyes. “You were late,” she said, scowling as if she were cross with him.

“Just a minute or two,” he said with a grin. Line shook his head so that his hair fell back over his eyes. “It won’t happen again.”

They descended steadily until the ocean spray began to mist their legs. The rays of the setting sun could not reach this area, and it was darker than they expected. Still, they were able to see the veins of ice glowing in the murky twilight.

Line continued down several feet, until the ocean spray wet his heavy canvas pants and wool sweater. Marin heard him mutter in surprise.

“What is it?” she called.

Line looked up. Marin was standing comfortably on a tiny ledge two body lengths above him. “The tide’s turned,” he said.

“Just now?”

She climbed down to get a better look.

“You’re right,” she said. “Look, you can see it.” She pointed to a thin band of white that clung to the cliff wall near their feet.

5

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 5

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

Line nodded. “That dried salt is the high-water mark.”

They hugged the cliff wall. After all the anticipation, it was happening. During the fourteen years of Day, the waters around their island remained at high tide. Then, just before the sun vanished, the tide reversed itself suddenly and rapidly, rolling out hundreds of miles and leaving exposed seabed where once there had been crashing waves. And the sea stayed away until Sunrise—some fourteen years later—when it returned just as fast. The timing of all of this was crucial for the islanders, who migrated with the tide. Once it turned, they had just a few days to depart.

“Do you think anyone else knows?” she asked.

“I bet the okrana know.” Line adjusted his hold on the rock and shivered. The nearby ice emanated cold with a surprising intensity. “We should go.”

He was beginning to climb back up when Marin saw something brown and green poking out of the frothy water.

“Line!” she called. Her voice was sharp against the muffled thump of the waves.

Line stopped. His foot was jammed into a tiny crevice in the rock, and one of his fingers curled around a slight nub. He leaned out and looked down, using his free arm and leg for balance. To Marin, it looked like his finger and foot were glued to the wall. Marin shook her head and smiled. Show-off.

“What is it?” he asked nonchalantly.

“Just come look,” said Marin. Her eyes were wide and brimming with excitement. “There’s something in the water.”

Line climbed back down to join her on the ledge. He followed her gaze and, over the next few minutes, they watched

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 6

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

a human form emerge from the receding tide. It jutted out at a strange angle, but still they could tell that it was a statue of a woman. The head was carved in simple lines, yet her expression was surprisingly intricate. Her mouth was gaping open, as if she were screaming or expressing great terror. The statue was big—three or four times the size of an average person.

“Palan’s hag,” whispered Line.

The water level was dropping steadily, and soon they saw her upper torso. The hag brandished a shield and wore a simple cloak wrapped tightly around a lean, muscular body.

“I see writing!” Marin called. “There—on the shield!”

They waited breathlessly through several waves, until the trough of one large wave revealed the following words in huge block letters: the houses must be without stain.

Marin tried to suppress an uneasy feeling. The island was littered with old ruins—crumbling foundations, broken pillars, old stone walls. This statue was just another relic of the island’s past. A vestige of ancient peoples. Still, the phrase seemed strangely relevant. The houses must be without stain. Now that the tide had turned, everyone in town would be cleaning their homes, preparing to leave. It was an ironclad rule—the last task before departure.

“Why is this statue here—in the ocean?” Marin asked.

Line said nothing at first. “It’s curious,” he finally replied.

“It looks very old.” He frowned as if an unpleasant thought had crossed his mind, then turned to Marin. “I’m ready to head back. All right?”

“What’s the matter?” Marin asked. The sea had left a fine mist on their exposed skin and hair.

7

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 7

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

Line smiled, but it was forced. “I’m just cold, that’s all.”

“Let’s go,” she said, nodding. Line was more her brother’s friend than hers, and she still didn’t know him that well. They began ascending the shadowy rock face. Marin was about to urge Line to climb faster when his foot rolled off the rock. It was shocking—he might have fallen backward if he didn’t have a rope to grab onto. Line was one of the best climbers in Bliss.

He’d never slipped before.

“What happened?” called Marin.

“Ice,” said Line, almost as a curse. “It’s in the crags.”

Together they climbed as quickly as they could, back toward the sunlight.

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 8

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

CHAPTER 2

EVEN THOUGH MUCH OF THE ISLAND WAS COVERED IN

shadow, there were still places that caught the light. The trail that led back to town was such a place. It was perfectly situated along a hill, facing the nearly disappeared sun. As a result, everything—from the garnet pebbles on the ground to the swaying remnants of wheat and grass—shimmered.

After their cold, dark climb, even this small amount of sun warmed Marin. It made her think of the Desert Lands and of her mother, who was born in that distant place. The ice had appeared so suddenly—and the cold coming from it still seemed to grip her. All of a sudden, following the sun to the Desert Lands didn’t seem like an entirely bad idea.

“It’ll be chaos in town,” said Line as they walked up a hill dotted with clumps of fragrant, blue-tinged bushes. He shook his head and shrugged, as if this would be more an annoyance than anything else. “Pure chaos.”

Marin frowned, trying to imagine their orderly town in a state of chaos. “They send the envelopes out after the tide turns— right?” Of course, she knew this to be true. How many times has

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 9

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

my father said as much? But still, now that the moment had arrived, she felt a compulsion to repeat it—just to be sure.

Line nodded. “I bet they’re doing it right now,” he replied.

“And after that, everything will shut down—the markets, school, even the fall wheat harvest.”

Marin thought about this. “I figured we’d have at least two more weeks.” She paused for a moment and then added, “I guess that means we’ve just had our last climb together.”

Line sighed, hoping that wasn’t true.

“I knew this was going to happen,” he said, glancing at the sea. “Anyone who sails could see the tide was going to turn sooner rather than later. I don’t know why the mayor uses that stupid lunar calendar.”

They continued on, walking single file along the narrow path. Marin picked up her pace, both to match Line’s longer strides and to warm herself up. Was she cold from the climb, or was the wind turning sharper? Probably both. The path widened again, and Line drew up next to Marin. Although she didn’t look over, she could sense that he was close to her.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked softly.

Line massaged his palms to release the tension from climbing. “Well, classes for the children will have ended now that the tide’s turned—so I have Francis to look after. I’d like to forage for some mushrooms, too—maybe even a bit of lekar.”

“You think you’ll be able to find lekar so close to Nightfall?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he replied. “Francis and I could really use the extra money.”

Line lived with his younger brother. Their father died just

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 10

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

after Francis’s birth, and two years ago, their mother had suddenly taken ill and died, too. The doctor said it was pneumonia, an illness that often came with Dusk. After that, the two boys lived with their uncle for a while, but it hadn’t worked out—he was foul-tempered and spent most of his time drunk. For over a year now, fourteen-year-old Line and seven-year-old Francis had been on their own. It was unusual, to say the least, but Line managed.

Line grabbed at a clump of dead wheat stalks and started shredding them. He glanced at Marin. “With the tide turning, I have a lot to do. I haven’t really packed up the house yet.”

Marin’s eyes widened. Her family had been doing this for weeks. Line’s house was much smaller, but still. “I’ll help,” she said quickly.

It was Line’s turn to look surprised. “Really? What if your parents find out?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she retorted. “I’ll help a bit—that’s all.”

Marin was suddenly embarrassed, and she wondered if Line could tell. Luckily, they’d crested a hill and were heading down the other side, into shadow. Of course, Line was right. It would be risky going to his house. Marin’s mother, Tarae, didn’t like the idea of her spending time alone with a boy—especially Line, who lived without parents.

They continued along the footpath, crested a small bluff, and took in the view, surveying their town’s collection of evergreen gardens, neatly manicured walls, timber-framed houses, and slate rooftops. It was a bucolic place. Theirs was a town of five hundred people, but from this vantage point it looked small. And compared to the massive forest that covered the 11

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 11

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

island’s interior, it was small—just over a hundred buildings, nestled together.

Delicate trilling noises suddenly filled the air. Moments later, a mule appeared pulling a cart. It was decorated with dozens of silver bells, which jingled rhythmically as the cart rolled down the dirt road that led toward Bliss.

In the driver’s seat was a figure clad in a black robe; he was the town’s vicar, a stony-faced man whose eyes stared purposefully ahead. In the backseat sat a fragile-looking elderly woman who held an infant in her arms. The woman was the matriarch of a band of widows who scaled fish to earn their keep, and she claimed to be 107 years old. No one had the temerity to dispute this. She looked so frail, it was surprising that she was able to sit up straight and hold the baby.

Marin and Line came to an abrupt halt. This custom—the so-called Pageant of Life and Death—occurred as soon as the tide turned; because this was their first Sunset, it was also the first time they’d witnessed the ritual. They stood in place, watching the cart pass, until the sound of its bells grew faint.

The noise, however, was soon replaced by a number of distant, high-pitched screams. The sounds were not human, but they were bloodcurdling all the same.

“What is that?” asked Marin. She put her hands to her ears.

“It makes my skin crawl.”

“They’ve started slaughtering pigs for the journey,” said Line. “Things are moving faster than I thought. We’d better hurry.”

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 12

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

CHAPTER 3

THEY TOOK A WINDING GOAT PATH THAT LED THROUGH

the abandoned fields surrounding Bliss. With the sun so low and the weather turning cold, their previously fertile farmlands had gone barren. Only a few fields still produced food, but it was nutritionally poor fall wheat and stunted potatoes.

In recent weeks, even these were hard to find—the fields suddenly teemed with bugs, mites, and strange biting worms. And so the people of Bliss lived mainly off their supplies while waiting for the ships that would take them south.

Line’s home was a small farmhouse at the edge of Bliss, notable for its round stained glass windows. Just beyond his farmhouse, the houses were built closer together, and the cobblestone roads of the town appeared.

As they neared Line’s home, they could see that foot traffic in town had picked up dramatically, and the usually quiet streets were filled with people chattering and pushing past one another. Bells began tinkling, and people stopped what they were doing to stare at the main street, which cut Bliss neatly in two. The Pageant of Life and Death had arrived in town.

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 13

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

Parents drew their children close, while others muttered devotions and averted their eyes.

Line slowed down and frowned. “Why is Kana in that tree?”

At the mention of her brother’s name, Marin looked around eagerly. “Where?”

Line pointed to a bare apple tree that stood near his house, overlooking Bliss’s main street. Like most apple trees, this one had stopped bearing fruit almost a year ago. Now a slender, fine-boned boy watched the pageant from its topmost fork.

“Kana!” Marin yelled.

The boy flinched but did not acknowledge her, not even with the slightest turn of his head.

“Kana!”

Again he ignored her.

Kana was Marin’s twin. He was about Marin’s size, but where Marin was dark-skinned, with black wavy hair, Kana’s hair and skin were pale—“snow-kissed,” as they called it. The only physical feature they shared was their long pitch-black eyelashes. They made Marin’s eyes unusually expressive; for Kana they served as a spotlight, drawing attention to his pale blue eyes.

Until recently, though, his eyes hadn’t seemed to work.

Kana had been born blind. Or at least that’s what the family had believed. At around ten years old, as the sun started dipping lower in the sky, Kana began perceiving shapes and shadows. When he squinted he could see better, so the town’s glass blower made him a bizarre pair of spectacles, which were essentially wire frames with eye patches on them. Each patch had a tiny hole in the center, allowing in only a pinprick of

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 14

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

light. Within the last year, however, as it grew darker, Kana no longer needed the spectacles at all.

“Kana!” shouted Marin again, betraying more than a touch of irritation. Nearby townspeople turned toward her voice.

Kana looked at her, revealing the other side of his face, which was marked by a jagged scar that began at the top of his right cheekbone and continued down to his jaw. Kana eyed Line and his sister coldly for a moment, then turned away.

Line put a hand on Marin’s arm. “Don’t force it,” he said.

“He’ll come around.”

Marin just furrowed her brow.

“Come on,” said Line.

A short while later, they found Francis waiting at the farmhouse where he and Line lived. He was wearing green overalls, a buckskin vest, and a gray flannel hunting cap. This was his favorite outfit, and Line let him wear it every day—until the smell became too ripe. As soon as he saw Line, Francis jumped to his feet and raced toward them. Line ruffled Francis’s thick brown hair, which probably should have been cut months ago.

“Were you waiting long?” asked Line.

Francis shrugged. “Some okrana came for you a few minutes ago.”

“Now what?” said Line. The okrana were the town’s volunteer police. They patrolled the coastline, looking out for the raiders and thieves who occasionally preyed on towns. Most were farmers with a desire for something more exciting, but Bliss—up to now—had provided little opportunity for action.

Lately, they had been checking in on Line often—urging him to pack up and get his house in order. This drove Line crazy.

15

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 15

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

Marin wasn’t so sure he didn’t need the reminders, but she never admitted as much.

“They gave me something,” said Francis. He dug into his pants and extracted a crumpled envelope. “They said it’s for the master of the house. What does that mean? Are you the master?”

Line ignored his brother and eyed the envelope. “I guess the letters are here,” he said to Marin. “I wanted to get to the bakery before this. We need bread.”

“Don’t worry—there’s plenty at our house,” said Marin. “My mother’s been hoarding it. Let’s open the envelope. May I?” “Might as well,” said Line.

Francis began fidgeting, unable to contain his excitement.

“I’ll do it!” he exclaimed. He tore awkwardly at the seal, ripping the paper in several places. Impatient now, Francis thrust it at Line, who promptly gave it to Marin.

She felt the envelope’s weight in her palm. It was heavier than she expected. Carefully, she pulled out two sheets of thin paper. The first page contained a detailed floor plan of the house. The second was filled with notes describing where each carpet, piece of furniture, and picture was to be stored.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a diagram of a wall in the front room. It was marked with an arrow and the words rat, snout, and teeth.

Line peered at the pages. Marin looked inside the envelope again, and saw a skeleton key encrusted with verdigris.

Francis’s eyes grew wide. He snatched the key but fumbled it, and it fell to the ground with a metallic clang. In an instant, he’d crouched down and picked it up.

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 16

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass

“Can I keep it?” he said, face beaming with excitement.

Line took the key from Francis and turned it over several times. “Later,” he said as he pocketed it. “I don’t want to lose this before I know what it opens.”

Francis frowned and gave his brother a shove. “I’m old enough! I won’t lose it.”

Line glanced at Marin and smiled. At least several times a day, and in a variety of situations, Francis claimed to be old enough. It was his favorite thing to say.

Line grabbed Francis and lifted him up. “Let’s get inside,” said Line. “I’m starving.”

He opened the door, walked inside, and unloaded Francis, who rushed away. Marin paused on the doorstep to look behind her. The Pageant of Life and Death was still occupying everyone’s attention, and Kana was no longer in the tree.

Line reappeared at the doorway. He held the door open for her and smiled. “Coming inside?”

Marin nodded and quickly followed him, shutting the door behind her.

17

Nightfall_3rdFinalPass.indd 17

5/28/15 5:29 PM

Juniors_FINALPass

KAUI HART HEMMINGS

G. P. Putnam’s Sons An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA)

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 3

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

1 THE PUNAHOU PEER COUNSELORS ARE TRYING TO LEAD

a gym full of juniors on a “truth walk.” Our ethics classes merged, so about fifty of us are against the wall of the gym, waiting to do whatever our peers have planned so we can be on our way to fulfilling our Spiritual, Ethical, Community Responsibility requirement for our spring semester. Sheri Ho stands before us in jean shorts that barely pass dress code. She’s a senior, cute and well-liked, but not cool. I think to be cool at Punahou, you have to drink (but not too much) and hook up (but not too much). As a peer counselor who wears a platinum promise ring, she does neither. But maybe I’m wrong about what “cool” is. There are so many variations here. It’s like looking at a menu for shave ice.

Countless flavors and colors; even weird-sounding things like pickled mango or green tea can be really good and popular.

My mom and I moved here in December, and I started mid-junior year, which I think is totally rare. So, two months at this place, but it may as well be my first day. I’ve adjusted to some things—the academics, how much harder it is than my last school—the offerings and choices, the campus itself, which is the size of a university. It’s the biggest private school in the US. 1

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 1

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

I’ve been playing catch-up socially too, scoping things out, getting the lay of the humid Hawaiian land. I feel like a surveyor or a pioneer, trying to know the ground I’m standing on and figure out where to stake my flag and settle. My mother grew up here, so we’ve visited a lot, but being a visitor is very different from living in Hawaii, especially when you’re going to high school.

Sheri whistles, then speaks in a loud, cheerleader-like voice.

“Okay, gang. Settle in, settle down.” Four other counselors stand by her, moving to some kind of imaginary music, but now that the group has quieted down I realize music really is playing. My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.

“Get all the way against the wall,” she yells. “I’m talking to you, Cici; you, Jim; you, Shasha—up against the wall!”

I scan my classmates, the many flavors of them, waiting to begin. I guess in some way this is like any high school in America, little sects in a big congregation—the football players, the drama kids, the ROTCs, the mushers (what skaters and stoners are called here). In Hawaii there are surfers, paddlers, water polo players. At Storey, my school in San Francisco, there were only a few surfers and other groups that were more defined and permanent, like, “we’re the sailor yacht club kids!”

People here seem to venture out of their groups.

Pete Weiner (pronounced Whiner not Weener, though I’m not sure what I’d choose between the two) is standing to my right, and I can tell he’s looking at me, waiting for me to acknowledge him. He has a football-shaped head and an expression that makes him look constantly on the verge of a sneeze.

He’s in my ethics class, and for some reason he’s always sharing his asides. I figure I’m sort of like a test dummy. If I laugh, 2

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 2

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

great, he’ll shop his joke around. If I don’t laugh, then at least he doesn’t embarrass himself because who cares what Lea Lane thinks? Who’s Lea Lane anyhow? Random-ass transfer student.

At least in Hawaii people pronounce my name right—Lea like Lei-a. Not Lee-a.

“This song is so lame,” he says. “‘Her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’? Sounds like she has a yeast infection.”

“I don’t get it,” I say, hating that this guy feels so comfortable with me.

“Yeah, neither do I,” he says.

I kick the toe of my shoe into the glassy floor, then stop when I remember we aren’t supposed to wear black-soled shoes in the gym. I’ve been hyperalert to the rules, not wanting to draw attention to myself, which is pretty easy in a junior class of four hundred and four, and a school of almost four thousand students. It’s hard to insert yourself so late in the game.

I’ve planned to lay low—Lea low—head down, graduate, move on. But these past few weeks, I don’t know, I’m lonely. I want to look around. I want to step more into the radar, get pulled over. Something, anything. In situations like this, or in chapel surrounded by so many students, I feel like if I vanished, if I melted into the floor, no one would notice I was gone. I’m getting bored being so quiet. I was quiet at my last school. Maybe I could reinvent myself, or at least remodel? Take the blank slate and mark it up.

“Okay, let’s do this!” Sheri yells, and I laugh to myself at her crazed enthusiasm. “Remember. This is a safe zone. Nothing you do or say leaves this room. There are no teachers here, no parents. This is our time to get real.”

3

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 3

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

“I want to have sex with you, Sheri!” Jim yells. “Honestly. For real!”

All of Jim’s “boys” erupt into laughter, except Mike Matson, who looks like he’s being tethered by his girlfriend, Maile Beaucage. Her name always makes me think of a flower in a handsome jail, and whenever they hold hands, he seems to look at his group of friends longingly, like they’re leaving on a booze cruise without him. Those boys are all dressed in T-shirts with surf logos, baggy shorts, caps worn low or backwards. They make the boys from my old school look like they’re dressed to clock in at Google. I want to be over there, not over here. I want them to see me laughing.

“Okay, boys,” Sheri says. “Settle down ’cause we’re about to get internally rowdy. We’re going to find out what’s inside of us.”

Our regular teacher isn’t here, since we’re about to get internally rowdy, but I wonder if Ms. Wood is hiding under the bleachers, trying to get glimpses into the real lives of teenagers.

The peer counselors are giving us a sneak preview of things they do during Camp Paumalu, a four-day lovefest of trust falls and cathartic crying. I hear you do things like write a problem on a slab of wood, then punch through it karate-style while listening to “Eye of the Tiger.”

“There are no winners in this race,” Sheri says. “I’ll be asking questions, and some of you will walk, and some of you won’t.

Everyone will get to the other side in the place that matters.” She thumps her chest with a closed fist.

“Now. I want you to take five steps if, within this past month, you’ve made someone feel good!”

I immediately look to the pack of guys, and they’re all smiling 4

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 4

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

as if they’ve done something sexual. Poor Sheri. The land of innuendos is boundless. I’d say mostly the entire group walks—it’s a pretty open-ended question.

“Now. Boo.” Sheri makes an exaggerated sad face with a duck-lipped pout. “Walk if you’ve done something that made someone feel bad. Awesome,” she says, as the bulk of the group takes a timid stroll. “It’s okay. Own those steps. No judgment.”

I walk, only because everyone else is and I don’t want to be left behind.

“Walk if you’ve done something you’re ashamed of.”

“I just sharted,” Jim says. “I’ll take a walk.”

Everyone laughs. I can’t imagine a girl saying that, but if one did, I’m sure I’d like her. I walk, ashamed that girl can’t be me, that I can only be funny on the inside.

“Now walk if you’ve recently said something behind someone’s back,” Sheri says.

Almost everyone walks again—with a collective sensation of relief, I think. This is easy and not too deep, like a trailer for a drama. I stay where I am. I haven’t spoken behind anyone’s back recently, not because I’m above such things, but because I don’t have people to air my gripes to. Besides Danny, I don’t really socialize with anyone. I like girls from my classes, but feel like I have a kind of guest membership with them, and honestly, I like them just because they’re there. They’re the ones I’ve seen so far, but I keep looking for more. My old friends were into debate club, cross-country, and pizza parties. On this campus, I overhear girls walking to classes or at paddling practice— shut up, omg shut up. I know, right? and admit I’ve stood before my bathroom mirror, imitating not just their words, but their 5

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 5

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

inflections. Shawt up, oh ma haw, shawt up. I knew, righta? and not knowing if I’m making fun of them or wanting to be them.

I guess I’m not being very honest with this exercise. While I don’t talk badly about people, I think badly about them. I take five steps.

“Walk if you’ve smoked a cigarette,” one of the other counselors says.

Ross Shetland laughs and runs his five steps. A few others follow suit, but not many. We’re a pot generation. Cigarettes are bad for you.

“Walk if you’ve lied to a friend.”

I walk.

I’ve lied to friends. In second grade, I told Crystal Watanabe I had a monkey, and to every friend I had in San Francisco I said I was excited to move to Hawaii. I’m sure there have been countless fibs and exaggerations, but too harmless to remember here.

Innocent questions like these keep coming, and then we move to more difficult terrain.

“Walk if your parents are divorced,” Sheri says. She looks like she’s going to break into a sad song.

I walk, then stop myself. My dad left before I was born. My parents were never married, and my mother hardly knew him.

I’ve never met him and probably never will. His name is Ray Piston aka Stranger Dad. The story I’ve been told is that he was handsome, arrogant, entitled. This part of my life has become like a fairy tale, something I know by heart and that seems like a fantasy.

My mom was taken with his swagger and young enough to 6

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 6

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

overlook the rest. He was visiting from New York, where he had a job in the hotel industry. He seemingly had very little to do, but made a lot of money doing it. Before him she had been in a quiet relationship—stable, sweet, good, but after she graduated from UCLA and came home to Hawaii, they broke up. She and Ray dated that summer, exclusively on her part, and not so exclusively on his, which she found out later. He did all the things she never thought she wanted or needed—gifts, dinners, trips, jewelry—and his reaction to her getting pregnant?

“Fabulous,” he had said. “Now this is getting fun.”

And then he left when my mom was six months pregnant, and she hasn’t seen him since. What a guy.

