The Replacement

Chapter One Blood

I don’t remember any of the true, important parts, but there’s this dream I have. Everything is cold and branches scrape the window screen. Giant trees, rattling, clattering with leaves. White rain gutter, the curtain flapping. Pansies, violets, sunflowers. I know the fabric pattern by heart. They’re a list in my head, like a poem.

I dream about fields, dark tunnels, but nothing is clear. I dream that a dark shape puts me in the crib, puts a hand over my mouth, and whispers in my ear. Shh, it says. And, Wait. No one is there, no one is touching me, and when the wind comes in around the edges of the window frame, my skin is cold. I wake up feeling lonely, like the world is big and freezing and scary. Like I will never have anyone touch me again.

They were sticking students in the cafeteria, over by the trophy cases.

They’d hung a curtain to hide the blood-draw station, and it came down almost to the floor, but everyone knew what was behind it. Needles going in, tubes coming out. A butcher-paper banner was stretched over the west entrance, announcing the blood drive in giant Magic Marker letters.

We’d just come in from lunch. Me, the Corbett twins, and Roswell Reed.

Drew Corbett was digging through his pockets for a quarter to show me how he could fix a coin toss. It sounded complicated, but he had a way of taking any trick or sleight of hand and making it look easy.

When he tossed the quarter, it hung for a second and I was sure I could see it flip over, but when he showed me the back of his hand, it was still heads. He smiled a wide, slow smile, like we’d just exchanged a really good joke without either of us saying anything out loud. Behind us, his brother Danny-boy was in this ongoing argument with Roswell about whether or not the only local band that was any good could ever get radio play or score spots on late-night talk shows.

From far away, you could look at the twins and get the idea that they were the same person. They had the same long, brown hands, the same narrow eyes and dark hair. They were good at the same things, drawing and building and fixing stuff, but Drew was more relaxed. He listened better and moved slower. Danny was the one who talked.

“But look at what sells,” Roswell said, raking a hand through his hair so it stood up in messy tufts, rust colored. “What makes you think that the same people who get all frantic for power chords would even appreciate a rarified talent like Rasputin Sings the Blues?”

Danny sighed and grabbed my arm. “Mackie, would anybody really take something that fundamentally sucks over something good?” He sounded impatient, like he already knew he was winning this one whether I backed him or not, so why were they still talking about it?

I didn’t answer. I was looking at Alice Harms, which was a habitual behavior, kind of like a hobby.

Danny yanked harder. “Mackie, quit acting like a complete stoner and listen. Do you really think someone would pick the bad thing?”

“People don’t always know what they should want,” I said without looking away from Alice.

She had on a green shirt, cut low so it showed the tops of her breasts. There was a yellow blood-donor sticker stuck to the front of it. She tucked her hair behind one ear and the whole thing was sort of beautiful.

Except, I could smell the blood—sweet, metallic. I could taste it in the back of my mouth and my stomach was starting to feel iffy. I’d forgotten all about the blood drive until I’d walked into school that morning and been greeted by the festival of hand-lettered signs.

Drew hit me hard on the shoulder. “Here comes your girlfriend.”

Alice was crossing the cafeteria, flanked by two other members of the junior-class royalty, Jenna Porter and Stephanie Beecham. I could hear the scuff of their sneakers on the linoleum. The sound was nice and reminded me of shuffling through dead leaves. I watched Alice but not in any really hopeful way.

Girls went for Roswell, not me. He was tall and knobby, with a wide, straight mouth. He was freckled in the summer, the hair on his arms was reddish, and he never got his sideburns even, but he was likable. Or maybe it was just that he was like them.

I was the weird one—pale, creepy. Blond hair might have been a strong point on someone else, but on me, it just made it harder to get away with how dark my eyes were. I didn’t make jokes or start conversations. Sometimes, people got uneasy just looking at me. It was better to stay in the background. But now here I was, standing in the middle of the cafeteria, and Alice was coming closer. Her mouth was pink. Her eyes were very blue.

And then she was right in front of me.

“Hi, Mackie.”

I smiled, but it felt more like wincing. It was one thing to look at her from across a room and think about maybe, possibly kissing her. It was another to have a conversation. I swallowed and tried to come up with any of the normal things people talk about. All I could think was how once I’d seen her in her tennis uniform last spring and her legs were so tan I thought my heart would stop.

“So, did you give blood?” she said, touching her yellow sticker. “You better tell me you gave blood.” When she pushed her hair back from her face, I caught a flash of something silver in her mouth. She had her tongue pierced.

I shook my head. “I can’t do needles.”

That made her laugh. Suddenly, her hand was resting on my arm for no good reason. “Aw, that’s so cute! Okay, fine, you’re off the hook for being a huge pansy. So, are your parents all completely freaked out about the latest drama? I mean, you heard about Tate Stewart’s sister, right?”

Behind me, Roswell took a sharp breath and let it back out. The twins had stopped smiling. I fumbled around for a way to change the subject but couldn’t come up with anything on the spot.

The smell of blood was sweet and oozy, too thick to ignore.

I had to clear my throat before I answered. “Yeah. My dad’s been pretty cut up about it.”

Alice opened her eyes very wide. “Oh God, do you actually know them?”

“His dad’s doing the service,” Danny said in a flat voice.

He and Drew had both turned away. When I followed their gaze, I saw they were watching Tate, who sat alone at one of the long tables, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sky.

I didn’t know her. I mean, I’d gone to school with her my whole life, and she lived down the block from Drew and Danny, and I’d had at least one class with her every semester since junior high. But I didn’t know her. I didn’t know her sister either, but I’d seen them together in the parking lot at my dad’s church. A chubby, smiling little kid named Natalie. Just this normal, healthy-looking kid.

Tate scraped back her chair and glanced in our direction. Her hair was dark brown and cut short, which made her face look strangely bare. From far away, she seemed small, but her shoulders were rigid as she stood up, like she was ready to take a punch. Until two days ago, she’d had friends. Maybe not the whispering, giggling, inseparable kind like Alice, but people had liked her.

Now there was an empty space around her that made me think of quarantine. It was unsettling to realize that it didn’t take much to make you an outcast. All you needed was for something terrible to happen.

Alice didn’t waste any time on Tate. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and suddenly, she was standing much closer to me. “Just, you never think about little kids dying. I mean, that’s so sad, right? My mom’s kind of been going crazy with the saints medals and the Hail Marys since she heard. Hey, are you guys going to be around on Saturday? Stephanie’s having a party.”

Roswell leaned in over my shoulder. “Cool. We might stop by. So you guys got suckered into the blood drive, huh?” He was looking at Stephanie when he said it. “How was exsanguination? Did it hurt?”

Stephanie and Jenna both started to nod, but Alice rolled her eyes. “Not really. Like, it hurt when she was putting the tube in—but it wasn’t bad. It actually hurts more now. When she pulled the needle out, it kind of tore and now it won’t quit bleeding. Look.”

She held out her arm. There was a cotton ball taped to the inside of her elbow, covering the needle mark. In the middle, starting under the tape and spreading out through the cotton, there was a red splotch that grew and grew.

Iron is everywhere. It’s in cars, kitchen appliances, and those big industrial machines they use to pack food, but most of it’s mixed with other things, carbon and chromium and nickel. It hurts in a slow, exhausting way. I can take it.

The blood iron was different. It roared up through my mouth and nose, getting in my throat. Suddenly, it was hard to focus. My heart was beating very fast and then too, too slow.

“Mackie?” Alice’s voice sounded thin and fuzzy, coming from far away.

“I have to go,” I said. “My locker . . . I forgot this thing and I need to . . .”

For a second, I thought one or two or maybe all of them were going to follow me. Alice started to reach for me. Then Roswell put his hand on her arm and she stopped. His expression was tight, like he was pressing his lips together to keep from saying something. He jerked his head in the direction of the hall, just barely. Just go.

I made it through the maze of tables and out of the cafeteria without stumbling, but my vision was starting to tunnel and I could feel my heartbeat in my hands and in my ears. It was better once I got away from the sweet, suffocating smell of the blood drive. I took deep breaths and waited for the dizziness to ebb off.

The lockers in the junior hall all looked the same—five feet tall and painted a light, flaking beige. Mine was at the far end, past the hall to the math wing and the doors out to the courtyard. As soon as I came around the corner, I knew something was wrong with it.

On the locker door, at eye level, there was a red smear the size and shape of someone’s palm. Even before I got close, I could smell the blood. It wasn’t as bad as Alice’s puncture wound. That had been warm, horribly metallic. This was cold and sticky, just starting to dry.

I looked around, but the hall was empty. The doors leading out to the courtyard were closed. It had been raining all day and there was no one on the grass.

The smear was a dark, gummy red, and I stood with my hands against my forehead. It was a joke, some kind of mean, stupid trick. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to come up with it—you wouldn’t have to guess. I am notorious for being the guy sitting on the ground with my head between my knees when someone gets a bloody nose.

It was a joke because it had to be. But even before I moved closer, I knew deep down that it wasn’t. Someone had gotten creative with a paper clip or a key. They’d scratched the word Freak into the congealing mess.

I took my sleeve and scrubbed at it, feeling sick and out of breath. I got most of the blood off, but Freak stayed right there on the door. It was scratched into the paint and blood had settled into the letters so the word stood out dark against the beige enamel. Looking at it made the rush of static sweep in again. I backed away and almost fell. There was just my slow, stuttering heartbeat.

Then my hand on the wall, feeling for the door, the empty courtyard, the fresh air.

I was in kindergarten the first time my dad told me about Kellan Caury.

The story was short, and he told it over and over, like Winnie-the-Pooh or Goodnight Moon. When my dad told it, I could see the important parts like scenes from an old movie, flickering and grainy. Kellan Caury would be quiet and polite. A grown-up, maybe in his thirties.

He was like me. Mostly. Except that he had an extra set of joints in his fingers and I always pictured him in black and white.

He ran a music repair shop on Hanover Street and lived above it in a little kitchenette apartment. He couldn’t tune pianos because he couldn’t stand to touch the steel wires, but he was honest and fair and everyone liked him. His specialty was fixing violins.

When kids started to go missing, no one thought that much about it. It was the Depression, and no one had enough food or enough money, and kids were always disappearing. They got sick or ran away, or died from accidents or starvation, and that was too bad, but no one really got suspicious or asked that many questions.

Then the sheriff’s daughter disappeared. This was in 1931, just before the end of October.

Kellan Caury had never hurt anyone, but it didn’t matter. They came for him anyway.

They dragged him out of his little kitchenette apartment and down into the street. They burned out his shop and beat on him with wrenches and pipes. Then they hung him from a tree in the churchyard with a bag over his head and his hands tied behind his back. They left his body there for a month.

The first time my dad told me this, I didn’t get what he was trying to say, but by the time I was in first or second grade, I was already starting to understand.

The moral of the story is, don’t attract attention. Don’t have deformed fingers. Don’t let anyone find out how amazing you are at tuning strings by ear. Don’t show anyone the true, honest heart of yourself or else, when something goes wrong, you might wind up rotting in a tree.

Everyone has a point of origin. A place they come from.

Some people’s places are just simpler than others’.

