A Million Junes
Page 1
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Penguin.com
Copyright © 2017 Emily Henry
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Ebook ISBN: 9780448493985
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Jack, Patrick, and Daniel,
who gave me a name worth keeping.
For Ceili, who loved well.
And for all those who find ways to go on:
Better days are coming for our little hearts.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The O’Donnell Family
The Angert Family
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Acknowledgments
One
FROM my bedroom window, I watch the ghost flutter. She shifts and warbles in the dark yard, her pink sheen caught in moonlight. I wonder if she’s looking up at the spread of stars or if she’s facing the farmhouse, watching us. Maybe things like her don’t have eyes. Maybe they wander, unseeing, through the world.
At the edge of the clearing, the sudden shuffle and bob of branches draw my eyes from the ghost. A couple of giggly sophomores I recognize break through the brush and hesitate, half-shadowed, as they scour the hilltop our house sits on.
They look right past the shimmering pink spirit and focus instead on the cherry tree that sprawls out in front of our porch. The tree’s as old as the town itself, planted by my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jonathan “Jack” Alroy O’Donnell, when he first settled here. He, like Dad, could talk roots into spreading anywhere, but part of the reason Jonathan stayed in Five Fingers was the taste of the cherries that grew on this hill. Like heaven on earth, Dad used to say, like the silent world before anything had gone wrong.
Within months of his arrival, Jonathan had started a farm a couple of miles from here, closer to the water, where the earth mixed with sand. For two generations, the O’Donnells built a legacy of roots and branches. It’s been four more since the Angerts, my family’s mortal enemies, foreclosed on the farm. But the cherries from that land are still sold in grocery stores and farmers’ markets, at festivals and fairs, beneath hand-painted signs and vinyl banners reading JACK’S TART.
The sophomores, Molly Malone and Quincy Northbrook, run toward the tree now, folded in half like they’re trying not to block a movie-theater screen. Neither of them sees the ghost, but they both shiver as they pass through her, and Molly stops and glances back. Quincy’s halfway up the tree, trying to shake down the empty branches. He hisses at Molly, and she runs to stand below him, folding her shirt up like a grocery bag as a few shriveled cherries drop.
Gravel crunches then, and headlights swing up the curve of our long driveway. In the tree, Quincy freezes like a raccoon caught robbing a trash can, but Molly’s already running, halfway back to the woods with her spoils. At the breathy honk of the car horn, Quincy drops from the branches and takes off full tilt after her.
Hannah rolls the Subaru’s window down and shouts, “Yeah, that’s right! You’d better run, punks!” She shakes her head in mock disapproval then looks up at me, affecting surprise. “But soft!” she calls. “What light through yonder window breaks?”
“It’s me,” I yell back.
“Wait. June? You’re positively glowing. I thought that was the east and you were the sun.”
“Yeah, I’m ovulating. Common mistake.”
“Well, get those incandescent ovaries down here. We’ve got death traps and deep-fried John Doe waiting for us.”
I pull on my canvas tennis shoes, swing my leather backpack over my shoulder, and flick the lights off. But something makes me take one last look at my room from the hallway, at the wild constellations of green star stickers Dad and I tacked on my ceiling when I was six years old. I’d been sure back then they’d glow forever—that nothing Dad touched could dim.
Mom even used to say, “June, your daddy’s the sun.”
And he was. He could make anything grow. He warmed every room he stepped into. When he touched an animal, it would lie down and nap. He even went away in the winter, like the sun so often did, and without him the house became cold, lethargic.
It’s been almost ten years since he died, and not a single star sticker still glows. But some people are too alive to fully die, their stories too big to disappear, and he was one of them. I see traces of him all over our magic house. I hear him in the creak and groan of the floorboards as the summer nights stretch them, can visualize him sitting at the foot of my bed, saying, Other houses have support beams and foundations. Ours has bones and a heartbeat.
I close my eyes and listen to the house hum and yawn, stretch and curl. Outside, Hannah honks, and I close the door and jog downstairs.
In the soft light of the kitchen, Mom and Toddy, my stepdad, are laughing and tickling each other like freshmen on a first date while they choose a bottle of white wine from the fridge. Shadow and Grayson are in the living room, standing on the couch, playing a gladiator video game with motion sensors.
“Han’s here,” I announce, and Grayson screams something like katchaaaaaaw over my words and kicks the air.
Mom yelps with laughter and squirms in Toddy’s arms, turning her sparkly Torch Lake eyes on me. Dad always said they were the first part of her he fell for. They met far away from here, but she was a little piece of home to him, so he swept her up and brought her back with him, because he wanted all the home he could have in one place.
