To Mom and Dad—there are some bad parents in this book but you guys are the best.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
MOM ASKS ME TO rob the house at the bottom of the hill.
At least, she says it like a question, but it doesn’t feel like one. She looks at me with her dark eyes leveled right at mine, and whenever she does that, I can never think of any answer but yes. She knows I can’t.
Maybe that’s why it feels a little unfair. Not that I’m going to say anything about it because—well.
We were painting this fortune-teller’s house a few weeks ago in exchange for gas money, somewhere on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. She was a fiftysomething woman with hair red as a cherry lollipop and twining roses tattooed up both her arms. She sat on her front porch steps, drinking something clear with olives in it while she watched us work. And she went on and on about souls.
“Every soul is born with a match, see? We don’t get any say in who ours is. Or if we’re born in the same country, or even in the same life. Most people don’t find their match, but once you do, you’ve got no choice but to stick with them.”
I huffed at that. I told her, “Only rich people have time for falling in love.”
“Did I say anything about love? Souls are a different thing altogether. There’s an old story about how humans used to be born with four arms, four legs, two faces, two hearts. What a sight.” She spit an olive pit into the grass. “But the gods thought we were too powerful, so they split us in two, and now we’re doomed to wander the earth looking for the missing part of ourselves. And if you’re lucky enough—well, maybe lucky isn’t the word.” She leaned her elbows on the step behind her, closing her eyes and tipping her head back to expose her neck to the sun. “Finding your match doesn’t mean you’ve even got to like each other. But you have to stay together. You’ve got no choice in that.”
Most of the time, I think all that hair dye she used had started melting down her brain.
But other times, late at night, when I fall into the thoughts I don’t want to think, I wonder what I’d do if I ever lost Mom.
And that’s why I tell her that I’ll rob the house at the bottom of the hill.
-
Mom’s eyes look black but aren’t. I used to think they were. But once she let me look closer, I realized they’re actually the same blue as a bruise—the same blue as the web of veins that I can always see through her temples and pale wrists. Her skin’s got a blue tint to it, too, which always makes her look cold. Makes you want to rub her hands between yours and blow on them, even on a day as hot as this one.
Her blue-black eyes skitter over the narrow road and across her rearview mirror to make sure no one’s around. Then she pulls off into the grass next to a gravel driveway that winds back around a hill. I can just see the peaked roof of the little house on the other side.
We both crawl up the hill while the sky blooms into an orange dawn. The grass is slick with dew that dampens the front of my shirt, and blades of it cling to my hands and knees.
We lie flat on our bellies and peer down at the little house. No movement for the first hour. I make attempts at whispered conversation while we wait. Things like, “How did you sleep?” and, “The days are getting long, aren’t they?” and, “Have you ever been so hungry, you start imagining little creatures in your body feeding on you from the inside? Just sucking everything right out of you until you’re just bones and skin?”
She doesn’t answer me. Not once. Even when I let my voice get too loud, she only cuts her eyes at me. And that’s enough to make me swallow whatever else I had to say.
I start to nod off, but when Mom’s breath hitches, my focus snaps back to the house. There, up in the left corner window—a light. A minute later, another one flicks on beside it. Then another, below.
They walk into the kitchen one right after another. The family. I shrink a little lower behind the crest of the hill. Mom’s a string pulled tight enough to break.
A gust of wind whips brown curls around my face, and I push them back down with both hands. Mom already thought to gather her long, black waves at the base of her neck. I cut my own hair a month or so ago, just below my chin. When I showed Mom for the first time with a grin and a shrug, twirling the rusted scissors around my finger, she said, “It looks like you used a butter knife.”
I thought keeping it short would be practical, but now it keeps fluttering over my eyes. Mom glances at me with an irritated twitch in her jaw before I dig a red ribbon from my back pocket and tie it into a headband.
Then she turns her blue-black eyes on me in full force, and they ask the question that isn’t a question.
I nod.
She flips onto her back to scoot down the hill. She’s going to hide the van, and I’m supposed to sneak into the house after the family leaves.
“Wait,” I say.
She doesn’t.
“What if they don’t go?”
“You wait until they do,” she says, eyes on the road below. She doesn’t stop to squeeze my hand or ruffle my hair or give me a soft smile and whisper something nice.
Those are rewards. I haven’t done my job yet.
When I turn back to the house, I can see them sitting down to breakfast together—a man, a woman, and two girls with hair like cinnamon. The younger one sits on her father’s lap, and the older one swirls her spoon in the air while she talks. Breakfast is a simple spread of toast, cereal, and orange slices. But all I’ve had to eat today is a handful of stale barbeque chips, and my mouth waters.
I don’t have to wait long. The man leaves in a white pickup truck. I press myself flat against the hill when he passes, holding my breath, my cheek against the cool grass.
