“What happened?” Elle asks in a horrified whisper. She holds a hand over a cut on his forehead. Better than Band-Aids.
“Some rumors have been getting around,” Frank says. He winces as Elle heals a black eye. He still manages to look at each of us individually, as though to be sure we’re listening. Winnie is translating for Brooke. She can read lips a little, but only if she can focus and the person is speaking very clearly. “I don’t know how or who. But some men in town had heard I might be hiding—well, they used the word witches. They were . . . quite determined to find out if that was true.”
Violet whimpers, and Frank gives them one of his fatherly smiles before Elle passes her hand over his split lip.
“I didn’t tell them, of course,” he says. “I’ve taken many precautions over the years to make sure no one knows where this house is.”
Not enough to stop people from stumbling upon it, I think. I shake the memory out of my head before it can form.
“So, they won’t . . .” Elle bites her lip, then continues. “They won’t come here?”
“No. I’d never let them. As long as you’re here, you’re safe.”
She breathes a sigh of relief, and I find myself sighing with her.
I understand why Jane would want to run, if that’s what she did. Frank takes care of us, but his watchfulness can be oppressive. His moods can be unpredictable in a way that can mean “extra movie night, as a treat” or “time-out for asking for an extra movie night.”
You never really know where you stand with him.
We know where we stand with everyone outside this house, though, and it’s not good. The lake house is the only place in the world where we can be alchemists out in the open and not end up as bruised and bloody as Frank after his run-in with those men—or worse. Frank may be moody, but he never touches us, and instead of squashing our magic, he encourages it to flourish.
My magic first showed itself when I was seven. Ivy grew up through the floor in my bedroom and twisted into a canopy across the ceiling. My parents didn’t know what to make of it. They were prepared to help me through bullying and illnesses and The Talk. Nothing could have prepared them for their little girl to be magic.
They’d tear down the ivy, and every night, it grew back. It reflected my dreams. When they were good, the ivy filled with honeysuckle and light. Nightmares brought tangles of poison ivy and flowers with scorpion-stingers.
And then there were the flowers growing on my body. I would wake up in the morning with tiny flowers blooming along my hairline, or circling my belly button. I hid that from my parents pretty effectively until one day, when they were fighting. I sat in the backyard listening to them through an open window, and I cried, and wood sprouted through the earth. A tree grew up around me, shielding me. When my father pulled me out, my long brown hair had become red-flowered vines that my mom had to shave off.
Children can hardly be expected to control their magic that young, especially when no one is there to teach them. Sometimes their parents get confused. Scared. Angry. They drive four hours to give up their ivy-growing nine-year-old to a man who says he can help. They, I imagine, move out of their old house and resign themselves to never having had a daughter at all.
I loved my parents. I needed them to love me, and instead they dropped me off like an unwanted pet.
We all have stories like that. Brooke and London have their tragedies. Irene and Elle’s single mother could handle twins and a trans daughter, but not when one turned out telepathic and the other, in a desperate burst of powerful magic, brought a run-over cat back from the brink of death with the touch of her hands. Jane’s parents grew weary of her trying to fix things around the house and disfiguring them beyond repair instead.
For all of Frank’s flaws, at least he wants us.
Frank gets up and goes to the sink to wipe the blood off his face. It reveals clean, unbroken skin. As always, Elle has done a remarkable job.
“I was thinking,” he says, turning back to us as he swipes a damp washcloth around his ears for any stray drops, “that maybe we could have a movie night.”
That makes all of us pay attention. “Really?” Violet asks.
Frank laughs at our eagerness. “Really. I know it’s not the usual circumstances, but I think we could all use it.” He points the washcloth at us. Once white, it’s now stained with his blood. “If you can finish your chores, and I know at least a few of you have worksheets you didn’t finish yesterday. If that’s all done by dinner, then after, we can watch a movie.”
There it is again, that sense of normalcy, that ability to forget Jane isn’t here. She could be up in our room, making her bed while the rest of us scatter to our own duties.
I don’t get far before Frank calls my name. “Derry. One moment.” His voice is grave.
My siblings leave, giving me worried looks, but not intervening. They all know they can’t help me right now. Only later, when we’re out of his sight.
Carefully, the way you would with a wild animal, I raise my eyes to Frank’s. I can only hold the contact for a second.
“Take a seat,” he says, gesturing to the table still covered in the remains of our lunch. He sits across from me, in the seat that’s usually Winnie’s.
He doesn’t say anything, not for a long time. I stare at the syrup-sticky plate in front of me, and he watches. I know because every few seconds I glance up to find him still watching with that passive, patient face.
“Did I do something wrong?” I ask.
“Did you?”
Every rule I’ve ever broken runs like a film reel in my mind. Every transgression. Good word. I’ve put off chores, I’ve cheated on assignments, I’ve taken too-long showers, I’ve fought with my siblings, I’ve kept secrets from Frank, I’ve gone outside without permission.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
Frank nods, tapping his fingers on the table. “I had some time to think while I was gone, and there’s this one little part of last night that I can’t quite . . . reconcile.” Here, he pauses again and waits for me to make eye contact.
He smiles.
