This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811359-9

Version: 2015-03-09

For my mom, who taught me how to read—and for Henry, who is a Story

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER 1: Acid Loves You

CHAPTER 2: Wellstone

CHAPTER 3: Six Feet

CHAPTER 4: I’m Alive

CHAPTER 5: Death Beginning

CHAPTER 6: Sensitive One

CHAPTER 7: Riding Too Long

CHAPTER 8: Wickedness and Snares

CHAPTER 9: What Do You Want?

CHAPTER 10: Can You See Me?

CHAPTER 11: Mixed Up

CHAPTER 12: Door to Nowhere

CHAPTER 13: Dance or Die

CHAPTER 14: Mr. Black

CHAPTER 15: The Lower Vale

CHAPTER 16: A Nice Dare

CHAPTER 17: The Gift at the Table

CHAPTER 18: Red Shoes

CHAPTER 19: It’s Easy to Dye

CHAPTER 20: Dearest Annabelle

CHAPTER 21: Great-granddaughter

CHAPTER 22: Free

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1:

Acid Loves You

Acid walked away the day he told me that he loved me.

He said those three little words, whispered them, and then the teacher slammed her hand on my desk, making me turn around and sit up straight and pretend to pay attention. By the time I glanced back, he had slipped out of the doorway into the hall, skipping class again.

I sat in the back at school. I felt different than everyone else. I wore different clothes. My school didn’t require a uniform, but I kind of wished it did. Acid wore expensive sneakers, but he’d had to scrimp for them, and I often saw him in the same shirt and jeans. Me, I was content to wear a sweatshirt, slipping the hood down over my face as far as I could, until I could hardly see.

The train the afternoon that Acid walked away was late, and when it came it was packed, only one seat in the back of the car I had chosen, near the operator’s booth. It was an hour’s ride home from school, forty-five minutes if I was lucky.

That was another way I was different:

I was never lucky.

The subway rumbled and swayed. The car I was in emptied as more and more people got out. Hardly anyone got in as we traveled uptown. We were almost home when the train jerked and halted, and I was pushed into the sleeping man beside me. I moved away quickly, scooting over until my shoulder pressed against the side of the car. The man only snorted and went back to sleep.

The conductor’s voice came over the intercom, scratchy and garbled—but I knew what he was saying; I had heard it before. “This train is being held by supervision. We will be moving shortly.”

We were in between stops, and outside the window, the tunnel looked black. Inside the train, the lights flickered and went out. When they turned back on, there was something on the outside of the window.

Hand. It was a hand.

Someone was riding on the outside of the train.

I stood, my bag sliding off my lap and hitting the floor with a thud. The sleeping man grumbled. The operator came out of his booth and scanned the car.

I met his glance. “There’s someone out there.”

He didn’t look. “Kid, sit down.”

“Look!” I said.

Annoyed, he flicked his eyes in the direction I pointed, barely a glance. But the operator didn’t see. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ll be moving soon.” He opened the door to his little booth, and went back inside, muttering to himself, “Kids!”

I had heard about people riding on the outside of subway cars, trying to be funny, getting themselves killed. But when I turned to look again, to double-check, the hand was gone. I saw only the empty tunnel and the swinging work light. Why was it swinging, as if someone had knocked into it?

With a jerk, the train started moving again.

My stop was the last in Manhattan before the Bronx. My building was the last on the block before the highway, and our apartment was on the top floor, up five flights of stairs. No elevator. “It builds the muscles,” my sister had said when she was a dancer.

But she wasn’t a dancer anymore.

She was waiting for me in the hallway of the apartment when I unlocked the door, which was bad. Really bad. The Firecracker never got home before me, not since she started working her “real job,” as she called it, her “grown-up job” that kept her late, every night, sometimes until nine or ten. I checked my phone. It was six.

“The Head-of-School called,” the Firecracker said. “You’re getting a D in English.”

That hurt, but I tried not to let it. “So?” I said.

“So, they won’t let you out of the ninth grade if you don’t get at least a C.”

I followed her into the kitchen. “What does that mean,

they won’t let me out

?”

“That means, you’ll lose your scholarship and be kicked out of school. You can’t coast by anymore, Esmé.”

“I’m not coasting,” I said.

But I knew I was.

It was like I was tired all the time. It was like I was angry and upset—but if I talked to someone about it, if I stayed after school to meet a teacher or go to tutoring, I would have to think about it. I would have to bring it up. And I didn’t want to bring it up. I wanted it not to be happening at all.