I don’t remember any of this, but my sister, Emma, swears it’s true and I believe her. This is the story she used to tell me at night, when I would climb out of bed and sneak down the hall to her room.

The baby in the crib: crying, in that anxious, fussy way. His face is shiny between the bars. The man comes in the window—bony, wearing a black coat—and grabs the baby up. He slips back out over the sill, slides the window down, pops the screen back in. Is gone. There’s something else in the crib.

In the story, Emma’s four years old. She gets out of bed and pads across the floor in her footie pajamas. When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother.

It’s me.

Chapter Two Never Talk to Strangers

Roswell found me in the courtyard. The two-minute bell had already rung and there was no one on the lawn to watch me. I was leaning against the building with my eyes closed, breathing in long gasps.

“Hey,” he said, right next to me before I knew he was there.

I swallowed and opened my eyes. The sky was overcast, still raining that thin, dismal drizzle that was all wrong for October.

“Hey.” I sounded hoarse and confused, like I’d been asleep.

“You don’t look great. How are you feeling?”

I wanted to shrug and shake it off, but the dizziness rolled in and out in waves. “Pretty bad.”

Roswell leaned against the wall and suddenly, I was sure that he was going to ask what happened or at least ask why I was hyperventilating alone in the courtyard. I wondered if he’d seen my locker.

I took a deep breath and cut him off before he could say anything. “Nothing like topping off a dead-baby story with some fresh blood.”

He laughed and knocked his shoulder against mine. “Hey, she can’t help that her brain is constantly misfiring. But I have to play nice with her if I’m ever going to have a shot at Stephanie, and last names aside, she’s mostly harmless. And I know you’re not indifferent to those natural endowments, right?”

I laughed, but it sounded forced and kind of miserable. I still had a queasy feeling, like there was a chance I might throw up.

“Look,” Roswell said, and his voice was unexpectedly low. “I know you don’t talk to girls that much—I know that. But she would go out with you. I’m just saying, the opportunity is there if you want it, you know?”

I didn’t answer. Alice was so incredibly, painfully hot, so perfect for watching from across the room, but the thought of actually going someplace with her made my chest feel tight.

The last bell rang, screeching out of the PA system on the roof, and Roswell stepped away from the wall. “Are you coming to history?”

I shook my head. “I think I’m just going to go home.”

“You want a ride? I’ll tell Crowley you had a family emergency or something.”

“I’m fine.”

The look he gave me was unconvinced. He ran a hand over his chin and stared out across the lawn. “I guess I’ll catch up with you later, then. Are you going to be at the funeral?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably not.”

He nodded. I nodded. We were both standing in the courtyard nodding but not really looking at each other. Sometimes Roswell asks very hard questions, but sometimes he has the decency not to. He didn’t say anything else. He went back inside and I left through the outer gate.

I started feeling better once I got out of the parking lot, away from the school, the cafeteria full of needles, the clanging metal smell of blood. I put up my hood and stared at my feet, thinking, How are you ever going to get a girlfriend? And why would someone like Alice Harms even be interested in you anyway? And what a loser.

Still, she’d touched my arm.

The air was clean and damp, making my breath come easier. I felt cold, a little shaky, maybe, but I was okay. I felt okay. Still, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging sense that things were about to get bad. At school. In the world. Alice’s mom was saying Hail Marys and everyone was on edge, looking for the demon in their midst, looking for someone to blame. My whole body felt weak, like I was coming down with something.

One thing was clear: I needed to do whatever it took to avoid being noticed. The rain pattered steadily on the sidewalk, making me uneasy for no good reason. Maybe things were bad, but they were always bad. I was used to that. The real, fundamental problem was this feeling I had that they were about to get worse.

In another, earlier life, Gentry was a steel town, but over the span of four or five decades, it had turned into a sea of minivans and lawns and golden retrievers.

Almost everybody worked at one of the computer plants, assembling boards and packing chips, or else at the dairy farm or the junior college, depending on their level of education. There were plenty of other company towns in neighboring counties—suburbs with no city to spread out from, each with their own factory or tech plant to orbit around.

Gentry was just more self-contained than most. People were born and grew up and died without ever feeling compelled to leave. Everything you needed was already there.

The high school was built on the edge of what used to be the Gates refinery. For forty years, Gates had been the beating heart of Gentry, and a lot of local businesses and school mascots were still named after it. When Gates folded after World War II, first the machine shops and then the tech companies had come in with jobs, sponsored bridges and town squares, always deciding that Gentry was a better bet than the other eight or nine small towns in the immediate vicinity. They’d torn the refinery down before I was born.

Most people at school cut through the Gates property to get home. The residential areas were almost all on the other side of it, separated from the business district and the school by a narrow ravine. There was still all kinds of scrap and debris lying around in the grass, though, and the ground was saturated with iron. I always took a different route.

Now I walked along Benthaven, skirting the open field where the refinery had sat a lifetime ago, trying to figure out what had just happened. Someone had painted blood on my locker door. But the critical question was, Why? What had I done to make someone want to single me out? Why now?

Things always got tense around Gentry when kids died. Funerals were a bad subject, but I’d been careful. I’d been close to invisible. I’d done my part.

And Roswell and I had both known I wouldn’t be at the service, but sometimes you have to play the game, even when there’s no one else around. It puts you in the habit of pretending you believe what you’re saying. When really it’s just two people who know a secret, pretending that they don’t.

Consecrated ground wasn’t like stainless steel or blood iron. It wasn’t something I could just deal with. If I went two feet inside the churchyard, my skin blistered the way other people get a bad sunburn.

There were parts of the property that weren’t off-limits to me—storage sheds and the Sunday school addition and an unconsecrated section of the cemetery, reserved for suicides and unbaptized babies—but the idea of going into the churchyard just to stand in one corner of the cemetery and stare at the rest of it was depressing.

When I was younger, I’d gone to Sunday school. My dad had the classroom addition built on an adjoining lot when I was three or four. It was a reasonable expansion because they really did need the space, but he had an ulterior motive, too. He never consecrated the ground.

The new building had been a workable solution for a while, but now that I was too old for Bible classes, I had to settle for looking like that rebellious kid who didn’t want anything to do with his pastor father.

I walked along Welsh Street until I came to the place where the road dead-ended. I stepped over the low concrete divider and started down the footpath toward the slag heap.

When the refinery was running, they’d just dump the gravel and quicklime into the ravine to get rid of it. It piled up for years, covered in skinny trees and clumps of weeds. It was the only part of Gates that still existed.

There were dump hills and slag heaps all over the county, but in Gentry, the elementary school kids never climbed the fences. Other towns’ slag heaps were fenced for liability reasons. They were low and gray and not very interesting. Ours were so black they looked burned. They were fenced because it was better to stay away.

The stories people told were the campfire kind, possessions and hauntings. Grinning, rotting things that rose from the dead at night and walked around deserted streets. None of it was believable, but that was irrelevant. It didn’t matter if the stories were just stories. You still didn’t want to go there.

Partway down the side of the hill, the path split and followed a footbridge across to the other side of the ravine. A man was standing in the middle of the bridge, which was weird because it wasn’t the kind of place grown-ups usually hung out. He was leaning on the railing, staring out with his chin in his hands. He looked familiar in a way I couldn’t place.

I didn’t really want to go any closer, but I had to walk past him to get home or else climb back up the hill and go all the way around to Breaker Street. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket and stepped out onto the bridge.

“You look awful,” he said as I came up next to him. It was a strange thing to say because it was rude and he was a stranger, but also because he wasn’t looking at me.

He had on a long coat with frayed cuffs and military stripes sewed onto the sleeves. There was a row of holes down the front, like someone had cut the snaps out.

“Your eyes,” he said suddenly, turning to stare at me. “Your eyes are black as stones.”

I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure there was no one else on the path before I nodded. My eyes were always dark, but iron made it worse. The dizziness was nearly gone, although I still felt sweaty and pale.

The man leaned closer. The skin around his eyes was bruised, oily looking. His complexion was an unhealthy shade of yellow. “I could help you.”

“I’m not an expert or anything, but you look like you need a little more help than I do.”

That made him smile, which didn’t improve his appearance. “My face is simply a result of my poor breeding, but you, my friend, are in bad shape. You need something to get you back on your feet.” He pointed across the bridge to the other side of the ravine, my quiet suburban neighborhood and my house. “That way lies misery. It’s what you’re going home to, and I think you know it.”

Rain pattered on the bridge. I glanced over the rail and down at the slag heap. It was so black that you could almost see other colors. My heart was beating harder than was comfortable.

“I’m not interested,” I said. My mouth was dry.

He nodded gravely. “But you will be.”

It didn’t sound like a threat or a warning. His voice was flat. He took a watch out of his coat pocket and turned away from me, flipping the lid open but staring down at the slag heap.

After a minute, I edged past him, careful not to let our shoulders touch. I crossed to where the path climbed the other side of the ravine and came out at the intersection of Orchard and Concord. I kept going, trying hard to fight the panic in my chest. A small, fearful part of me was convinced he was following, he was coming up behind me, but when I turned back toward the bridge, there was nothing.

On Concord Street, all the houses were two stories high, with big wraparound front porches. Three houses down from ours, Mrs. Feely was out in her yard, nailing a horseshoe to the porch railing. Her hair was gray, arranged in tight poodle curls all over her head, and she was wearing a yellow rain slicker. She glanced over her shoulder and when she saw me, she smiled and gave me a wink.

Then she went back to nailing up the horseshoe, like the iron would protect her from something big and scary. I headed home, with the clang of her hammer following me down the street.

Chapter Three Heartbeat

In the front hall, I dropped my book bag and yanked off my hoodie. There was blood all over the sleeve, and I debated just throwing it away, but I figured my dad would have something to say about that.

The laundry room was in a little alcove off the hall. I didn’t like to go in there. The washer and dryer were both stainless steel and the room was so small that the air always had a dense, poisonous smell to it. For a minute, I considered running the washer anyway, but even just standing with the door open was making my pulse hammer in my ears. I wadded up the hoodie and made a mental note to ask Emma if she’d wash it for me. In scalding water. With bleach. Then I shoved it in the hamper and headed for the kitchen.

From the back of the house, I could hear the clack of the keyboard. My mom was in the office, tapping away at her computer.

“Mackie,” she called, “is that you?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let your father catch you skipping class, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

I got a glass of water and sat at the table, looking at the tablecloth and trying to figure out the plaid pattern. It went red, black, red, white, green, and then I lost track.

When Emma came in, I was so out of it that her hand on my shoulder made me jump. I started to ask about the laundry but stopped when I realized there was someone else with her. The second girl was tall and serious looking, with a long, bony face.

Emma got a jar of peanut butter from the pantry and took out a plastic picnic knife.

“Hey, ugly,” she said, reaching to tousle my hair. “You’re home early.” She glanced across the hall at the office door, then said so quietly she was almost mouthing it, “Are you feeling okay?”

I wiggled my hand in a so-so gesture. “Aren’t you supposed to be in botany?”

Emma was nineteen and not the kind of person who skipped class. She was taking every science course the junior college offered and her dedication was kind of scary.

“Professor Cranston gave us outside time to work on our group project.” She waved her plastic knife at the other girl. “That’s Janice.”