“You trust me, don’t you, Derry?”
I hesitate. I grip the sides of the chair, fingers curling up under the seat. “Yes?” It comes out like a question, and his eyes narrow. More confidently, I say, “Yes. Of course.” I hold the eye contact until his face settles back into a calm smile.
“Then why didn’t you come get me as soon as you realized Jane was missing?”
He asked me that last night. What did I say then? “I was just thinking I had to find Jane.”
“And you thought you’d be better equipped to do that than I would?”
“No—”
“I’m still not sure how you got out, either.”
“The front door was open.”
“With no unusual activity on the alarm record?”
I shrug. “I don’t really know how that works. I just know it was open.”
Frank leans in across the table, searching my face. I want to school my expression into something he’ll believe, but I don’t know what that expression is. I don’t know if it makes more sense for me to be scared or confused or vulnerable or defiant.
“You know that lying only hurts you, Derry,” he says. His voice is soft. Gentle. Asking me to trust him with all my secrets. “Everything I’ve built here is for you. For your siblings. The world out there doesn’t understand you. It doesn’t want to understand you. Here, without their fear, without distractions? Your magic can grow into something beautiful and powerful.” He smiles, and I find myself leaning in like a flower toward the sun. I want him to be proud of me and my magic. “Lying only hurts this home.”
I recoil. I’m the one hurting our home? Jane’s been taken or lost or run away, but I’m the one who’s doing the hurting? This isn’t fair. I didn’t do anything, not this time—all I did was look for my sister. So what if I didn’t come get him first?
My grip on the chair tighten
s, fingertips tingling with pins and needles. Magic courses out of them, into the chair and out. Something grows out of the underside of the chair and around my fingers. A familiar dizziness buzzes at the edges of my skull. Not like I’m going to faint, but like I’m going to explode if I don’t scream, if I don’t reach across the table and shove Frank’s face into the wood—
“You can and should talk to me,” he continues. “Any problems you have—I can fix them, but only if you tell me. There’s nothing I can do to save you if a problem I don’t know about gets out of control.”
He smiles one last time, raps his knuckles on the table twice, and leaves. Once he’s gone, the oxygen rushes back into the room. I can breathe again.
With some effort, I unlock my fingers from around the edge of the chair. I brush away the purple flowers that sprouted out of my right thigh, just below the hem of my shorts. I’m still a little shaky from the rush of anger, so it takes me a moment to get on the floor and check the underside of the chair.
It’s covered in small, twisted snowdrops.
Figures.
If I found my siblings right now, they wouldn’t mean to crowd me, but they would anyway. They’d want to know I’m okay. They’d want to hear everything Frank said. Elle would pace and flutter about, alert for the possibility that we might not all be thrilled or in agreement with Frank. Even if no one else said anything against him, Winnie definitely would, and Elle would chide her, and they’d fight and Brooke would step in, and—
It’s exhausting to even think about.
Instead, I clear the table. Elle and Brooke believe in cleaning as you cook, but the little twins don’t, so I toss eggshells in the trash and rinse out a bowl that held the milk-egg-vanilla mixture for French toast. I get the dishwasher started.
Then, using the sound of their voices and chores as a guide, I avoid my siblings all the way up to my bedroom. I close the door behind me and sink to the floor, wishing I could sink into the floor.
I’ve always struggled more with anxiety than with depression, but sometimes . . .
Someone knocks. I don’t scream FUCK OFF, and good thing, because when I clamber to my feet and open the door, it’s London. She’s holding a huge, battered dictionary.
“Do you want a word of the day?” she asks.
I smile. London couldn’t know this is just the right thing. I hadn’t even known, until she was here and looking up at me with those big brown eyes, not asking for answers. Just asking for a word.
“Let’s do two,” I say. “I still haven’t found a good replacement for alchemist.” I sit on my bed, and London climbs up with me.
“How do we find a word for that out of the whole dictionary?” she asks.
I’d been doing it the way we do word of the day—pick a random page, look for something that sounds magic-y. That can take forever, though. “Go to magic,” I say. “Tell me the synonyms.”
London flips to M. She runs one finger down the page until she finds magic. “Bewitchery. Conjuring. Devilry. Sorcery.”
“Tried conjurer already,” I say. “Not into devil. How would we make bewitchery work? Bewitcher?” London wrinkles her nose, and I nod. “Yeah, agree. So, sorcerer?”
Even as I say it, I don’t like it. London shrugs, more neutral on it than she had been on bewitcher, at least.
“Well, worth a try,” I say. “Find us a word of the day.”
London closes her eyes, flipping back and forth through the pages. After a few seconds, I say “Stop!” Eyes still closed, she points at the page she stopped on.
We lean in together to read it.
“Senescent,” London says. “Growing old; aging.” She purses her lips. “Couldn’t that be anything?”
“Maybe it means something that’s already old and is only getting older,” I suggest. “Like how as a kid, you aging means you’re developing, not getting old. But Irene said that after a certain point, the cells in our bodies don’t develop and grow—they age and die. So someone past that age would be senescent.”
“Is Frank senescent?” London asks.