Miss Wrong.

I did well in school when I was a kid, well enough that they made me take tests, and the tests got me into a new school, a private school. Acid and I were scholarship kids, brought in by the tests. In middle school, I had raised my hand and answered questions, and I had usually got them right. But in high school, this year, something had changed in me. I got the questions wrong sometimes, often enough that I got a new nickname.

The teachers at my new school all called us by our last names, like we were in the military or gym class. So

Wong

became

Wrong

for my classmates.

Miss Wrong.

It wasn’t a stretch. It wasn’t very creative.

But I still stopped raising my hand.

The Firecracker was banging pots in the kitchen. “They’ve given you multiple chances at that school,” she said.

I dropped my bag on the floor. “No, they haven’t.”

“Those were their words. Not mine. Your scholarship is a big deal, and if you don’t deserve it, if you don’t work for it, they’re going to find someone who does.”

“So?” I said. I slumped against the doorframe. My sister was kneeling, her head and shoulders in a cabinet. “Are you actually going to try and cook something?” I asked.

“I’m home early,” she said. “I thought I might as well.”

Her frame was twisted to reach into the back of the cabinet, her arm extended, almost artfully. I thought of her dancing—and then I thought of how I was never going to see that again.

She backed out of the cabinet, holding a frying pan at a distance, as if it were something distasteful. “I can’t afford that school. If you lose that scholarship, you’re out.”

I shrugged. “Public school.”

“No. You don’t understand. If you lose your scholarship, you’re out of

here.

You’re out of New York. I’m sending you away.”

Acid never answered his phone. When it got too late to call, I fell asleep.

I had nightmares since my parents died. Not nightmares: dreams. I dreamed about a dark space. At the end of the space was a light, a bright white light growing brighter and bigger and whiter—and in the light, my mother danced.

I knew it was my mother, not my sister, although I had never actually

seen

my mother perform on stage. But the face on the dancer in my dreams matched the face I saw in pictures—like the Firecracker’s only thinner, a slimmer face than mine, with the high cheekbones I would never have, and the wrinkles on the forehead I didn’t have yet. It was the smile most of all that made me certain it was my mother. In photographs, she always smiled when she performed, and I knew—I remembered from seeing her on stage—my sister never did.

My sister grimaced. She grunted and frowned and stomped across the stage, a ball of energy, a lightning bolt. She danced like she was always angry. She tore through toe shoes. Her tutus ripped. Her feet bled. “The Firecracker,”

The Times

called her, and the name stuck. They also wrote that she was a tribute to her mother.

My sister quit dancing, right after that.

I didn’t really remember my mother, and I remembered my father only as a voice, a deep belly laugh. They died when I was a kid, in a car crash.

But I never dreamed about that.

In English, I tried to text, and the teacher saw. “Miss Wong,” she said. “Your phone, please.”

I slid out of my seat and dragged myself to the front. No one laughed until the third row, when a girl coughed and said it: “Miss Wrong.” Then everyone laughed, an explosion that radiated through the room. The teacher glared at the class, but didn’t say anything. I was getting a D, why would she?

After school, I had to double back to the classroom to pick up my phone, and I barely made the train. It was less crowded than yesterday, but slow, and the car I had picked had bad air-conditioning, the windows steaming over in the afternoon heat. Someone had cracked one open, a slit through which I could see the black tunnel. When we stopped at 168

Street, I could see something on one of the tunnel walls: graffiti. A tag. A name in bright green. I read it.

Acid.

There was more. There was a whole, terrible sentence.

Acid Loves You

It wasn’t my stop, but I pushed out of the car just as the doors were starting to close. My bag got stuck, and I yanked it free, nearly falling onto the platform. People were staring, but I didn’t care.

The train began to pull away and I looked around. Everyone who had gotten off went up the stairs to street level. With a shudder, the train left too. And I could see it now, the stupid graffiti, see it clearly:

Acid Loves You

. It was painted in bright green, the color of acid, almost florescent in the dark tunnel.

The subway platform where people waited was tiled in white, but in the tunnel through which the trains traveled, the walls were black. It was here that the message had been painted. Someone had climbed down from the platform, and into the tunnel to do it.

The platform ended at the mouth of the tunnel, at a sign that read

CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER.

But a little walkway continued into the tunnel beyond the sign, an access path for subway workers. I looked down this little walkway, peering into darkness. The only light came from the work bulbs strung across the ceiling every few feet, and the signal light: a kind of traffic light for trains.