Janice sat down across from me and folded her hands on the table. “Hi,” she said. Her hair was muddy brown and hung in wild snarls on either side of her face.

I nodded at her but didn’t say anything.

She was looking at me like I was a laboratory specimen, one of those bugs with the pins through it. Her eyes were huge and dark. “Why does she call you ugly?”

Other people could make pretty much any situation seem normal just by saying the right words. But I wasn’t like that. I stared hard at the backs of my hands and waited for Emma to ride in and take over the conversation.

Emma, the master liar. Queen of my-brother-is-normal, my-brother-is-shy. My brother is sickly, has allergies, mono, food poisoning, the flu, the biggest, messiest lie of all: My brother.

Reliably, she came up behind me and leaned her chin on the top of my head. Her hair was fine and limp. Stray pieces had come loose from the rubber band and hung down so they tickled my face. “When he was a baby, he was the ugliest thing you ever saw in your life. All yellow and wrinkly. And he had these teeth.” She let me go and turned in the direction of the office. “A full set—right, Mom?”

“Just like Richard the Third,” my mom called back.

Janice was still looking at me, crouched at the table like she was hungry. “Well, he’s not ugly now.”

“I’m going upstairs,” I said, and pushed my chair back.

In my room, I lay on the bed but couldn’t get comfortable. I felt restless, like little bugs were crawling around under my skin. The man on the bridge had been waiting for me—me, and not some random kid cutting across the bridge. He’d stared right into my face like he was looking for something. I was still cold and shaky from the blood, worse than I’d felt in a while and worse than I used to feel, ever.

Finally, I got up and went over to my closet. I got out my bass and my amp and plugged in the headphones.

The bass was strung with Black Beauties, and I’d pulled off the metal frets. If the song was fast, I used a pick, and when I didn’t, the lacquer coating on the strings kept the steel from burning my fingers. But even if I had to play with bare strings, I’d probably do it anyway, just to get that low, humming sound, that feeling. Sometimes it’s the only thing that helps. Anything that scares or worries you is suddenly a hundred miles away.

I played the lines to songs I knew and to songs I made up. I played progressions full of high, clear notes that hung forever and heavy tones that thumped and doubled back on themselves again and again and again.

After a long time, I started to get a strange feeling. Like someone was listening. Not the feeling of the house or even of Emma standing out in the hall. It was more like the warm, anxious rush of playing for a stranger. When I took the headphones off and went to the window, though, the backyard was empty. More time had passed than I’d realized and it was starting to get dark. I stared out at the lawn and the bushes, but it was ridiculous to think that someone had been listening. Completely ludicrous, when I was sitting there with the sound filtering through my headphones.

I sat back down on the edge of the bed with the Gibson propped across my knees and played a walking bass line that peaked and dropped and grew until I could feel it in my own heartbeat.

When I woke up a while later, someone was calling my name.

I rolled off the bed, untangling myself from cables and cords. I’d dozed off with my headphones on. From the floor, the amp hummed softly in the gloom and I felt hazy and numb. Outside, the sky was dark.

The house was very bright, which meant my dad was home. He has this thing for electric lights. If a switch can be flipped, he’ll flip it. When I stepped out onto the landing, I had to shut my eyes against the glare.

“Malcolm,” he called from the kitchen. “Come in here, please.”

I went downstairs, blinking and shading my eyes with my hand.

He was at the table, and I could tell from his expression and his necktie that he’d just gotten back from the church. From Natalie Stewart’s funeral. His face was round and generally friendly, but right now it looked sort of raw. I wanted to ask about the service but didn’t know what to say.

He was flipping through a pile of old sermons and making notes on them. His suit coat was slung over the back of a chair. He glanced up when I came in but didn’t put his pen down. He looked tired and sort of exasperated, like he could hardly wait for the day to be over.

“Do you want to talk about why I got a call from the attendance office this afternoon?” he said.

“They had the blood drive at school. . . .”

He watched my face, rolling the pen between his fingers. “Today wasn’t a good day for doing things that could get you singled out. I’m assuming they announce something like that ahead of time?”

“I forgot,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not like it was some huge crisis.”

“Malcolm,” he said. “Your entire responsibility is not to make them see.”

I stared down at the linoleum. “I didn’t.” After a second, I glanced back up at him. “I don’t.”

He arranged his sermons in a neat pile, lining up the edges. Then he got up and went to the counter. He got out a plastic knife and started using it to cut an apple into slices. I wanted to ask why he didn’t just pick up the apple and eat it like a normal person, but everyone has their own private quirks.

After mangling the apple for a while, he threw the knife into the sink. It bounced like a pick-up-stick and snapped in half. “Why are there no paring knives in this house?”

“The good one’s in the cupboard. Above the refrigerator,” I said when he gave me a blank look.

My mother moves cutlery around like she’s playing chess. Sometimes, she throws it out. Anything that can’t be plastic or ceramic is aluminum. Anything that isn’t aluminum, she hides.

He opened the cupboard, sorting through the pile of knives and stainless steel flatware, and took the paring knife back to the counter.

I watched his back as he sliced the apple. His shoulders were tight. He smelled like aftershave and this tense, sharp smell he gets when he’s stressed out.

“I was thinking,” he said without turning around. “Missy Brandt mentioned that it might be nice to have someone come in and help with the preschool class once in a while. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

I had a feeling that Missy hadn’t mentioned it, that this was something he’d come up with on his own, and of course she’d said yes because what else can someone say when the minister asks you to babysit his sideshow of a son?

When I didn’t answer, he glanced over his shoulder. “Is something wrong? I thought it might be a good solution. This way, you have an official place in the congregation.”

I dug my fingernails into my palms and tried to get my voice under control. “It’s just so . . . messed up.”

“Well, it might take you a few weeks to get used to being around little kids, but I think you’ll do fine if you just give it a chance.” He sighed, shaking his head. “That’s the trouble with you and your mother. Both of you, you take a situation and start inventing obstacles right away. You never just give things a chance to get better.”

So, we were back to the sticky politics of choosing sides. On one side, me and my mom—pessimistic realists, always. On the other side, my dad and Emma, glowing with all the ways the world could be good, and I couldn’t just agree with them because I didn’t really believe it. But I wanted to.

I picked at the tablecloth, then stopped because it was making me look uncertain, and that wasn’t how I felt. I meant what I had to say to him. I just didn’t want to say it. “Dad, this doesn’t have anything to do with giving things a chance. This is just how it is and it’s not going to magically get better. I’m not ever going to be able to just live my life like everyone else.”

My dad turned toward the window so I couldn’t see his face. “Don’t say that again. None of this is because of you.”

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, feeling a deep, pulsing ache in the middle of my chest, like someone was hitting me. “It is because of me. You don’t even treat me the same way you treat Emma.”

That made him breathe out in a harsh gust, almost a laugh. “You’re nothing like Emma. I try my best to figure out what you need, but it’s hard. It’s never been obvious with you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try. That’s all we can do, really—try to do the right thing.”

I was about to tell him that the right thing was to go with what worked and not put me in charge of a bunch of little kids when Emma came in. She shuffled across the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I stopped talking and my dad kept his back to both of us.

Emma rummaged through the vegetable drawer for a while, then looked at us. “You didn’t have to be so rude to Janice,” she said, and at first, I thought she meant me.

My dad set down the knife and turned to face her. “You know we have rules about unexpected guests.”

We do have rules. We have a lot of rules. Roswell can come over, but only because my dad trusts him. A random acquaintance might be tipped off by our lack of canned food and metal kitchen utensils.

My dad raked his hands through his hair. “Both of you, please. This family is an extremely visible part of the community and we need to be conscientious about the image we’re projecting.”

Emma closed the refrigerator, hard. “What image? We weren’t embarrassing you. She was over so we could go through the seed experiment.”

“Well, this isn’t really the ideal place for a study session. Could you meet at the library, maybe?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Unfortunately, they have a policy about setting up germination trays at the library.”

“Well, what about that nice little bookstore downtown? Or a coffee shop?”

“Dad!”

They glared at each other, but neither of them said anything.

They were the loud ones in the family, always shouting or laughing. I thought how strange it was that they were also the ones who’d perfected the art of a wordless argument. They could communicate just by the various ways they breathed in or out.

My dad made a huffing noise and Emma rolled her eyes and looked away.

She was standing against the refrigerator, staring at the floor. Suddenly, she leapt forward and hugged him around the waist like she was apologizing. They stood with their arms around each other and I knew that there’d never been any question about whether he’d hug her back.

She pressed her face against his shirt and said, “You better put that knife back when you’re done. Mom hates it when the kitchen gets disarranged.”

He laughed and turned to swat her with the dish towel. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to disarrange her kitchen, would I?”

“Not if you know what’s good for you.”

She reached out to rumple my hair, but she was still looking at him. Then she turned and danced out of the room. He watched her go. They had an actual relationship—one I could never decipher or duplicate.

My dad left his mangled apple on the counter and sat down across from me. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time, but you know how important it is to keep a low profile.”

“Some people pass out when there’s blood. It’s a known phenomenon.”

He leaned down so that he was staring into my face. His eyes were pale green, like glass, and his hair was going from dishwater brown to gray. He had a way of seeming so good and so right when you didn’t have to live with him, like anyone else could just go to him and find something warm and comforting there.

“You don’t have the luxury of being like some people. You have to resemble the majority. I’m not saying they’re bad, but this is a nervous, suspicious town, and it’s going to be a lot worse for a while. A family buried their daughter today. You know that.” Then his expression got softer. “Did you pass out?”

“No. I just had to go out and get some air.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“Roswell.”

My dad sat back in his chair, linking his hands behind his head, studying me. “Are you sure no one else saw you?”

“Just Roswell.”

After a minute, he nodded. “Okay.” He took a deep breath and said it again, like that decided something. “Okay. You’re right—this isn’t a crisis.”

I nodded, looking at the floor and the shining granite counters. If you assessed our family dynamic based on just the kitchen, you would probably assume it was sitcom quality.

I leaned my elbows on the table like I was checking to see if it would take my weight. The smell of his aftershave was so strong that it kept getting in my mouth, making it hard to swallow. On the wall, the clock was ticking softly, inching toward eleven.

No. It wasn’t a crisis. Except someone had scratched Freak on my locker door.

But there was no way to tell him about that. No way to make him understand that none of his rules and his safety measures mattered.

The word was still true.

Chapter Four Gentry at Night

Later, I lay facedown on the bed. The sounds of the house were familiar. Refrigerator, central air. The upstairs toilet that never quite stops running.

Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Rustle of mail on the hall table, jingling keys. No scuffle of shoes. My mom wears white nurse’s sneakers, rubber soled. Totally silent.

“Sharon,” my dad called. It sounded like he was still in the kitchen. “Could you come here, please?”

My mom said something unintelligible. Must have been a no because a minute later, the shower came on. She always showers as soon as she gets home because her job is to splash around in blood. Because all day, she’s been touching stainless steel.

I rolled onto my back and looked at the ceiling, the overhead light fixture. The way the fan spun, making shadows like dragonfly wings.

Finally, I pushed the window open and climbed out onto the roof.