He lives in Paris now. Done. For a long time I wanted to know him, to know my roots, but the more my mom told me, the less interested I became. At the Outrigger Canoe Club, where they hung out, he made the waitresses bring his meals over to him on the beach where he sunbathed by a canoe. Now when I think of him, I imagine a man dallying about Paris, making waitresses schlep up the Eiffel Tower to serve him croissants.

I’ve Googled him, of course, read his business profile, articles about legal battles with his properties. I’ve seen pictures of him at various charity events, posing with the same expression—like he’s about to call out across the room to a pal. He looks handsome, smart, both careful and careless. His connection to me seems unreal, like I’m looking at a celebrity. I’m not his, and he’s not mine. I kind of hate him.

“Walk if you’ve been cruel to someone you love,” Sheri says.

Everyone walks; most heads are down. Pete Weiner has a little psycho smirk on his face. Mike Matson looks contemplative.

7

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 7

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

I walk too. I’ve been mean to my mom and to Lo, my best friend in San Francisco. Sometimes you’re just mean to the people you love the most. You know you’ll get a pass.

“Walk if someone you love has been cruel to you.”

I walk. My San Francisco friends left my good-bye sushi dinner after an hour so they could go to Fletcher Ronson Jr.’s party. I saw the Instagram posts the next day in Honolulu. Girls are the cruelest.

“Walk if you’ve ever felt neglected,” Sheri says in a solemn voice.

I walk into the pity party. I’ve been neglected my whole life, even though my dad never seemed real enough to be able to neglect me. Oddly, I feel more neglected by my mother, who is always there. I can’t pinpoint why I feel this way. Sometimes I interpret it not as neglect, but as too much trust in me, which I’ve come to dislike.

We moved because my mom got a part in a TV drama being shot here. No Borders, it’s called, and the pilot airs in three weeks, right after spring break. She plays a surgeon, Samantha Lovejoy, who has come with a group of doctors whose mission is to help people on a remote island. They fight, fall in love, doctor, and have lots of downtime to do montaged activities and enact overly complicated methods of revenge. My mom has a leading role, which is many steps up from her prior gigs, mainly nonrecurring parts in sitcoms and minor roles in movies—very minor—not even the best friend, but the acquaintance or the quirky secretary or a shop owner. She’s done tons of commercials, both as an actor and a voice (chicken wings, deodorant, car insurance, Quilted Northern). I know I’m lucky. She could 8

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 8

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

be insecure and envious, tormented, egotistical, like so many people in her business. Instead she’s just happy for work.

Yes, I feel neglect, I feel it by looking around the room. I’m neglected by people who don’t know they’re wanted in the first place, by people who don’t know my name, who possibly never will, even though I know all of theirs—first and last. But whose fault is that? It’s my own. I’m getting closer to the middle now, to Sheri and the other counselors.

This question of neglect and the tougher ones that follow are making people look straight ahead, their faces dulling a bit. Walk if you are afraid. Walk if you think people don’t really know who you are. Walk if you love someone who doesn’t love you back. Walk if you’ve been used or humiliated. Everyone looks at Mia and Pua, two of the many girls whose Snapchat nude pictures were traded by boys who called themselves the Pokemon Trading Club. The boys were all expelled the second week I got here.

Walk if you feel that you’ll never have enough. Walk if you do things to feel good that aren’t good for you. Walk if these things make you feel worse. These questions resonate inside us, triggering our brains to remember things specific or vague, which can be harder—not having a thing to stick a pin into.

Ross and Jim aren’t making jokes after every question anymore, and the cluster of girls has been separated by their differing answers. The majority of the group is well ahead of me, which makes me feel boring. I need to steal, cheat, gossip, do drugs, text someone pictures of my boobs. Beside and behind me are the people I expect to see: Mark Lam, Mark Lum, Geoff Davenport, Sylvia Moncrief, the ballerinas, but then I see 9

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 9

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

someone only a few steps ahead whose presence surprises me: Whitney. Beautiful, blessed Whitney West, daughter of a hotelier; she’s like Hawaii’s Paris Hilton. I make eye contact with her.

She has never spoken to me before, even though our mothers are friends and my mom and her dad both went to Punahou.

Mom and the Wests have kept in touch, though it seems that Melanie’s fondness for my mom is proportionate to my mom’s success. A stint in a sitcom: Melanie West calls. A commercial for Crest Whitening Strips: not so much.

Now, for example, with a show set in Hawaii on the brink of its debut, Melanie is a close, close, super-close friend.

When my mom and I visited my grandparents—who passed away four and seven years ago—Melanie would have her come to dinner parties. She was Melanie’s actress friend. I was never invited (rich people seem to have a no-kids rule), and my mom would come home feeling slightly proud and slightly degraded.

“I’m kind of like a circus monkey,” she once said, having had to perform one-liners all night about the famous people she has come across in her career.

Whitney looks back and smiles at me, just slightly. I can’t tell if it’s a smile recognizing our family connection or if it’s a kind of sly grin, telling me she’s lying and she shouldn’t be so far behind. Why is she so far behind? Is she not as experienced as I’d imagine her to be? Or maybe she’s back here because nothing bad can touch her.

Her brother, Will, is a senior. He’s her male equivalent, lookswise, yet even more large and magnetic, pristine. My first week of school, I happened to pass him, thinking that he’d know who I was because of my mom. “Hey,” I managed to say. He looked 10

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 10

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

at me as though he wasn’t sure if I’d spoken or burped, and he kept on walking.

“Walk if you feel like you’re living your life to its fullest potential,” Sheri says in a soft voice.

I don’t move. Whitney doesn’t either. Of course we don’t.

We’re seventeen. I hope to God this isn’t my fullest potential.

On the other side of the partition, I hear the dribbling of basketballs and feel like our little world is being intruded upon.

Sheri turns the music up.

“Now,” Sheri says, “walk if you’ve ever done anything illegal.”

An easy one. Mostly everyone walks. I’m sure we’ve all had a drink, even the peer counselors.

“This week,” Sheri says. “Walk if you’ve done something illegal this week.”

It’s Tuesday. I rack my brain for something, anything. Jaywalking perhaps, not using my blinker. Other people walk, and they all happen to be good-looking, as if only beautiful people can have such bad fun. They’re looking around with smirks on their faces. What have they done? I have always known that my life was a little predictable, but for the first time, I see it as totally disappointing. Whitney walks. I’m farther behind her now. What has she done in just two days? Mike turns around and gives her a knowing look that I don’t think anyone else was supposed to see. I want to walk too. I want to seem interesting.

No—I want to be interesting. This is a race, and I am far behind.

And then I remember something. I guess it’s not technically illegal, but whatever—it’s against the rules. I proudly take five steps. I’m in the gym, and I’m wearing black-soled shoes.

11

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 11

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

•••

When I get home my mom tells me something that brings me back to today’s exercise, our crossing. I think of what I had felt during the truth walk—wanting a change, wanting something, anything, wanting to belong here, to just speak up. For me, it wasn’t about getting real and confessing, it was seeing what little there was to be said.

When my mom tells me what’s about to happen I experience a rush and then a kind of crushing. I’m stunned into silence— the what, why, when, whaaaat???? of it all stuck to my dumb tongue.

My mom tells me we’re moving to 4461 Kahala Avenue. The home of Whitney West.

12

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 12

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

2 I IMMEDIATELY HAD TO GET ON MY BIKE AND RIDE OUT

of Enchanted Lakes to clear my head. I rode through the other sections of Kailua, a town I know and love. I can’t say that I love our house, though. I ride back into our neighborhood and park my cruiser in the carport and look at our dark town house, which sits alongside a canal that I believe to be a source of diseased tilapia and staph infections. According to my mom, we will move to a three-bedroom cottage on a thirtythousand-square-foot lot right on the ocean. White sand, palm trees, disease-free fish.

Our current neighbors are a single mom with a red-faced toddler who is always screaming and beating his chest and, on the left, Dr. Rocker, a sex therapist for paraplegics. Our new neighbors will be less visible. I’ve already looked them up. On the right: Stanton Ichinose, founder of a hospital supply company and a recent addition to the Forbes list of world billionaires. To the left: Stavros Angelopoulos, a money manager known as “the Greek,” who just purchased the home (his third) for a bargain at twenty-one million.

Moving into a new home bought with my mom’s hardearned money would sound awesome to me, but the thought of 13

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 13

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

living in Whitney’s cottage? I may as well go the cafeteria, put on a hairnet, and serve her two scoops of rice.

I walk in. My mom’s in the kitchen, packing up a box. Her phone is docked and playing music—the poor sound quality is something she doesn’t mind, but it drives me bonkers.

“You’re packing already?” I ask. “You just told me two hours ago. I went for a ride, remember? To clear my head before getting more details. Now I need to reclear!”

“You don’t need to reclear,” she says, looking at me as if I’m joking around and not being completely heartfelt. Her smile is wide and filled with nice square teeth. She has a face that’s calming. I don’t know how she isn’t some megastar. She’s beautiful in this effortless and blooming way that makes me stare sometimes as if I don’t know her at all.

“I just got inspired to organize,” she says. She flips her hair back and rolls her head from side to side.

I look around at the stained carpet and worn armchairs that were here before we moved in. The chairs are covered with our things.

“There are boxes,” I say. “I see boxes.”

“May as well get started,” she says. “The cottage is open, and we pay month-to-month here. Plus, it’s kind of hard to know you’re going somewhere but not heading there, right?” She ponders a spatula, the slightly melted plastic, and puts it aside.

“This is crazy,” she says, but in a way where “crazy” means exciting and not insane. She looks at me for confirmation, but I don’t give her any, so she looks away, still smiling to herself.

I get a glass of water, wishing I had those poetry magnets to try to describe what I’m feeling with a limited choice of words.

14

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 14

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

I look at the small TV as if someone on it could help me out.

The redheaded woman on the screen says she’s going to stick it to cancer.

“How was school?” my mom asks. Her innocent everyday question has no place here, and how does one ever answer that question in ways other than “good” or “okay” or by shrugging?

“It was somewhat taxing,” I say. “I was nervous walking by this group of guys. They just sit in this spot, looking really bored, and I have to walk by them every day to get to biology.”

My mom keeps sorting through utensils and cookware.

“Biology was kind of fun,” I say. “We dissected a frog—I thought it would come shrink-wrapped like bacon the way they did at Storey, but Punahou doesn’t use real frogs. They use a frog app, so we dissected on our laptops.”

“Cool,” she says, though I could have said “I have herpes” and elicited the same response.

“Creative writing was creative,” I continue. “Our teacher is kind of lame. I think he wants to be like a movie teacher—you know, all irreverent and inspiring—but it just makes him look like a tool. I ate a papaya and a Dove bar and some sushi at the snack bar. And in ethical responsibility, we did an exercise that had the ironic effect of making me want to be more unethical.”

My mom sifts through a drawer. I’m always super detailed as punishment for her asking me how school was, but she keeps asking and, as far as I can tell, she listens here and there. I try to catch her tuning out.

I walk around to get air in my shirt—it’s so hot in here, and I’m sweaty from the bike ride. I can’t help but feel thrilled that we’re leaving. We’ve always known we wouldn’t stay in this 15

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 15

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

condo, so we never bothered to make it our own. My mom’s been keeping an eye out for rentals in Maunawili, or something in town. I’m not sure how we could have made this our own, anyway. It seems designed for anonymity.

“I jumped off the roof of the gym into the pool,” I say.

“Herpes.”

She throws some plastic spoons into the trash. “Are you swimming for PE?” Caught her.

“How was your day?” I ask. “Any other news? Or just that we’re moving in with strangers.”

“They’re not strangers,” she says and runs her hand through her hair. “The Wests are longtime friends.”

It’s funny how my mom’s voice takes on a Hawaiian lilt at times. I sit on a bar stool and drum my fingers against the counter. “I’m not understanding how all this happened. Melanie just asked if you wanted to live in their cottage, and you said yes?” I’m hoping the repeated verbalization will make it seem less bizarre.

“Yes,” my mom says. “That’s what happened.” She looks like she’s holding back laughter.

“Why would she ask? How did it even come up?”

Since we got here, it seems like my mom is constantly taking calls from or going to events with Melanie. With dogs, you multiply their ages by seven to get the human equivalent. It seems like for minor celebrities, when they come to Hawaii, their celebrity also multiplies by seven. San Francisco society couldn’t care less about my mom, but here she’s on what I call the charity circuit—going to fashion shows and dinners that benefit the 16

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 16

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

arts or kids with diseases. She chaired some kind of Oscar party, which even she found to be ridiculous. Dentists and lawyers came out and walked a red carpet in their finery, all styled for the grand occasion of watching the Oscars on TV. “It just . . . came up,” my mom says. I spin on my stool, and she goes through the cabinet with the pots and pans. “She knew we wanted a new place. She was telling me to look in town, that everything was happening on her side. Then she kind of lit up and said we may as well use her cottage, because it’s just sitting there. And I guess it made sense. We’ve been wanting to get out of here, and you know her—you can’t mention anything without her texting solutions and offers, I swear.”

She places the cookie sheets on the counter.

“No, I don’t know her,” I say. “I don’t know her at all. How much is rent?”

“Do you think we’ll need all of these pots?” she asks.

I don’t care about the pots. Kahala is like the equivalent of the Presidio or Nob Hill. I remember a sixth-grade sleepover at my friend Ashley’s in the Presidio. Her house was supposedly inspired by a castle in France. Her mother told me to make myself at home. I stood on the cold marble floors, looked up at the grand staircase and the chandelier, and thought, I don’t know how to do that.

My mom tucks her hair behind her ear. “So, she won’t let me pay rent.”

“What?” I automatically think of the charity circuit.

“I know, it’s crazy,” she says off my look. “But I’ll try anyway.

I offered to cook for them—” “What? That’s ridiculous—like an employee?”

17

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 17

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

She resumes her packing, gathering kitchenware and putting it into a box, her hair falling back in front of her eyes. “No, no, not like that. Just as a friend. A friendly neighbor. You know I love cooking.”

“Is this some kind of pity party? Should I wear ripped clothes and hold out a tin cup?”

She stops packing, finally stops moving and avoiding the sight of me—my slumped shoulders and questioning face.

“It saves money and gives us a place before I decide if we can make living in Hawaii permanent. Who knows if the show will get renewed, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll be staying anyway so you can finish school.” She blows out a puff of air. “Plus, it will be fun.” She holds out her fists in a kind of cheering move. “It’s beautiful, there’s a pool, surf, it’s closer to school, closer to everything, and you know the kids, right? They’re nice kids, aren’t they? It will be a good thing. Really great.”

I don’t say anything to her or her happy little fists, but my first feeling is of anger toward her versus empathy when she said it would save money. I don’t expect a lot, but sometimes all I want is an unawareness of money matters. I feel that I know too much.

I know that this week, Times has zucchini for $1.49 a pound, which is less than the farmers’ market on Thursday. I know that this week Foodland has the cheapest cabbage, and Safeway has blueberries that are buy one get one free.

I know tuition at Punahou is expensive and renting is outrageous, and I know that my mom does pretty much everything on her own. I’ve never been denied anything. Gymnastics, ballet, tap, musical theater, piano, ukulele, a brief stint on the 18

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 18

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

bass guitar, ski trips, after-school care, art, private school, car.

I’ve done and still do it all, but am always aware of her working for it and working alone. Maybe this is how all kids with single parents feel.

And so I don’t say that this arrangement, especially if she cooks, makes her seem like a live-in maid, because I’m sure this has already crossed her mind. I think when people see my mom on TV, they figure we’re super wealthy. She has access, she looks the part, but she’s in—not of—a certain world.

“Just have Stranger Dad send some money,” I say.

When I asked once how she affords private school, she said he’s helped a bit with tuition when needed. She ignores my suggestion.

“Melanie’s excited. She says Whitney adores you.”

“I’ve never spoken to Whitney in my life.” I open the freezer and grab a Popsicle, which makes me feel like a little kid.

“Well, she thinks you and Whitney will really get along. It’ll be fun. I promise. And Melanie says to use the pool, come over for barbecues, dinner. She says whenever we want we can sit with the family.”

For some reason, this makes me tear up a bit, and I’m not sure why. Is it because I could sit with my mother and the family and I’m happy, or is it because I’d be allowed to sit with my mother and the family and this is tin-cup humiliating?

“We’ll have our own space though, right?” I say. “So we won’t be sitting with them anyway.” I take the wrapper off the grape Popsicle and sit back down.

She doesn’t answer me, knowing I’m getting worked up. I’m chewing my Popsicle like a rabbit.

19

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 19

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

“I’m not going,” I say, but she doesn’t stop packing, which makes my heart beat fast, like I’m fighting with someone who won’t hit back. We both know it’s a pitiful threat.

“When are we going?” I mumble.

“We can move in now,” she says. “This week. Tomorrow.”

She won’t look at me. Look at me, I want to say.

I don’t understand my anger completely. I’m angry that what we have isn’t good enough. I’m angry that I have so much and don’t have a thing.

“It will be a good change for you,” my mom says. “Something different from Enchanted Lakes.”

I know she’s implying I have nothing to lose. She knows my daily routine and knows I won’t be leaving or giving up very much. Plucking me out of what’s familiar could only be for the best. I have no attachments here. My mom’s life is the one that matters.

I look out at the canal through the living room window.

Across the water is the shirtless man smoking a cigarette and rubbing his hard, round stomach. There is nothing enchanted about this lake, but I’ll miss the town, Kailua, the way I feel at ease here. It’s a place I could see myself growing into, tailoring it to fit.

I like my routines, even though they’re pretty solo—biking on the path by the marsh, the sounds of the birds and my tires on the gravel, the light shooting through the clouds and spilling over the Ko’olaus down onto the expanse of the Kawainui grass. Walking up to the Lanikai pillboxes, looking out at the windward coast and down at Waimanalo, which from that distance looks vacant and wild. Some days I walk 20

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 20

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

with Danny up to the Pali Lookout, and we’re often the only ones on the trail until we get to the top and are joined by the people who come on tour buses. The wind is so strong at the top you can’t hear anything but the sound of it, and you feel you’ll be swept away. When I’m up there, I always think of my grandmother, who lived here all her life, driving to town on the old highway. I think of the battles fought in that very spot, battles to unite the island chain.

“My routines,” I say. I have a life here. Kind of.

My mom looks up and sighs. “Be grateful. You can still do everything you ever did. We’ll be half an hour away.”

Then I’ll be visiting someone else’s backyard.

“You’ll find other routines,” she says. “Whitney will show you around, I’m sure.”

“What a carrot,” I say. “She’ll show me around Kahala Mall?

Or the Outrigger? Great.”

“She’s a nice girl,” my mom says. “And what a beauty.”

There’s nothing that makes me feel worse than my mom complimenting another girl: it’s less about her praising someone else than that she’s suggesting I change or try harder. Whitney, hair the color of burnt butter, golden skin that’s slightly freckled. If you described us, it would sound as though we looked alike, but the results of our similar traits are different. I feel like I don’t wear my brown hair and brown eyes and petite frame as well as she does. I straighten, throw my shoulders back.

“She could help you meet people,” my mom says. “You can’t just tag along after Danny.”

“I don’t need to meet more people,” I say. “And I don’t tag along.”

21

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 21

5/6/15 10:46 AM

Juniors_FINALPass

Danny’s a childhood friend, and I don’t tag along after him, no way. Do I? No. He wants me with him. He asks me to do stuff with him all the time.

“Anyway,” she says, closing a box and giving it a tap. “That’s the plan. That’s what we’re doing, so—” “So we’ll all be friends now? I’ll meet tons of people and have tons of fun?” I’m embarrassed that my voice betrays me.

It sounds hopeful and not sardonic, as I intended. That is her aspiration for me, and yes, fine, maybe it’s mine too, but her desiring it makes me feel I’m lacking something I didn’t know I needed. “Whatever,” I say and throw out my wrapper, then walk to my room where I look in the mirror and see all the things I’m missing. I stick out my purple tongue.

22

Juniors_FINALPass.indd 22

5/6/15 10:46 AM

THE

ACCIDENT

SEASON

***

So let’s raise our glasses to the accident season, To the river beneath us where we sink our souls,

To the bruises and secrets, to the ghosts in the ceiling, One more drink for the watery road.

When I heard Bea chant the words, it was as if little insects were crawling in under my spine, ready to change it. I was going to crack and bend, become something other. Our temples were sweating under our masks, but we didn’t take them off. It felt like they had become part of our skins.

The fire broke and moaned in the middle of the room and the arches above the doors whispered. I don’t know how I knew that Sam’s eyes were closed or that Alice had a cramp in her side. I only knew that I was everyone. I was Alice with her mouth half open, maybe in excitement or fear; I was Sam with his hands in fists; I was Bea swaying in front of us all, her red dress soaked with sweat; and I was me, Cara, feeling like I was coming out of my skin. Bea’s feet struck drum beats on the wooden floor. Her words

3

grew louder. Soon we were all moving and the floorboards were shaking the ceiling downstairs. Wine flew from our glasses and dropped on the floor like blood.

When we stamped around the fire in the remains of the master bedroom, we woke something up. Maybe it was something inside us; the mysterious something that connects every bone of our spines, or that keeps our teeth stuck to the insides of our mouths. Maybe it was something between us; something in the air or in the flames that wound around us. Or maybe it was the house itself; the ghosts between the walls or the memories clicked inside every lock, the stories between the cracks in the floorboards. We were going to break into pieces, we were going to be sawn in two and reappear whole again, we were going to dodge the magician’s knife and swing on the highest ride. In the ghost house in the last days of the accident season, we were never going to die.

Â

4

1

Elsie is in all my pictures. I know this because I have looked through all the pictures of me and my family taken in the last seventeen years and she is in them all.

I only noticed this last night, clearing six months’ worth of pictures off my phone. She is in the locker room at lunchtime. She hovers at the corner of the frame on school tours.

She is in every school play. I thought: What a coincidence, Elsie’s in all my photos. Then, on a hunch, I looked through the rest of the photos on my computer. And the ones glued into my diaries. And in my family photo albums. Elsie is in them all.

She turns her back to the camera at birthday parties. She is on family holidays and walks along the coast. A hint of her even appears in windows and mirrors in the zoomed-in background of pictures taken at home: an elbow here, an ankle there, a lock of her hair.

5

Is there really such a thing as coincidence? This much of a coincidence?

Elsie is not my friend. Elsie is nobody’s friend, really.

She’s just that girl who talks too softly and stands too close, who you used to be sort of friends with when you were eight and your father’d just died but who mostly got left behind with the rag dolls and tea sets and other relics of childhood.

I’ve put a representative sample of seventy-two pictures taken in the last few years onto my phone to show to Bea before class. I want to ask her if she thinks there’s something really strange going on or if the world really is so small that someone can turn up in all of another person’s photographs.

I haven’t shown the photos to Sam yet. I don’t know why.

In the older pictures, my house looks like a cartoon

house: no cars in the driveway, colored curtains framing the windows in hourglass shapes, a cloud of smoke attached to the chimney like white cotton candy. A seven-year-old me playing Steal the Bacon with Alice on the road in front of it.

And there, at the side of the frame, a leg, the hem of a tartan skirt, and the heel of the type of sensible brown shoe that Elsie always wears.

Those pictures were taken a decade ago; this morning there is no cotton candy smoke coming from the chimney, and the hourglass curtains of the sitting room frame the image of my mother hopping on one leg as she tries to wrestle

6

a boot onto her other foot. Alice, outside, stamps her own feet impatiently. She stalks up to the window and raps on the glass, telling our mother to get a move on. Sam laughs from the hallway, invisible in the morning sun that casts everything past the front door in shadow. I push my fists deeper into my pockets and look up at the sky. There are a few wisps of cloud just hanging there mirroring me leaning against the side of the car.

