Contents
Prologue
Book One: Susan
Chapter 1
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Chapter 2
Chapter 3
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Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
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Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
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Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Book Two: Max
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
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Chapter 28
Chapter 29
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Chapter 30
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Chapter 31
Chapter 32
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Chapter 33
Chapter 34
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Chapter 35
Chapter 36
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Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Book Three: Nell
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
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Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
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Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
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Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
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Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
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Chapter 58
Chapter 59
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Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Book Four: Kate
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
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Chapter 70
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Chapter 71
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Chapter 72
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Chapter 73
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Chapter 74
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Chapter 75
Chapter 76
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Chapter 77
Chapter 78
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Chapter 79
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Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
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Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Book Five: Jean
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
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Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
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Chapter 93
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Chapter 94
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Chapter 95
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Chapter 96
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Chapter 97
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Chapter 98
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Chapter 99
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Book Six: Susan
Chapter 100
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Chapter 101
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Chapter 102
Epilogue
If Max were to begin this story, he would tell you that one day science will discover the seams of the universe, the edges where things lie side by side, unnoticed until they bump together in the strangest ways. He would say that one day, someone brilliant, maybe even he, would know the reason for what unfolded that long winter’s eve.
If Nell were to begin it, she would start, of course, with Mrs. Grady, the cheerful lady next door, who liked to tell her neighbors that if her kitchen light ever went out, she’d be gagged, bound, or possibly dead. This was, after all, why Nell was watching Mrs. Grady’s window that night. Part of her hoped the light would go out, just to see what would happen.
If Kate or Jean were to begin, they’d say it started with an accident. So many things seem accidental when you’re eight and seven, hours of the day pieced together like a patchwork quilt, one square fastened to the next because someone once discarded something colorful and someone else picked it up with needle in hand.
But it’s Susan who begins this story, because Susan is the one who names things. She finds words for the summer wind that blows through before an afternoon storm or the awkward pause when you’ve forgotten what you wanted to say after beginning to say it. It’s Susan who marks the texture of moments and wonders why they might mean what they do.
Though she loved the word dusk, which felt like smoke, and evening, which spoke of romance, Susan called the span between day and night blue window time. Somehow she knew the blue that filled the window was the essence of the hour, turning clouds into filigree and trees into lines, obscuring some things and revealing others. And perhaps it was the blue, after all, that last, stubborn hue clinging to the sky, that opened the door — or, in this case, the window.
On the day before it all began, Susan found herself wishing mightily that she could melt into light-gray paint, which by no coincidence was the color of Ms. Clives’s classroom wall. Lucy Driscoll was making a scene, and Susan stood at the center of it.
“But, Ms. Clives, you promised!” Lucy sobbed. “Don’t you remember? You said I could be Juliet!”
Criminations! Susan thought. Exactly what I deserve for opening my mouth.
She stared out the window at the December sky, where the clouds had swallowed the sun. It winked feebly from beneath a smear of gray, looking half suffocated. Which was exactly how Susan felt, trapped up there in front of everyone as Lucy moved from sobs to conniptions. Five full minutes of it left Ms. Clives looking fatigued. She turned a pained and apologetic face to Susan.
“Susan? You don’t mind, do you? And you can have a turn next time?”
Susan had only been waiting to get a word in edgewise anyway. Her cheeks were on fire, and she thought she’d combust if she had to stand near Lucy for another second.
“Of, of course not! That’s okay!”
She darted to her seat, thinking that wild horses couldn’t drag her back to the front of that room for another tryout. It was a phrase of her grandmother’s she particularly liked. Wild horses and an eight-hundred-pound gorilla seemed to be the two things that could drag a person anywhere, at least according to Grandma. Susan was certain she could withstand both of them more easily than further drama from Lucy, along with the humiliating, gossipy glee the rest of the class took in watching the whole thing.
Unfortunately, thanks to Max, the scene wasn’t over. The entire time Susan had been at the front of the room, her twin brother had been mouthing, “Stand up for yourself! Say something!” and she’d answered with the tiniest shake of her head. Now that she’d taken her seat, he began lecturing her in a low, insistent whisper. “You could at least say you worked for it! You don’t have to act like you don’t care! It’s not just about you, anyway; it’s about what’s fair. . . .”
She turned and shot him a look hot enough to singe his eyebrows. Apparently, he was flameproof.
“I don’t want to talk about it!” she hissed. “So stop already!”
Flameproof and deaf.
Max leaned forward, grippi
ng the edges of his desk. “How long did you practice? All this week, remember? Lucy doesn’t know the first thing about —”
“Max, do you have something to share with the class?”