From so high up, I had a view of the neighborhood and the backyard. I leaned forward and propped my elbows on the tops of my knees. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still spitting a fine, chilly mist.

Down in the street, there were motorcycles, fire hydrants, and parked cars. Trees lined up all the way along Wicker Street. The whole city reeked like iron, but under that, the green smell was alive and bright.

In the hall outside my room, someone was shuffling along, dragging their feet on the carpet. Then there was a knock, soft and cautious.

I rolled over and leaned in through the window. “Yeah?”

Emma opened the door. Her hair was twisted into a knot and she was dressed for bed, wearing her horrible fuzzy slippers. She climbed onto my bed and struggled out onto the roof. With her hands out for balance, she scooted down the slope on her butt so that she was sitting next to me on the wet shingles.

We looked out at the street and Emma leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder.

I leaned my cheek against the top of her head. “So, you and Dad must’ve had a good one.”

“Difference of opinion. His was that I was breaking a cardinal rule, and in my opinion, he was acting like a crazy person. You kind of got the end of it. Sorry.”

I shook my head. “He wasn’t mad. He just wants me to be more inconspicuous. Because of that little kid today. Or because of Kellan Caury.”

“Oh God, I wish he’d stop talking about that. Telling you antiquated horror stories is not helping anything.”

I slid my fingers along the surface of the roof. The shingles were rough, full of galvanized nails. The burn was just painful enough to be distracting. “He didn’t say it. It’s just what he means. This girl at school—Tate. It was her sister.”

Emma nodded and picked her head up off my shoulder. The air was cool. She shivered and hugged her elbows.

“It’s hard for him.” She wasn’t touching me at all anymore, and her voice sounded strange. “It’s hard for both of them. I guess that means it’s supposed to be hard for me too, but I can’t even feel it the right way, you know? You’re the only brother I’ve ever had.”

I stared at my socks. They were tarry from the shingles, stuck all over with little pieces of grit. “Could we please not talk about this?”

Emma took a deep breath and turned to face me. “I’m tired of not talking about it. Have you not noticed that everyone in this town is desperately committed to pretending that nothing is wrong?”

I nodded, but I had to resist an urge to point out that sometimes it’s just so much easier that way. I scraped at the shingles with my fingers and didn’t say anything.

Emma crossed her arms over her chest. “You looked a lot like him.”

I hunched my shoulders without meaning to. She was talking about the brother she should have had, and everything about him, even the little things, made me feel heavy and sort of numb.

She just went on in a soft, dreamy voice. “He was blond, I think, like you. I know that he had blue eyes because you did too, for a while. But then it was like the blue just wore out. Or trickled off or something. Maybe there was a spell or a charm, but it faded, and one day the blue was gone, and there you were.”

“But you don’t actually remember what he was like?”

Emma looked down at the backs of her hands, scowling like she was trying hard to picture something. “I was really young,” she said finally. “I can’t always tell the difference between before and after. I’ll remember some detail and I can’t even tell if I’m remembering him or you. The thing I remember best is a pair of scissors. Mom had a pair of scissors that she tied on a ribbon over the crib. They were pretty.”

I thought about all the Old World superstitions. Tricks to guard the livestock and protect the house. It was obvious, more and more. They didn’t work.

Emma sighed. “I guess I don’t remember him at all,” she said finally. “I just remember the things Mom did to keep him from being stolen.”

She pulled one knee up so she could hook an arm around it. Her hair was starting to come down from the knot and she tugged at it, looking lonely and sad as a lighthouse. Sad as a nun.

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.

She sighed and glanced over at me. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

I shrugged. The feeling was easy, but the words wouldn’t come.

She looked at me a long time. Then she touched my cheek. “Good night, ugly.”

She flopped headfirst through the window, landing on the bed with her feet sticking out over the sill. Her slippers were grimy from the shingles and I almost reached out and tweaked her ankle, but I didn’t.

Below me, the neighborhood was sleepy and still. I leaned on my elbows and looked down into the street.

Gentry was two different things, and at night, I could always see that second thing better. The town was its green suburban lawns, sure, but it was also its secrets. The kind of place where people double-checked the locks at night or pulled their kids closer in the grocery store. They hung horseshoes over their front doors and put up bells instead of wind chimes. They wore crosses made from stainless steel instead of gold because gold couldn’t protect them from people like me.

Maybe the brave ones buried quartz and agate in their gardens or left a saucer of milk out for luck—a little backyard offering for whatever might be waiting in the shadows. If someone called them on it, they’d shrug or laugh, but they didn’t stop doing it because hey, we lived in a place where people kept their porch lights on and didn’t smile at strangers. Because when they set out a few pretty rocks with their marigolds, early snow never took the branches off their trees and their yards looked nicer than other people’s. Because mostly, more than anything, night was about shadows and missing kids, and we lived in the kind of place where no one ever talked about it.

After a long time, I climbed back into my room and got into bed. I left the window open so I could breathe. The house wasn’t bad, but still, it was hard to sleep with the air smelling like screws and brackets and nails.

When the breeze came in, I shivered and crawled deeper under the covers. Crickets were shrieking out in the yard, and the trees creaked against each other. Down by the road, in the tall stands of grass, there were mice rustling, night birds chirping away like spinning gears.

I put my pillow over my head to shut out the sound. The noises from the yard were muffled, and I wondered if this was what things sounded like to Roswell. To anyone who wasn’t me. He could walk into class and not get distracted by the rustle of paper or the ventilation system. I had to remember not to flinch when someone closed a door or dropped a book, in case the sound hadn’t been loud enough to startle anyone else.

This was life in Gentry—going to school every day, blending into a world where everyone was happier to ignore the things that didn’t fit, always willing to look away as long as you did your part.

Otherwise, how could they go on living their neat suburban lives?

Maybe it wasn’t that hard. Kids died. They got sick and then sicker, and no one could figure out what was wrong. Someone somewhere lost a son or daughter. Maybe they measured pollution or blamed it on the groundwater. Lead, maybe, or toxic seepage from the slag heap.

Natalie Stewart was just another casualty, buried in the Welsh Street graveyard with my dad standing over her, and that was a sad thing. I knew the script, the normal responses, but when I tried to feel some kind of sorrow or grief, even the polite kind, I just saw Tate sitting alone in the cafeteria. And when I thought of her there, the feeling I got wasn’t sadness, it was loneliness. When I pictured the circle of empty seats around her, I wasn’t mourning for her sister. It was just the same dull ache I felt every day.

The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you’re just another part of it.

Chapter Five The Scarlet Letter

Friday was chilly and gray. The blood-draw station had been cleared away, but I was still feeling kind of rickety and made it a point not to go in the cafeteria. In the atrium at the main entrance, rain coursed down the windows so that the glass looked like it was melting.

I spent the morning avoiding things. Crowds and conversations and anyone who might ask me why I was wandering around like a zombie—so, mostly Roswell—but by fourth hour, I was running out of excuses for my lack of school supplies and had to go by my locker. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to.

Freak was gone, though. Instead, there was a weird spiral pattern, covered in thin, snaking lines. The paint had been scraped away in a kind of spiderweb, leaving a network of bare metal that radiated out from what had been one accusatory word inlaid with blood. Some of the areas had been shaded in, black in places and a thick lumpy white in others.

“We fixed your locker,” Danny said, coming up behind me.

Drew nodded and held up a marker and a bottle of Wite-Out.

I studied the tangle of spirals and circles. At the outer edge of the design, correction fluid had been carefully applied over the marker, then scratched away so the ink showed through in ghostly corkscrews. For a project limited by preexisting vandalism and involving only Sharpie and Wite-Out, it was nice work.

Danny leaned his elbow on my shoulder. “We weren’t trying to squash your personal expression or anything. We just thought it might be a bad move to brand yourself too aggressively too early. It might, I don’t know, set the wrong tone.”

They both looked resolutely blank, like they were trying not to look too pleased with themselves. Drew was tossing the bottle of Wite-Out in the air and catching it again. They stood on either side of me and waited for my reaction.

I wanted to do something to show how relieved I was, how grateful, but all I said was, “Thanks.”

Danny punched me. “Don’t thank us. You’re the one who owes the school sixty bucks to get it repainted.”

If it hadn’t been obvious yesterday, Tate Stewart was the new point of interest. She stalked through the halls, past clusters of people who whispered behind their hands. Their glances weren’t the sideways glances of sympathy, but quick, furtive stares, full of curiosity.

They spent whole passing periods watching her and, at the same time, pretending not to. It didn’t seem to matter. She moved through the crowd like she was alone. Like the gossip and the stares couldn’t touch her. Her eyes were closed off, her expression was remote, but something about the set of her mouth made me feel sorry. She didn’t look sad, which made everything a hundred times sadder.

The thing about Tate was, she didn’t have any real interest in what people thought. She never tried to impress them or make them like her. Once, in seventh grade, she joined the boys’ baseball team, even though the baseball team sucked, just to prove that the athletics department couldn’t stop her.

As the morning went on, though, her mouth got thinner. There was a strange feeling coming off her, almost an electric charge. It hung in the air, like she was getting ready to explode, but things didn’t really hit the fan until English.

We were finishing the unit on Romanticism and The Scarlet Letter. Mrs. Brummel was tall and thin, with bleached hair and a lot of different sweaters. She got very excited about the kind of literature that no reasonable person would ever read for fun.

She stood at the front of the room and clapped because she was always clapping. “Okay, today we’re going to talk about guilt and how Pearl’s very existence condemns Hester more effectively than the A. This is most obvious in the fact that some of the villagers believe Pearl is the child of the devil.”

Then she wrote it on the board: Pearl as a concrete manifestation of guilt.

“Does anyone want to expand on this?”

No one did. In front of me, Tom Ritchie and Jeremy Sayers were flicking a paper football back and forth, mock cheering each time one of them got it between the uprights of the other one’s hands. Alice and Jenna were still watching Tate, whispering and then covering their mouths like they’d just said something so shocking it needed to be contained and giving each other significant looks.

Mrs. Brummel was making bullet points with her back to us, waiting for someone to start filling them in.

I watched Alice. When she’d taken her seat at the beginning of class, her skirt had slid up far enough to show the tops of her thighs, and I was enjoying the fact that she hadn’t adjusted it yet. Her hair was loose down her back and looked almost like bronze in the fluorescent light.

She propped her elbows on her desk and leaned forward so she could whisper into Jenna’s ear. “I heard that her mom won’t get out of bed since it happened. Like, not even for the funeral. I can’t believe she’s acting like nothing’s wrong. I just wouldn’t even come to school.”

Apparently, that one was loud enough for Tate to catch some or possibly all of it because she stood up fast enough to send her desk screeching along the floor. Her gaze was hard, sweeping over us, and I couldn’t tell if I was dizzy from the screws and wires in the walls or from the way she was looking at me.

“Oh,” she said, in a clear, challenging voice. “Was this what you wanted? Did you want a good look? Take a good look—I don’t mind.”

And maybe no one had really been excited about Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, but they were paying attention now. I kept my head down, hunching over my desk, trying to get smaller. My heart was beating so fast that I could feel it in my throat and I kept telling myself that everything was fine, that I’d imagined she’d looked at me, because I had to believe that. I had to believe that no one in Gentry would ever hear the words child of the devil and then look at me.