Alice is my sister. She is one year older and a million years wiser than me, or so she’d like to believe (and she may be right; how should I know? I am hardly wise). Sam is my ex-stepbrother, which is a mouthful to say, but as our parents are divorced, he isn’t technically my brother anymore. His father was married to my mother until he disappeared four years ago. He ran off with a biological anthropologist and spends his time studying gibbons in the rainforests of Borneo. Sam has been living with us for seven years now, so I suppose to all intents and purposes he is my brother, but mostly he’s just Sam, standing tall in the shade of the hallway, dark hair falling in his eyes.

Knowing that getting everyone into the car will take some time, I take my hands out of my pockets and pull out my phone again. I flip through the photos for the third time this morning, playing Spot-the-Elsie like in those Where’s Waldo? books.

I’d never realized that Elsie always looks worried. Frown

7

lines crease her forehead, and her mouth makes a little pout.

Even her hair looks worried, somehow, when her head is turned. That’s quite an accomplishment. I wonder what my hair looks like when my head is turned. The back of my head is not something I see very often; unlike Elsie, I pose when a photo is being taken, and smile.

When Alice’s head is turned (when, for example, she is banging on the front room window for the twentieth time to hurry my mother, who has forgotten something—her phone, her bag, her head—and has gone back upstairs to fetch it), her hair looks severe. It is dyed two shades lighter than her natural blond, always right to the roots, perfectly straightened, tightly wound into one of those make-a-bun hair donuts and stuck with two sticks. Alice has don’t-mess-with-me hair.

My mother’s hair is purple. It tumbles down her shoulders in unbrushed waves as she drives, and swings when she shakes her head. Strands of it stick to her lip gloss; she spits them out as she speaks. Today, she has painted her nails the same color. If it were any other time of year on this drive to school, she’d be reaching across to Alice in the passenger seat or fixing her hair, licking the tip of her finger to smooth the edges of her eye makeup or drinking from a flask of coffee like some people drag on a cigarette, but it’s coming up to the end of October and Alice fell down the stairs last night, so my mother grips the steering wheel with white-knuckled, purple-nailed hands and doesn’t take her eyes off the road.

8

She wouldn’t have driven us, but she’s convinced walking is more dangerous.

“How’s your head feeling, honey?” she asks Alice. It’s the thirty-second time she’s asked that this morning (the eightyninth since coming home from the hospital last night). Sam marks another line on his hand in red pen. Every time my mother asks this question, Alice’s mouth gets smaller and smaller.

Sam leans over and whispers in my ear. “Bet you a ten Alice screams before a hundred.” I hold my hand out to be shaken. Sam’s grip is firm and warm. I silently urge Alice to hold on until we get to school.

“You all have your gloves, right?” my mother is saying.

“And, Sam, I’ll write you a note for chemistry. Are you all warm enough? You did take your vitamins this morning, didn’t you?”

“Sure, Melanie,” Sam says to my mother. He grins at me. Alice will never last under this onslaught. My mother chances the tiniest peek at her before hurriedly looking back at the road. Alice is carefully tying a silk scarf to hide the bandage around her head. She has darkened her eyes with kohl so the bruise on the side of her face seems less severe. She looks like a storybook Gypsy in a school uniform.

We come to the intersection before the school. My mother’s hair whips around as she frantically tries to look every way at once before crossing the light traffic. We crawl

9

past at a snail’s pace. The other drivers sound their horns.

When she has parked, my mother cracks her knuckles and shakes out her hands. She takes off her sunglasses and gives us each a packed lunch. “Now, you will be careful, won’t you?” She squeezes Alice’s shoulder affectionately. “How’s your head feeling, honey?”

Alice’s lips disappear. She gives a short, wordless scream without looking at our mother, and storms out of the car and into the main school building. I slump back in my seat.

“Cough it up, sister,” Sam cackles.

When we’ve gotten out of the car, I reluctantly hand over a ten. We wave my mother good-bye and she drives carefully away. “I’m not your sister,” I remind him.

Sam drapes an arm over my shoulders. “If you say so, petite soeur,” he says.

I sigh and shake my head. “I know that means sister, Sam. We’re in the same French class.”

When Sam heads for his locker to get the books for his first class, I go find my best friend in the main school building.

Bea is sitting at the back of the library, her tarot cards spread out on the desk in front of her. She likes to read the cards every morning, so she can know what kind of day she’s getting into. Bea doesn’t like surprises. It wouldn’t surprise her to know that the small group of eighth graders sitting a few desks away from her are snickering and whispering be

10

hind her back, so I don’t draw her attention to them. Anyway, I’m half convinced Bea can give the evil eye to anyone who insults her.

I take one of my two pairs of gloves off my uncomfortably warm hands (it’s not the weather for hats and gloves, but my mother wouldn’t let us out of the house without them) and pull up the chair behind me to face Bea across the little desk. I rest my chin on the chair back in front of me.

“Elsie is in all my pictures,” I tell her.

Bea and I automatically look across the library toward the window. Usually by this time in the morning Elsie will have opened up her secrets booth for the day. The youngest are always the first to come to her, before the bell rings for assembly, before the janitor opens the locker rooms and the librarian comes out of her office to tell us to get to class. They come one at a time, type up their secrets on Elsie’s antique typewriter, and shuffle out of the library, heads bowed, pretending to be engrossed in the contents of their school bags.

Elsie’s box gets fuller and fuller with the things that can’t be said. She isn’t here this morning, though. Maybe she’s running late.

Bea turns back to me. “What do you mean?”

I take out my phone and show it to her. I point out the mousy hair, the sensible shoes, the worry lines on the brows of every Elsie in every photograph.

Bea takes a long time over the photos. Finally she looks

11

up. Her eyebrows are drawn together and her mouth’s a thin line. “Cara, this is . . .” She shakes her head slightly.

“A little weirder than usual?” I rest the tips of my fingers against my forehead and close my eyes. Bea reads tarot cards and lights candles for ghosts. She talks about magic being all around us and laughs when our classmates call her a witch.

But this is different.

Bea goes through the photos again, scrolling, stopping, tapping the screen and peering close.

“Do you think it’s real?” I say to her from behind my hands. “Or do you think I’m crazy? Please don’t say both.”

Bea doesn’t say anything. Instead, she shuffles her cards and lays them out slowly one by one on the desk between us.

She looks down at the cards, and up at me, and back at the cards again. When she finally looks back at me, she’s wearing an expression I haven’t seen in a long time.

She takes in my woolly hat, my remaining pair of gloves under the pair I just took off, the thick leggings I’m wearing as well as tights under my uniform skirt, the Band-Aid on my finger, the ACE bandage around my wrist, the vague aroma of echinacea and anxiety following me around like a strange sad cloud.

Bea sighs and nods; she understands.

It’s the accident season, the same time every year. Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom. Years ago my mother tried to lock us all up, pad the hard edges of things with foam and

12

gauze, cover us in layers of sweaters and gloves, ban sharp objects and open flames. We camped out together in the living room for eight days, until the carefully ordered takeout food—delivered on the doorstep and furtively retrieved by my mother, who hadn’t thought how she would cook meals without the help of our gas oven—gave us all food poisoning and we spent the next twenty-four hours in the hospital.

Now every autumn we stock up on bandages and painkillers; we buckle up, we batten down. We never leave the house without at least three protective layers. We’re afraid of the accident season. We’re afraid of how easily accidents turn into tragedies. We have had too many of those already.

“Alice fell down the stairs last night,” I tell her. “All the way from the top. Her head cracked on the banister rail on the way down. She said it sounded like a gunshot in a film, only duller.”

“Oh God.” “There was no one in the house. They said at the hospital that she had a concussion, so we had to keep her awake, walk her around and around.”

Bea’s eyes are wide. “Is she okay?”

“She’s fine now. Mom didn’t want us to come to school today, but Alice insisted.” I take off my hat and shake out my hair, then try to smooth it down. Unlike Alice, I don’t dye my hair (also unlike Alice, I’m not blond), and it’s too short to straighten, so my perpetually-growing-out pixie

13

cut sticks up in fluffy brown spikes whenever I wear hats.

Bea covers my hands with hers. The pinkie of her right hand loops through the wool of the hat I’m holding. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asks; then, as if to answer her own question, she looks back down at the cards. She clears her throat, as if she’s hesitating before she speaks. Then she says it. “I think . . . It’s going to be a bad one, Cara.” She tries to look me in the eye, but I stare down at her cards instead. It takes a minute for me to answer.

“How bad?”

Bea touches my gloved hand gently. She says it softly.

“One of the worst.” She turns one of the cards to face me. On it there is a figure on a bed being pierced by swords. I shiver.

My knee knocks into one of the desk legs and I feel a sharp pain. When I look down, I see that my leggings and tights have been ripped by a huge nail sticking out of the wood. A few drops of blood collect around the edges of the tear. I can feel my eyes start to fill.

Bea gets up and wraps her arms around me. She smells like cigarettes and incense. “It’ll be okay,” she whispers into my ear. “We’ll make sure nothing happens to you. I promise.

We can change this. And I don’t think you’re going crazy.

We’ll talk to Elsie. It doesn’t look like she’s in school today, but we’ll talk to her together tomorrow. It’ll be okay.”

I squash down the panicky feeling rising in my throat and take a packet of pirate-print tissues out of my schoolbag.

14

I blot the blood off my leggings, trying to move my wrist as little as possible. I don’t remind Bea that something’s already happened to me, even if it’s just cut skin from a nail and a sprained wrist getting out of the car last night. It’s always like this: Things happen and things keep happening, and things get worse and worse. I look back across the library at where Elsie’s secrets booth usually is. The empty desk is like a missing tooth.

15

2

For the rest of the morning I am careful, holding tight to banister rails, watching where I put my feet, avoiding corners and sharp edges. At lunchtime Alice follows me, Bea, and Sam down past the soccer fields to the train tracks behind the school. We like to come here and smoke sometimes (the teachers rarely walk by, and if we sit close to the tracks, we are hidden from the school’s windows), but Alice, who is in the year above the three of us, usually spends her lunch hour in the cafeteria with her friends.

“I just can’t take any more questions,” Alice says when I ask why she has joined us today. “Or staring.” I look away from her bruised face. Sam and I like to invent elaborate, nonsensical backstories for our injuries at this time of year. Nobody believes us, of course: The teachers wearily tell us to stop exaggerating and some of our classmates call us crazy under

16

their breaths, but at least nobody asks us too many questions.

Alice prefers never to talk about the accidents, even with her friends. It bothers her a lot more than it does us when people in school whisper about us behind our backs. A lot of things bother Alice.

“Also,” she says as an afterthought, “I could use a smoke.”

Bea doesn’t mention the fact that Alice doesn’t smoke.

She also doesn’t mention Alice’s bruises or the bandage peeking out from underneath her scarf. Instead, she sits down on the edge of the ditch with the train tracks at her feet and takes out her ukulele and a pack of cigarettes. She takes a drag on one and hands it to Alice. She exhales as she strums her ukulele, and her face is wreathed in smoke. With her bright-dyed halo of curly red hair, it looks like she’s on fire.

Beside her, blond, pale Alice looks like Snow White to Bea’s Rose Red. Although Alice would never describe herself as a fairy-tale girl.

Bea likes to say that Alice is like a looking-glass version of us: practical rather than poetic. I’ve always thought Alice’s namesake would make more sense for Bea, but then, we don’t get to choose our names. Bea was named for a Shakespearean heroine, Alice for a children’s book. They could never swap now. Sam doesn’t know why his mother chose his name, because she died just after he was born. As for me, my mother’s always sworn that my full name is Caramel. Sometimes I don’t even think she’s joking.

17

Alice hands the cigarette back to Bea, who takes a couple of drags. Her lipstick leaves bright red stains on the filter.

“Some people say that sharing a cigarette is like sharing a kiss,” Bea tells us as she hands me the cigarette. I grin and close my lips around the filter.

“What people?” Alice asks. Alice questions Bea more than the rest of us do. Maybe because Alice’s life is anchored in the real world a little more than ours are, or so she likes to think. She tells herself (and she tells us, loudly and often) that she doesn’t believe in the accident season or in tarot cards, but sometimes I wonder if she’s telling the truth. She ignores my mother’s pleas to dress in protective layers, but I often think that’s just so the kids in school won’t stare.

“All kinds of people.” Bea is used to Alice’s cynicism.

Sometimes I think she says even more outrageous things around her because she enjoys the challenge. “There’s something so intimate about putting your lips where someone else’s were just a moment before, inhaling the same air.”

Sam reaches across me and takes the cigarette. His fingers brush against mine.

“It’s not air.” Alice pulls up tufts of grass. She has one eyebrow raised as if in disapproval, but she is smiling. “It’s tobacco and tar.”

“Same difference,” Bea says. “You inhale it anyway.”

I take out my book and look across the train tracks. The day is still bright, but fading, like it’s tired of holding on to

18

the sun and the birdsong and the green smells of the fields just outside town. Like this weird warm October weather is finally tired of pretending it’s still summer and is just waiting for the rains and winds of autumn to start, to make it feel real again.

Sam leans against me and we swing our legs out over the tracks. My feet dangle over the iron and weeds: big red Docs over thick socks over small feet that could break too easily. I try to concentrate on my dog-eared copy of Wuthering Heights, but I keep having visions of the train arriving suddenly and crushing our fragile limbs. I try to convince myself I don’t believe that for one month of every year a family can become suddenly and inexplicably accident-prone. I try to pretend I don’t remember the accidents of the past—the bad ones, the big ones, the tragedies.

Involuntarily, I look over at Alice. Bea’s cards said this would be one of the worst. When the worst ones happen, people die.

My heart jumps into my mouth and beats there instead of in my chest. There are too many things I’m trying not to remember and sometimes there’s just no use pretending. I fold my legs underneath me and pull Sam and Alice up onto the bank of the ditch, away from the tracks. They don’t ask why, only sit with me, cross-legged in the middle of the dirty grass, and Bea joins us, strumming her ukulele softly.

I put my book back in my bag and we all take out our

19

lunches and the cardboard cups of tea we got at the cafeteria.

The tea has gone cold, but at least that means we won’t scald ourselves.

Sam takes a sip of his and makes a face. “Tepid,” he says.

“Delicious.” He looks over at Alice with a crooked smile. “So, how’s your head feeling, honey?” he says in a passable imitation of my mother’s voice.

“Ugh, don’t.” Alice tilts her head back and rolls her eyes.

“She really needs to learn that sometimes I’m fine means I’m fine.”

I watch Alice tear her sandwich into tiny pieces and eat them slowly, the butt of the cigarette she just smoked smoldering at her feet. I’m not sure I believe her I’m fine any more than my mother did.

“She’s just worried about you,” Bea says.

Alice brushes sandwich crumbs off her skirt. “My friends’ parents worry about them applying to the right college and not getting too drunk on nights out,” she says. “My mother worries when I’m not wearing more than one pair of gloves.

That’s not worry, that’s pathological.”

“No, you’re right,” Sam says to her with mock sincerity.

“It’s not like you have a serious head injury and were in the hospital last night or anything.”

Alice opens her mouth to retort, but before she can, I jump in quick and change the subject. “So what kind of schools are your friends applying to?” I ask.

20

Alice is one of those people who has a fairly large group of casual friends. She usually hangs out with the popular crowd at school, without being particularly close to any of them. They have lunch together and she gets invited to all their parties, but after class she mostly spends time with her boyfriend, Nick, who is more popular than any of them.

Nick is a musician with wicked finger-picking skills and a voice like a fiery god’s. His talent comes off him like a scent that every girl can smell half a mile away. I suppose that when your boyfriend writes epic love songs to you at three in the morning and pulls you up on stage after every show, you don’t really need too many more close friends.

I, on the other hand, am one of those people who has a small group of very close friends. Those friends are Bea and Sam. It is, I have to admit, a rather tiny group.

Alice pops a little piece of sandwich into her mouth.

“Kim wants to do nursing,” she says. “And Niamh’s first choice is business and French. So if I don’t get into computer science in Trinity, I’ll be in DCU with her. It’s, like, fourth on my list, though.”

Alice will end up being the only person in our family not doing something arty or literary, but I think for her that’s part of the appeal. “I’m sure you’ll get your first choice,” I tell her.

“If I don’t die of overwork first,” Alice says. “Do you know Mr. Murray has us doing two hours of study a night?

As well as homework?”

21

“It’s only October,” says Sam. “No wonder you’re so crabby.”

Alice reaches out and shoves his shoulder.

“What you need,” Bea muses, taking an apple out of her bag, “is a big, crazy party to get everybody’s priorities straight.”

“You’re right,” Alice laughs. “Homework should never be a priority.”

“Homework!” Sam suddenly exclaims with dismay. He starts to root through his bag for his schedule. “Please tell me that essay on the First World War wasn’t due today.”

“I would,” Bea says, amused, taking a bite out of her apple, “but I’d be lying.”

“Shit.” Sam pulls his history book out of his bag and opens it on his lap. “Have you done this?” he asks me and Bea. “We won’t be able to copy each other’s homework next year, you know,” I say sadly. “Not if we want to do well in the exams. And we’ll probably have to hand it in on time too.”

“Never,” Bea says solemnly.

“Well, I can tell you that most of my class definitely doesn’t give their homework in on time,” Alice says as Bea takes her history folder out of her bag and hands it to Sam. “Except for Toby Healy, of course.”

Toby is one of the most popular boys in school. He has sandy blond hair and an inexplicable tan and small dimples when he smiles. He’s one of the best players on the soccer

22

team and top of his year, and still spends almost every evening in supervised study. Not that I’ve noticed.

Bea gives me a mischievous look. “Cara thinks Toby’s cute.”

“Everybody thinks Toby’s cute,” I say.

“I don’t,” says Sam. “Everybody except Sam thinks Toby’s cute.”

“You don’t actually, though, do you?” Sam asks me.

Alice’s phone buzzes. She checks her messages but puts her phone down without replying.

“Cute or not, it would never work out,” Bea says blithely.

I am about to protest—despite only being very vaguely interested in Toby Healy, I feel I should stand up for myself—but Bea goes on: “For one thing, there’s only room for three in our Parisian loft apartment.”

Sam, Bea, and I have a carefully constructed and oftdaydreamed-about plan for when we leave school. We will move to Dublin together to study literature and philosophy, which will give us the education we need to run away to Paris, where Sam will direct French art house films, I will spend my days in dusty bookshops, and Bea will pay the rent by working as an artist’s model (nude, of course).

I give Bea a playful smack and correct a few lines of Sam’s history essay from the notes in my own notebook.

Alice’s phone buzzes again.

“Doesn’t that boyfriend of yours know you’re in school

23

right now?” Bea asks as the phone starts to ring in earnest.

“Back in a sec,” Alice says, getting to her feet and moving a few feet away from us to answer. Nick finished high school four years ago; who knows what you forget when you’ve been away that long.

Bea starts picking out a tune on her ukulele. I recognize it as one of the particularly depressing folksongs she likes to play. Ms. O’Shaughnessy, the Irish teacher, had Bea play the song in the original Irish a few weeks ago in class. Since then she and the music teacher, Mr. Duffy, won’t stop raving about Bea’s “new spin on traditional music,” but no one in the school folk group wants a ukulele in the band. Or maybe they just don’t want a Bea. Alice returns to us with a smile on her face. “He sent me flowers,” she says, sitting down to gather her things into her bag. “To the school cafeteria. He thought I’d be there now.

Kim says there are a dozen roses in a big glass vase. Everybody’s talking about it.”

I’m about to ask Alice what the occasion is or if Nick is just being romantic and spontaneous, when the ground beneath us begins to shake. The tracks sing. We turn to face the train. It flies past us like a snaky bird, screeching and screaming. There are faces in the windows all streaming by.

The station is just down the road from the school, and the train slows to let another train by, and in one of the cars I think I see a reflection of the four of us, but different, dis

24

torted by the light and sky on the other side of the window.

They look like they are dressed up for a costume party.

The redhead who looks like Bea could be dressed as a mermaid, scaly skin and all. I imagine there is a starfish stuck to her face and that her sequined dress ends in fins. Another girl with light brown hair as short as mine is sitting with her legs up on the table between her and the mermaid. She almost looks like she’s wearing a strange, fluid dress the color of oil puddles, and silver Converse, with blue-green fairy wings attached to her shoulders. They are squashed up against the seat back behind her. The girl sitting beside the mermaid—in the same position as Alice, who’s beside Bea on the grass— seems to be dressed as a forest, with leaves stuck to her face and to her mossy dress, and twigs and little flowers twined through her long blond hair. The boy of the group, sitting beside the fairy girl, looks like he’s just walked out of a silent film. His skin is gray and he could be wearing a sort of vaudeville-circus-ringmaster top hat on his black hair. I’m a little disappointed when the train pulls away, because he’s really quite beautiful.

“I wonder where they’re off to,” I say to Bea, who is also watching the train move away.

Alice, texting one-handed, stands up, slings her bag onto one shoulder, and hurries back toward the main school building.

“Where who are off to?” Bea asks distractedly, turning to

25

look after Alice. She starts to retune her ukulele with a series of loud twangs.

“The kids in the car right there,” I say. She and Sam look after the departing train, but of course the car with the dressed-up kids in it has moved away.

“What kids?” says Sam. Bea shrugs. “I didn’t realize there was anyone in the window.” She strums a couple of chords experimentally. “I just saw the four of us reflected in the glass.”

I snap my head back up to look after the train, but by now it’s gone. Maybe I’m just hallucinating from lack of sleep.

I think of the hospital last night; the nurses who know us by name at this point, the way we had to walk Alice around and around, ask her questions, keep her awake. My knee itches around the little cut from earlier where the blood has stuck the tights to my skin.

All the rest of the day I find it hard to concentrate.

When the three-o’clock bell rings, I follow Sam and Bea to the doors of the PE hall, but instead of going inside to get changed, I plead with Mrs. Smith, the PE teacher, to let me off class because of my sprained wrist until she agrees to allow me to go home. Bea, who would clearly rather not have to halfheartedly run laps in the sweaty, smelly hall, waves morosely at me as I leave to walk home alone slowly in the afternoon light.

Our house is a couple of miles outside town, down the

26

main road past shops and houses and housing developments, past fields and farms, and farther, down a smaller country road lined with hedges and whitewashed houses. Mostly, though, to get home from town, we follow the river. A little way off the main road, there is the river walk, which is sometimes no more than a rough track and sometimes a proper area with picnic benches and bridges to take you to the woods on the other side.

The place I like to sit is close to the smallest of the bridges—really just a wooden placeholder across the water waiting for the council to build a proper bridge of stone.

Instead of going straight home, I climb down and sit on the riverbank and take out a cigarette. The ground is hard and gritty beneath me. Across the river everything is yellow and red, the fallen leaves dry and crackly and inviting. There’s something about autumn leaves that just begs to be stepped on. I can hear them whispering in the breeze. I take off both pairs of gloves so the cigarette won’t singe them and I sit there for a while, a splash of color on the duller bank, smoking and trying not to think about Bea’s cards.

Since I was little, since long before Elsie started with the secrets booth, I’ve come down here when there’s no one else around, to tell my secrets to the river. Sometimes I almost think I can hear it whispering them back at me.

I open my mouth to talk about what Bea said and how I’m afraid this really will be a bad one; the worst one, if

27

that’s even possible—although I can hardly imagine what could ever be worse than the one four years ago we so often try to forget—when suddenly I think I see a shape between the trees. When I squint my eyes against the sun to look closer, it’s gone. I stand up and come right down to the river, the toes of my Docs almost touching the water. I could have sworn I saw a flash of mousy brown hair moving between the trees.