The girls are next. Their mother slips behind the wheel of a minivan, and her daughters climb in with backpacks on. It must be a school day.
I haven’t stepped foot in a school in more than seven years. But I nearly finished the fourth grade before I left, and I’ve gotten by just fine in my opinion. Haven’t needed to recite the presidents or use long division even once. Mom teaches me what she knows.
I wait a few more minutes to make sure there’s no one else in the house. But when I make my way down the hill, I still keep low in the tall grass, a trash bag balled up in my fist. The front steps creak under my weight. There are initials carved into the wood—T. L. M. and J. M. M. Maybe the girls’.
The front door is locked. I could check for
others, but Mom has told me over and over again that getting it done fast is more important than getting it done right, so I shatter a window with a fist-size rock from the flower bed.
I empty the fridge first, and then I check the bedrooms upstairs, dumping clothes out of drawers and tearing through closets. There’s a fifty-dollar bill in a makeup drawer and a twenty rolled up in a jar by someone’s bed. The little girl has a plastic piggy bank heavy with coins that I tuck under my arm.
I’m walking out of her room when I hear the lock on the front door rattle.
I won’t admit to Mom later that I freeze. My mind and body tense up, and I know that I’m being pretty damn useless, but I can’t do anything about it as the door swings open, and a man stands tall in the doorway. The man I watched eat breakfast. Our gazes lock, and for the span of a few seconds, neither of us moves.
Like an idiot, I run back into his daughter’s room, thinking I’ll just climb out a window. But from the second floor, I could break my leg.
As I turn to face him, he mounts the top of the stairs, and I brace myself for him to attack me. But he holds very still in the doorway. He has a baseball cap on—Atlanta Braves.
“Now just hold on,” he says. He raises his hands.
I obviously don’t have a gun, or I’d be waving it around in his face and shooting holes into these pretty walls right now. So I don’t know why he waits.
Maybe because I’m young. Maybe because I’m a girl. Maybe because he has daughters.
“Just—let’s talk about it, okay? I’m Clint. Clint Mitcham.”
I tilt my head at him. He takes that as a good sign and lowers his hands. Then he steps into the room and asks, “What’s your name?”
My name.
Well. I won’t tell him that. I won’t tell anyone that. Not the one I was born with. Anyone who ever knew it forgot it a long time ago anyway.
My new name is Phoenix.
Mom told me it’s a bird from old stories that catches fire when it dies. It burns down to a pile of ash, and then it crawls out as something new.
But I don’t give Clint that answer. Or any other answer.
He takes another step forward. I hold still while he takes one more. He even manages a slight smile when he reaches for me, like he’ll squeeze my shoulder.
With a growl from deep in my gut, I charge headfirst into him.
His fall vibrates the whole staircase. Wood splinters under his bulk, and the sound makes me sick to my stomach.
He’s stone-still when he gets to the bottom. I hurry down after him, hold my hand under his nose, and feel his hot breath on my skin, just to make sure he isn’t dead. Blood leaks from the corner of his mouth. His arm is splayed behind him at the wrong angle.
I could call an ambulance and be clear of the house before anyone got here.
But Mom’s voice circles in my head, Get out get out get out get out get out.
I leap over Clint Mitcham and run through the open front door.
The van idles at the bottom of the gravel driveway, a hulking white box that has probably never seen a car wash. Not in my lifetime, anyway.
I sprint toward it, the trash bag knocking hard against my hip and the plastic piggy bank rattling under my arm. The sun is higher now, bearing down on me—exposing me. But I don’t see another soul.
Mom watches me on the way down through her half-lowered window, her face blank. I could have a pack of wolves on my heels and her face would look the same.
I toss the trash bag and piggy bank through the open door before I tumble in after them. The tires screech under us, and I almost pitch right back onto the asphalt before I slam the door shut.
The thin, yellowed mattress that takes up the back end of the van breaks my fall, but the lid popped off the piggy bank when it landed, and hundreds of shiny little coins vibrate with the hum of the road. I don’t bother to gather them up, just lie down on top of them and feel them cold and hard against the sweat-slicked back of my neck while I gulp down air.
Mom turns in her seat to look down at me.
I watch her blank face break into a grin. And I can’t help grinning back.
I don’t forget about Clint Mitcham, but he’s just a blurry afterimage on the insides of my eyelids by that afternoon. If I took the time to feel bad about every Clint Mitcham in my life, I’d have driven the van off a bridge a long time ago.
-
The fortune-teller told me one other thing that I’ll never be able to scrub from my mind.
After we finished painting her house, while Mom was taking a shower inside and I was cleaning trash out of the back of the van, the woman snuck up behind me and grabbed my wrist, clamping it tight in her bony hand.
“You can feel it on her,” she whispered to me, glancing back at her house. Nervous.
“What?”
“The evil.”