No one said anything.

The room was so quiet that all I could hear was the buzz of the fluorescent light. I had the idea that it was buzzing right over me, like some kind of signal or alarm, but no one turned to stare accusingly. No one whispered or pointed.

Mrs. Brummel stood with her back against the whiteboard and the marker uncapped in her hand, staring at Tate. “Is there something you needed?”

Tate shook her head and kept standing. “Don’t mind me. I’m just waiting for my big red A.”

“This isn’t funny,” Mrs. Brummel said, putting the cap back on the marker.

“No,” said Tate. “It’s not. But we can all agree to smile anyway because it just makes things so much easier.”

Mrs. Brummel retreated behind her desk and waved a box of tissues, even though Tate wasn’t crying. “Do you need some time to pull yourself together?”

“No. Because I’m not unbalanced or grief stricken, okay? I’m pissed off.”

“Would you like to go down to the counseling office?”

“No, I’d like someone to fucking listen to me!” Her voice was loud, unnaturally shrill. Suddenly, she hauled back and kicked the desk so hard that the whole room seemed to ring with the metallic clang of her work boot.

“You’re excused,” Mrs. Brummel said, but not in that wispy, understanding voice that teachers sometimes use. Her tone was no-argument, like if Tate didn’t go, there was a chance that she would be escorted out by the school rent-a-cop. For a second, Tate looked like she might hold out for forcible removal. Then she grabbed the books off her desk and walked out without looking back.

The rest of the class sat in awkward silence. I held on to the corners of my desk to keep my hands from shaking, and Mrs. Brummel did her best to wrench us back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Hester’s big stupid dilemma until the bell rang.

Out in the hall, Roswell was just being dismissed from his math class and he swung into step beside me. “Ready for some conversational French?”

I shook my head and started in the direction of the back parking lot. “I need some air.”

He looked at me like he was trying to figure out how to phrase something. “I think you should go to French,” he said finally.

“I can’t.”

“You mean, you don’t feel like it.”

“I mean, I can’t.”

He folded his arms and suddenly looked a lot bigger. “No, you mean you just don’t feel like it. Semantically, it’s possible.”

I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and reached for the door. “I have to go outside,” I said, and my voice was low and unsteady. “Just for a little while. I really need some air.”

“No, you need to tell me why you look like stone-cold death. Mackie, what is wrong?”

“I hate this,” I said, and my voice sounded tight. “I hate the way people are always fixating on things that aren’t any of their business. I hate that no one can just leave it alone. And I hate Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

Roswell shoved his hands in his pockets, looking down at me. “Okay. Not what I was expecting.”

He didn’t follow me.

I stood on the far side of the parking lot and leaned against one of the biggest white oaks, letting the rain filter down between the leaves and land on my face. The bell rang and I stayed where I was, numb and breathing too fast because I wasn’t always the best student when it came to doing the reading, but I knew the book enough to know that maybe Hester goes around with a big red A pinned on her dress, but Dimmesdale’s the one with it burned into his skin. He’s the one who dies.

Behind me, there was the rough idle of a car and then a voice said, “Hey, Mackie.”

Tate had pulled up next to the curb in this absolute monstrosity of a Buick and was leaning across the front seat. Apparently, she’d decided she was done with school for the day. Or, more likely, done being a public spectacle. She put her hand on the edge of the passenger window. “The rain isn’t going to stop. Do you want a ride somewhere?”

The car sat idling against the curb, its wipers flicking back and forth. Long primer-gray body, poisonous fenders. It made me think of a wicked metal shark. “That’s okay. Thanks, though.”

“Are you sure? It’s not a problem.”

I shook my head, watching the rain drip in a wavering curtain off the front bumper so I wouldn’t have to look at her.

Her face was softer and younger looking than normal. I stood under the dripping oak and debated complimenting the way she’d faced down Mrs. Brummel, just to have something to say—tell her I was impressed by the way she could be sad and stared at and still tell everyone to go straight to hell.

After a minute, she killed the engine and got out of the car. “Listen. I need to talk to you.”

When she came across the grass to me, she had this look on her face, like out in the parking lot, in the open, she wasn’t so sure of herself after all. Like maybe I scared her. Her mouth had a bruised look. Her eyes were blue underneath, like you get from not sleeping.

When she came up next to me, she turned so we were standing side by side, staring out at the parking lot. The point of her elbow was inches from my sleeve.

“Do you have a minute?”

I didn’t answer.

“Jesus, why don’t you ever say anything?” She turned and stared up at me with her teeth working on her bottom lip. It looked raw, like she’d been chewing it a lot. Even reeking like iron from the Buick, she still smelled crisp and kind of sweet. It made me think of flowering trees or something you want to put in your mouth. The kind of smell you shouldn’t notice about girls who are covered in tragedy and Detroit steel.

“You weren’t at the funeral yesterday,” she said.

Between us, the current seemed to hum louder. I nodded.

“Why? I mean, your dad seems like he’d be all about ‘pulling together as a community,’ and considering he pretty much organized the whole thing . . . And, I mean, Roswell was there.”

“Religion is my dad’s business,” I said, and my voice had a flat, mechanical sound that showed me for what I was—a bad liar reciting someone else’s lie. “Anyway, a funeral isn’t really an ideal social event. I mean, it’s not like I would attend one for fun or anything.”

Tate just watched me. Then she folded her arms tight across her chest, looking small and wet. Her hair was plastered against her forehead. “Whatever. It’s not like it matters.”

“You’re taking it really well.”

Tate took a deep breath and stared up at me. “It wasn’t her.”

For a second, I didn’t say anything. Neither of us did. But we didn’t look away from each other. I could see flecks of green and gold in her eyes and tiny spots so deep and cool they looked purple. I realized that I hadn’t really looked at her in years.

She closed her eyes and moved her lips before she spoke, like she was practicing the words. “It wasn’t my sister in that box, it was something else. I know my sister, and whatever died in that crib, it wasn’t her.”

I nodded. I was cold suddenly, goose bumps coming up on my arms in a way that had nothing to do with the rain. My hands tingled and started to go numb.

“So, are you just going to stand there looking like a piece of furniture?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything—I want someone to listen to me!”

“Maybe you should talk to a school counselor,” I said, looking at my shoes. “I mean, that’s what they’re there for.”

Tate stared up at me and her eyes were wide and hurt and, for the first time, full of tears. “You know what? Fuck you.”

She crossed the lawn to her car and swung herself into the driver’s seat. She slammed the door, wrenched the transmission into reverse, and backed out onto the road.

After she’d made it all the way down Benthaven and disappeared around the corner, I let myself slump against the oak tree, sinking to a crouch with my back against the trunk.

I barely felt the rain as it ran down my forehead and the back of my neck.

I hadn’t given away my secret because I didn’t even know how to say the secret out loud. No one did. Instead, they hung on to the lie that the kids who died were actually their kids and not just convincing replacements. That way, they never had to ask what had happened to the real ones. I had never asked what happened to the real ones.

That was the code of the town—you didn’t talk about it, you didn’t ask. But Tate had asked anyway. She’d had the guts to say what everyone else was thinking—that her true, real sister had been replaced by something eerie and wrong. Even my own family had never been honest enough to come right out and say that.

Tate had made herself a loner and an outcast when I was the one who was supposed to be the freak. I’d shied away like she might infect me, but she was just a girl trying to get a straight answer from the most obvious source.

And yes, I was obvious. When it came down to basic facts, I was weird and unnatural, and the game only worked as long as everyone else agreed not to see. If you took all the kids in school and lined them up, it was clear that I was the one who didn’t belong. I was the disease. I crouched under the dripping tree and covered my head with my hands.

I’d treated her like shit because I’d had no choice. This was how the game went, and when you got down to it, what mattered most was staying out of sight. Everything else was secondary. There was no way to fix what I’d done, no way to take it back, because it was just me.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the pale, drizzly sky and the dying grass and the tree. To the empty parking lot and my own shaking hands.

Chapter Six Fridays at Starlight

When Roswell picked me up after dinner for our weekly trip downtown to see the showcase of local bands, we didn’t talk much. I stared out the passenger window while he messed around with the radio, trying to find something he liked.

Finally, he switched it off. “So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” His voice sounded loud in the silence.

“What?”

He didn’t look away from the road. “You’re not too chipper tonight is all.”

I shrugged and watched the strip malls go by. “Tate Stewart is . . . It’s just, she freaked out in class today. She wanted to talk to me, and I don’t know what to say. Her sister died—she needs a professional.” And because those things were true but not the whole truth, I told him something else, so hoarse and low it was almost a whisper. “Roz, I don’t feel good. I haven’t felt good in a long time.”

Roswell nodded, tapping his palms on the steering wheel in four-four time.

“What’s it like?” he said suddenly. “Being—you know.”

He made it sound so easy, like he was asking about hemophilia or having double-jointed thumbs. It took me a second to realize I’d stopped breathing. It was hard to describe something you weren’t supposed to talk about. And yeah, maybe my dad liked to call it uncommon—this neutral, sanitary word—but I could tell sometimes, just by the look on his face, that what he really meant was unnatural.

Beside me, Roswell was still ticking his fingers against the steering wheel. Finally, he rolled his head to the side and looked at me.

He wasn’t stupid. I knew that. He’d known me pretty much my whole life, so it wasn’t like I thought I was fooling him. The thing that kept me mute was the chance that if I said it out loud, he’d look at me differently. Maybe it wouldn’t be obvious—he’d try not to let it show—but the difference would be there.

And that was bad enough, but stranger, deeper was the fear that nothing would change at all. He might just shrug and carry on like always, which was somehow worse. The truth was an ugly thing, and I couldn’t stand the possibility that he might be okay with it when it wasn’t okay.

He was quiet, watching me in the pauses at stoplights, waiting for an answer.

I rolled down the window and stuck my head out, letting the rain splash against my face. I knew that if I opened my mouth, I’d tell him. The cold air was helping, a little, but under the car’s fiberglass quarter panels, the frame was carbon steel and I was starting to feel sick. It was getting worse.

Roswell let out his breath in the long, pressurized sigh that meant he had something on his mind. “I’ve been thinking,” he said after a minute. “This is totally not scientific, and maybe it’s not even my business—but do you think you might be depressed?”

I looked down at my hands and then I made fists. “No.”

I knew what it looked like. Lately, I was a mental-health pamphlet, answering questions in monosyllables, avoiding strenuous activities, sleeping too much. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I was just doing my part, playing invisible. That when you’re tired all the time and you have to keep your sleeves pulled down over your hands so you don’t accidentally touch a handle or a doorknob and a good day is defined by the fact that no one noticed you exist, that’s pretty depressing. But it’s not clinical.

The Starlight music hall had been a movie theater in the fifties and a regular theater before that. The building was three stories of chalky stucco, trimmed around the windows and the roof with spirals of wrought iron, but now it was rusting like everything else, leaving stains that ran down the front of the building like dried blood. We got in line and gave the bouncer two dollars apiece.