I take a last drag of my cigarette, put the end in the bin by the bench, and hurry over to the bridge. I’m halfway across when it begins to creak. I stop. I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times. It was built before I was born, but it’s sturdy; it has weathered the years. I take a careful step. Another creak, louder this time. Then, in a rush of wood and water, the bridge collapses.

I grab the hand rail and hold on for dear life as the bridge plunges toward the river. It’s a short drop. The middle section of the bridge hits the water and stops, caught between two rocks. Water whooshes over my legs to my waist, but I’m still standing, leaning against the rail in the middle of the river.

I’m shaking all over, but not from the cold. I’m okay, I tell myself sharply. I’m okay. I breathe deeply until I can move again. Carefully, hand over hand, legs heavy in the water, I make my way across the rest of the fallen bridge to the other side of the river.

I climb up onto the opposite bank. Still breathless, I

28

edge toward the copse of trees where I thought I caught a glimpse of Elsie. Moss and bits of twig stick to my boots.

They squelch as I walk. I part a row of branches and peer into the little clearing behind them. Everything is dark here, shadowed by trees. The light is watery and weird, full of whispers.

“Hello?” I feel like that girl in the horror films, the one who makes you scream at the screen, telling her to turn and run away. My heart does a little flutter dance. “Elsie?”

I think I hear a tiny noise coming from a clump of bushes at the far side of the clearing. Everything else is strangely silent.

I can’t hear the leaves crunch or the river flow behind me.

“Hello?” I say again. I tiptoe toward the bushes. The leaves rustle as I approach.

“Elsie?” I reach forward and part the branches quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid. There’s nothing there. Nothing except a small box squirreled away to the back of the bushes.

I get down on my hands and knees and stick my head in under them. The branches catch in my hair. I blow at the leaves to get them out of my way, and that’s when I see the mousetrap nestled in a pile of dusty moss.

For a minute I scan the ground, worried that I’ve gotten too close to a rodent’s nest, but then I notice what’s on top of the trap and it’s not (thankfully) a dead mouse, nor is it a piece of perfectly holey cheese like in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

What it is, is a doll.

29

It looks like it’s been made of cardboard and wire and cloth, like the Guatemalan worry dolls my mother keeps in a little pouch hanging from the rearview mirror in her car.

Only this one looks exactly like Elsie. It’s got mousy brown woolen hair and pale cloth-skin and it’s wearing a tartan skirt that looks like our school uniform and a shapeless red sweater of the kind Elsie always seems to wear outside of school. It even has the Peter Pan collar of a tiny shirt coming up from underneath the sweater’s neck. I back away and stand up slowly.

“Elsie?” I call. “Elsie!” No one answers. A little breeze whistles through the clearing and my legs break into goose bumps underneath my wet layers. Or at least I tell myself it is the cold and the wet, and not the little cardboard doll set out like the bait in a trap.

30

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

—Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 7

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

P ROLOGU E

T

he café in the basement of Tisch, the art and film school at New York University, was redecorated this year. After entertaining a

number of ambitious design proposals, including one with a water wall illuminated from within by pulsating LED lights, they decided to go with a retro–New York theme that featured subway-tile walls, stained mirrors, large filament glass lightbulbs, and hand-weathered bentwood chairs. They revamped the menu, too, adding old-school New York deli food, like huge pastrami sandwiches on rye, hot potato knishes, and half-sour pickles the size of a freshman’s forearm.

Everyone seemed pretty confident that the redesign would make the space more inviting for students than when it had a 1990s look, with grunge band posters and retro shag carpet and papasan chairs. Nobody ever went down there then.

They decided to dress up the wall behind the salad bar with silkscreened reproduction newspaper articles, all collaged together. For some reason most of the collaged newspapers documented long-­ forgotten tragedies, like the Draft Riots in 1863 or the Astor Place Riot of 1849. The decorator’s assistant whose job it was to find and

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 9

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

silkscreen the newspapers, they found out too late, had kind of a macabre sense of humor, and had been rejected by NYU. She’s since been let go.

Fortunately, nobody ever bothers to read the articles.

On the lower left part of the wall, overshadowed by the metal rack that holds the cafeteria trays, is the following story. There’s a smear of ketchup across the title, but it’s so low down on the wall that no one has noticed, and the bloodred stain has been allowed to stay.

The New-York Star Sentinel October 28, 1825

TRAGEDY STRIKES CANAL JUBILEE GRAND AQUATIC DISPLAY Dozens Feared Lost as Barge Sinks amid Cannonade New-York— The celebration of the marriage of the waters between Buffalo and the Atlantick reached a tragic climax off the Battery yesterday during the celebration of the Grand Canal Commemoration.

The day’s revels began as a grand cannonade announced the entry of the Erie Canal boats into the waters of the Hudson River. There they were joined by steam-ships carrying representatives of the Canal Corporation flying flags of the City, escorted by pilot-boats, barges, and canoes with Aborigines from Lake Erie to see them safely to the waters off New-York. Upon passing the North Battery the flotilla’s arrival was heralded with a National Salute, and it proceeded to round the island and traverse the East River as far as the Navy Yard, where it was met

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 10

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

by a Frigate flying the flags of the City, which fired another National Salute.

The officers of the Navy then joined the Corporation and their guests on the flotilla proceeding to the Battery, where the Grand Aquatic Display met with the Mayor and the Governor, together with representatives of the Mechanics, Merchants, Military Officers, Citizens, Tradesmen, the Students of Columbia College, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and all the Societies for the Grand Procession throughout the City. All ships and vessels were splendidly decorated, festooned with flags and pennants in celebration of the honor of the day.

By special order of the Canal Corporation the Evening Celebration began with the ceremonial illumination of City Hall beginning at seven, together with all Theatres and Public buildings similarly illuminated with suitable bunting and decoration. As the illumination neared its apogee, a grand display of fireworks of entirely novel design ignited over City Hall, with echoing fireworks and Cannonade bursting over the flotilla moored within sight of the Battery’s many thousand spectators.

The standers-by agreed such a sight was never before seen in the City of New-York, and when the barge nearest land erupted in a roar of great blue-purple flames, many were heard to remark that the Fire Brigade of the Seventh Ward had outdone themselves with their sponsorship of such a fine display.

However, the tragedy of their mistake was soon apparent, as screams pierced the night from the unfortunate barge, which carried distinguished family and guests of the Canal Corporation. Several pilot-boats approached to render assistance, but in vain, driven back as they were by tremendous heat and rains of sparks. As the flames licked into the night sky, the silhouettes of

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 11

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

the unfortunate souls trapped aboard could clearly be seen, their hands rending their clothes as they were burned to cinders.

Within minutes all that remained of the unfortunate barge were some few charred logs slipping beneath the nighttime surface of the harbor, and the screams of helpless onlookers echoing through the night, as elsewhere in the city the spectacular Grand Commemoration concluded amid applause and universal acclaim when his Excellency the Governor ceremoniously united the waters of Lake Erie and the Great Rivers of the World with the Ocean.

The New-York Harbormaster refused to speculate as to the cause of the barge’s conflagration, only suggesting that an errant spark had ignited the bunting hung thereon. This correspondent, however, observed what appeared to be anti-slavery sloganeering on the doomed barge, possibly the result of radicalism.

The United Brotherhood of Luddites has notified this paper of an imminent statement of responsibility.

The Canal Corporation has declined to comment on the record.

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 12

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

PART ONE

WES

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 13

6/4/15 3:01 PM

INTENTIONAL BLANK

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 14

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

CHAPTER 1

I

’ve been having trouble with time lately. But I must have been thinking about her even before Tyler said anything.

“Would you tell her to sit down?” Tyler hisses.

He’s squinting through the eyepiece of the camera that we’ve

signed out from the AV department supply closet. It’s a 16 millimeter, so it’s not like there was a waiting list or anything. I’m not even sure they’d notice if we forgot to bring it back. In fact, it’s possible Tyler’s not planning to bring it back. Pretty soon they’re going to be collector’s items. I wonder what one would go for on eBay? A lot, I bet.

“What?” I whisper back.

“Her. That girl. She’s blocking the shot.”

“What girl?” I crane my neck, looking, and the hair on my arms rises. At first I don’t see who he means. It’s too crowded, and I’m too far back in the corner.

“Her. Look.”

Tyler gestures for me to come look with an impatient crook of his finger.

The room we’re in is not much bigger than my bedroom back

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 1

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

home, and crossing it without accidentally groping somebody is going to be tough. It’s packed with, like, twenty people, all milling around and turning off their cell phones and moving folding chairs to get close to the table in the center. Red velvet curtains cover the walls. It should be bright, because the picture window faces the Bowery, but the window has a velvet curtain, too. Even the glass door to the town house’s stairwell is taped over with black construction paper. There’s a cash register on a counter off to the side, one of those antique ones that rings when the drawer opens. And there’s a door to nowhere behind the cash register, behind a plastic potted plant. That’s where Tyler’s set up the tripod.

The only light in the room comes from candles, making everything hazy. A few candles drip from sconces on the wall, too. Other than that, and a cheap Oriental carpet latticed with moth holes, there’s not much going on.

I don’t know what Tyler thinks is going to happen. We’re each supposed to make our own short film to screen in summer school workshop, and Tyler’s determined to produce some masterpiece of filmic experimentation that will explode narrative convention and reframe visual media for a new generation. Or else he just thinks using Jurassic format will get him an easy A, I don’t know.

I pull the headphones off my ears and nest the boom mike against the wall behind where I’m standing, in the corner farthest from the door. I’m worried something’s going to happen to the equipment and Tyler will find a way to make me pay for it, which I cannot under any circumstances afford. I’m disentangling myself from headphone cords and everything and accidentally bump the back of some woman’s head with my elbow. She turns around in her seat and glares at me.

Sorry, I mouth at her.

I keep one eye on the microphone, as if staring hard at it will 2

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 2

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

prevent it from falling over, as I edge around to where Tyler’s waiting.

The air in here has the gross, wet summer feeling of too many people all breathing in a room with no air-conditioning. My hair is slick with sweat. I can feel the dampness in my armpits, too, a fetid droplet trickling every so often down my side. I really hope I don’t smell. I didn’t start wearing deodorant ’til sophomore year of high school, when one of the coaches pulled me aside for a talk so mortifying I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.

It’s a more diverse group than I’d expected in this room. Mom types in khakis, a couple of panhandler guys in army surplus jackets and weedy beards, a girl with tattoos snaking around her neck and straight 1950s bangs, and at least one guy in a suit, like a banker.

There’s a black guy in a Rangers jersey and saggy jeans. One really young girl with a hard-gelled ponytail, here with her baby. I’m surprised she’d want to bring a baby here, but there’s no telling with people sometimes. Some of them exude the sharp pickled smell that people get when they’ve been drinking for a very, very long time.

I’m climbing monkeylike around the room, trying and failing not to get in everybody’s way, and the woman sitting in the middle, who owns the place, gives me a sour look because I’m being so disruptive.

“The angle should be fine from where you are,” I whisper to Tyler when I reach his corner.

“Yeah, no kidding, but she’s completely blocking the shot.” Tyler pops a stick of gum in his mouth, which he does whenever he wants a cigarette but can’t have one. Or so he says. I don’t think he really smokes.

“We’re going to begin,” the woman in the turban intones, and all the people start settling down and putting their phones away.

The camera’s on a tripod, angled down over the circle of heads, right at the center of the table. The table itself is like a folding card table, but everyone’s crowded around it, so at least a dozen pairs 3

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 3

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

of hands are resting there. It’s covered in a black velvet cloth, and between the knotted fingers are a couple of crystals, one polished glass ball that looks like a big paperweight, a plastic indicator pointer thing from a Ouija board, a dish of incense, and some tea lights. The incense is smoking, hanging a haze over everything, like the smoke that drifts after Fourth of July fireworks.

It’s a total firetrap in here. I don’t know why I agreed to come. But Tyler was dead set on getting footage of a séance for his workshop film. I don’t know why we couldn’t have just staged one with some kids from our dorm. That would have been easier. And he’s not a documentarian, anyway.

Not like me.

“Spirits are fragile beings,” the woman in the turban continues in a fake-sounding accent, and everyone but us leans in closer to listen.

“They can only hear us when they’re ready. When the right person goes looking for them. We must be very serious and respectful.”

“Look,” Tyler insists, plucking at my T-shirt. The woman glares at him, but he doesn’t pay any attention. He comes down off the footstool that we brought and gestures with a lift of his chin for me to confirm what he sees.

“I’m telling you, man, I’m sure it’s fine,” I whisper as I step up on the stool and screw my eye socket onto the eyepiece of the camera.

But when I look, a weird crawling sensation spreads across the back of my neck. It’s so intense, I reach up and rub my hand over the skin to get rid of it.

At first it’s hard to tell what I’m looking at. We’ve put a Tiffen Pro-Mist filter on the camera, for extra artistic effects or something, and my pupil dilates with a dull ache when my eye goes from the orange glow of the room to the softened pastel outlines in the filter. It looks like Tyler might have framed the shot too narrowly. He’s aimed the camera right on the woman’s hands in the middle, so it should be 4

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 4

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

showing me her knuckles wrapped around a glass ball, next to a tea light ringed in halos of pink scattered light. But all I can see is what looks like a close-up of the black velvet tablecloth.

“Can we talk to, like, anyone we want?” the girl in the gelled pony­ tail asks at the same time that I say, “Dude,” while reaching up to readjust the angle. “You’re in way too tight. That’s the problem.”

“Bullshit I am,” says Tyler. “She got in my way.”

“Shhhhh!” One of the mom types tries to shush us.

“Who did?” I ask Tyler.

I zoom out about 10 percent and then pan slowly across the tabletop, using the tripod handle like Professor Krauss taught us, expecting any second to stumble across one of the crystals magnified to the size of a truck. Tyler thinks he knows how to use this equipment, but I’m starting to have my doubts.

“I beg your pardon,” the woman in the middle interrupts us. “Are you boys almost finished?”

“Just about,” Tyler says, raising his voice. “Thirty seconds.” To me, he hisses, “Don’t screw up my shot, man. I’ve got it all set up.”

Like hell you do, I think but don’t say.

“Spirits who are at peace cannot be disturbed,” the woman goes on, trying to talk over our whispering. “Anyone we reach will have a purpose for being here. It’s our job to determine what that purpose is. To help them. Bringing them peace will bring us peace, too.”

“So we can’t just ring up Elvis, huh?” the banker jokes, and a few people laugh uncomfortably.

I’ve panned the camera slowly across what I thought was the velvet tablecloth, but I come to rest on a small satin bow. I pull my face out of the viewfinder and look up, squinting through the candlelight to find what the camera is looking at. But I don’t see anything. The table looks the same, crystals and Ouija thing and whatever. No bows anywhere. The person nearest the line of camera sight is the guy in 5

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 5

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

the Rangers jersey, who’s bent over his cell phone and not paying any attention to us.

“But I, like, wanted to talk to my nana and stuff,” the girl with the gelled ponytail complains.

“Huh,” I say.

“See her?” Tyler asks.

In the camera, outlined in eerie art-filter light, I find the satin bow again. I adjust the focus and zoom out very slowly.

The bow proves to be attached to the neckline of somebody’s dress, in the shadow of lace against pale skin. I adjust the lens another hairsbreadth. I inhale once, sharply, the way I do when jumping into the lake by my parents’ house for the first time at the beginning of the summer, when the water hits me so hard and cold that it makes my heart stop.

Tyler’s right—there’s a girl blocking the shot. A girl like I’ve never seen.

“I see her,” I say to him, covering my sudden irrational panic. “It’s not a problem.”

“We can reach her, if your nana needs to be reached,” the psychic explains with apparent impatience. “If she has something in this world holding her back.”

“Told you,” Tyler says to me.

“What, you saying my nana’s not at peace, and it’s my fault?” the girl’s voice rises.

“I’ll take care of it,” I say to Tyler.

“No, no,” the psychic backpedals. “That’s not what I meant.”

“You can trust Madame Blavatsky, sweetie.” One of the mom types tries to soothe the girl with the baby. “But you should let her get started.”

The weird crawling sensation spreads across my neck again, but

6

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 6

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

I can’t rub it away because I’m busy climbing back around the periphery of the room to reach the girl with the satin bow. She’s just standing there, not talking to anyone, looking down at her hands. My heart is tripping along so fast, I’m having trouble catching my breath.

I don’t want to make her feel weird or anything. I also kind of hate talking to people. But more than that, she’s . . .

“Yes, we really can’t wait any longer,” the woman in the turban says. “Spirits only have limited time, once summoned, to resolve their unfinished business. If we don’t act quickly, we risk damning them to an eternity in the in-between.”

The medium’s starting to get pissed off. I’m not positive, but I think Tyler’s paid her for letting us film. Which we’re not supposed to do for workshop, but whatever. She sounds really annoyed. I don’t blame her. I’m kind of annoyed. At Tyler, mostly, for dragging me along to do sound when I could be working on my own film. Should be working on my own film, especially considering how much is riding on it. In fact, all I want is to be working on my own film. But I find myself pulled into other people’s stuff a lot. I get caught up.

“What do you mean, limited?” asks the guy in the Rangers jersey.

“Like, they on the clock or something?”

Tyler thinks he’s going to be the next Matthew Barney. He’s doing an experimental film of people in what he calls “transcendental states,” using all different film stock and filters and weird editing tricks that he’s refused to reveal to me. I don’t think we’re going to see much in the way of transcendental states in a palm reader shop upstairs from an East Village pizzeria. But we already spent the afternoon with the AX1 filming drummers in Washington Square Park. I think he’s running out of ideas.

“Or something,” the medium says, and when she says it, a sickening chill moves down my spine.

7

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 7

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

The girl with the satin bow on her dress is standing on the opposite side of the room from the camera, not far from where I stashed the mike, looking nervous, like she’s doing her best to blend into the wall. She’s awkwardly close to the edge of the table. Nobody seems to notice her, a fact that causes my ears to buzz.

Now that I’ve seen her, I feel like she can never be unseen. She looks . . . I suck at describing people, and beautiful feels especially pathetic. But the truth is, I don’t understand how I haven’t been staring at her the whole time we’ve been here. As I edge nearer, my blood moves faster in my veins and I swallow, a fresh trickle of sweat making its way down my rib cage. I can feel her getting closer. Like I can sense where she is even when I can’t see her. She’s not paying any attention to me, her head half turned away, looking around at the walls with interest.

The girl is so self-contained, so aloof from all of us, that she seems untouchable. Watching her ignore my approach, I wonder how you become someone that other people make room for, whether they know it or not.

She’s wearing one of those intense deconstructed dresses they sell in SoHo. My roommate, Eastlin, is studying fashion design, and he’s got a sweet internship in an atelier for the summer. He took me to the store where he works one time and showed me this piece of clothing, which he said was a dress, which was dishwater-gray and frayed around the edges, covered in hooks and eyes and zippers and ribbons. I couldn’t really understand what the appeal was. To me it looked like something I’d find in a trunk in my grandmother’s attic. When he told me how much it cost I dropped the sleeve I was holding because I was afraid I’d snag a thread and have to take out another student loan.

I’m definitely afraid to touch this girl’s dress. Seeing how she

8

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 8

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

wears it, though, I begin to understand what Eastlin’s talking about.

Her neckline reveals a distracting bareness of collarbones. Her hair is brushed forward in curls over her ears in some bizarre arrangement that I think I saw on a few hipster girls in Williamsburg when Tyler took me out drinking there. She must sense me staring at her. Why won’t she look at me? But she’s finished her examination of the curtains, and if she’s noticed me approaching her, she’s not letting on. As I move nearer, near enough that I can practically sense the electrical impulses under her skin, she steps back, retreating from the edge of the table into the red curtain folds along the wall. I glance at Tyler, and he waves to indicate that she’s still in the shot, and I should get her to sit down already.

My heart thuds loudly once, twice. Up close, her skin looks as smooth as buttermilk. Milk soft. Cool to the touch.

I want to touch the skin at the base of her throat.

This thought floats up in my mind so naturally that I don’t even notice how creepy I sound.

“Hey,” I manage to whisper, drawing up next to her. It comes out husky, and I cough to cover it up.

She doesn’t hear me. At least, she doesn’t respond. My cheeks grow warm. I hate talking to people I don’t know. I hate it more than going to the dentist, I hate it more than taking SATs or doing French homework or stalling a stick-shift car with my dad in the passenger seat.

“When everyone is seated, we’ll finally begin,” the woman in the middle of the room says pointedly. A few eyes swivel over to stare at me trying to talk to the girl, and my flush deepens.

“Listen,” I whisper in desperation, reaching a hand forward to brush the girl’s elbow.

The instant my fingers make contact, the girl’s head turns and she

9

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 9

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

stares at me. Not at me—into me. I feel her staring, and as the lashes over her eyes flutter with something close to recognition it’s like no one has ever really seen me before her.

Her face is pale, bluish and flawless except for one dark mole on her upper lip, and twin dark eyebrows drawn down over her eyes. As we gaze at each other I can somehow make out every detail of her face, and none of them. When I concentrate I can only see the haze of incense smoke, but when I don’t try too hard I can trace the curve of her nose, the slope of her cheeks, the line where lip meets skin.

Her eyes are obsidian black, and when she sees me, her lips part with a smile, as if she’s about to say something.

I recoil, taking a step backward without thinking, landing my heel hard against the boom. The microphone starts to fall, and I fumble to catch it before it hits the girl with the gelled ponytail and the baby, and I nearly go down in a tangle of wires and headphones and equipment.

“Dude!” Tyler chastises me from behind the camera.

He’s laughing, and some of the people around the table are joining in. The guy in the Rangers jersey pulls out his phone and snaps a picture of me glaring at Tyler. The girl with the neck tattoo smiles at me out of the corner of her mouth and starts a slow clap, but fortunately nobody joins in and after a few slow claps alone she stops and looks away.

“It’s fine,” I mutter. “I’ve got it under control.”

“Whatever,” Tyler says, pressing his eye to the viewfinder and panning across the people’s faces. They’ve started to join hands.

Once I’ve gotten the headphones back on and the boom mike hoisted over my head, balanced unobtrusively over the table so I can pick up the soft breathing of all the New Yorkers in this second-floor room on the Bowery, I check to see if the girl in the deconstructed dress is still hiding against the velvet curtain.

10

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 10

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

I don’t see her.

The woman in the turban has blown out all but the candles in the sconces on the wall, plunging the table into an intimate darkness with everyone’s face in shadow. In my headphones I hear Tyler whistle softly under his breath, and I imagine that the scene looks pretty intense through the softening filter.

“Now,” the woman breathes. “We shall invite the spirits to join our circle, if everyone is ready.”

I get a better grip on the boom, balancing my weight between my feet and settling in. The woman in the turban told us it would only take about forty-five minutes. But forty-five minutes can feel like an eternity, sometimes.

11

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 11

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

CHAPTER 2

W

ell, that sucked,” Tyler says. He pulls on the gelled tips of his faux hawk with irritation.

“No kidding,” I agree, fastening closed the audio equipment case

with a final click. People are filing out all around us. Some of them look embarrassed. The banker guy was the first one out the door.

“I don’t know how they expect us to make an art film when nothing interesting ever actually happens here,” he continues.

“Tyler,” I mutter to him.

“What?” he says.

I glance pointedly at the woman in the head scarf, who can absolutely still hear us. She’s tidying up all the objects on her séance table, pretending like she can’t. The crystals clink together in her hands.

“Whatever,” Tyler dismisses me. “We should’ve done it on skateboarding. Those guys are always easy to find. And they love being on film. It would’ve basically directed itself.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. Because what the world needs is another student film about skateboarding as a transcendent state. That’s definitely the most interesting thing happening in New York City right now. As if.

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 12

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

“I’ll wait for you outside,” he says, shouldering a bag of equipment and pulling out his phone.