The signal light was red, which meant no train was coming.

I glanced behind me. There were only a few people waiting for the downtown train. No one was looking. I stepped over the sign, crept onto the walkway—and went into the tunnel.

I wanted to see the graffiti up close. It had to be from my friend, it

had

to be. How many people in our neighborhood were called Acid? I balanced on the narrow walkway. There was a railing, but it was low and spindly. It wouldn’t hold me if I fell.

I just wouldn’t fall, I told myself.

The graffiti was only a few feet inside the tunnel, painted on the wall a little above my head. Whoever had written it hadn’t been much taller than me—and they were sloppy; a line of green paint trailed down the tunnel. I followed the paint splatter, crouching until I was kneeling, until the paint disappeared into the wall.

Into the wall?

I spread my palms, scanning the wall. It felt smooth. Then I felt a rough line. I worked my fingers into the crack and pulled until a door popped open. It was a small space, a crawl space, little more than a hole, and inside was darkness—and green polka dots.

Inside the door in the wall, green paint spotted the floor, so bright it glowed. I didn’t think; I crawled. I pushed in, my knees dragging on cement, trying to examine the paint.

With a groan, the door to the crawl space swung shut behind me. My chest swelled and I couldn’t breathe. I shot forward, knocking my forehead into a wall. Pain. Then everything was blackness.

When I woke, it took a moment for me to remember where I was. Panic returned. I was cold and stuck in the subway tunnel, in some sort of recess. I couldn’t turn around so I pushed back as hard as I could, shoving my backpack against the door. It swung open and I fell out onto the tunnel walkway.

A light was moving in the tunnel, jostling up and down. I stood. I wanted to run, but I was afraid I would fall. I saw a man beneath the moving light. The light was

attached

to him, a big headlamp, and he was running, coming right at me. I would have been scared, except he looked funny with the oversized headlamp, like a kid playing dress up. He wore a pair of overalls, and they were filthy, as was his shirt. Even his face was smeared with dirt.

“Child,” he said. He waved his arms. “Child, get out of here. A train is coming.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “The light is red.”

“The light?” he said, confused.

“The signal light.” I pointed behind me, then turned back to the man to show him, but he was gone. The tunnel was empty. And I felt something behind me. Arms wrapped around my waist and lifted, grabbing me, yanking me out of the tunnel.

It was another man, another subway worker who had grabbed me. He wore a bright orange and yellow safety vest, goggles, no headlamp—and there was a policewoman with him. The radio on the cop’s shoulder squawked.

“We got her,” the officer said into the radio.

Out on the platform, a crowd had gathered.

The subway worker was sweating. He set me down on the platform, and wiped his forehead with his hand. “Girl,” he said. “You are in so much trouble.”

And I was.

CHAPTER 2:

Wellstone

My sister dragged the old suitcases out of the closet, and swung them onto my bed. She clicked them open, one after the other.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Packing,” she said.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m packing for you.”

“Where am

going?”

She looked at me. “You know.”

The nightmares that night were different. No dancing. No mom. No tunnel even, despite the fact that I had just been pulled from one, despite the fact that the police had taken me to a corner of the station, and asked me:

What was I doing? How could I have been so dumb? Didn’t I know I could have been killed? Didn’t I know people died that way? Just a few months ago, in this very tunnel.

I knew, I knew, I told them. I said I was sorry.

The first few times I told the story, I told about the man with the headlamp and the dirty clothes. But no one knew who the man was. So I stopped telling that part. When my sister showed up, the police let me go. No fine. This time. And no court appearance because the Firecracker was taking me out of state.

She promised.

The nightmares that night felt real. I dreamed I was in my bed in my room in the apartment—but something was wrong with my hand. It hurt. It tingled, the blood pricking my palm as if my hand had fallen asleep.

But then in the dream, when I turned over to look at it on the sheet, my hand wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. My hand was gone. It hurt, but it was a phantom pain. In my dream, my body was missing.

I woke up with aches, my limbs stiff from sleeping wrong—and I woke up late. The Firecracker threw my suitcases down the stairs. I pulled on an oversized sweatshirt and jeans without looking in the mirror, half-asleep.

It was May, still cold in the morning. We didn’t talk in the cab. We didn’t hug at the station. I kept my hands stuffed in my pockets and my hood pulled down.

But then the Firecracker said, “It will be better this time.”

I sniffed. “What do you mean?”