Inside, the crowd was pushed up close to the stage. The old curtain still hung over the stage in huge velvet swags. There were plaster columns along the walls, and the molding around the ceiling was carved with birds and flowers and leaves. Dollhouse of Mayhem was on, yelling about corporate incentives and the government. Their lead guitar sounded like what would happen if someone wedged a traffic accident into a blender. The whole place smelled like rusting iron and spilled beer, and the bad, shaky feeling that had been looming all day broke over me in an ugly wave.

Roswell was saying something very analytical about the music scene at any given time being a barometer for civil unrest, but his voice was fading in and out, and my mouth was full of too much saliva.

“And then you get these bands like Horton Hears,” Roswell said. “I mean, no one would accuse them of being socially proactive, but—”

I knew suddenly that I was going to throw up and not in some distant, abstract future, but now, right now. I put up a hand to say hold that thought and went for the bathroom.

Crouched in a doorless stall, I tried to puke over the toilet without actually kneeling on the floor, which was pretty disgusting.

Behind me, Roswell, stood in the doorway. “Another day in the glamorous life of Mackie Doyle?”

His voice sounded easy and fake, and I got an idea that he was trying to counteract the moment. That he just didn’t know what else to do. My whole life, I’d been able to count on him to just look the other way and pretend really hard that everything was normal.

Afterward, I stood at the sink, rinsing and spitting. There was a heavily graffitied mirror above the counter and I tried not to watch myself through the web of black marker. Behind the illegible scrawls, my face looked pale and shocked. I couldn’t help thinking about Natalie. The fact that a body had been buried under her name when maybe it wasn’t even the real body made me feel like I might pass out.

“You’re shaking,” Roswell said. He stood against the counter while I washed my face and avoided looking at my reflection.

I nodded and turned off the faucet.

“You’re shaking really bad.”

I wiped my mouth with a paper towel and didn’t look at him. “It’ll stop soon.” My voice sounded hoarse, almost a whisper.

“This isn’t funny,” he said. “Do you think you should maybe go home? If you went easier on yourself, maybe—” Then he just stopped talking.

I jammed the paper towel in the trash and reached for another.

He came up behind me. “Mackie—Mackie, look at me.”

When I turned to face him, he was staring down at me. His eyes were blue, which faded and changed in different kinds of light. I wished that mine were any color but flat, unnatural black.

“You don’t have to go around acting like you’re okay all the time.”

“I do have to.” It came out too loud, echoing against the tile walls. I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes. “Please—I need to not talk about it.”

After a second, he moved closer, and then I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was unexpected, but the weight was reassuring, making me feel solid.

When I opened my eyes, Roswell was still standing next to me, but he’d let his hand fall. After a minute, he took out a pack of gum. He popped a square through the back foil with the ball of his thumb, offered it to me, and I took it.

“Come on,” he said, turning for the door. “Let’s go find Drew and Danny.”

The twins were in the lounge by the bar, playing pool with Tate. Roswell went over to them, but I hung back. Tate was standing with her back to me and I needed to seem like nothing had happened between us. Like I had never stonewalled her in the parking lot and then watched her walk away.

If I’d thought she would make a big show of being pissed at me, I was wrong. She glanced at us once, then went back to running the table. She made a straight shot. Not difficult, but she made it look impressive and tricky. Her hair was standing up all over the place like she’d just gotten out of bed. Mostly, she looked calm, not like a person who had just buried her sister and definitely not like a person who sought out the weirdest guy in school in order to discuss the theory that what they’d buried was not her sister at all.

The next shot was fancier, a bank in the corner, and she sank it like a rock. The ball clanged hard in the pocket, but her expression never changed.

“Nice,” Roswell said as we came up to the table.

She jerked her head at Drew and Danny. “Yeah, well, these guys suck.”

Drew just shrugged, but Danny snorted and flicked a crumpled piece of paper at the back of her head. “Get screwed, Stewart.”

I stood slightly behind her and watched as she lined up the next shot. Compared to the others, it was nothing, but she jerked at the last second and the ball went spinning off in a crooked arc. It just kissed the bumper, then sat balanced at the edge of the pocket.

Danny punched her shoulder, but he was grinning. “Wait, who sucks again?”

She tossed the cue at him. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m going to get a Coke.”

Drew came up next to me, looking uncommonly cheerful. “We’re getting close with the Red Scare. We just got a whole bunch of parts we bought off the Internet, and I think some of them are even the right ones this time. We almost stayed home to work on it.”

Mrs. Corbett was an antiques dealer, which was a politically correct way of saying that she collected a lot of junk. The twins had been picking through her back stock since they were little, taking apart old toasters and radios, then putting them back together. The Red Scare had been their ongoing project for the last six months. It was a 1950s polygraph machine and didn’t work. I didn’t like to be a pessimist, but despite what Drew said, it was probably never going to work.

A low half wall ran around the outside of the lounge and I leaned against it and looked out over the crowd. On the floor, people were moshing. They slammed into each other, churning in circles, crashing together and pulling apart again. Watching it made me feel tired. I leaned forward so the top of my head rested on the wall and closed my eyes.

“Why did you even come out tonight?” Roswell said from somewhere above me. His voice was almost buried under the music.

I took a long breath and tried to sound at least marginally energetic. “Because it was better than the alternative.”

“Yeah,” Roswell said, but he said it like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

When I straightened up and looked out over the crowd again, I saw Alice. She was standing with some girls from one of the newer subdivisions.

I leaned my elbows on the half wall and watched her. The light on her face was nice.

Onstage, Dollhouse of Mayhem finished their set, bowing off in a way that was probably supposed to be ironic. The silence when they unplugged their amps was so heavy that it made my teeth hurt. I just concentrated on Alice and the colored lights.

According to Roswell, I had a shot with her. But even if that was true, having a shot was different from knowing how to take it. She was a bright spot at the center of things, while I was destined to spend house parties and school dances standing against the wall with the guys from the Latin club. Except even that wasn’t the right way to describe what I was.

Roswell was in the Latin club, and the debate club, and the honor society. He did things like collecting bottle caps and unusual pens. In his spare time, he built clocks out of various household materials, and it wasn’t the big, defining core of him. He played soccer and rugby and ran in all the school elections. He smiled. He hugged everyone, all the time, and never acted like there was even a chance someone wouldn’t like him. He could do what he wanted, hang out with anyone he wanted to and get away with it. When he talked to girls, even pretty, popular ones like Stephanie Beecham, they smiled and giggled like they couldn’t believe he was actually noticing them. He just took it for granted that everything would be okay, while I found a convenient wall and worked hard at disappearing.

Above us, the curtains opened again and Rasputin Sings the Blues came on.

The Starlight always had at least five bands on the bill, but everyone knew that Rasputin owned the stage. Everybody else just got to use it once in a while.

It wasn’t only that other bands couldn’t compete with the stage act and the magic tricks. When Rasputin played, the music was just better. When they covered a song, it was like their version of it was the only real version.

The lead singer, Carlina Carlyle, strutted onstage with her hair piled in a knot on top of her head. She was wearing a dark-colored dress with a high collar. It looked old-fashioned, except that the skirt was short enough to show her knees, along with about six inches of thigh.

She grabbed the microphone, striking a cool, superhero pose. Her eyes were huge and too-light blue, black smeared around the lids, making her look crazy.

They were covering a Leonard Cohen song. The riff was hard and tight and the drums thumped like someone’s aching heart.

Drew came up to the half wall and leaned next to me, looking out at the pit like it was the most boring thing. “I’m so freaking sick of Leonard Cohen,” he said. “Man, do you have any idea how cool it would be if they did ‘Head Like a Hole’ or maybe some Saliva or Manson? Or the Gutter Twins.”

Onstage, Carlina was singing repent over and over, not like the backup girls on the album track, but snarling it, screaming with her head thrown back. Down in the pit, the crowd was screaming back at her, pounding their fists at the ceiling in time to the beat. Leonard Cohen could be just as hard as Reznor or Manson if you did it right.

They launched into an original track called “Formula for Flight” and Carlina took a cigarette from behind her ear. The first lyric was Burning towers down / Sleeping underground. She stuck the filter in the corner of her mouth, sending the audience into a riot.

Over by the other end of the stage, Alice was laughing with Jenna and Stephanie and some of the other hot girls. They were all wearing bright tank tops and tight jeans. When they danced, they seemed to move in unison, like they’d agreed on the steps ahead of time.

Onstage, the bassist stopped picking the line and stepped into the spotlight, reaching into his pocket for a handful of matches. The clips on his suspenders caught the light like mirrors.

“Light her up!” yelled someone from the crowd.

He saluted and stuck a match between his teeth, lighting it with an easy flick, then holding it out. Carlina put one hand against her collarbone and closed her eyes, bending to the match. He dropped it.

He lit the second one by striking it on his shirt cuff, but when Carlina leaned in, it went out by itself. The third, he didn’t strike on anything, just snapped his fingers and it flared to life.

He held it to Carlina’s cigarette and she breathed in, making the flame waver and gutter. She started to pace back and forth and the lead guitarist followed her, playing a solo that made me think of cracked glass and scrambled wires. He was wearing a black top hat and the shadow of the brim made his face look hard and hungry.

In back, the drummer still kept the tempo, but every time Carlina threw her hips to the side, he’d add a hard double beat on the bass drum. If she arched her back, that got the snare, a sharp rat-a-tat. I was utterly focused on her progress, and so was every other guy in the audience.

She stood in the spotlight while the guitar player circled around her, panting like a dog. She winked and put the cigarette out on his tongue. The whole time, he kept up that same complicated progression, and in the pit, the punk rock kids were slamming like it was the end of the world.

Carlina gripped the microphone and sang the bridge, Going low, going down, going to burn the spires / No one in this sleepy town wants a race of monsters.

Behind her, the guitarist spit out a mouthful of ash, making the solo climb. When the crowd stopped thrashing and started screaming for him, he raised his head, smiling up into the spotlight like he’d just found sunshine.

The chill started at the top of my head and poured down through my chest and arms. I knew him.

The angle of the stage made it hard to see his eyes, and the top hat shadowed his face, but even in the dark, I knew him. I’d seen him on the footbridge. He’d called me out on my dark eyes, sneered at my shaky hands and my blue mouth.

I stood in the crowd, looking up at a scary man with a scary smile.

I knew his secret and he knew mine.

After the Rasputin set, they tore their equipment down, and Concertina came on. The lead singer’s voice was decent, but their arrangements were sloppy, with too much distortion, and without the expert stage presence of Carlina Carlyle, the Starlight was back to being dusty and run-down. Just rented space.

Alice still stood in a little herd with her friends, and I had an idea that I might feel better if I got a drink of water. It would be an excuse to go over to her. I could walk past. Maybe say something, or maybe she’d say something to me. I started for the bar.

The guitar player from Rasputin appeared without a sound. One minute, I was alone, edging my way along the wall toward the fire door. The next, he was right beside me, glowing weirdly under the green exit sign.

He nodded to where Alice stood, smiling like he knew something funny. “She’s lovely. But you need to watch out for girls like that. She might ambush you in the parking lot. Kiss you with that cold iron tongue.”

I took a step back and he grabbed me, catching me by the jaw, digging his fingers into the soft place under my chin. He pulled me close so that my neck was bent at an awkward angle. His breath was hot and smelled like burning leaves.