I nod, not looking at him while he leaves. I’m waiting for him to go. I want to try to talk to her. If I can work myself up to actually doing it, that is.

Some of the other people are loitering, too, like they want to talk to the woman in the turban. I know I should be going. We’ve signed up for the editing room tonight to work with Tyler’s digital footage, but it closes at eleven, and the sooner I can get this project finished, the happier I’ll be. I pretend to reach into the box to adjust the coils of wire inside. Really, I’m listening, and looking under my eyelashes to see where the girl with the hipster-curled hair is. One of the khaki mom types is talking to the woman in the head scarf in a low voice.

The girl in the gelled ponytail eyes me, jostling the baby over her shoulder. I was pretty impressed that the baby didn’t cry, what with the dark and the chanting and everything. Especially when all the candles went out. That was a pretty cool trick. I wonder how the woman in the head scarf did it.

I glance sidelong at the ponytail girl, quick so she won’t notice.

That girl has got to be like three years younger than me. That must really suck, having a baby in high school. She’s petite, and the baby is just a little guy, who’ll probably be small like she is. I let my eye roam down her body, which is tight and young. She’s in those uptown jeans, the ones that make a girl’s ass look really high, and she’s wearing huge gold hoop earrings. The baby has his fist around one of the earrings, gumming it. I guess I can see how it would happen. But even so. God. A baby.

“The hell you lookin’ at, huh?” the girl snaps, glaring at me. She shuffles the baby onto her other hip, freeing the earring as she does so.

Dammit.

13

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 13

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

“Nothing,” I mutter, looking down fixedly at the audio equipment box. “Sorry.”

“That’s right,” she says, turning her back to me.

Well, that’s just great. Caught checking out the unwed underage teen mother. I am an asshole.

My hands rush around to finish packing the audio equipment. I figure it’ll take Tyler and me about two hours to edit the digital footage into a rough cut tonight, and then over the weekend I can slap on some transitional music and headings or whatever, and he’ll get the 16 millimeter film back from the developer early next week and we can edit it in with the digital and then get this over with. Then I never have to see any of these people again.

“Busted,” whispers a young woman’s voice not far from my ear.

“Huh?” I glance up and find the girl with tattoos and Bettie Page bangs standing directly in front of me, her arms folded.

I struggle up to my feet, trying not to look at anyone. I definitely don’t want to catch myself looking at my accuser’s tattoos. She has starkly inked black laurel leaves coiling over her chest and up her neck, and the fold of her arms makes her breasts swell a little under her tank top. I swallow, looking fleetingly at her face, and then hard at a spot six inches above her left shoulder.

“Don’t feel bad,” says the tattooed girl. “I was staring, too.”

Someone pulls open a cheap velvet curtain, exposing the picture window overlooking the Bowery. The window lights up with the orange chemical glare of the streetlights below, tinted red by the neon sign advertising the medium’s services: palmistry psychic tarot $15.

clairvoyant

Outside, taxi horns, and the wet roll of tires

through streets hot with tar.

“Bye, Madame Blavatsky,” someone calls on her way out the door.

The bell overhead jingles.

I look more curiously at this girl’s face. Under all the eyeliner and 14

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 14

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

black lipstick and tattoos she’s actually pretty. Younger than I thought at first. My age, basically, so, like, nineteen. She has a snub nose and pale eyebrows, which suggest that the black dye in her hair hides an agreeable dirty blond. The red light from the neon sign makes her skin look creamy and pale.

“Yeah,” I say, because I’m really smooth like that.

More of the people are filing out around us. The guy in the Rangers jersey left like ten minutes ago, never looking up from his phone.

I glance over the tattooed girl’s shoulder, searching for the girl with the deconstructed dress. I haven’t seen her since the lights came back on. I don’t know where she could have gone, since Tyler’s tripod was blocking the only other door.

“So what did you and your friend think?” she asks.

“Um . . .” I hesitate.

The truth is, I thought it was a waste of time, and I’m pretty sure Tyler thought so, too. Everybody held hands and chanted, and the medium said some stuff and then all the candles blew out. But then there was a long wait and as far as I can tell nothing happened.

One of the moms started crying. Then the medium busted out some matches and lit all the tea lights again and then there was a little more chanting and then it was over. I didn’t see anyone in what Tyler might call a transcendent state. The atmosphere was spooky. I was ready to be freaked out. But then, nothing.

I’m on the point of saying this to the punk girl, but I stop myself.

What if she comes here all the time? Maybe she takes it seriously. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I peer at her face, probing it for clues, trying to read what she wants me to say. But besides a lip piercing that I didn’t notice before, all I see is a girl’s warm smiling gothmade-up face.

“I guess it was interesting,” I hedge. “I mean, I hadn’t been before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. But it was kind of cool, 15

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 15

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

I guess. I liked when the candles all went out. That was freaky. What did you think?”

“Eh.” She shrugs, hoisting an army surplus backpack over her shoulder. “I don’t really care. I just come here to sleep.”

“What?” I blink.

“It’s okay,” she says, taking my elbow. “Madame Blavatsky”—she gives the name ironic emphasis—“never remembers me.”

I was going to ask the medium to sign the release form that Professor Krauss told us to use for any projects that we want to put on the web—and I know Tyler’s going to put this on his Vimeo, because he won’t shut up about it—but this girl is dragging me by the elbow and anyway the medium’s busy talking to the girl with the baby. I hesitate. I don’t want Professor Krauss to tell us we can’t use the footage without the release. But then I think, Screw it. It’s just a summer school project. Nobody cares. It’s not like anyone’s ever going to see it anyway, besides at workshop.

“I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t remember you,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t.

The tattooed girl gives me a coy smile over her shoulder, takes my hand in hers, and leads me to the door. I’m dragging my feet, because I haven’t seen the other girl yet, and I really wanted to talk to her. I thought for sure she’d . . . I mean, the way she looked at me, I thought . . . But I guess, if she wanted to talk to me, she’d have stuck around.

I’m weirdly disappointed. I mean, I didn’t even talk to her. Not really.

“That was a nice line,” the girl with the bangs says as she drags me down the stairs to the street. “Almost like you didn’t even plan it.

Come on. I’ll let you buy me a slice.”

The first floor of the psychic parlor’s building houses a no-name

16

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 16

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

pizzeria, one of those places with Formica counters and fluorescent lighting and a good-size plate of garlic knots for a dollar. I spot Tyler on the sidewalk outside, our camera equipment heaped around his feet while he looks at his phone. He hasn’t noticed us come out.

“Okay,” I say. Pizza is good medicine for disappointment.

It’s a hot night, damp from summer rain, and the pizzeria doors are propped open to the street to capture any passing breeze. I don’t even realize how hungry I am until the smells of cheese and garlic hit me. Saliva springs to my mouth, and I’m instantly starving.

We spend a minute staring slack-jawed at the menu board overhead, and then we’re at the front of the line and a guy in a stained apron is yelling at us. He chucks our slices into the oven, jerks his thumb at the lady behind the cash register, and by the time she’s taken my ten bucks the slices are out, paper plates and puddles of orange grease and fistfuls of tissue-thin napkins.

She gets pepperoni and garlic. Two slices. She doesn’t even make a thing of getting two. My high school girlfriend was so weird about food, it drove me crazy, but I was always too afraid of ticking her off to say anything about it. I like that this girl eats garlic. And I like that she doesn’t seem to care if I like that she eats garlic.

I get the same, and we pick two seats at the counter facing the street. The window is open, but the air is dead.

“So what were you guys doing up there? Are you making, like, a movie or something?” the girl asks through a mouthful of pizza.

Outside the window Tyler spots me and throws his hands up in a what-the-hell-man? gesture that I’ve come to know pretty well over the past month.

“Kind of. I guess,” I say while chewing. “It’s for school. Like a project?”

“Oh yeah? Where do you go?”

17

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 17

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

“NYU,” Tyler says, appearing at the counter between us. “I’m doing an experimental film. It’s a non-narrative, multimedia, post-visual exploration of transcendent states. He’s just helping me out.”

Tyler reaches across us and helps himself to my second slice with a superior grin of acquisition. I glower at him.

“Um.” The girl with 1950s bangs suppresses a smile. “You don’t say.”

She eyes Tyler, and I watch her take in his skinny black jeans and faded Ramones T-shirt that he probably got at Urban Outfitters. I look down at my own utterly nondescript polo and cargo shorts from the Target in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, and frown.

“NYU, huh? That’s great,” she says in a way that suggests she doesn’t necessarily think it’s great.

“I . . . ,” I stammer. “I don’t really go to NYU. I mean, I want to.

But it’s just summer school.”

“He thinks if he makes a good enough film, they’ll let him transfer.” Tyler smirks. “Then he can go for real.”

My ears flush purple. Dick. It’s true, though. It’s the one thing I want most in the world.

“Oh yeah? You any good?” she asks me.

I start to answer when Tyler interrupts through a mouthful of my pizza. “We should get going, dude. We’ve got the lab starting in twenty minutes.”

“Right,” I say. But I don’t make a move to leave. I want to tell her that yeah, actually, I am pretty good. But I’m afraid if I say that out loud the universe will hear me, and then I’ll be jinxing myself.

“Well,” the girl says, toying with a crust. “Thanks for the pizza, anyway.”

“Sure,” I say. “No problem.”

Tyler sighs loudly. “I’m Tyler,” he says to the girl. “And this is Wes. And Wes has got to be going now. Come on, man.”

18

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 18

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

I glare at Tyler in a way that I hope will set the gel in his hair on fire, but nothing happens.

“Well, Tyler and Wes,” she says. One pale eyebrow arches at me.

“It’s been real.”

“I . . . ,” I start to say. There’s got to be a right thing for me to say, right now. Nothing good comes to mind, though, and Tyler is already outside with half the bags, flagging down a cab.

The girl pulls out a phone and snaps my picture. I’m embarrassed.

I always look weird in pictures. My hair sticks up in this wavy way that I hate, and pictures make my nose look huge. Plus I’m too tall, so in group pictures the top of my head is always cut off.

She smiles mysteriously at me and whispers, “I see you, Wes.” A strange shiver travels around behind my ears when she says this.

“I’ve got to go. Sorry,” I mumble.

“Sure.” She smiles that one-sided smile again, looking at her phone instead of me.

“But, listen,” I say in a rush of unaccustomed courage. “Can I know your name?” I’m not about to make the same mistake twice in one night, and not ask. Not even I am that stupid.

Her smile spreads, lighting up her eyes, and she leans in close to my ear.

“I see you, Wes,” she whispers again. Her lips hover so near to my ear that I can feel her breath on my skin. It makes my ear tingle.

“What?” I whisper back, confused.

“Dude!” Tyler hollers from the corner. “Come on, let’s go!”

Her smile goes sphinxlike.

Baffled, I gather my stuff, keeping one eye on her as I sling bags over my shoulder and toss a crumpled dollar bill onto the counter.

With a last glance at her, which she meets with a slow, silent wave, I turn and lope out of the pizzeria. Tyler’s loading equipment into the trunk of a cab when I arrive puffing next to him.

19

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 19

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

“Hey, you see that girl come out?” he says to me.

“What?”

“That girl. The one who was blocking my shot. Did you see her come out?”

I glance back at the pizzeria and observe the tattooed girl with 1950s bangs collecting my pizza crusts and dollar tip and loading them into her backpack. Weird.

“No.” I pause.

The girl continues to sit at the counter facing the street, fiddling with her phone. She smiles to herself, unaware that anyone is watching. I glance up at the windows above the pizzeria, but the velvet curtains have been drawn closed again. Thinking about the first girl makes the pizza weigh heavy in my stomach. The pizza of dismay.

“No, I guess I didn’t,” I say.

“You’ve got to make her sign one of Krauss’s releases, you know, to cover my ass. This is so going on my Vimeo channel when it’s done.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

Then we’re in the back of the cab and Tyler is giving the driver the address of the film lab. I turn and look one last time through the rear windshield. It glitters with droplets of hot summer rain.

The chair where the tattooed girl was sitting is empty, and there’s nothing but some greasy napkins and plates to show she was ever there.

Upstairs, behind the neon of the psychic medium sign, the velvet curtain twitches. I press my cheek to the taxi window, squinting up at the façade of the building.

A vertiginous rush knocks me sideways. I’m almost certain I glimpse the pale outline of the girl’s face with hipster hair curled over her ears. The face is looking down at our taxi in the street, and she’s

20

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 20

6/4/15 3:01 PM

MASTER SET - 2nd Pass

smiling. That perfect mouth with its perfect mole. The eerie feeling spreads across the back of my neck again, and I close my eyes against it. It’s almost sickening. The taxi jolts as it pulls away from the curb, jostling me against Tyler and shaking loose the weird sensation.

But when I open my eyes again, the girl is gone.

21

AnnieVanSindren_2ndPass.indd 21

6/4/15 3:01 PM

THE BOY MOST LIKELY TO

by Hu n t l ey Fi t z p a t r i c k

DIAL BOOKS an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 3

5/19/15 9:34 AM

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 4

5/19/15 9:34 AM

Chapter One I’ve been summoned to see the Nowhere Man. He’s at his desk when I step inside the gray cave of his office, his back turned.

“Uh, Pop?” He holds up his hand, keeps scribbling on a blue-lined pad.

Standard operating procedure.

I flick my eyes around the room: the mantel, the carpet, the bookshelves, the window; try to find a comfortable place to land.

No dice.

Ma’s fond of “cute”—teddy bears in seasonal outfits and pillows with little sayings and shit she gets on QVC. They’re everywhere. Except here, a room spliced out of John Grisham, all leather-bound, only muted light through the shades. August heat outdoors, but no hint of that allowed here. I face the rear of Pop’s neck, hunch further into the gray, granite-hard sofa, rub my eyes, sink back on my elbows.

On his desk, three pictures of Nan, my twin, at various ages—poofy red curls, missing teeth, then baring them in braces. Always worried eyes. Two more of her on the wall, straightened hair, expensive white smile, plus a framed news-

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 1

5/19/15 9:34 AM

paper clipping of her after delivering a speech at this summer’s Stony Bay Fourth of July thing.

No pics of me.

Were there ever? Can’t remember. In the bad old days, I always got high before a father/son office visit.

Clear my throat.

Crack my knuckles.

“Pop? You asked to see me?”

He actually startles. “Tim?” “Yep.” Swiveling the chair, he looks at me. His eyes, like Nan’s and my own, are gray. Match his hair. Match his office.

“So,” he says.

I wait. Try not to scope out the bottle of Macallan on the . . . what do you call it. Sidebar? Sideboard? Generally, Ma brings in the ice in the little silver bucket thing ten minutes after he gets home from work, six p.m., synched up like those weird-ass cuckoo clock people who pop out of their tiny wooden doors, dead on schedule when the clock strikes, so Pop can have the first of his two scotches ready to go.

Today must be special. It’s only three o’clock and there’s the bucket, oozing cool sweat like I am. Even when I was little I knew he’d leave the second drink half-finished. So I could slurp down the last of the scotchy ice water without him knowing while he was washing his hands before dinner. Can’t remember when I started doing that, but it was well before my balls dropped.

“Ma said you wanted to talk.”

He brushes some invisible whatever from his knee, like his attention’s already gone. “Did she say why?”

2

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 2

5/19/15 9:34 AM

I clear my throat again. “Because I’m moving out? Planning to do that. Today.” Ten minutes ago, ideally.

His eyes return to mine. “Do you think this is the best choice for you?”

Classic Nowhere Man. Moving out was hardly my choice.

His ultimatum, in fact. The only “best choice” I’ve made lately was to stop drinking. Etc. But Pop likes to tack and turn, and no matter that this was his order, he can shove that rudder over without even looking and make me feel like shit.

“I asked you a question, Tim.” “It’s fine. It’s a good idea.”

Pop steeples his fingers, sets his chin on them, my chin, cleft and all. “How long has it been since you got kicked out of Ellery Prep?”

“Uh. Eight months.” Early December. Hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase from Thanksgiving break.

“Since then you’ve had how many jobs?”

Maybe he doesn’t remember. I fudge it. “Um. Three.”

“Seven,” Pop corrects.

Damn.

“How many of those were you fired from?”

“I still have the one at—” He pivots in his chair, halfway back to his desk, frowns down at his cell phone. “How many?”

“Well, I quit the senator’s office, so really only five.”

Pop twists back around, lowers the phone, studies me over his reading glasses. “I’m very clear on the fact that you left that job. You say ‘only’ like it’s something to brag about. Fired 3

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 3

5/19/15 9:34 AM

from five out of seven jobs since February. Kicked out of three schools . . . Do you know that I’ve never been let go from a job in my life? Never gotten a bad performance review? A grade lower than a B? Neither has your sister.”

Right. Perfect old Nano. “My grades were always good,” I say. My eyes stray again to the Macallan. Need something to do with my hands. Rolling a joint would be good.

“Exactly,” Pop says. He jerks from the chair, nearly as angular and almost as tall as me, drops his glasses on the desk with a clatter, runs his hands quickly through his short hair, then focuses on scooping out ice and measuring scotch.

I catch a musky, iodine-y whiff of it, and man, it smells good.

“You’re not stupid, Tim. But you sure act that way.”

Yo-kay . . . He’s barely spoken to me all summer. Now he’s on my nuts? But I should try. I drag my eyes off the caramelcolored liquid in his glass and back to his face.

“Pop. Dad. I know I’m not the son you would have . . . special ordered—” “Would you like a drink?”

He sloshes more scotch into another glass, uncharacteristically careless, sets it out on the Columbia University coaster on the side table next to the couch, slides it toward me. He tips his own glass to his lips, then places it neatly on his coaster, almost completely chugged.

Well, this is fucked up.

“Uh, look.” My throat’s so tight, my voice comes out weird—husky, then high-pitched. “I haven’t had a drink or anything like that since the end of June, so that’s, uh, fifty-nine 4

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 4

5/19/15 9:34 AM

days, but who’s counting. I’m doing my best. And I’ll—” Pop has steepled his hands and is scrutinizing the fish tank against the wall.

I’m boring him.

“And I’ll keep doin’ it . . .” I trail off.

There’s a long pause. During which I have no idea what he’s thinking. Only that my best friend is on his way over, and my Jetta in the driveway is seeming more and more like a getaway car.

“Four months,” Pop says, in this, like, flat voice, like he’s reading it off a piece of paper. Since he’s turned back to look down at his desk, it’s possible.

“Um . . . yes . . . What?”

“I’m giving you four months from today to pull your life together. You’ll be eighteen in December. A man. After that, unless I see you acting like one—in every way—I’m cutting off your allowance, I’ll no longer pay your health and car insurance, and I’ll transfer your college fund into your sister’s.”

Not as though there was ever a welcome mat under me, but whatever the fuck was there has been yanked out and I’m slammed down hard on my ass.

Wait . . . what?

A man by December. Like, poof, snap, shazam. Like there’s some expiration date on . . . where I am now.

“But—” I start.

He checks his Seiko, hitting a button, maybe starting the countdown. “Today is August twenty-fourth. That gives you until just before Christmas.”

“But—” 5

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 5

5/19/15 9:34 AM

He holds up his hand, like he’s slapping the off button on my words. It’s ultimatum number two or nothing.

No clue what to say anyway, but it doesn’t matter, because the conversation is over.

We’re done here.

Unfold my legs, yank myself to my feet, and I head for the door on autopilot.

Can’t get out of the room fast enough.

For either of us, apparently.

Ho, ho, ho to you too, Pop.

6

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 6

5/19/15 9:34 AM

Chapter Two “You’re really doing this?”

I’m shoving the last of my clothes into a cardboard box when my ma comes in, without knocking, because she never does. Risky as hell when you have a horny seventeen-year-old son. She hovers in the doorway, wearing a pink shirt and this denim skirt with—what are those? Crabs?—sewn all over it.

“Just following orders, Ma.” I cram flip-flops into the stuffed box, push down on them hard. “Pop’s wish is my command.”

She takes a step back like I’ve slapped her. I guess it’s my tone. I’ve been sober nearly two months, but I have yet to go cold turkey on assholicism. Ha. “You had so much I never had, Timothy . . .”

Away we go. “. . . private school, swimming lessons, tennis camp . . .”

Yep, I’m an alcoholic high school dropout, but check out my backhand!

She shakes out the wrinkles in a blue blazer, one quick motion, flapping it into the air with an abrasive crack. “What are you going to do—keep working at that hardware store?

Going to those meetings?”

She says “hardware store” like “strip club” and “going to

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 7

5/19/15 9:34 AM

those meetings” like “making those sex tapes.”

“It’s a good job. And I need those meetings.”

Ma’s hands start smoothing my stack of folded clothes. Blue veins stand out on her freckled, pale arms. “I don’t see what strangers can do for you that your own family can’t.”

I open my mouth to say: “I know you don’t. That’s why I need the strangers.” Or: “Uncle Sean sure could have used those strangers.” But we don’t talk about that, or him.

I shove a pair of possibly too-small loafers in the box and go over to give her a hug.

She pats my back, quick and sharp, and pulls away.

“Cheer up, Ma. Nan’ll definitely get into Columbia. Only one of your children is a fuck-up.”

“Language, Tim.” “Sorry. My bad. Cock-up.”

“That,” she says, “is even worse.”

Okeydokey. Whatever.

My bedroom door flies open—again no knock.

“Some girl who sounds like she has laryngitis is on the phone for you, Tim,” Nan says, eyeing my packing job. “God, everything’s going to be all wrinkly.”

“I don’t care—” But she’s already dumped the cardboard box onto my bed.

“Where’s your suitcase?” She starts dividing stuff into piles.

“The blue plaid one with your monogram?”

“No clue.”

“I’ll check the basement,” Ma says, looking relieved to have a reason to head for the door. “This girl, Timothy? Should I bring you the phone?”

8

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 8

5/19/15 9:34 AM

I can’t think of any girl I have a thing to say to. Except Alice Garrett. Who definitely would not be calling me.

“Tell her I’m not home.”

Permanently.

Nan’s folding things rapidly, piling up my shirts in order of style. I reach out to still her hands. “Forget it. Not important.”

She looks up. Shit, she’s crying.

We Masons cry easily. Curse of the Irish (one of ’em). I loop one elbow around her neck, thump her on the back a little too hard. She starts coughing, chokes, gives a weak laugh.

“You can come visit me, Nano. Any time you need to . . . escape . . . or whatever.”

“Please. It won’t be the same,” Nan says, then blows her nose on the hem of my shirt.

It won’t. No more staying up till nearly dawn, watching old Steve McQueen movies because I think he’s badass and Nan thinks he’s hot. No Twizzlers and Twix and shit appearing in my room like magic because Nan knows massive sugar infusions are the only sure cure for drug addiction.

“Lucky for you. No more covering my lame ass when I stay out all night, no more getting creative with excuses when I don’t show for something, no more me bumming money off you constantly.”

Now she’s wiping her eyes with my shirt. I haul it off, hand it to her. “Something to remember me by.”

She actually folds that, then stares at the neat little square, all sad-faced. “Sometimes it’s like I’m missing everyone I ever met. I actually even miss Daniel. I miss Samantha.”

“Daniel was a pompous prickface and a crap boyfriend.

9

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 9

5/19/15 9:34 AM

Samantha, your actual best friend, is ten blocks and ten minutes away—shorter if you text her.”

She blows that off, hunkers down, pulling knobbly knees to her chest and lowering her forehead so her hair sweeps forward to cover her blotchy face. Nan and I are both ginger, but she got all the freckles, everywhere, while mine are only across my nose. She looks up at me with that face she does, all pathetic and quivery. I hate that face. It always wins.

“You’ll be fine, Nan.” I tap my temple. “You’re just as smart as me. Much less messed up. At least as far as most people know.”