Mom smooths her T-shirt down over her improbably toned stomach. “Tell Hannah hi!”
Toddy wraps her waist in his arms and rests his chin on her head. “Go anywhere else after the carnival and you need to let us know, Junie,” he adds. “Don’t you girls get in any trouble.”
“Love you, baby,” they both call.
Outside, the throng of moths surrounding the porch light disperses around me. The hens, as usual, are asleep in the grass beyond the decrepit chicken coop, no cares in the world. As I slide into Hannah’s passenger seat, everything feels particularly right in a way I can’t explain. Like the whole world’s in harmony.
The house, the woods, the hens. Hannah in her floral minidress and me in my ratty summer tank top and shorts. The spirit.
I scan the yard for any hint of the wobbly pink thing. “Saw the ghost,” I tell Hannah.
Hannah pops a piece of gum into her mouth then holds the pack out for me. “Which one?”
The cozy pink presence isn’t the only one that has drifted across our yard since before I was born. “Feathers,” I answer.
Hannah chews on her lip. “Good.”
The other ghost—the shadowy one we haven’t named, that plume of darkness that makes you feel nauseated and cold if you brush against it—only ever appears before something bad happens. Even when we hadn’t actually seen the blackish thing, we’d know it had been there because all the animals on our land would freak. The always serene hens would flap, peck, break their wings, sometimes even kill one another. The normally merciful coywolves would mutilate rabbits and sparrows and leave their uneaten bodies on our hillside, scatterings of grisly omens. The last time it came was three years ago, the night before our porch collapsed and I broke my foot, but I haven’t actually seen the dark ghost in ten years.
Not since before the worst Bad Thing.
Hannah starts to reverse down the hill and into the woods. “Ugh, your house always makes me feel the feelings. I swear, there’s no place more nostalgia inducing than that leaning stack of lumber.”
I nod and look out the window.
“Is she here now?” Hannah asks as she reverses slowly down the driveway. “Feathers?”
I point out toward a curve in the edge of the forest where I can barely make out a pink tendril caught in moonlight. “There,” I tell Hannah. She gazes out toward that point with a dreamy, contented smile, then returns to easing down the driveway. “I wish you could see her.”
Hannah lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “I just like knowing she’s there. You know, not everyone gets to be best friends with someone who has a guardian . . . ghost.”
“Han, if she were my guardian ghost, don’t you think she would’ve intervened when I got bangs?”
“Who says guardian ghosts don’t have a sense of humor?”
When we were little, I saw the pink ghost all the time. Hannah couldn’t, but she could feel it. Sometimes we’d chase the shimmer across the yard and run through it, as if it were the spray of the sprinkler. It felt soft and lush, like running through a million falling feathers, thus our nickname for it. Dad always called it the Sprite, and when Mom shot him dubious looks— you shouldn’t toy with the kids like that—he’d wink and say, “You know, Léa, to enter the kingdom of heaven, you must become like a child.”
Then she’d smile as she turned back to hanging laundry, or rolling dough over the floured counter, or trailing her fingers along the gauzy wind-rippled drapes, and say, “Five Fingers loves its stories.”
Like most transplants to this place, Mom had a hard time accepting the strange things that happened on our land as anything other than the shared imaginings of wild, summer-dazed minds and a town-wide tendency to exaggerate.
Five Fingers did love its stories, but Dad’s were true. Our house is magic, in some small way. The skinny halls and wallpapered rooms, the gnarled forest that encircled our hill—together they do all kinds of impossible things. My whole life kids have crept onto our property at night to make wishes and look for spirits, or to steal cherries from the first Jack’s Tart tree with hopes of shrinking their dogs’ tumors, healing their grandparents’ melanoma, even clearing up their acne.
As we pull onto the wooded road beyond my driveway, something flutters in my peripheral vision: the shift of a shadow, the undulation of something inky in front of the gatehouse.
My blood chills. My stomach clenches, a knot tightens my throat, and there’s a jarring halt in my heart. But when I glance in the rearview mirror, there’s nothing there. No shadowy thing, no darkness.
It’s gone, I tell myself. It’s been gone three years. It’s not coming back.
Hannah flicks the frayed edge of my jean cut-offs. “June?”
“Huh?”
“You okay? You look sort of . . . not.”
I shake my head. “Sorry, just distracted.”
It’s gone.
Still, tonight’s feeling of rightness has been disturbed. Something off buzzes in the air, like a single hornet circling my head, always out of sight.
Two
WE leave Hannah’s car parked by Meijer and join the crowd rollicking across the highway toward the high school. The organ music playing on loop in the Tunnel O’ Love overlaps chaotically with the whoop and dingdingding of carnival games, and sweet, fatty smells mingle with the pine in the air.