We stood in the green glow of the sign, staring at each other. His grip hurt, but I let him hold on. Maybe he was camouflaged onstage, but down on the floor, it wasn’t smart to be so exposed. I could pass most of the time, but his eyes were too dark. His teeth were sharp and narrow, crammed close together. I kept still, ready to do whatever it took not to make a scene.

He leaned over me so the brim of the hat shadowed us both. “You’re pale and you’re cold, and you reek like steel.” His voice sounded tight, like the words were getting stuck behind his teeth. “Don’t pretend you’re not infected or that it doesn’t hurt. It’s on your breath and in the whites of your eyes. It’s in your blood.”

I stood there, helpless to look away as he leaned in closer. He tightened his grip on my jaw and whispered hoarsely, “Do you really need a wretch like me to tell you that you’re dying?”

Chapter Seven Dying Young

My pulse hammered and I put out a hand to steady myself. The whole building seemed to surge in on me and then roll out again. I just kept my eyes on the guitar player and my hand on the wall. I didn’t want to do anything that might suggest to him that he was right. Dying? The idea was so enormous it was disorienting. I might be sick, but dying?

Deep down, though, I knew the declaration had some truth to it. I thought about all the times I’d had a bad reaction to a car ride or the steel counters in the science wing, how it was always a little worse than the time before. When you got down to facts, I wasn’t actually supposed to be alive. Under ordinary circumstances, I should have just worn out my welcome, buried years ago like Natalie Stewart.

No. Not like Natalie—like the thing that had been buried with her name.

The air was cold suddenly, and I started to shake. The man hunched over me and smiled—almost kind. His nose was uncomfortably close to mine. “I could change your life,” he whispered. “Come with me tonight and I’ll save you.”

But on the stage, Concertina was playing a song called “Kill All Cowards,” and no one had saved Kellan Caury. It didn’t matter that county justice was just murder with a different name or that he was harmless. You couldn’t go around associating with strangers. If you did, you might wind up swinging.

I put my hand on the man’s wrist and twisted away.

His eyes were just dark pockets of shadow, but suddenly they burned ferocious and hot under the brim of his hat.

I turned around fast, before he could grab me again, and went back the way I’d come.

My heart beat hard and panicky as I shoved my way through the crowd, back to where Roswell laughed too loud and waved his hands around when he talked and could almost always make me feel normal.

But I knew that this time, it was going to take more than pretending everything was fine. I could still hear the guitar player’s voice. It reverberated in my head like a tinny echo, You’re dying.

When I came up to the pool tables, Drew was terrorizing Roswell at nine ball, sinking numbers one after another, then starting another round and doing it all over again.

“So, what was going on over there?” Danny asked, jerking his head in the direction of the floor and leaning on his cue.

“Nothing,” I said, clearing my throat. “Just a misunderstanding.”

Danny gave me a hard look. When a situation started to get too weird or too bad, he could generally be counted on to turn it into some kind of joke, but he wasn’t smiling now, not even close. “Kind of a strange place to have a misunderstanding, though. What did he want?”

You’re dying. You’re dying.

I glanced in the direction of the fire door without meaning to. The doorway was empty and the green exit sign still glowed over it, flickering a little.

Danny was watching me with a blank expression.

What did the guy want? He wanted to take me somewhere, or to tell me something or give me something. He said that he wanted to save me, and I wanted that too, only not in the middle of the Starlight where everyone could see, and not by someone with black, flashing eyes and yellow teeth. I couldn’t shake the way Danny was looking at me, like he was waiting for me to show myself.

I was saved from answering by Tate. She came back to the tables breathing hard. Her face was shiny with sweat and there was a rip down the shoulder of her T-shirt where someone in the pit must have grabbed her by the collar.

She pushed herself up to sit on the half wall just as Alice came down the steps behind her. I figured they must be hanging out together, even though I never saw them talk in class, but Alice walked right past Tate and came over to me. “Hey, Mackie! I was looking for you. You seemed kind of rough yesterday. Roswell said you went home. Are you feeling better?”

I wasn’t, really, but I shrugged. “It was no big deal.”

She looked up at me, tucking her hair behind one ear. “So, I kind of wanted to ask you—Stephanie’s having that party tomorrow night. Do you think you’ll go?”

I looked down at her and smiled. It felt good to smile. “Sure, maybe.”

From somewhere to my right, I could feel Tate’s eyes on my face. It made me want to look at her and also made me want to be someplace else.

Alice sighed and leaned against the wall so that her arm was touching mine. In the dim glow from the lamp above the pool table, her hair looked like bronze. “So, did you go up by the stage at all? It’s crazy tonight. I mean, some guy actually pushed me into the soundboard—on purpose. I’m not some sweaty hard-core, okay? I’m a girl!”

Tate slid down off the ledge and gave us both an annoyed look. “Then don’t go in the pit.”

Alice opened her mouth like she was going to say something back, but Tate just stalked away and yanked Roswell’s cue out of his hand.

Alice sighed, and when she turned to me, her eyes looked sad. “Wow. She is in so much denial about her sister. I mean, she just keeps acting like nothing happened.”

I didn’t answer, because that was not actually the case. It was just that the thing Tate thought had happened was different from the thing everyone else thought.

Tate was racking for eight ball, slamming balls into the plastic triangle. Suddenly, I wanted to apologize. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry for not being brave enough to listen to her, for letting her be the one to stand alone in front of the whole class when it should have been me.

Alice leaned against me, watching as Tate lifted the triangle. “So, do you know what the deal is with her family? I mean, she should be home right now, processing or grieving or something, right?”

I shrugged. The twins had been hanging out with Tate since junior high, but the thing was, you couldn’t really know her unless she let you.

“Hey, Mackie, you want this one?” Drew said, jerking his head at the table.

I shook my head. Drew shrugged and tossed the cue to Danny, who chalked it and lined up his shot. The break was only okay, and he didn’t sink anything.

Tate gave me a hard, clever smile and I got the impression that she was imagining how I’d look with a piece of rebar through my chest. “Just so there’s no confusion, I would have destroyed you,” she said.

I nodded, but there was a nasty little whisper in my head. It went, You wouldn’t have to. I’m dying anyway.

For a second, we just looked at each other. Then, without warning, she chucked the cue in Drew’s general direction and stalked up to me, looking apocalyptic. Alice must have seen it too because she backed away.

Tate stood with her toes almost touching mine, staring up into my face. “Okay, I’ve had about enough. You need to start talking to me.”

I wanted to sound assertive, but I had to look over her head to keep my voice from cracking. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

She grabbed my wrist and yanked me closer. “Look, maybe you don’t give a shit about any of this, but I’m not going to sit around and act like everything is normal and fine!”

“Tate, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She shook her head and looked away. “You believed me today. You believed me and it scared you, and now you’re just too much of a pussy to man up and say it.” She was standing with her shoulders slumped and her eyes downcast, but her fingers were digging into my wrist. “Why won’t you just say it?”

I stared down at her with my mouth open. Her jaw was hard, but I knew without a doubt that she wasn’t nearly as mad as I was—not even close.

You don’t get to tell me what I should do. That’s what I should have said. You don’t get to be self-righteous, because you have no idea what it’s like to be me. People get beaten to death for being me. People have close, personal relationships with lynch mobs for being me. I am on the outside all the time, with no chance at a normal life, no way to be average or to fit in. Free weights in PE constitute a medical emergency, food poisoning means anything that comes in a can. Oh, and by the way, there’s a really good chance I’m dying, so that’s pretty awesome.

I just looked at her, and when she didn’t say anything else, I jerked my arm out of her hand. Alice was standing against the half wall, watching us with a stunned look. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for the interruption, that my life was not usually this bizarre, but my throat was so tight I knew I’d never get the words out. I just walked out of the lounge and into the crowd to find Roswell.

He was over by the bar with Stephanie and Jenna. I grabbed him by the back of his jacket and pulled him away from them. When he didn’t shake me off or ask why I was acting like a lunatic, I thanked God and started for the door.

My getaway wasn’t clean. It should have been a speedy, decisive exit, but I didn’t have that kind of discipline. I glanced back—just once. But it was enough. Tate was standing in the lounge where I’d left her, with a pool cue in her hands and the most painful look on her face.

Chapter Eight In Need of Saving

When Roswell dropped me off at home, I waited until his taillights had disappeared around the corner. Then I sat down in the driveway and put my head between my knees. The air was cool and I sat there breathing it and listening to the rain.

My heartbeat was pounding in my ears and the look Tate had given me as I left the Starlight felt caustic, like it had left this huge raw spot in my chest. After a little while, I stumbled my way inside and tried to hang my jacket on a wall hook. It fell and I left it there because picking it up again seemed way too complicated. I had to stop halfway up the stairs to rest. The dark was lonely but familiar, and I fell into bed without pulling back the covers or taking my shoes off.

The dreams were worse than they’d been in a long time. Dreams of being left alone, leaves brushing the window screen. The curtains snapping on a sharp, dry breeze.

My joints ached, and even half asleep, I was uncomfortably aware of my heartbeat racing, lagging, stuttering. Slow, slow, fast. Nothing.

I dreamed about Kellan Caury. I dreamed that the Gentry lynch mob broke down the door to his little downtown apartment and dragged him out into the street. The picture was fuzzy and overexposed, like I was getting it confused with the windmill scene in Frankenstein. The townsfolk all had torches. I dreamed about the outline of his body, hanging from an oak tree at the end of Heath Road.

In the morning, I woke up late, feeling thirsty and worn out.

I dragged myself down the hall to the bathroom and got in the shower. After standing under the water for fifteen minutes without actually reaching for the soap or lifting my hands, I toweled off, got mostly dressed, and went downstairs.

In the kitchen, my mom was rattling a copper pan back and forth on the front burner. The sound made me want to climb out of my skull.

I watched her as she opened a drawer and dug for the spatula. Her hair was fine and blond, slipping out of its ponytail. Her expression was the same one she usually had, calm, patient. Completely unconcerned.

“Did you have breakfast yet?” she asked, looking at me over her shoulder. “I’m frying potatoes, if you want some.”

I shook my head and she sighed. “Eat something.”

I ate dry cereal out of the box and my mom rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything.

Outside, it was gray and rainy, but in my current state, the light seemed indecently bright, coming in the windows like a flash bomb. Fall leaves jittered and twitched, reflecting the slow, incessant rain.

I sat at the table, eating cereal in little handfuls. I wanted to put my head down on my arms or ask what time it was, but I couldn’t think of how to phrase the question. My joints felt brittle.

“Where’s Emma?” I said, staring into the open cereal box. It was dark inside.

“She said something about a lab project. She was going over to campus to meet a friend. Janet, I think it was.”

“Janice.”

“Maybe that was it.” My mom turned to look at me. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right? You’re very pale this morning.”

I nodded and closed the folding tabs on the cereal box. When I shut my eyes, I could still hear the gravelly voice of the guitar player. You’re dying. You’re dying.

“Mom,” I said suddenly, feeling reckless and exhausted. “Have you ever thought about what happens to the kids who get taken?”