Nan twitches back. We lock eyes. The elephant in the room lies bleeding out on the floor between us. Then she looks away, gets busy picking up another T-shirt to fold expertly, like the only thing that matters in the world is for the sleeves to align.

“Not really,” she says in a subdued voice. Not taking the bait there either, I guess.

I grope around the quilt on my bed, locate my cigs, light one, and take a deep drag. I know it’s all kinds of bad for me, but God, how does anyone get through the day without smoking? Setting the smoldering butt down in the ashtray, I tap her on the back again, gently this time.

“Hey now. Don’t stress. You know Pop. He wants to add it up and get a positive bottom line. Job. High school diploma.

College-bound. Check, check, check. It only has to look good.

I can pull that off.”

Don’t know if this is cheering my sister up, but as I talk, the squirming fireball in my stomach cools and settles. Fake it. That I can do.

10

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 10

5/19/15 9:34 AM

Mom pops her head into the room. “That Garrett boy’s here.

Heavens, put on a shirt, Tim.” She digs in a bureau drawer and thrusts a Camp Wyoda T-shirt I thought I’d ditched years ago at me. Nan leaps up, knuckling away her tears, pulling at her own shirt, wiping her palms on her shorts. She has a zillion twitchy habits—biting her nails, twisting her hair, tapping her pencils. I could always get by on a fake ID, a calm face, and a smile. My sister could look guilty saying her prayers. Feet on the stairs, staccato knock on the door—the one person who knocks!—and Jase comes in, swipes back his damp hair with the heel of one hand.

“Shit, man. We haven’t even started loading and you’re already sweating?”

“Ran here,” he says, hands planted hard his on kneecaps. He glances up. “Hey, Nan.” Nan, who has turned her back, gives a quick, jerky nod.

When she twists around to tumble more neatly balled socks into my cardboard box, her eyes stray to Jase, up, slowly down.

He’s the guy girls always look at twice.

“You ran here? It’s like five miles from your house! Are you nuts?”

“Three, and nah.” Jase braces his forearm against the wall, bending his leg, holding his ankle, stretching out. “Seriously out of shape after sitting around the store all summer. Even after three weeks of training camp, I’m nowhere near up to speed.”

“You don’t seem out of shape,” Nan says, then shakes her head so her hair slips forward over her face. “Don’t leave without telling me, Tim.” She scoots out the door.

11

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 11

5/19/15 9:34 AM

“You set?” Jase looks around the room, oblivious to my sister’s hormone spike.

“Uh . . . I guess.” I look around too, frickin’ blank. All I can think to take is my clamshell ashtray. “The clothes, anyway. I suck at packing.”

“Toothbrush?” Jase suggests mildly. “Razor. Books, maybe?

Sports stuff.”

“My lacrosse stick from Ellery Prep? Don’t think I’ll need it.”

I tap out another cigarette.

“Bike? Skateboard? Swim gear?” Jase glances over at me, smile flashing in the flare of my lighter.

Mom barges back in so fast, the door knocks against the wall. An umbrella and a huge yellow slicker are draped over one arm, an iron in one hand. “You’ll want these. Should I pack you blankets? What happened to that nice boy you were going to move in with, anyway?”

“Didn’t work out.” As in: That nice boy, my AA buddy Connell, relapsed on both booze and crack, called me all slurry and screwed up, full of blurry suck-ass excuses, so he’s obviously out. The garage apartment is my best option.

“Is there even any heat in that ratty place?”

“Jesus God, Ma. You haven’t even seen the frickin’—” “It’s pretty reliable,” Jase says, not even wincing. “It was my brother’s, and Joel likes his comforts.”

“All right. I’ll . . . leave you two boys to—carry on.” She pauses, runs her hand through her hair, showing half an inch of gray roots beneath the red. “Don’t forget to take the stenciled paper Aunt Nancy sent in case you need to write thankyou notes.”

12

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 12

5/19/15 9:34 AM

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Ma. Uh, forgetting, I mean.”

Jase bows his head, smiling, then shoulders the cardboard box.

“What about pillows?” she says. “You can tuck those right under the other arm, can’t you, a big strapping boy like you?”

Christ.

He obediently raises an elbow and she rams two pillows into his armpit.

“I’ll throw all this in the Jetta. Take your time, Tim.” I scan the room one last time. Tacked to the corkboard over my desk is a sheet of paper with the words THE BOY MOST LIKELY TO scrawled in red marker at the top. One of the few days last fall I remember clearly—hanging with a bunch of my (loser) friends at Ellery out by the boathouse where they stowed the kayaks (and the stoners). We came up with our antidote to those stupid yearbook lists: Most likely to be a millionaire by twenty-five. Most likely to star in her own reality show. Most likely to get an NFL contract. Don’t know why I kept the thing.

I pop the list off the wall, fold it carefully, jam it into my back pocket.

Nan emerges as soon as Jase, who’s been waiting for me in the foyer, opens the creaky front door to head out.

“Tim,” she whispers, cool hand wrapping around my forearm. “Don’t vanish.” As if when I leave our house I’ll evaporate like fog rising off the river.

Maybe I will.

By the time we pull into the Garretts’ driveway, I’ve burned through three cigarettes, hitting up the car lighter for the next 13

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 13

5/19/15 9:34 AM

before I’ve chucked the last. If I could have smoked all of them at once, I would’ve.

“You should kick those,” Jase says, looking out the window, not pinning me with some accusatory face.

I make to hurl the final butt, then stop myself.

Yeah, toss it next to little Patsy’s Cozy Coupe and four-yearold George’s midget baby blue bike with training wheels. Plus, George thinks I’ve quit.

“Can’t,” I tell him. “Tried. Besides, I’ve already given up drinking, drugs, and sex. Gotta have a few vices or I’d be too perfect.”

Jase snorts. “Sex? Don’t think you have to give that up.” He opens the passenger-side door, starts to slide out.

“The way I did it, I do. Gotta stop messing with any chick with a pulse.”

Now Jase looks uncomfortable. “That was an addiction too?” he asks, half in, half out the door, nudging the pile of old newspapers on the passenger side with the toe of one Converse.

“Not in the sense that I, like, had to have it, or whatever. It was just . . another way to blow stuff off. Numb out.”

He nods like he gets it, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Gotta explain. “I’d get wasted at parties. Hook up with girls I didn’t like or even know. It was never all that great.”

“Guess not”—he slides out completely—“if you’re with someone you don’t even like or know. Might be different if you were sober and actually cared.”

“Yeah, well.” I light up one last cigarette. “Don’t hold your breath.”

14

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 14

5/19/15 9:34 AM

Chapter Three “There is,” I say through my teeth, “an owl in the freezer. Can any of you guys explain this to me?”

Three of my younger brothers stare back at me. Blank walls.

My younger sister doesn’t look up from texting.

I repeat the question.

“Harry put it there,” Duff says.

“Duff told me to,” Harry says.

George, my youngest brother, cranes his neck. “What kind of owl? Is it dead? Is it white like Hedwig?”

I poke at the rock-solid owl, which is wrapped in a frosty freezer bag. “Very dead. Not white. And someone ate all the frozen waffles and put the box back in empty again.”

They all shrug, as if this is as much of an unsolvable mystery as the owl.

“Let’s try again. Why is this owl in the freezer?”

“Harry’s going to bring it in for show-and-tell when school starts,” Duff says.

“Sanjay Sapati brought in a seal skull last year. This is way better. You can still see its eyeballs. They’re only a little rotted.” Harry stirs his oatmeal, frowning down at what I’ve tried to pass off as a fun “breakfast for lunch” occasion. He upturns

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 15

5/19/15 9:34 AM

the spoon, shakes it, but the glob of cereal sticks, thick as paste, stubborn as my brother. Harry holds the spoon out toward me, accusingly.

“You get what you get and you don’t get upset,” I say to him.

“But I do. I do get upset. This is nasty, Alice.”

“Just eat it,” I say, clinging to patience with all my fingernails. This is all temporary. Just until Dad gets a bit better, until Mom doesn’t have to be in three places at once. “It’s healthy,” I add, but I have to agree with my seven-year-old brother. We’re way overdue for a grocery run. The fridge has nothing but eggs, applesauce, and ketchup, the cabinet is bare of anything but Joel’s protein-enhanced oatmeal. And the only thing in the freezer is . . . a dead bird.

“We can’t have an owl in here, guys.” I scramble for Mom’s reasonable tone. “It’ll make the ice cream taste bad.”

“Can we have ice cream instead of this?” Harry pushes, sticking his spoon into the oatmeal, where it pokes out like a gravestone on a gray hill.

I try to sell it as “the kind of porridge the Three Bears ate,” but George and Harry are skeptical, Duff, at eleven, is too old for all that, and Andy wrinkles her nose and says, “I’ll eat later. I’m too nervous now anyway.”

“It’s lame to be nervous about Kyle Comstock,” Duff says.

“He’s a boob.”

“Boooooob,” Patsy repeats from her high chair, the eighteenmonth-old copycat.

“You don’t understand anything,” Andy says, leaving the kitchen, no doubt to try on yet another outfit before sailing camp awards. Six hours away from now.

16

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 16

5/19/15 9:34 AM

“Who cares what she wears? It’s the stupid sailing awards,” Duff grumbles. “This stuff is vomitous, Alice. It’s like gruel. Like what they make Oliver Twist eat.”

“He wanted more,” I point out.

“He was starving,” Duff counters.

“Look, stop arguing and eat the damn stuff.”

George’s eyes go big. “Mommy doesn’t say that word. Daddy says not to.”

“Well, they aren’t here, are they?”

George looks mournfully down at his oatmeal, poking at it with his spoon like he might find Mom and Dad in there.

“Sorry, Georgie,” I say repentantly. “How about some eggs, guys?”

“No!” they all say at once. They’ve had my eggs before. Since Mom has been spending a lot of time at either doctors’ appointments for herself or doctor and physical therapy consults for Dad, they’ve suffered through the full range of my limited culinary talents.

“I’ll get rid of the owl if you give us money to eat breakfast in town,” Duff says.

“Alice, look!” Andy says despairingly, “I knew this wouldn’t fit.” She hovers in the doorway in the sundress I loaned her, the front sagging. “When do I get off the itty-bitty-titty committee?

You did before you were even thirteen.” She sounds accusatory, like I used up the last available bigger chest size in the family.

“Titty committee?” Duff starts laughing. “Who’s on that? I bet Joel is. And Tim.” “You are so immature that listening to you actually makes me younger,” Andy tells him. “Alice, help! I love this dress. You 17

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 17

5/19/15 9:34 AM

never lend it to me. I’m going to die if I can’t wear it.” She looks wildly around the kitchen. “Do I stuff it? With what?”

“Breadcrumbs?” Duff is still cracking up. “Oatmeal? Owl feathers?”

I point the oatmeal spoon at her. “Never stuff. Own your size.”

“I want to wear this dress.” Andy scowls at me. “It’s perfect.

Except it doesn’t fit. There. Do you have anything else? That’s flatter?”

“Did you ask Samantha?” I glare at Duff, who is shoving several kitchen sponges down his shirt. Harry, who doesn’t get what’s going on—I hope—but is happy to join in on tormenting Andy, is wadding up some diapers from Patsy’s clean stack and following suit. My brother’s girlfriend has much more patience than I do.

Maybe because Samantha only has one sibling to deal with.

“She’s helping her mom take her sister to college—she probably won’t be back till tonight. Alice! What do I do?”

My jaw clenches at the mere mention of Grace Reed, Sam’s mom, the closest thing our family has to a nemesis. Or maybe it’s the owl. God. Get me out of here.

“I’m hungry,” Harry says. “I’m starving here. I’ll be dead by night.”

“It takes three weeks to starve,” George tells him, his air of authority undermined by his hot cocoa mustache.

“Ughhh. No one cares!” Andy storms away.

“She’s got the hormones going on,” Duff confides to Harry.

Ever since hearing it from my mother, my little brothers treat “hormones” like a contagious disease.

My cell phone vibrates on the cluttered counter. Brad again. I ignore it, start banging open cabinets. “Look, guys, we’re out of everything, got it? We can’t go shopping until we get this week’s 18

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 18

5/19/15 9:34 AM

take-home from the store, and no one has time to go anyway.

I’m not giving you money. So it’s oatmeal or empty stomachs.

Unless you want peanut butter on toast.”

“Not again,” Duff groans, shoving away from the table and stalking out of the kitchen.

“Gross,” Harry says, doing the same, after accidentally knocking over his orange juice—and ignoring it.

How does Mom stand this? I pinch the muscles at the base of my neck, hard, close my eyes. Push away the most treacherous thought of all: Why does Mom stand this?

George is still doggedly trying to eat a spoonful of oatmeal, one rolled oat at a time.

“Don’t bother, G. You still like peanut butter, right?”

Breathing out a long sigh, world-weary at four, George rests his freckled cheek against his hand, watching me with a focus that reminds me of Jase. “You can make diamonds out of peanut butter. I readed about it.”

“Read,” I say automatically, replenishing the raisins I’d sprinkled on the tray of Patsy’s high chair.

“Yucks a dis,” she says, picking each raisin up with a delicate pincer grip and dropping it off the side of the high chair.

“Do you think we could make diamonds out of this peanut butter?” George asks hopefully as I open the jar of Jif. “I wish, Georgie,” I say, looking at the empty cabinet over the window, and then noticing a dark blue Jetta pull into our driveway, the door kick open, a tall figure climb out, the sun hitting his rusty hair, lighting it like a match.

Fabulous. Exactly what we need for the flammable family mix. Tim Mason. The human equivalent of C-4.

19

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 19

5/19/15 9:34 AM

•˚•˚

We walk up the creaky garage stairs and Jase hauls a key out of his pocket, unlocks the door, flips on the lights. I brush past him and drop my cardboard box on the ground. Joel’s old apartment is low-ceilinged and decorated with milk crate bookcases, ugly couch, mini-fridge, microwave, denim beanbag chair with Sox logo, walls covered in Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and all that—tits everywhere—and a gigantic iron weight rack with a shit-ton of weights.

“This is where Joel took all those au pairs? I thought he had better game than this massive cliché.”

Jase grimaces. “Welcome to Bootytown. Supposedly the nannies never minded because they expected it of American boys. Want me to help yank ’em down?”

“Nah, I can always count body parts if I have trouble sleeping.”

After a brief scope-out of the apartment, during which he makes a face and empties a few trash cans, he asks, “This gonna work for you?”

“Absolutely.” I reach into my pocket, pull out the lined paper list I snatched off my bulletin board, and slap it on the refrigerator, adios-ing a babe in hot pink spandex.

Jase scans my sign, shakes his head. “Mase . . . you know you can come on over anytime.”

“I’ve been to boarding school, Garrett. Not like I’m afraid of the dark.”

“Don’t be a dick,” he says mildly. He points in the direction of the bathroom. “The plumbing backs up sometimes. If the plunger doesn’t work, text, I can fix it. I repeat, you’re always 20

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 20

5/19/15 9:34 AM

welcome to head to our house. Or join me on the pre-dawn job. I gotta pick up Samantha now. She ended up not going to Vermont. Ride along?”

“With the perfect high school sweethearts? Nah. I think I’ll stay and see if I can break the plunger. Then I’ll text you.”

He flips me off, grins, and leaves.

Time to get my ass to a meeting. Better that than alone with a ton of airbrushed boobs and my unfiltered thoughts.

21

BOM_9780803741423_BoyMostLikelyTo_TX.indd 21

5/19/15 9:34 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

Tri

t

1

t

Thrift Shop Mardi Overbrook shifted into fourth gear on the

1S 1R 1L

Montauk Highway, gunning to pass what had to be yet another banker’s kid in a brand-new black Ferrari. She belted along to Macklemore, singing about the twenty dollars in her pocket, her car vibrating to the powerful beat as it dusted the ultimate Hamptons douchemobile.

Sucker had probably paid extra for automatic because he never learned to drive stick.

Her own car was a Ferrari too, but it was far from new—a 1972 red convertible Daytona that had lived many lives. It didn’t look anything like Banker Boy’s car, and she didn’t look anything like his preppie girlfriend either. Mardi had a rainbow tattoo that circled her neck like a python and an emerald-studded barbell through the tip of her tongue, which she stuck out at the astonished driver as she blurred by him, screaming along to her favorite song.

At the light, she glanced down at her phone, which

6

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 6

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

was sitting faceup on the ebony leather passenger seat.

Her social media feed was flowing in a steady stream, showing the streets and interiors of the city she was leaving behind. Unlike the majority of the stuck-up kids at her stupid prep school, she wasn’t getting the posts of sunsets in Mustique or cocktail parties in Nantucket. No, her feed was full of the real stuff from after-hours clubs all over the five boroughs of New York City, places without names or defined locations, places that appeared and disappeared in water towers and in abandoned fleabag motels, places she called home because she traveled there in a manic rebel pack that she called family. The pictures were of passed-out teens, teens staggering out into the daylight like disoriented moths, teens in various states of undress. She smiled down as they migrated across her phone screen. Her tribe.

She adjusted the strap of her vintage leopard-skin push-up bathing-suit bra, which she was wearing with a pair of threadbare rhinestone-encrusted denim shorts. The outfit had been left decades ago in the back of a closet by one of Dad’s girlfriends from his Studio 54 days. There was great stuff to be pillaged from Dad’s past in the Overbrook loft in Greenpoint—if you knew where to look.

Mardi grabbed the phone, puckered her lips, and took a quick close-up, posting it for all her friends back in the city with a tagline: “Don’t you dare forget me while I’m gone.”

7

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 7

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

Tri

Why in the Underworld was she leaving her life behind? Could someone please remind her?

Oh, yeah—she was leaving her life behind to spend the summer babysitting in a sleepy town lost somewhere on the East End of Long Island. With her princess of a twin sister, Molly, no less.

It was a fate worse than being badly dressed.

As she drove farther out from civilization, the landscape grew more pastoral and the salt smell in the air grew more pronounced, irritating her eyes so that she started to tear up. She was not one to cry, but this summer stretching ahead of her, an endless ribbon of small-town boredom, was a depressing prospect. She hadn’t even arrived in North Hampton, and she already felt trapped.

Mardi Overbrook hated feeling trapped.

She gritted her teeth, shifted into fifth gear, and turned the music up, determined not to admit defeat. If she was going to live for the summer in North Hampton, then she was going to make North Hampton worth living in.

A post popped onto her phone, which she instantly knew was from her twin. Not only because it was a phony artistic shot of some sand dune, complete with endangered shrubs and a pensive-looking seagull, that Molly had surely stopped to capture along her route— typical pretentious Molly—but because of the pink gold ring rolling over the image, undulating like soft taffy across the screen.

1S 1R 1L

8

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 8

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

This was what young witches did lately to wink at one another through cyberspace. They overlaid their static posts with moving images visible only to their kind. Everyone had a symbol, like a living emoji. There were waxing and waning moons, twinkling stars, beating hearts, all sorts of romping mythical creatures. It was a tribal thing. And tribes were the whole point of social networking, right?

Molly and Mardi always had the rose gold ring, subtly carved with a diamondback pattern, floating through their posts, but only the two of them could see it. They had other images for sharing with the general witch population. Mardi used a vaulting rainbow, Molly a galloping thoroughbred horse. Only to each other did they make the golden ring visible. They’d never talked about it. But that’s how it was.

So, when Mardi sent the image of her red lips out into the world, Molly alone would notice the symbol of their sisterhood floating across the screen, while the rest of Midgard’s witches saw a snaking rainbow and the general population saw nothing but a cherry-red pout and a hint of leopard and lace.

Normally, this notion that she shared something unique with Molly wouldn’t faze Mardi. It was no big deal, a stupid twin thing. But today she had to admit that she found it just a little bit comforting that, as she left the known world, there was someone—even if that someone was the most irritating person in the universe—who was truly on her wavelength.

9

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 9

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

1S 1R 1L

Tri

The phone rang, and her father’s handsome face filled the screen. She turned the music down and instinctively slowed, as if he could see her, although she was still twenty miles over the limit.

“S’up?”

“How about ‘hello, Dad’?” Troy Overbrook asked.

“S’up?”

“Are you almost there, my sweet?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. The GPS is acting weird.”

“Well, can’t your sister navigate for you? I told you it was tricky.”

Mardi looked at the empty seat beside her. “Molly’s right here, but I’m afraid she’s fully occupied painting her nails a lovely shade of lavender and simply cannot be bothered to come to my aid, Your Majesty. So sorry, Your Highness. At your service, My Lord. Deferentially yours, Master. Is that what you want to hear?”

Troy sighed. “Well, at least you girls are together.

And what I want to hear is that you are both going to take this summer with Ingrid seriously. She’s an old, dear friend of mine, and I’m afraid she may be our last hope. Show her some respect. Take good care of her children. I’m asking you to try. For your own good.”

“I still can’t believe you’re making us do this—for the whole summer!”

“Do it you will. You have no idea how ugly things will get if you blow it.”

“Life is an ugly thing, Dad.”

10

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 10

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

“Not as ugly as Hell, my sweet.”

A flashing red light appeared in Mardi’s rearview mirror.

“Dad, gotta go. I’m being pulled over.”

“What?” There was a groan on the other end. “Okay, but I want you to promise me that there will be no funny business. Take it like a mortal. A mortal who deserves a speeding ticket. I’ll pay the fine. You have got to learn some self-control.”

“Okay, promise, Dad. I swear. Okay. Bye.” She hurled the phone onto the floor and downshifted to a perfect stop. Before the police officer could open his door, she had already appeared between the exhaust pipes of her ridiculously powerful cherry-red car.

Her hair was jet black and knotty. Her eyes were dark and defiant, her makeup artfully smudged. Her legs were endless, sprouting pale and willowy from a pair of gladiator sandals covered in bronze spikes. The effect, with her studded shorts and pointy leopard bra, was quite unnerving. Her stomach was so defined and her arms so ripped that she looked hard to the touch, both wildly attractive and severely off-putting at the same time. The green glow emanating from the precious stone studding her tongue gave her the hypnotic quality of a cobra.

“Young lady,” said the cop as he stumbled from his car door, “you should remain in your vehicle.”

“Noted for next time.” She laughed, squinting at him

11

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 11

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

1S 1R 1L

Tri

until he stumbled again. “Next time, I will remain in my vehicle. Promise.” Control her powers? Seriously, Dad, what were powers for?

“Next time?” he slurred. Then, making a super­ human effort to get ahold of himself, he said, “License and registration, please.”

“Say ‘pretty please.’”

“Pretty ple—wait a second, you’re not old enough to be driving a car like this!”

“I’m sixteen. Last time I checked that was the legal driving age.”

“License and registration,” he repeated, making his syllables yawn in slow motion. Then he said it again, way too fast, three times over, in a high, squeaky cartoon chipmunk voice: “License and registration! License and registration! License and registration!”

“Officer”—she grinned and took a step toward him— “are you harassing me?”

He looked down at his shiny black beetle shoes and clenched his fists, attempting one last time to get a grip on himself in the presence of her overwhelming magic.

“Miss, you were going over ninety miles an hour in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone. License and registration.”

This time his voice sounded as though he were underwater.

Gleefully, Mardi watched him close his mouth for fear he would start blowing bubbles. This was one of her favorite tricks to play on authority figures: to fill

12

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 12

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

their mouths with so much saliva that they became terrified of becoming human soap-bubble wands.

“My speedometer told me I was right at the limit, Officer,” she said sweetly.

He made a sound, but his lips wouldn’t part to form words.

She laughed and hopped effortlessly back into her car.

“I’m afraid,” she said as she revved the engine, “that you and I are going to have to agree to disagree, Officer.”

She left him standing stock-still by the side of the road. She had made sure he wouldn’t move a muscle for five minutes and that his memory of the encounter would be as fuzzy as a fading dream.

Sorry, Dad. Why be mortally weak when she was immortally gifted?