I snatched my hand back. “You’re drunk.”
She shook her head, red curls swaying. “Not that drunk, honey. I’m not saying she is evil. I’m just saying she has it. Maybe it was done to her. Whatever it was, it’s living in her skin now. The pain.”
I looked her up and down with a scowl and went back to gathering trash like I didn’t know what she was talking about. Like I didn’t feel it, too.
“Whether it was her fault or not,” she told me, “it’s not good to live with that burrowing in your bones. It rots you. Turns you mean.”
“Don’t worry about us.”
But she didn’t seem to hear me. She was watching her house again. Like she could see the bad energy curling like black smoke through her windows.
“You could stay here, if you wanted,” she said. Without her, she didn’t have to say.
I took a deep breath and eased it out through my teeth. “What about all that talk about souls? Sticking together?”
She caught her lower lip between her teeth and thought that over for a while. I went back to clearing out the van, until she said, “Stay with her then, if you feel like you have to. But listen—I know you want to save her. I know you think it’ll be as simple as sucking the poison out of a snakebite. But it’s not going to work, because she is the snake. Do you understand? Stop drinking her poison, or you’ll wind up dead.”
I turned to the fortune-teller. And maybe she was worth her salt, because her face fell, like she already knew what I was going to say.
I spoke in scissor snaps so she’d know there’d be no changing my mind.
“Then I’m dead.”
Chapter 2
IT’S DARK WHEN WE pass over the state line from West Virginia into Ohio. We drive through a faded little town, the kind of place that pops up out of nowhere in the Appalachian foothills—crooked houses, peeling paint, and boarded-up windows. Where the only signs of life on a Saturday night are at the bar and a gas station with two pumps and a flashing sign for seventy-nine-cent Polar Pops. Dust clings to everything. Our tires kick up clouds of the stuff, and I wonder if it sticks to the tongue of every person who lives here. Maybe that should depress me, but I’ve always liked places like this—permanent as roots a hundred feet deep.
I’m taking my turn behind the wheel, careful to keep the red needle on the speedometer hovering right at thirty-five. Getting pulled over would be just the kind of attention we don’t need—especially because I don’t technically have a license.
I thought Mom was asleep on the mattress in the back, but she grabs my shoulder and points to a parking spot. “Here.”
While I pull in, she rifles through the trash bag we keep our clothes in, then tosses me a T-shirt and jeans. The shirt hangs on me, and the pants don’t quite cover my ankles. I think I found them somewhere in Tulsa, that time we broke into a storage shed.
We get dressed in the back of the van, our elbows knocking against each other. Then I hop out and use the gritty mirror on the driver’s side to adjust the red ribbon controlling my hair. I took it from someone’s sewing drawer in Birmingham.
Mom wears a black dress with a lac
e neckline that I stole for her from a stranger’s closet in Indianapolis. Black like mourning, but the color has always looked alive on her, like she’s wrapped in a cut of midnight sky. The glow of a naked bulb mounted to a telephone pole—someone’s hopeful attempt at a streetlight—casts hectic shadows over her pretty face. The night is warm, and cricket chirps and dragonfly wingbeats make the air pulse with its own heartbeat. Mom and I smile at each other in the dark.
Then she turns on her heel and strides off, boots crunching over gravel, and I trot behind her like I’m attached by a rope, a boat being towed to shore.
The Haggard Colonel is full to the brim, with people standing in the doorway and flowing out onto the street. The band set up in the corner is made up of men with white T-shirts tucked into their jeans, their gray beards hanging down past their belt buckles. They play mostly Toby Keith covers. There’s a nice, warm light draped over everything, like we’ve stumbled into a sepia-toned photograph.
Mom twists all the way up to the bar and asks for two beers—beers that I’m not old enough to drink yet; I’m only sixteen.
But the bartender doesn’t notice me anyway. He’s too busy drawing his eyes over the fine lines of Mom’s collarbones while he pours amber liquid into two tall glasses. I can’t tell if he’s closer to my age or hers. She turned thirty-one a month ago. We celebrated with a cake I made out of whipped cream and graham crackers.
Her hair falls in deep-black waves down her back; her dark eyes are quick and wide, and her teeth flash sharp when she smiles. I think she’s probably the most beautiful woman most people have ever seen, but they’re usually too startled to know exactly what to do about it.
We find two empty stools against the wall and shout at each other over the din of the crowd. “When I saw that man driving back up the hill—” She clutches her heart while she laughs and stamps her foot against the low rung of her stool. “Well, I thought we were done for. He was so big, too. I would have loved to see his face when he saw a little thing like you running at him.”
The deeper her laugh is, the quieter it becomes, like it gets lost somewhere in her chest before it ever passes her lips. Her body shakes with it. I laugh, too, and tip my head toward hers, the way you lean into a lit candle when you want to breathe the smell in deep.
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