At the stove, she stopped flipping the potatoes. “What do you mean?”

“Little kids. I mean, if they get replaced by . . . people like me, there’s a reason, right? That can’t be the end of it. They go somewhere. Right?”

“Not anyplace good.”

Her voice sounded so quiet but so definite that for a minute, I almost couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Are you saying that because you know I came from someplace really bad—because of how I am?”

“No, I know because it happened to me.”

I sat at the table, feeling groggy and stupid. “Happened to you how?”

Her eyes were impossible, too wide and too clear. They fooled you into thinking she had no secrets, but she looked away before she answered my question, and I knew she was telling the truth. “They took me, that’s all. It’s not exciting or glamorous. It’s just something that happens. That’s all.”

“But you’re here now—you’re here in Gentry, living a normal life. I mean, took you where?”

“This is not an appropriate topic of conversation,” she said sharply. “I wish you wouldn’t bring up ugly things at the table, and I don’t want you to mention it again.”

Then she got out an onion and started chopping it into little cubes, humming softly under her breath. I shut my eyes. The information was awkward and unwieldy. I had no idea what to do with it.

My dad came in, completely oblivious to the way the two of us were managing a very uncomfortable silence. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and I tried not to wince. “Malcolm, any big plans for the day?”

“He isn’t feeling well,” my mom said with her back to him. She bent over the onion, chopping it smaller. Smaller. Microscopic.

My dad leaned down to look into my face. “Is that so?”

I nodded and didn’t say anything. I wasn’t feeling well, but from roughly two minutes ago, I had started feeling a whole lot worse.

My mom was humming again but louder now, faster. Her back was to both of us as she chopped, the knife flashing down, and then she gasped. The smell of blood rushed out into the room and she crossed to the sink, running her cut finger under the faucet.

I put both hands over my nose and mouth, feeling the room slosh in and out like the tide.

Without saying anything, my dad went to the cupboard above the refrigerator and took down a box of Band-Aids.

They stood facing each other at the sink, and then she offered him her hand. My dad dried the skin with a paper towel and applied the Band-Aid. She was always cutting her fingers or bumping her arms and legs. I’d never heard of her having any kind of accident when she was in surgery, but at home, she was constantly running into things, like she forgot that they took up space in the world and so did she.

When her finger was bandaged, my dad stepped back and let go of her wrist. On the stove, the potatoes had started to burn and they smelled like toast.

“Thank you,” she said.

He kissed her on the forehead and then walked out. My mom just stood at the sink, gazing out the window. After a second, she reached over and turned off the burner.

I smeared my hand over my face and took a breath. The smell of blood drifted lazily, filling the kitchen. There was a dim, pulsing ache that came and went behind my left eye. “I think I’m going to go back to bed.”

In my room, I yanked off my T-shirt and pulled the shades down. Then I lay down with my face to the wall and pulled the covers over my head.

I woke up with a bad jolt. It was dark. My phone was buzzing on my bedside table, and I rolled over. In the gloom, I could see the shapes of bass and amp and furniture. I wanted to go back to sleep. The phone just kept buzzing.

Finally, I reached over and answered it. “Yeah?”

“Whoa, don’t sound so excited.” It was Roswell.

“Sorry. I was sleeping.”

“So, Stephanie’s having that party tonight, and there’s maybe going to be one at Mason’s. You want me to come get you?”

I rolled onto my back and squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t think so.”

Roswell sighed. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this. ’Tis the season for girls to dress like hookers. We’ll catch up with the twins, get a little socially lubricated. I have this feeling that Alice is particularly looking forward to your company.”

I scrubbed my hand over my eyes. “I’m not ditching out on you. Okay, I am. But not like that. Jesus, what time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

On the other end of the line, a door opened and Roswell sighed. I could hear his mom in the background, telling him that someone needed to feed the dog and it had better be him. He said something back, but it was muffled, and I heard her laugh from somewhere far away.

The idea came to me that I’d gotten up for a little in the morning and that I’d had a really awful conversation with my mom. The whole thing was like a bad dream, though, and I couldn’t pull all the threads together.

Then Roswell was back, talking into the receiver. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine. I’m just not into going out right now. Not tonight.”

After I hung up, I put the pillow over my head and was just starting to drift back into a pleasant state of oblivion when the phone rang again.

This time, I checked the caller ID but didn’t recognize the number. I answered anyway, thinking it could be someone from school, calling about homework or something else just as improbable. I was thinking, but not admitting, that it could be Alice.

If I’d had any trouble recognizing Tate’s voice, the lack of formal greeting would have tipped me off.

“Mackie,” she said, “I need you to listen to me.”

I took a deep breath and flopped back down on the bed. “How did you get my number?”

“If you didn’t want me calling, you should have told Danny not to give it to me. Now, where can we meet, because I really need to talk to you.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Yes, you can. Okay, fine. I’m coming to your house. Are you at home? I’ll be at your house in ten minutes, so you’d better be home.”

“No!—I mean, I won’t be here. I’m going to this party with Roswell and I’m just about to leave.”

“Party,” she said. Her voice sounded cold, and I could picture the look on her face suddenly—this weird mix of frustration and hurt. I had a miniature daydream, just a half second, where I imagined touching her, running the ball of my thumb over her cheek in an attempt to make her stop looking so sad, but it guttered out the next second when she said, “Something is disgustingly wrong, and you know it, and you’re going to a party? You’re unbelievable.”

“I don’t know anything, okay? I’m hanging up now.”

“Mackie, you are such a—”

“Goodbye,” I said, and hit End.

Then I called Roswell back.

He answered on the first ring, sounding easy and cheerful. “What’s up? Are you calling to wish me luck in my quest to rescue Stephanie from the tyranny of clothing?”

“Is it okay if I come with you?”

“Yeah, that’s fine. Not with the clothing thing, though, right? I mean, that’s kind of a one-man job.”

I laughed and was relieved to find that I sounded almost normal.

Roswell went on in a fake-conversational voice. “So, you remember that I called you fifteen minutes ago, right? And during the course of that conversation, I asked if you wanted to go to a party and get chemically altered and possibly ravish Alice—I mean, I think I really sold the ravishing—but you said no? I mean, you do remember that, right?”

I cleared my throat. “I changed my mind.”

He was quiet on the line for a long time. Then he said, “You sound like shit, though. Do you feel okay?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Mackie. Are you sure you actually want to go to a party?”

I took a deep breath. “All I want right now is to get out of the house.”

After I hung up, I closed my eyes and tried to get my head together. Then I rolled off the bed and stood up. If I was going to go with Roswell, I needed to do something about the rumpled state of my hair and also put on a shirt. I crossed the room and started going through my dresser. Usually, sleeping all day would be enough to get rid of the spins, but every time I turned my head, the room seemed to execute a lazy half turn, and I had to keep my hand on top of the dresser for balance.

“Mackie?”

When I glanced over my shoulder, Emma was standing in the doorway watching me. She was wearing sweats, and her hair was twisted into its customary knot. It looked soft and messy, like it had since we were kids. She didn’t go out much, and it looked like she was all set for a night of reading.

I closed the drawer and turned to face her. “You can come in, you know.”

She took a couple steps, then stopped again.

“Janice—my lab partner, Janice—she gave me something,” she said. She was holding a paper bag. “She said it was a special kind of . . . holistic extract.” The sound of her voice was weirdly shrill, like I was making her nervous. “She said—she just said it would be good for you.” She crossed the room to my desk.

“Thanks,” I said, watching as she set the bag down and backed away. “Emma—”

But she’d already turned and walked out of my room.

I picked up the bag and opened it. Inside, there was a tiny bottle made of brown glass. It had a paper label, and someone had written: Most Beneficial Hawthorn. To drink.

Instead of a cap or a cork, the bottle was sealed with wax. When I cracked the seal with my thumbnail, the odor of leaves was sharp, but it didn’t smell spoiled or poisonous.

I trusted Emma. All my life, she’d made it her mission to take care of me, to make sure I was okay. But drinking something unidentified was a very sketchy thing, and while I trusted Emma, I wasn’t at all sure that I trusted Janice.

But more insistent was the feeling that if something didn’t change, if things just kept going on the same way they had been, I was going to wake up one day and not be able to get out of bed. Or, more likely, I was going to go to sleep and not wake up at all.

I touched the mouth of the bottle, then licked the residue off the tip of my finger and waited. After a few minutes of rummaging through old homework assignments and laundry, I figured Janice’s hippie voodoo hadn’t killed me yet, so I took a good-sized drink and then another. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. It kind of tasted like Everclear and dirt.

I put the empty bottle back in the bag and found a shirt with a collar and not too many wrinkles. I was pulling the shirt down over my head when I realized that I suddenly felt better—all-over better. I’d been exhausted for so long that I’d sort of forgotten I felt exhausted until I didn’t anymore. I stretched and the muscles in my shoulders felt good, flexing restlessly.

In the bathroom, I stood in front of the mirror. My eyes were still dark but not freakish. They were just normal, black at the pupil and a deep, muddy brown in the iris. My skin was still pale, but it would be called “fair” instead of “terminal.” I looked like a regular person, going out on a Saturday night. I looked normal.

I went back into my room and studied the bottle. The label was plain, heavy paper, with nothing else written on it besides the mysterious notation Most Beneficial Hawthorn and the instruction to drink it. I knew that hawthorn was a low, thorny tree that grew out along the country roads, but the label gave no other indication about what the drink actually was.

My head was cluttered with questions. What was it really, and how did it work? Was feeling better the same thing as a cure? Had Emma saved me? Even while my first instinct was to doubt it, I felt the grin spreading across my mouth. Huge, relieved. I hadn’t felt this good in weeks. Months, maybe.

I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to do something that took a lot of energy. I needed to jump around the room or laugh uncontrollably or find Emma and hug her until she started laughing too and we both couldn’t breathe and had to sit down on the floor. I wanted to do handstands or backflips, but there wasn’t enough space. I wanted to run. I turned off the light and went out into the hall.

“Emma.” I leaned my forehead against her door, then when she didn’t answer, I pushed it open. “Emma, what is this stuff? It’s amazing.”

But Emma wasn’t in her room or anywhere I could find her.

For the first time since my encounter with the guitar player the night before, the voice in my head had faded. Maybe dying wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Maybe there was a way to have a real, actual life, to be normal. Something in me didn’t really believe it. That small piece of me stood apart and watched with deep suspicion as I studied a tiny bottle that was too good to be true. But the rest of me didn’t care. There was too much pleasure in feeling free.

When I heard Roswell’s car in the driveway, I bolted downstairs. On the front porch, I was hit by a barrage of smells: the raw vegetable reek of carved pumpkins, and the scorched smell of burning leaves, and faint but there, the swampy odor of the dry lake bed out on County Road 12. The night was deep and vibrant and ferociously alive.

Three blocks away, I heard Mrs. Carson-Scott calling her cat inside and that was normal. Then I heard the faint jangle of the bell on its collar and the rustle as it crept through the bushes. Even the cars on Benthaven sounded like they were right there in front of me.

Forget Tate. Forget dead kids and bloody lockers and the deep, pulsing ache I got whenever I thought about my family or my future. This was my life, right here.

And I wanted it.