She was the daughter of Thor, after all.

1S 1R 1L 13

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 13

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

Tri

t

2

t

Fancy As she made out with Leo Fairbanks in the back of an

1S 1R 1L

Uber limousine, Molly Overbrook not so surreptitiously checked her phone over his muscular shoulder. Her feed was flying with the jet-set frenzy that always marked the beginning of the summer season. Her friends were posting from private seaplanes as they hopped between St. Maarten and St. Barths, from yachts in Newport and from villas on Lake Como and the Côte d’Azur. Each image sent a current of jealousy coursing through Molly’s gorgeous frame. She hated her “friends.”

Molly was not headed anywhere remotely cool. Quite the contrary, she was on her way to the sleepiest town on the Eastern Seaboard. To babysit. And to get lectured by some old lady friend of Daddy’s named Ingrid Beauchamp about how not to abuse her magic.

Whatever. She had never felt quite this indignant before. Life was totally unfair.

The most galling picture on her feed showed a clique

14

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 14

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

of bikini-clad vampires from Duchesne, a rival Upper East Side prep school to Headingley, where she and Mardi had just finished a disastrous but wickedly amusing sophomore year. The Duchesne vamps were arrayed on a white-sand Caribbean beach, brandishing exotic cocktails, each of their bodies a gleaming perfection.

Vampires could eat whatever they wanted and not put on an ounce. The famous Blue Blood metabolism. A bunch of social X-rays. Not so with witches. A witch could get as flabby as a mortal if she let herself go.

There was no justice on this Earth.

Molly unlocked her glossy lips from Leo’s mouth and sighed.

“What?” Leo pulled a few inches away and looked into her dark eyes. He was the hottest guy of a certain set in all of New York City, on his way to his summer home in East Hampton.

When she and Mardi had a fight this morning about Mardi’s insisting on driving to North Hampton in that ridiculous old car, which had no trunk—i.e., no room for Molly’s three giant Louis Vuitton suitcases—Molly went into one of her huffs and tapped out an order for an Uber limo. After, she texted Leo and offered to drop him off at his house on Lily Pond Lane en route, ostensibly so he wouldn’t have to take the train but mostly because the idea of being alone with her thoughts in a car for three hours was unbearable.

Of course, Leo, varsity tennis champion at Headingley, jumped at the chance. With her luxuriant dark

15

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 15

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

1S 1R 1L

Tri

mane, mesmerizing dark eyes, willowy curves, vertiginous cleavage, and impeccable style, no one could resist her. And she and Leo had been dating on and off all spring, although her interest was waning pretty hard.

Boys were like shoes. Once you owned them and had worn them out once or twice so that all your friends had seen them and done their oohing and aahing, the high was pretty much over. Leo was smoking cute, but he was last season’s catch. You might hold on to a guy like him for a while just because he was high quality.

But, once the thrill of the conquest was gone, it was time to go shopping again. You’re never that psyched about a pair of scuffed shoes, now, are you?

At this image of worn-out shoes, Molly crinkled her upturned button nose. She would never understand how her sister wore those ratty, smelly used clothes.

What was Mardi trying to prove?

As if summoned by the negative thought, a post from Mardi popped onto Molly’s screen, a shot of Mardi’s pucker in that cherry-red lipstick she liked, along with a strap of that leopard-print bra she’d filched from some skanky old flame of Dad’s. So gross. Mardi had written a whiny comment asking her low-life crowd not to forget her over the summer. Pathetic. By the end of the summer, most of Mardi’s so-called friends would have overdosed or been shipped off to rehab.

There would be no one left to remember her anyway.

Despite her irritation, Molly couldn’t help but feel a

16

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 16

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

little bit comforted by the sight of the phantom rose gold ring drifting over her sister’s mouth, the ring that she alone could see. The twins shared a secret language that might come in handy in the boonies of the East End. At some point, they just might need to shore each other up.

She fiddled with the ring on her finger, the physical model for the image that drifted secretly across the twins’ posts. The ring was warm and luminous, its diamond-shaped grooves pleasantly worn, like a kind old woman’s face. She and Mardi passed the ring back and forth between the middle fingers of their right hands. The exchange was almost unconscious and totally peaceful. In every other aspect of their lives, from who got the most cereal in her breakfast bowl to who got to control the playlist at a party to which girl got more of Daddy’s attention, the twins were viciously competitive. “It’s not fair!” was their constant refrain. But when it came to the ring, which they had shared for as long as they could remember, there was simply no issue. It drifted between them. And they had a tacit understanding that one of them would keep it at all times.

Frustrated with Molly’s distraction, Leo checked out her phone too. “Wow,” he said. “Is that Mardi? She looks hot!”

Spiked with jealousy, Molly pulled him closer and kissed him harder.

17

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 17

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

Tri

“Whoa.” He laughed, enjoying her passion after such a tepid make-out session earlier. “I’ve never seen you take anything so personally.”

Molly refrained from replying, locking him in a rageinfused kiss instead. She jammed her tongue down his throat and kept it there until the limo pulled up in front of his family’s ten-million-dollar vine-covered house.

Feeling confident that she had erased any impression her sister might have made on her boyfriend, Molly waved him off. He stumbled onto his vast lawn, racket bag slung over his shoulder, and in an instant, he crumpled under the bag’s weight. She watched, cackling to herself as he squirmed in a helpless puddle, gradually going still. Someone would find him in a few hours and assume he was wickedly hungover. He would remember nothing.

Causing silly boys to black out was a favorite sport of Molly’s.

As the limo glided back toward the Montauk Highway, she put her headphones on and scrolled through for her go-to song. Over the blasting music, she yelled to the driver that she hoped he knew where they were going, because she herself had no idea of East End geography. All she had was an address.

He said the GPS wasn’t showing him the place exactly, but he was sure they would find it.

She shrugged. She wasn’t in any hurry to greet her oppressive fate.

1S 1R 1L

18

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 18

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

Why was Daddy doing this to them? Why was he so intimidated by the White Council? If the Council wanted to punish her and Mardi, they would have done so already. But Daddy was convinced that, this time, after the havoc they had wreaked on Headingley Prep and the wild accusations flying in all directions, things would be different. If Molly and Mardi didn’t shape up and start to use their magic “responsibly”— yawn—Daddy feared they would be hurled into Limbo or some such ridiculous thing. But he was wasting his time worrying. And, worse, he was wasting their precious summer by banishing them to North Hampton, because she and her sister were never going to change their ways. No one could make them. There was no point in trying.

Molly belted along with Iggy Azalea as the green of the Montauk Highway started to give way to the gold of undulating sand dunes. She scrolled down her posts, looking to see if anyone had “liked” the photo she had taken earlier, when it had occurred to her that she should put up something tragic and artistic about her upcoming fate, a tableau of nature to be followed by radio silence. Make them wonder.

She’d told the driver to pull over for a minute, teetered out onto a dune in her stilettos and snapped a shot of a seagull. She hoped Bret Farley would be intrigued, but so far there was no indication he had seen it—no “likes” no “favorites.”

19

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 19

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

1S 1R 1L

Tri

Why did she care whether or not Bret saw her post?

She repressed an image of his ice-blond hair, blue eyes, and sharp cheekbones, wanting to banish him from her mind like last year’s platform shoes. But his memory was haunting her—perhaps because he was the one that got away? Bretland Farley was the ultimate pair of designer stilettos that were all sold out in her size.

For a while she pouted in silence. Then she put her headphones back on.

As the limo eased into a sudden bank of fog, the bright day grew misty and strange, and Molly grew uneasy about what lay before her.

“Are we almost there?” she whined.

She couldn’t hear the answer to her question because her ears were suddenly ringing with a full orchestral sound. It was a total rush. She recognized it as the theme music for some famous movie that Daddy was into. Apocalypse something. While the orchestra galloped forward, louder and louder, she envisioned helicopters and exploding bombs. She was carried away from the moment in a thrilling fever vision.

Then it was if her soul had been deposited on the other side of a dream. The sky was bright again, everything was calm, and Iggy was rapping again, boasting about how fabulous she was. Molly knew the feeling.

“We made it,” the driver chirped with palpable relief as they passed a welcome to north hampton sign.

They drove through peaceful fields of corn and

20

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 20

7/6/15 8:08 AM

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

potatoes, a peach orchard. There were quaint farmhouses that probably weren’t air-conditioned, a shabby bar called the North Inn, and some beachside restaurants advertising local fare on chalkboards. There was no frozen yogurt, no Starbucks. Molly looked desperately along the road for any brand names she might recognize. At this point, she would have settled for a Duane Reade pharmacy. But there was nothing. She was going to wither and die here.

Her feed had stopped. It was just as Ingrid had warned in her email: North Hampton was not wired for social networking—no Facebook, no Tumblr, no Twitter, no Snapchat, nada. You could text and email here, but that was about it. When you came to North Hampton, your whole being was immersed in the actual place, rather than scattered throughout cyberspace. “In some ways,” Ingrid had written, “North Hampton is outside of time. It is the perfect place to reflect.”

At the very moment that Molly’s limo pulled up to a beachfront colonial house, freshly painted robin’s egg blue, with a saltbox roof and white gables, Mardi’s idiotic Ferrari screeched to halt in the unpaved driveway. Molly waited for the dust to settle before she nodded to her driver to open her door. She didn’t want to ruin her Prada shift. She couldn’t imagine that this town boasted a decent dry cleaner.

Molly surveyed the front yard: a swing set, a

21

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 21

7/6/15 8:08 AM

1S 1R 1L

Triple Moon - 3rd pass

Tri

dome-shaped jungle gym, and a huge vegetable patch.

Then she turned her eyes to her sister.

The twins emerged tentatively from their respective vehicles. “Nice ride,� they sneered at each other in unison.

1S 1R 1L 22

TripleMoon_int3rdPass.indd 22

7/6/15 8:08 AM

CHAPTER 1

MY SISTER IS IN TROUBLE, and I have only minutes to help her.

She doesn’t see it. She’s having difficulty seeing a lot of things lately, and that’s the problem.

Your brushstrokes are off, I sign to her. The lines are crooked, and you’ve misjudged some of the hues.

Zhang Jing steps back from her canvas. Surprise lights her features for only a moment before despair sets in. This isn’t the first time these mistakes have happened. A nagging instinct tells me it won’t be the last. I make a small gesture, urging her to hand me her brush and paints. She hesitates and glances around the workroom to make sure none of our peers is watching. They’re all deeply engrossed in their own canvases, spurred on by the knowledge that our masters will arrive at any moment to evaluate our work. Their sense of urgency is nearly palpable. I beckon again, more insistently this time, and Zhang Jing yields her tools, stepping away to let me work.

1

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 1

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD Quick as lightning, I begin going over her canvas, repairing her imperfections. I smooth out the unsteady brushstrokes, thicken lines that are too thin, and use sand to blot out places where the ink fell too heavily. This calligraphy consumes me, just as art always does. I lose track of the world around me and don’t even really notice what her work says. It’s only when I finish and step back to check my progress that I take in the news she was recording.

Death. Starvation. Blindness.

Another grim day in our village.

I can’t focus on that right now, not with our masters about to walk in. Thank you, Fei, Zhang Jing signs to me before taking her tools back. I give a quick nod and then hurry over to my own canvas across the room, just as a rumbling in the floor signifies the entrance of the elders. I take a deep breath, grateful that I have once again saved Zhang Jing from getting into trouble.

With that relief comes a terrible knowledge that I can no longer deny: My sister’s sight is fading. Our village came to terms with silence when our ancestors lost their hearing generations ago for unknown reasons, but being plunged into darkness? That’s a fate that scares us all.

I must push those thoughts from my mind and put on a calm face as my master comes strolling down the rows of canvas.

There are six elders in the village, and each one oversees at least two apprentices. In most cases, each elder knows who his or her replacement will be—but with the way accidents and sickness happen around here, training a backup is a necessary precaution.

2

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 2

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS Some apprentices are still competing to be their elder’s replacement, but I have no worries about my position.

Elder Chen comes to me now, and I bow low. His dark eyes, sharp and alert despite his advanced years, look past me to the painting. He wears light blue like the rest of us, but the robe he has on over his pants is longer than the apprentices’. It nearly reaches his ankles and is trimmed in purple silk thread. I always study that embroidery while he’s doing his inspections, and I never grow tired of it. There’s very little color in our daily lives, and that silk thread is one bright, precious spot. Fabric of any kind is a luxury here, where my people struggle daily simply to get food. Studying Elder Chen’s purple thread now, I think of the old stories about kings and nobles who dressed in silk from head to toe. The image dazzles me for a moment, transporting me beyond this workroom until I blink and reluctantly return my focus back to my work.

Elder Chen is very still as he takes in my illustration, his expression unreadable. Whereas Zhang Jing painted dreary news today, my task was to depict our latest food shipment, which included a rare surprise of radishes. At last, he unclasps his hands from in front of him. You captured the imperfections of the radishes’ skin, he signs. Not many others would have noticed such detail.

From him, that is high praise. Thank you, master, I say before bowing again.

He moves on to examine the work of his other apprentice, a girl named Jin Luan. She shoots a look of envy in my direction

3

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 3

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD before also bowing low to our master. There’s never been any question who his favorite student is, and I know it must frustrate her to feel that no matter what she does, she never grasps that top spot. I am one of the best artists in our group, and we all know it. I make no apologies for my success, especially since I’ve given up so much to achieve it.

I look to the far side of the room, where Elder Lian is examining Zhang Jing’s calligraphy. Elder Lian’s face is as unreadable as my master’s as she takes in every detail of my sister’s canvas.

I find I’m holding my breath, far more nervous than I was for my own inspection. Beside her, Zhang Jing is pale, and I know my sister and I are both braced for the same thing: Elder Lian calling us out for deceiving them about Zhang Jing’s sight. Elder Lian lingers much longer than Elder Chen did, but at long last, she gives a cursory nod of acceptance and strolls on to her next apprentice. Zhang Jing sags in relief.

We have tricked them again, but I can’t feel bad about that either. Not when Zhang Jing’s future is at stake. If the elders discover her vision is failing, she will almost certainly lose her apprenticeship and be sent to the mines. The very thought makes my chest tighten. In our village, there are really only three jobs: artist, miner, and supplier. Our parents were miners. They died young.

When all the inspections are finished, it is time for our morning announcements. Elder Lian is giving them today, and she steps up on a platform in the room to allow her hands to be visible to all who are gathered.

4

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 4

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS Your work is satisfactory, she begins. It’s the usual acknowledgment, and we all bow. When we are looking up again, she continues. Never forget how important what we do here is. You are part of an ancient and exalted tradition. Soon we will go out into the village and begin our daily observations. I know things are hard right now. But remember that it is not our place to interfere with them.

She pauses, her gaze traveling around the room to each of us as we nod in acknowledgment at a concept that has been driven into us with as much intensity as our art. Interference leads to distraction, interrupting both the natural order of the village’s life as well as accurate record keeping. We must be impartial observers. Painting the daily news has been a tradition in our village ever since our people lost their hearing centuries ago. I’m told that before then, news was shouted by a town crier or simply passed orally from person to person. But I don’t even really know what “shouting” is.

We observe, and we record, Elder Lian reiterates. It is the sacred duty we have performed for centuries, and to deviate from it does a disservice both to our tasks and to the village. Our people need these records to know what is happening around them.

And our descendants need our records so they can understand the way things have always been. Go to breakfast now, and then be a credit to our teachings.

We bow again and then shuffle out of the workroom, heading toward the dining hall. Our school is called the Peacock Court.

It’s a name our ancestors brought with them from fairer, faraway

5

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 5

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD parts of Beiguo beyond this mountain, meant to acknowledge the beauty we create within the school’s walls. Every day, we paint the news of our village for our people to read. Even if we are only recording the most basic of information—like a shipment of radishes—our work must still be immaculate and worthy of preservation. Today’s record will soon be put on display in our village’s heart, but first we have this small break.

Zhang Jing and I sit down cross-legged on the floor at a low table to wait for our meal. Servants come by and carefully measure out millet porridge, making sure each apprentice gets an equal amount. We have the same thing for breakfast each day, and while it chases the hunger away, it doesn’t exactly leave me feeling full either. But it’s more than the miners and suppliers get, so we must be grateful.

Zhang Jing pauses in her breakfast. It will not happen again, she signs to me. I mean it.

Hush, I say. It’s a topic she can’t even hint at in this place.

And despite her bold words, there’s a fear in her face that tells me she doesn’t believe them anyway. Reports of blindness have been growing in our village for reasons that are just as mysterious as the deafness that fell upon our ancestors. Usually only miners go blind, which makes Zhang Jing’s current plight that much more mysterious.

A flurry of activity in my periphery startles me out of my thoughts. I look up and see that the other apprentices have also stopped eating, their gazes turned toward a door that leads from this dining room to the kitchen. A cluster of servants stands there,

6

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 6

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS more than I normally see at once. Usually mindful of the differences in rank, they stay out of our way.

A woman I recognize as the head cook has emerged from the door, a boy scurrying in front of her. Cook is an extravagant term for her job, since there’s so little food and not much to be done with it. She also oversees running the Peacock Court’s servants.

I flinch when she strikes the boy with a blow so hard that he falls to the floor. I’ve seen him around, usually doing the meanest of cleaning tasks. A frantically signed conversation is taking place between them.

—think you wouldn’t get caught? the cook demands. What were you thinking, taking more than your share?

It wasn’t for me! the boy tells her. It was for my sister’s family. They’re hungry.

We’re all hungry, the cook snaps back. That’s no excuse for stealing.

I give a sharp intake of breath as I realize what has happened. Food theft is one of the greatest crimes we have around here. The fact that it would occur among our servants, who are generally fed better than other villagers, is particularly shocking.

The boy manages to get to his feet and bravely face the cook’s wrath.

They’re a mining family, and they’ve been sick, the boy says.

The miners already get less food than we do, and they had their rations cut while not working. I was trying to make things fair.

The hard set of the cook’s face tells us she is unmoved. Well, now you can join them in the mines. We have no place here for

7

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 7

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD thieves. I want you gone before we clear the breakfast dishes.

The boy falters at this, desperation filling his features. Please.

Don’t send me to work with them. I’m sorry. I’ll give up my rations to make up for what I took. It won’t ever happen again.

I know it won’t happen again, the cook replies pointedly.

She gives a curt nod to two of the burlier servants, and they each take one of the boy’s arms, hauling him out of the dining room.

He tries to free himself and protest but can’t fight against both of them. The cook watches impassively while the rest of us gape.

When he’s out of sight, she and the other servants not working our breakfast service disappear back into the kitchen. Zhang Jing and I exchange glances, too shocked for words. In his moment of weakness, that servant has just made his life significantly more difficult—and dangerous.

When we finish breakfast and head to the workroom, the theft is all anyone can talk about. Can you believe it? someone asks me. How dare he give our food to a miner!

The speaker’s name is Sheng. Like me, he is one of the top artists at the Peacock Court. Unlike me, he is descended from a family of artists and elders. I think he forgets sometimes that Zhang Jing and I are the first in our family to achieve this rank.

It is certainly a terrible thing, I respond neutrally. I don’t dare express my true feelings: that I have doubts about whether the food distribution is fair. I learned long ago that to keep my position in the Peacock Court, I must give up all sympathies to the miners and simply view them as our village’s workforce.

Nothing more.

8

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 8

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS He deserves a worse punishment than dismissal, Sheng says ominously. Along with his skill in art, Sheng has the kind of brash confidence that makes people follow him, so I’m not surprised to see a few others walking near us nod in agreement. He lifts his head proudly at their regard, showing off fine, high cheekbones.

Most of the girls around here would also agree he’s the most attractive boy in the school, but he’s never had much of an effect on me.

I hope that changes soon, as we are expected to marry someday.

Boldly, knowing I’m probably making a mistake, I ask, You don’t think the circumstances played a role in his actions? Wanting to help his sick family?

That’s no excuse, Sheng states. Everyone earns what they deserve around here—no more, no less. That’s balance. If you can’t fulfill your duty, you shouldn’t expect to be fed for it.

Don’t you agree?

My heart aches at his words. I can’t help but give a quick glance at Zhang Jing, walking on my other side, before turning back to Sheng. Yes, I say bleakly. Yes, of course, I agree.

We apprentices begin gathering up our canvases to take them out for the other villagers to view. Some are still wet and require extra caution. As we step outside, the sun is well above the horizon, promising a warm and clear day to come. It shines on the green leaves of the trees among our village. Their branches create a canopy that shades much of the walkway to the village’s center. I watch the patterns the light creates on the ground

9

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 9

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD when it’s filtered through the trees. I’ve often thought about painting that dappled light, if only I had the opportunity. But I never do.

I’d love to paint the mountains too. We are surrounded by them, and our village sits on top of one of the highest. It creates breathtaking views but also a number of difficulties for us. This peak is surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. Our ancestors migrated here centuries ago along a pass on the mountain’s opposite side that was flanked by fertile valleys perfect for growing food. Around the time hearing disappeared, severe avalanches blocked the pass, filling it up with boulders and stones far taller than any man. It trapped our people up here and cut us off from growing crops anymore.

That was when our people worked out an arrangement with a township at the mountain’s base. Each day, most of our villagers work in the mines up here, hauling out loads of precious metals. Our suppliers send those metals to the township along a zip line that runs down the mountain. In return for the metal, the township sends us shipments of food since we can’t produce our own. The arrangement was working well until some of our miners began losing their sight and could no longer work. When the metals going down slowed, so did the food coming back up.

As my group moves closer to the center of the village, I see miners getting ready for the day’s work, dressed in their dull clothing with lines of weariness etched on their faces. Even children help out in the mines. They walk beside their parents and, in some cases, grandparents.

10

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 10

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS In the village’s heart, we find those who have lost their sight. Unable to see or hear, they have become beggars, huddled together and waiting for the day’s handouts. They sit immobile with their bowls, deprived of the ability to communicate, only able to wait for the feel of vibrations in the ground to let them know that people are approaching and that they might receive some kind of sustenance. I watch as a supplier comes by and puts half a bun in each beggar’s bowl. I remember reading about those buns in the record when they arrived a couple of days ago.

They were already subpar then, most of them showing mold. But we can’t afford to throw away any food. That half bun is all the beggars will get until nightfall unless someone is kind enough to share from their own rations. The scene makes my stomach turn, and I avert my gaze from them as we walk toward the central stage where workers are already removing yesterday’s record.

A flash of bright color catches my eye, and I see a blue rock thrush land on the branch of a tree near the clearing. Much like Elder Chen’s silk trim, that brilliance draws me in. As I’m admiring the sheen of the bird’s azure feathers, he opens his mouth for a few seconds and then looks around expectantly. Not long after that, a duller female flies in and lands near him. I stare in wonder, trying to understand what just took place. How did he draw her to him? What could he have done that conveyed so much, even though she hadn’t seen him? I know from reading that something happened when he opened his mouth, that he “sang” to her and somehow brought her, even though she wasn’t nearby.

A nudge at my shoulder tells me it’s time to stop daydreaming.

11

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 11

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD Our group has reached the dais in the village’s center, and most of the villagers have gathered to see our work. We climb the steps to the platform and hang our paintings. We’ve done this many times, and everyone knows their roles. What was a series of illustrations and calligraphy in the workshop now fits together as one coherent mural, presenting a thorough depiction of all that happened in the village yesterday to those gathered below.

When I’ve hung my radishes, I shuffle back down with the other apprentices and watch the faces of the rest of the crowd as they read the record. I see furrowed brows and dark glances as they take in the latest reports of blindness and hunger. The radishes are no consolation. The art might be perfect, but it’s lost on my people in its bearing of such dreary news.