I pause. I don’t know how old Frank is, but he’s always looked . . . not young, exactly, but not old, either. He’s never changed. Even as we lost baby teeth and grew taller and wider, Frank stayed the same.
But everyone is senescent in some way. Like Irene said, at some point, your body just starts the process of dying and never looks back. She’d know—she’s read every biology book that Frank has ever given us. I think she said it starts earlier than you’d think, too. In your twenties, maybe?
Frank’s got to be older than that. Surely that death process has started in Frank’s body by now. Even if he was only twenty when Jane first came here, he’d have to be near thirty now. Or older.
How much longer could he have? What would it mean for us, if he died? Sure, we can grow a lot of our own food, but we’d have to start going into the world for everything else. Frank can barely do that without being attacked, and he’s only rumored to associate with “witches.” What they’d do to us if our secret was discovered . . .
But maybe we’d figure it out. Keep each other safe. Get a chance to try everything Frank calls wasteful or dangerous, and learn for ourselves.
London is fiddling with the edge of the page, not looking at me. Frank might be the closest thing to a father she’ll ever remember, and here I am, saying, Oh well, he’s gonna die, don’t worry about it.
Cool. Very cool. Very helpful, especially with one of her sisters missing. The thing London needs to worry about right now is definitely losing another piece of her family.
“He might be,” I say carefully. “But if anyone could convince their body not to age, it’d be Frank.”
She smiles and nods. Her smile is bright, but I think I’ve still managed to plant one more fear in her young brain.
London scans the dictionary for another magic-y word. I lean back, resting my head against the wall.
He is, though. Everyone’s senescent. One day, Frank’s going to die, and . . .
I don’t know why that makes me a little happy.
6
After dinner, Frank wheels the TV out into the living room. It’s usually kept in his quarters. Too much screen time, he says, is bad for the growing mind, so he has to regulate it strictly for our own good. That’s why we don’t get our own iPads or internet access, either. According to Frank, that way lies addiction.
He also brings out a little bowl with nine slips of paper in it. He closes his eyes and dramatically fishes around before pulling out a paper, unfolding it, and saying “Violet!” like they’ve won first place at the county fair.
We clap as Violet stands and walks over to the shelf containing all twenty-seven DVDs. They clasp their hands under their chin, examining each title with care, even though they must have each movie as memorized as the rest of us.
After a few moments’ consideration, Violet picks a DVD case colored blue and silver and teal with a flash of red hair. The Little Mermaid. Violet hands the case off to Frank, who nods in approval—as if each movie wasn’t already chosen and approved by him—and he puts it in. We’re all piled onto the two couches and the floor in front of them with blankets and pillows and popcorn.
The movie opens on a flock of seagulls in a cloudy ocean sky. I know every beat, every line, every song, every flip of Ariel’s tail. When you only have twenty-seven movies to watch, they tend to sear into your brain. I’ve even memorized how my siblings will react to certain parts of a given movie. When the huge fluff of a dog is on screen, Winnie’s eyes never stray from him, because the one thing she misses more than her parents is her dog. Elle sings along with every song in every musical we have, but none more passionately than “Part of Your World.” Frank does a perfect Sebastian impression during “Under the Sea” that never fails to make us all dissolve into giggles. Olivia and London both hate the part where Sebastian is in danger of being cooked and eaten, and will usually cover their eyes. Brooke is more likely to cover her
eyes during “Kiss the Girl,” overcome by secondhand embarrassment. As much as she devours any book with a romance plotline, she can’t deal with it on screen—especially if there’s a pretty girl involved. Brooke has a crush on a minimum of one girl in every movie we watch.
Personally, I’m a sucker for Ursula. She’s expansive in body and power, she has the best song, and a little part of me thinks she kinda deserved to win.
Frank’s favorite is King Triton. He likes to point to the pain Ariel goes through on land as proof she shouldn’t have left her family behind, and firmly believes she would have had an even happier ending if she’d only listened to her father. It’s a little heavy-handed, as messages go, but he’s not entirely wrong. I couldn’t leave my family for anything.
Tonight, I can hardly focus on any of it. The TV is set up with the window behind it, and with the lights off for the movie, I can see out to the front lawn. It’s silly, but I can’t look away.
There’s nothing there.
There’s something there.
Even in the empty space I know there’s something there, outside the house, waiting.
For me?
The movie’s over before I know it, and Frank’s shooing us off to bed. Brooke stays downstairs with the little twins long enough to make sure they brush their teeth and get settled. The rest of us head upstairs, change into pajamas, and take turns in the bathroom. I go through the motions of washing my face and brushing my teeth, but I’m still outside that window, in the dark.
Brooke’s coming upstairs as I leave the bathroom. She smiles at me. ‘Do you want to stay with me and Winnie?’ she asks, just like she did last night.
Just like last night, I shake my head. ‘Thank you,’ I sign. ‘But I want my own bed.’
I spend almost an hour lying awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. It’s too quiet. I like the quiet, but this is the kind of quiet that’s so inescapable it’s loud. I briefly consider seeing if anyone else is awake and asking them to come stay in my room, but I don’t want anyone in Jane’s bed—and I doubt they want to be in hers.
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