It was Ms. Clives, glowering from the front of the room, tapping a purple manicured nail on her desk. Ms. Clives had started the year as one of those aggressively cheerful, pretty teachers the class tended to love — the kind that arranged the desks, including her own, into a circle so everyone could be friends. The kind that made Susan nervous, because in her experience, the Ms. Cliveses of the world generally lost their patience by about December. By winter break, all the cheerful good humor would have drained away, replaced by the temperament and patience of Godzilla. The worst of it would be the whiny, peeved reminders of the good old days back in September, when the kids had supposedly known how to behave.
Lucy Driscoll had moved the teacher perilously close to that point now, in Susan’s estimation, and the look on Ms. Clives’s face said it would be Max who pushed her over.
Max did not see the warning in the teacher’s stiff posture and tapping fingers. He just shrugged and repeated what he’d said, along with a few other things of interest, while Susan withered in her seat and Lucy gulped air and shuddered. Susan sometimes thought that she and Max must be about the two least alike people in the world, especially for a set of twins. Make that the universe, since that was the scale on which Max tended to put things. He liked to argue over principles like Justice, and Rights, and Progress. Max’s principles were always introduced in capital letters. At home, Susan argued right back. But despite the fact that her favorite books were all about spunky, outspoken girls who played as hard as the boys did, Susan abhorred having everyone look at her. The only trouble she ever got into was for reading under her desk, and that, along with slightly exasperated notes home — “If Susan only applied herself, she could be a real star in school. . . .” — was enough to manage. Max, on the other hand, had a habit of making a splash. He’d been doing it since they were both little: breaking things, playing too rough, having trouble sitting still. Lately, his splashes had to do with being taken seriously, a difficult thing for a bulky thirteen-year-old boy with a soft face, hair that sat like a dark, rumpled mountain range on top of his head, and theories that came out of reading The Giant Book of Why.
Susan wasn’t interested in making other people see what they didn’t want to, or couldn’t. She only wanted to do her work and go home. She’d try, often, to make this point to Max after one school disaster or another, but he refused to get it. And he wasn’t getting it now, despite the expression on Ms. Clives’s face and the fact that Susan repeated his name three times in a low, urgent, you-will-pay-for-this-later-if-you-don’t-stop-right-now type of voice.
Finally she had no choice but to speak up.
“Max, it’s okay!” she said firmly. “I don’t mind. Really, I don’t!”
Ms. Clives’s purple nails had been doing a drum solo on the desk.
“Max, your sister doesn’t mind, and Lucy will do a wonderful job, too. The discussion is over.”
This time there was steel in her voice, and he subsided, grumbling. Lucy, tears all gone, made her way shakily to her seat. When she got there, she beamed at the teacher. “Thank you, Ms. C. I’ll work really hard — I promise.” She turned Susan’s way and flashed a sudden, wicked grin. “And thank you, Susan.”
“There, that’s nice,” Ms. Clives said, her voice tight with irritation. “I’m proud of both of you.”
Susan closed her eyes. When she’d been little, younger even than Jean, she’d thought that if you closed your eyes, no one could see you. She wished it were true now. Either way, she wanted to block out the sight of Lucy’s smug face, and Max’s outraged one, too.
But she couldn’t settle. She had the strangest feeling someone was waiting to ask her a question.
She opened her eyes and frowned at her brother.
“What?”
He frowned right back. “Now you talk? I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, stop looking at me, then.”
“I wasn’t looking. And you’re not in charge of my eyes, now, are you?”
Ms. Clives shot a warning look their way, and Susan didn’t answer.
Susan was still smarting as she and Max got off at the bus stop and started walking home. She trudged along the street in a coat that had once fallen to her knees but now was at least two inches short. It would swallow Nell, though, so she’d kept it for one more year. Beneath it, her skirt blew against her legs, which had gone red with the cold. She was on her way to getting tall, and lately her body had begun to stretch into unfamiliar angles and lines. She wasn’t used to it and so preferred to focus on what was the same: same slightly messy, loose brown curls; same pointy chin; same blue eyes. They were her secret favorite, sky blue and just the shade of her grandfather’s. Her eyes made her feel like she belonged somewhere, and she liked that.
Right now she felt like she belonged nowhere at all. Even the street seemed unfamiliar, changed with the first snowfall. The remains of it had begun to turn brown at the curb, and when the wind blew, a grimy mist rose from it before settling back across her boots. Overhead, an oak tree full of stubborn, dead leaves chafed in the wind.