Some of them make the sign against evil, a gesture meant to chase away bad luck. It seems ineffectual to me, but the miners are extremely superstitious. They believe lost spirits roam the village at midnight, that the mist surrounding our mountain is the breath of the gods. One of their most popular stories is that our ancestors lost their hearing when magical creatures called pixius went into a deep slumber and wanted silence on the mountain.

I grew up believing those tales too, but my education in the Peacock Court has given me a more practical view of the world.

Slowly, the miners and suppliers turn from the record and begin the treks to their jobs. Elder Chen signs to us apprentices: Go to your posts. Remember, observe. Don’t interfere.

I start to follow the others, and then I catch sight of Elder Lian taking the steps back up to the dais where the record is

12

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 12

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS displayed. She seems to be examining the work all over again, painstakingly studying each character. Such scrutiny isn’t part of the normal routine. The other apprentices have left, but I can’t move, not until I know what she’s doing.

She stands there a little longer, and when she finally turns away, her gaze meets mine. A moment later, her eyes fall on something behind me. I turn around and see Zhang Jing is standing there, hands clenched together nervously. Elder Lian descends the stairs. Go to your posts, she signs. The silk thread that edges her robe is red, and it flashes in the light as she walks past.

Swallowing, I take Zhang Jing’s elbow and steer her away from the village’s center, away from the blind beggars. Most of them are old and former miners, I remind myself. She isn’t like them. She isn’t like them at all. I squeeze her hand as we walk.

She will get better, I tell myself. I will not let her become one of them.

I repeat the words over and over in my mind as we move past the beggars, but saying them to myself can’t erase the image of those cavernous faces and blank, hopeless stares.

13

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 13

7/13/15 12:54 PM

CHAPTER 2

WE SOON NEAR A SMALL PATH branching from the main track through the village, and I nod at it. Zhang Jing nods back, turning toward the fork.

Before we get very far, a group emerges unexpectedly from a nearby wooded area. It is Sheng with two boys dressed in suppliers’ attire. They’re dragging someone between them, and I recognize the servant from our school, the one who was caught stealing. New bruises and welts accompany the one the cook gave him, and from the gleeful look on the faces of the others, they have more planned. I can understand their outrage at what he did, but the enjoyment they take in doling out such pain sickens me. Zhang Jing cringes back in fear, not wanting to get involved in any altercation. I know I should do the same, but I can’t. I step forward, ready to speak my mind.

Before I can, I am knocked to the side by yet another person rushing past. He wears the dull clothes of a miner and strides right up to Sheng and the others, blocking their way. When I realize who

14

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 14

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS this newcomer is, my breath catches, and I feel as though the very ground beneath my feet has shifted, knocking me off-balance.

It is Li Wei. What do you think you’re doing? he demands.

Sheng regards him with a sneer. Teaching him a lesson.

Look at him, Li Wei says. He’s learned his lesson. He can barely stand anymore.

That’s not good enough, one of Sheng’s supplier friends says. Are you saying he should be let off easy? You think it’s okay for him to steal food?

No, Li Wei replies. But I think he’s been punished enough.

Between your “lesson” and losing his job at the school, he’s more than paid for the crime of trying to help his family. All you’re doing is hurting his ability to help us in the mines. We can’t afford that right now. It’s time to let him go.

We’ll say when it’s time to let him go, Sheng says.

Li Wei takes a menacing step forward. Then say it.

Sheng and the suppliers hesitate. Although the numbers are in their favor, Li Wei is unquestionably one of the biggest and strongest in our village. Muscles gained from long hours of grueling work in the mines cover his arms, and he towers over them by nearly a head. He stands straight and tall, his tough body braced and ready for a fight. He doesn’t fear three-to-one odds.

He wouldn’t fear ten-to-one odds.

After several tense moments, Sheng gives a shrug and smirks as though this is all one big joke. We have work to do, he says far too casually. He deserves worse, but I don’t have time for it. Let’s go.

15

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 15

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD The supplier holding the servant releases him, and Sheng and the others begin sauntering away. Seeing me, Sheng asks, Are you coming?

We’re going a different way today, I say, nodding toward the path.

Suit yourself, he replies.

When they are gone, Li Wei reaches out a helping hand to the servant, whose face is filled with terror. The boy backs up and then scurries away, fear having given him a burst of energy, despite his pain. Li Wei watches him go and then turns in our direction, looking surprised to see us still there. He bows in deference to our higher station, having noticed our blue robes, and then stiffens slightly when he looks up and sees my face.

It’s the only outward indication of his surprise. Everything else about him is perfectly respectful and proper. Forgive me, apprentices, he says. I was in such a hurry to help, I’m afraid I jostled you earlier. I hope you aren’t injured.

Although he is addressing both of us, his eyes are locked on me. His gaze is so piercing, I feel as though it will knock me over.

Or maybe that’s just the earlier dizziness I felt from being near him. Regardless, standing there before him, I find myself unable to move or speak.

Zhang Jing, unaware I am reeling, smiles gently. It’s okay.

We’re fine.

I’m glad, he says. He starts to turn from us and then pauses, his expression both curious and hesitant. I hope you don’t think I was wrong to help that boy.

16

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 16

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS It was very kind of you, Zhang Jing says politely.

Although she has answered for us, Li Wei’s gaze lingers on me as though he hopes I will add something. But I can’t. It’s been too long since I’ve seen him, and this sudden, unexpected confrontation has caught me unprepared. After several awkward moments, Li Wei nods.

Well, then. I hope you both have a good day, he says before walking away from us.

Zhang Jing and I continue on our path, and my heart rate slowly returns to normal. You didn’t say much back there, she remarks. Do you disapprove? Do you think he should have let Sheng and his friends take their revenge?

I don’t answer right away. Zhang Jing is a year older than me, and we have been nearly inseparable our entire lives, sharing everything. But there is one secret I have kept from her.

When I was six, I climbed an old rotting shed our mother had warned us about many times. The roof collapsed while I was on it, trapping me below with no one in sight. I was stuck there for two hours, frightened and certain I would be there forever.

And then he appeared.

Li Wei was only eight but had just begun working full-time in the mines. When he came to me that day, he was returning from his shift covered in fine, golden dust. As he held out his hand to help me, the late afternoon sunlight caught him just right, making him shine and glitter. Even back then, the striking and beautiful always moved my heart, and I was spellbound as he helped me out of the rubble. His easy smile and sense of humor soon helped

17

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 17

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD me overcome my shyness, beginning a friendship that would span almost ten years and eventually become so much more. . . .

Fei? asks Zhang Jing, truly puzzled now. Are you okay?

I push my memories aside, shaking off the dazzling image of that golden boy. Fine, I lie. I just don’t like to see that kind of violence.

Me neither, she agrees.

We divert to a path that is much narrower than the village’s main thoroughfare but sees enough foot traffic to be well-worn and packed down. It takes us along one of the cliff’s sides, giving us spectacular views of the peaks surrounding us. It’s early enough in the morning that mist still hangs in the air, obscuring the depths below.

Zhang Jing and I come to a halt when we reach the cypress tree. It looks greener and fuller than the last time I saw it, now that summer has fully arrived. I feel a pang in my heart for not having been here more recently. The venerable cypress clings doggedly to its rocky perch, its branches spreading wide and high into the sky. See how it stands proudly, even in such inhospitable conditions? our father used to say. This is how we must always be—strong and resilient, no matter what’s around us. Our family used to go on evening walks together, and this path past the tree was one of our favorites. When our parents died, Zhang Jing and I had their ashes spread here.

She and I stand together now, saying nothing, simply gazing out at the vista before us and enjoying a faint breeze that plays among the needled branches of the tree. In my periphery, I notice

18

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 18

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS her squinting, even here. As much as it hurts, I feel compelled to finally say something. Stepping forward, I turn so that she can better see my hands.

How long has it been going on?

She knows immediately what I’m referring to and answers with a weary face. I don’t know. A while. Months. It wasn’t that bad at first—just occasional hazy spells. Now those spells are more frequent and more intense. On some days, I can still see perfectly. On other days, things are so blurred and distorted I can’t make any sense of them.

It will get better, I tell her staunchly.

She shakes her sadly. What if it doesn’t? What if it’s only a matter of time before I’m like the others? Before everything goes dark? Tears glitter in her eyes, and she obstinately blinks them back. I should tell our masters and give up the apprenticeship now. It’s the honorable thing to do.

No! I tell her. You can’t.

They’ll eventually find out, she insists. Can you imagine the disgrace then, when they throw me out on the streets?

No, I repeat, even though a secret, scared part of me fears she is right. Don’t say anything. I’ll keep covering for you, and we’ll find a way to fix this.

How? The smile she gives me is sweet but also full of sorrow. Some things are beyond even you, Fei. I look away, fearing my own eyes will fill with tears at the frustration I feel over my sister’s fate.

Come on, she says. We don’t want to be late.

19

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 19

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD We continue on our way, walking along the cliffside path, and my heart is heavy. I won’t admit it to her, but this might indeed be beyond me. I might dream incredible things and have the skills to paint any vision into reality, but even I can’t restore sight itself. It’s a humbling and depressing thought, one that so consumes me that I don’t even notice the crowd of people until we practically walk into them.

This path that traces the village’s edge goes past the station where the suppliers receive shipments from the township below.

It looks as though the first shipment of the day has arrived up the zip line and is about to be distributed. While that’s often a cause for excitement, I rarely see it draw this many people, which makes me think something unusual is happening. Amid the sea of dull brown clothing, I spy a spot of blue and recognize another artist apprentice, Min. This is her observation post.

I tug her sleeve, drawing her attention to me. What’s happening?

They sent a letter to the keeper a few days ago, telling him we need more food, that we cannot survive with the recent cuts, she explains. His response has just arrived with this shipment.

My breath catches. The line keeper. Communication with him is rare. He’s the one our existence depends on, the one who decides what supplies come up the line to us from the township.

Without him, we have nothing. Hope surges in me as I join the others to learn the news. The keeper is a great and powerful man.

Surely he’ll help us.

I watch with the others as the lead supplier unrolls the letter

20

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 20

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS that came up with the food. The letter was tied with a tiny green ribbon that he clutches as he reads, and for a moment, I’m transfixed by it. I shift my gaze back to the man’s face as his eyes scan the letter. I can tell from his expression that the news isn’t going to be good. A flurry of emotions plays over him, both sad and angry. At last, he gives the letter to an assistant and then stands on a crate so that we can all see his hands as he addresses the crowd.

The keeper says: “You receive less food because you send less metal. If you want more food, send more metal. That is balance. That is honor. That is harmony in the universe.”

The lead supplier pauses, but there is a tension in the way he stands, the way he holds his hands up, that tells us there is more to the message. After several seconds, he continues sharing the rest of the letter, though it’s obviously with reluctance: “What you have suggested is an insult to the generosity we have shown you these long years. As punishment, rations will be reduced for the next week. Perhaps then you will better understand balance.”

I feel my jaw drop, and chaos breaks out. Shock and outrage fill everyone’s faces, and hands sign so fast that I can only catch snippets of conversation: Reduced? We can’t survive on what we have— How can we get more metals? Our miners are going blind and— It’s not our fault we can’t mine as much! Why should we be punished for— I can’t follow much more than that. The crowd turns on

21

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 21

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD the lead supplier with angry faces, striding right up to where he stands on his makeshift perch.

This is unacceptable! one woman signs furiously. We won’t tolerate it!

The lead supplier regards them wearily. There’s an air of resignation around him. He doesn’t like the way things have turned out either, but how is he supposed to change them? What do you suggest we do? he retorts. When no immediate response comes, he adds, Everyone needs to get back to work. That’s the only way we’re going to survive. It’s like he says: If we want more food, we need more metal. Standing around and complaining won’t accomplish that.

This enrages one of the men standing near the podium. He wears a miner’s dirty clothes. I’ll go down there! he insists, face flushed red. I’ll make the keeper give us food.

Others in the crowd, caught up in the heat of the moment, nod in agreement. The lead supplier, however, remains calm in the face of rising hostility. How? he asks. How will you go down there? On the line? He pauses to make a great show of studying the other man from head to toe. Everyone knows the zip line can only hold about thirty kilos. It will fray and snap under your weight, and then we will have nothing. Your son might be able to make the trip. Perhaps you could send him to negotiate. He’s, what, eight years old now? That earns a glare from the miner, who’s very protective of his young son, but the supplier remains unfazed. Well, if you don’t want to risk yourself or your loved ones in the basket, you could always just climb down instead.

22

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 22

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS The lead supplier takes a rock the size of his hand and throws it off the edge, hurling it toward a bend in the cliff. We all watch as it hits the mountainside and is momentarily followed by a small avalanche of other stones, some of which are significantly larger than the original rock. They kick up dust as they fall down to depths we cannot see. The unstable nature of the cliffside is well-known throughout the village and has been documented in records for years. Some of our ancestors who could hear would attempt the climb, supposedly because their hearing aided them in knowing when avalanches were coming. But even they were wary about the cliffs.

Of course, then you face the risk of being crushed by falling rocks before you even get the chance to express yourself to the keeper. Anyone still want to go down there? asks the lead supplier, looking around. Unsurprisingly, no one responds. Return to your work. Get more metals so that we can restore the balance, as the line keeper said.

Slowly, the crowd disperses and everyone goes off to their assigned tasks, including Zhang Jing and me. As we walk, I think about what was said about balance and how we have no choice but to do what the keeper asks. We’re at his mercy—his and the line’s. Is that truly balance? Or is it extortion?

Zhang Jing and I arrive at the mines, and it is there we finally part ways. She waves farewell before disappearing into the darkness of the cavernous entrance, and I watch her go with a pang. This has been her post for a while now—going deep within the mines to observe the workers at their daily labors. Even

23

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 23

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD though she stays well away from any situation that might be dangerous, I still worry about her. Accidents happen, even with the best of intentions. I’d switch places with her if I could, but the elders would never allow it.

I was recently assigned a post just outside the mine. With increased accidents and discontent over the food situation, the elders wanted another set of eyes to observe. My job is to keep track of the miners’ morale and any incidents that happen, as well as note the amount of metal being unearthed. My last post was in the center of the village, and this is usually a calm one by comparison.

I perch on an old tree stump off to the side of the entrance.

It’s comfortable and gives me a good view of both the mine and the forested trail Zhang Jing and I took earlier. Near the trail, I notice a cluster of pink-veined white mountain orchids that are finally blooming. They’re cup-shaped and make a pretty spot of color among the mostly green and brown foliage surrounding the trail. Flowers rarely bloom up here, and I pass much of my day studying and memorizing the orchids, going over ways I’d depict them if only given the luxury to do so. Sometimes I dream up even more fantastical visions to paint, like fields and fields of orchids stretching out into a carpet of pink.

A blur of movement near the mine’s entrance draws my attention back to the real world. For a moment, I wonder if I’ve truly lost track of time and if the miners are coming out for lunch. That’s when my assignment is busiest. But no—it’s not quite midday yet, and only two men emerge from the entrance, one young and one old. Neither of them notices me, sitting out of the way on my stump.

24

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 24

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS One of them is Li Wei, and I’m astonished to encounter him twice in one day. Our lives have taken such different directions that I rarely see him anymore. The older man with him is his father, Bao. He shows the signs of having worked in the mine his entire life: a strength of body and character that’s let him survive all these years but that’s also taken its toll. He doesn’t stand as straight as he once did, and there’s an exhaustion in him that’s almost palpable, despite the resolute look in his dark eyes.

Studying the two together, I can see how Li Wei serves as a reminder of what Bao must have looked like in his youth. Li Wei still shows all the strength and none of the wear. His black hair is pulled into the same neat topknot the other miners have, though a few strands have escaped and now cling to his face, which is damp with perspiration. Fine gold dust from the mine glitters across his skin and clothing, almost as it did on that day long ago in my childhood. The light plays over him now, and I feel an ache in my chest.

Bao turns his head, revealing an oozing red gash on his forehead. Once Li Wei has made sure his father can stand, he begins cleaning the wound with some supplies he removes from a small cloth bag. Li Wei’s hands are quick and efficient, a contrast to his towering strength and size. But his touch is delicate as he helps his father, and soon the older man’s head injury is clean and bandaged.

You can’t let this keep happening, Li Wei tells him when he’s finished. You could’ve been killed.

I wasn’t, Bao signs back obstinately. Everything’s fine.

Li Wei points to his father’s forehead. Everything’s not fine!

25

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 25

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD If I hadn’t intervened at the last minute, this would’ve been a lot worse. You can’t work in the mines anymore.

Bao remains defiant. I can and I will! I see well enough to do my work. That’s all that matters.

It’s not just about your work. Li Wei looks as though he’s trying very hard to remain calm, but there’s an obvious panic behind his eyes. It’s not even just about your life. It’s about the lives of others. You endanger them by staying down there. Let go of your pride and retire.

Pride is the only thing I have left, says Bao. It’s the only thing any of us have. They’re taking everything else away from us. You heard the news about the food. With rations decreased, they need me more than ever down there. That’s where I’ll be—doing my duty. Not sitting around the village’s center with the other beggars. It is not your place to dictate your father’s actions, boy.

Li Wei gives a reluctant bow, but it’s clear that it’s out of respect, not agreement. With that, Bao turns around and returns to the mine, leaving his son staring.

I hold my breath. Their conversation could have been a mirror to the one I had earlier with Zhang Jing. Bao is yet another villager going blind.

Once his father is out of sight, Li Wei punches a scraggly tree growing near the mine’s entrance. I’ve seen him make impulsive gestures like this since childhood. They’re born out of passion, when his emotions run high, and they’re usually harmless. Except, when his hand makes contact with the tree, blood spurts

26

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 26

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS out, and he jumps back in surprise. Recalling how notices are sometimes hung on the tree, I realize he’s struck one of the old nails. Without thinking twice, I’m on my feet, retrieving the supply bag he brought out for his father.

What are you doing? Li Wei signs, even with blood dripping off his hand. The surprise on his face tells me he didn’t know I was nearby.

Stop talking, I scold. Stay still.

To my astonishment, he complies and stops moving so that I can help him. The cut is on his right hand, which could be catastrophic for a miner. As I clean it, though, I can see it’s actually pretty shallow. It reminds me of the paper cuts I sometimes get back at the Peacock Court, cuts that are barely skin deep but still manage to put out a lot of blood. But there’s something a little bit more sinister about an old nail, and even after I’ve poured water on the cut and wiped away most of the blood, I worry about infection. I hurry over to the stump and return with a small belt pouch, searching through tiny packets of pigment. When I find the one I want—yellow—I sprinkle a little of the powder on his cut before wrapping a clean cloth bandage around it. Once the bandage is secure, I examine his hand one more time, turning it over in my own. His fingers start to entwine with mine, and I abruptly pull back.

What was that? Li Wei asks when I tuck the packet back into my pouch.

It’s pigment for a special type of paint. We make the color from a root that also has medicinal properties. I saw my master

27

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 27

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD use it once on another wound. It will prevent infection. I don’t tell him how valuable the pigment is and that I’m not even supposed to be bringing it out with me on my observations. It’ll be a while before our masters do inventory, and I hope I’ll have some reason for explaining why I’m low.

Won’t you get in trouble for interfering? Li Wei asks. With a miner?

His words startle me. Everything happened so fast that I didn’t even really have a chance to think about what I was doing.

I just broke our primary commandment, interfering when we’re only supposed to be observing. I’d be in serious trouble if my master or any of the others found out.

If I get in trouble, so be it, I say at last. I make my own decisions.

That’s not what I remember. A moment later, he realizes how mean that was. I’m sorry. His hands waver again before he asks: I suppose you’ll have to tell them about my father? That he’s going blind?

Li Wei is right. Technically, as part of my duty, I should report back everything I observed—including their discussion. I can tell that as much as it pains him, Li Wei secretly wants me to report on his father. It will take the burden of responsibility away and finally get Bao removed from the mines and the danger there.

I think about the old man’s words, about holding on to his pride.

And then I think about Zhang Jing and her own fears of being found out. Slowly, I shake my head.

No, I won’t tell. I hesitate before continuing on. And you

28

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 28

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS shouldn’t be so hard on him. He’s just trying to do what he’s always done. It’s noble.

Li Wei stares at me incredulously. Noble? He’s going to get himself killed!

He’s providing for others, I insist.

Providing? he asks, still outraged. We slave away, putting our lives at risk and our own dreams aside so that we can feed everyone else. We have the entire village’s hopes and fears resting on our shoulders. If we don’t work, they starve. That’s not providing. That’s certainly not noble. That’s being given no choice. That’s being trapped. You’ve been with the artists so long, you’ve forgotten what it’s like for the rest of us.

That’s not fair, I say, feeling my own anger rise. You know the job we do is vital to the village’s survival. And of course I know what it’s like for the miners! That’s the whole point of my job: observing everyone.

Observing is not the same as experiencing. Li Wei gestures angrily to my stump. You sit there and judge others from a safe distance every day. You assume because you watch us, you understand us. But you don’t. If you did, you never would have— He can’t finish, so I do. Bettered myself? Accepted a position that raised my sister and me out of that hovel and gave us a place of honor and comfort? One that allowed me to actually use my talents? What is so wrong with wanting to improve my life?

He doesn’t speak for several moments. Then: Did it, Fei? Did it improve your life?

29

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 29

7/13/15 12:54 PM

RICHELLE MEAD I think back to lazy summer days, lying in the grass with him, our hands linked as we talked about the future. I only ran errands for the artists back then. It wasn’t until I was offered an official apprenticeship that my status in the village changed, raising me up from a miner’s family to Elder Chen’s successor.

My parents had just died, and Zhang Jing and I were living in a small, ramshackle place, given the barest of rations while waiting for the results of the testing we’d undergone at the Peacock Court in order to be accepted. The elders so coveted my talents that they took Zhang Jing on as well, though her skills were less than mine.

That move gave me everything I could ever have wanted, with one exception: Artists only marry other artists.

Did it improve your life? Li Wei asks again.

In most ways, I say at last, hating the pain I see flash through his eyes. But what could we do? You know I had to take the opportunity. And with it came sacrifices. That’s life, Li Wei. That’s the way it’s always been.

Maybe it’s time things change, he shoots back. He stalks away from me just as other miners begin emerging from the main entrance for lunch. I watch him until the crowd swallows him, wondering what exactly he meant should change. The system that traps Bao and others in the mines? Or the one that has kept Li Wei and me apart? After a moment, I realize that they are one and the same.

As the miners settle down in various clusters, eating and talking, I flit about them as unobtrusively as possible, trying to watch conversations and gather all the information I can—and

30

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 30

7/13/15 12:54 PM

SOUNDLE SS trying not to think about what Li Wei said. A busy time like this one is when our observing-without-interfering mandate is most important.

When I return to my stump, I do a double take when I discover that someone has taken a knife to its surface. What was previously simply flat and weathered has now been carved up with a chrysanthemum design—a really remarkable one. Carving is not a trade cultivated very much at my school, but my artistic eye can’t help but notice the skill and detail that has gone into every single petal of this king of flowers—a flower I’ve only ever seen in books. These chrysanthemums are beautiful, and the fact that they’ve been created in such a short time makes them even more amazing.

I sigh, knowing where they came from. Throughout our youth, whenever we had a dispute, Li Wei and I would apologize to each other by exchanging gifts. Mine would be in the form of drawings, crudely done with whatever natural supplies I could find. His would always be carvings. There was only one time the exchange didn’t happen, the day I told him I was accepting the apprentice position and would never be able to marry him. We argued then, and after the fact, I painted chrysanthemums outside his door as a peace offering. Nothing ever came in return.

I touch these carved ones now, amazed at how his skill has progressed in the last two years. Bittersweet memories cling to me, and then, reluctantly, I let go of them and continue my observation.

31

9781595147639_Soundless_INT_4P_correx.indd 31

7/13/15 12:54 PM