We follow the curling path to the red-and-white ticket booth at the entrance to the school’s parking lot, and I try to leave behind any thoughts of the dark presence I imagined back at the house. It’s gone; it’s not coming back. It was never there.
Hannah squeezes my arm and squeals in excitement as we step into the ticket line. She may be painfully shy, but she loves crowds.
Our friendship couldn’t be any more of a teen-TV-drama cliché if we tried: Hannah Kuiper is a shy yet extroverted, violin-playing salutatorian. I’m a socially comfortable yet severely introverted underachiever who, if given the option for a weekend excursion, would choose Desert Island over Theme Park. She’s a waify, blue-eyed blonde, and I’m a dark-eyed, even darker-waved brunette who wore Hannah’s current pant size back in the seventh grade. Mom attributes my relative brawn to the fact that I, like Dad, never stop moving.
As we near the front of the line, Han rises up on her tiptoes, searching the crowd beyond the booth. “I think I see Nate Baars,” Hannah says.
“How,” I say, “in this writhing mass of Vineyard Vines shorts and North Face fleeces, did you pick out one little Vineyard Tendril–North Freckle?”
“Why are people crowded around him like that?” she asks, completely ignoring me. I squint and follow her gaze to the base of the Ferris wheel. Nate’s standing with a dozen kids from our school, most of whom have already graduated.
“Weird,” I say. “I’ve never seen people line up to hear someone make a fart noise with their armpit before. Is that Stephen Niequist with him?” I gesture to the rail-thin blond boy in the grandpa cardigan, Hannah’s academic rival.
She shrugs. “Weirdly enough, they’re friends. No idea what those two have to talk about, but I see Stephen’s car at Nate’s house all the time.”
Nate and Hannah live on the same street. We used to ride bikes with him when we were kids, before the natural current of high school took him and us in two very different directions. One direction being distinctly toward flatulence-based humor.
“Maybe the world’s ending and Nate just found out he’s allowed to choose one person to save,” I suggest. Truthfully, Nate is exactly the kind of boy who might draw a crowd—he’s all suntanned muscle and shiny, chocolaty hair—if he weren’t so ridiculous. But he is, and so this visual makes no sense.
“Maybe he won the lottery,” Hannah says, “and now he has fifty new best friends who want a piece of the pie.”
The gaunt woman in the admission booth calls us forward, and we trade twenties for highlighter-pink wristbands. We wander partway down the aisle on the right and stop before the House of Mirrors, staring up at the pink archway over the entrance. “Hey,” Hannah says gently, taking my hand. She juts her chin toward it. “Mayb
e this year?”
The House of Mirrors was always Dad’s favorite, and it’s mine too. There’s something so thrilling about wandering around only to get yourself un-lost—especially when the thing you’re lost in blurs the line between dream and reality, possible and impossible. Like our house and our land. Like Dad himself.
Hannah and I come to this carnival every year, but I haven’t been into the House of Mirrors since Dad died.
“What do you think?” Hannah says, studying me.
I shake my head. Hannah squeezes my hand then lets go. “Maybe next year.”
We stand in silence for a few more seconds, like we’re at an altar or a grave and not five feet from a game where you shoot plastic clowns with mounted water guns.
“Huh,” Hannah says, breaking the reverie. I glance sidelong at her. Her eyes are back on the group at the bottom of the Ferris wheel. Now that we’re closer, it’s apparent that Nate is not, in fact, the center of their attention. He and Stephen are standing off-center, a little bit behind the others, and as a gaggle of middle schoolers jostles past, a gap in the group shifts to reveal the person they all seem uniformly focused on. At first, I can only see his back. He’s on the tallish side of average and the thinnish side too, but he somehow takes up more space than someone his size should, as if his presence bends everything around itself.
He turns a bit, and I get a partial view of his profile, but I still don’t recognize him. Clean-cut dark hair, uniform five-o’clock shadow. A T-shirt whiter than I’ve managed to keep one in the time it takes to get from the cash register to the door. The kind of dark, slim-fit jeans you can get away with wearing to a Five Fingers wedding.
I realize then that the reason he stands out so starkly against the backdrop of our lakeside town is because he looks unnaturally clean. Even the tattoos covering his pale arms manage to look cleaner than plain Five Fingers skin.
Hannah takes a step past me, trying to get a better look. “Is that . . .”
A couple of people laugh, and Nate Baars smacks the stranger on the back. He turns then, so I can see his full profile, and he forces a fraction of a smile before discreetly maneuvering away. The curvature of the group shifts to accommodate his movement.