Susan glanced at Max, who usually had something meteorological to say as they walked home. This time, he only shook his head at her.
“You should have said something.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like you always stand up for yourself? I saw Ivan and Mo in the hall after class. I heard what they called you.”
He wouldn’t meet her eye.
“That’s different. Ms. Clives doesn’t threaten to kick the smart out of you if you stand up for yourself. She can be reasonable, not like those two idiots.”
Susan shook her head. “You could tell someone. You don’t have to put up with it all the time.”
Max sighed. “I’m not a girl, Susan.”
She was about to say that no, girls were more reasonable, when Nell rounded the corner to prove her wrong. Max and Nell swore up and down that the two of them were opposites, and it was true they looked nothing alike. Nell was small for eleven years old, with intense blue eyes a shade darker than Susan’s and the round, freckled face of a pixie, though only the stupidest people had the nerve to tell her that. But looks were deceiving, because inside, Nell was just as full of big ideas as Max was, and just as certain she knew how to make them happen.
Their particular sameness usually meant that Nell and Max sat on each other’s very last nerve, a pattern that only changed when they turned their mutual energy to analyzing what had gone wrong with Susan. Susan wondered now if the two of them had radar communication set up on the subject, because as soon as Nell jogged up, she looked from one to the next and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s wrong?”
“Susan,” Max shot back.
“Nothing,” Susan snapped.
Nell zigzagged up the road, pouncing on every half-decent snow pile that remained in the street as Max replayed the afternoon for her. When he was done, Nell nodded sagely.
“You let people push you around too much,” she informed Susan.
“She’s the teacher,” Susan protested. “I couldn’t say anything. Why would I even want to?”
“I said something!” Max cut in.
A chilly wind whistled past Susan’s ears and set them tingling.
“I should have clobbered you before you did,” she grumbled, rubbing the feeling back into her ears with a gloved hand. “I still should.”
Nell ambushed another lump of dirty snow, splattering Susan’s exposed leg.
“Bad temper in all the wrong places,” she said. “That’s you. If anyone deserves a clobbering, it’s Lucy Driscoll.”
She frowned suddenly and turned around. “Hey!”
“Hey what?” Max asked.
Nell tilted her head. “That’s juvenile, Max.”
“What is?”
“T
apping me from behind and pretending you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.”
Nell’s frown deepened. “Susan, did you?”
“No!”
“Well, somebody did. And whichever of you it was, just stop it.”
Max hitched his backpack higher onto his shoulder. His puffy coat sighed under the weight of it.
“Maybe it was some of that snow you keep flattening, hitting back,” he suggested.
“Yeah, right.” Nell looked over her shoulder again, brow furrowed.
Susan felt suddenly antsy, as if she’d forgotten something she’d been supposed to remember. But then it had been a strange day, full of wishing she could fly out the classroom window, or at least turn invisible. She tried to shrug it off and set her mind to getting home and finding her book, the only proven way, so far, of disappearing.
She did just that for most of the evening and went to bed early, hoping sleep would wash away the mortification of the day.
“Susan? I had a funny dream again.”
Susan squinted in the sudden light from the hall and glanced at the clock. Past midnight, and Kate stood there in her nightgown, waiting.
At eight, Kate was too old to be waking her parents but apparently not too old to be waking her big sister. This big sister, anyway, who had a soft spot for pensive eight-year-olds with bad dreams. Pensive. That word had been a find, and one Susan had immediately applied to Kate. It seemed to fit them both, and maybe that’s why they got along so well. Being pensive, at eight or thirteen, always kept you a half step out of the main. For Susan, who would rather read than talk, and Kate, who seemed to hear things differently than other people did, pensive was just the right word. Susan rolled over and nodded to the small figure standing in the doorway, Kate’s unruly curls lit by the light of the hall. They were sandy brown, a shade lighter than her eyes, and gave the impression of being lighter still, the color of amber or honey.
“Funny how? Scary? Were there monsters?”
A long pause from Kate, until Susan waved her in, permission to climb into bed beside her. The mattress bounced and Kate slipped under the covers. Susan could feel her sister’s bony little body, warm against her.
“Not monsters. And I don’t think I was scared. But I was someplace different. And there were other people there. I could hear them.”
Susan yawned. Sleep was tugging at her.
“And? What did they look like?”
Kate sighed in the darkness. She rolled over and threw an arm across Susan. “They were gone when I turned around. I think the splashing scared them off.”
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