“Grandma. She’ll be good for you. It’ll be good for you to be in the country right now, away from …” she gestured around at the station: the early morning commuters rushing by, the platform littered with trash, the garbage cans covered with graffiti like scabs. “All this.”

“I thought you loved all this.”

“Sometimes I do,” my sister said. “But it’s time for you to go.”

And then she gripped my shoulders and pulled me toward her in a hug. She smelled of fancy perfume and leather and the smell that never quite went away from her; it seemed attached to her hair, the smell of rosin for the toe shoes, though it had been ages since she had worn them.

“I’ll visit you soon,” the Firecracker said. I was about to say something in response, but then she pulled out of the hug and squeezed my shoulder. “Esmé, eat something. You feel like you’re wasting away to nothing.”

Once on the train, I closed my eyes and didn’t look back.

My sister had bought me a ticket on the Keystone to Pennsylvania—a daylong trip from Penn Station. I slept mostly. We passed into New Jersey, following the water, steely and gray. I didn’t talk to anyone, or move when the conductor came through, calling for lunch reservations. I wasn’t hungry. When the train stopped after Elizabethtown, at the most desolate, busted place I could imagine, I stood. This was the stop. I knew it. After all, I had been here before.

When our parents died, the Firecracker was fifteen—my age now—too young to take care of me herself. I tried to imagine my sister like me, in school, wearing toe shoes around her neck, her long hair in a ponytail. I couldn’t picture it, not really. I was five then, and we moved in with our grandmother, our mother’s mother, for three years until my sister was legal, could drop out of school and get a job, get a place for us back in the city where we belonged, she said.

I knew the blandness, the brokenness of this place, I had been here and escaped from it once already. Wellstone.

The conductor called the name of the town, but I was the only one who got out. The train huffed away, and I was left. Outside on the platform, under an overhang, I sat on a bench to wait.

Wellstone was a punishment, like my grandmother was a punishment. My sister had used both of them as idle threats for years. If I didn’t do better in school, if I didn’t come home on time, if I didn’t stop talking back, she would send me here, to Wellstone, where there were no malls or coffee shops or stores that stayed open past five o’clock or kids my own age or anything to do.

There were also rumors about this town, stories which I could still remember bits of: something about a man in the woods; bones in the weeds; places where kids were afraid to play. This was not a good place, I knew that much.

My grandmother didn’t have internet. She didn’t have a computer. She didn’t have cable. She lived in an old, rambling mansion that was falling down. It wasn’t

safe

, I remembered. Once, my foot had fallen through a stair. Rain had fallen through the ceiling. The Firecracker had cried a lot.

But in New York, after they had pulled me from the tunnel, my sister had made plans, secretly and instantly. There were three weeks left of school, and she had arranged for me to be transferred. The school in Wellstone had emailed a schedule. They were expecting me.

Grandma was the only family we had left, the last resort for me.

I didn’t even know if I would know her face. She was quiet and terrifying, I remembered that much. She kept cats with no tails who roamed freely in and out of the house. There was a barn I wasn’t allowed to go into. There was a big black bag she carried that I wasn’t allowed to touch.

My grandmother had worked the night shift, as a nurse or something. She had cooked strange things, nearly inedible things, bubbling stews and simmering broths, which she left hissing on the stove all day. The house smelled of herbs and dried flowers and dust and spice and boiling chickens. She kept the bones. The cats played with them.

On the train platform, I shivered. I checked for reception on my phone. I waited. And I waited. I had started to fall asleep when I heard a car. I sat up and reached for my suitcases.

My grandmother came around the corner of the station. I hadn’t seen her for seven years. She was smaller than I remembered, and she wore glasses, the kind with a beaded chain. She walked heavily and slowly, as though it hurt her. She stepped up to the platform and looked across.

I didn’t run to her. I didn’t shout. I wasn’t going to hug her. I decided to stay very still. I decided to look like it didn’t matter; I didn’t care.

She turned, and without a word to me, began to walk back to her car.

“Grandma?” I said, but my voice felt thick. I wasn’t sure she had heard me. By the time I had gathered up my bags, the car was starting. “Grandma, no!” I left the suitcases and ran into the parking lot.

Her car, a station wagon, was just disappearing up the road.

I dialed my phone. “Grandma left me,” I said when my sister picked up.

“Why are you calling me at work?”

“She

left

me.”

“Where?” my sister said.

“At the train station.”

“Well, was your train late?”

“No.”

“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” the Firecracker said. “A misunderstanding.”

I remembered her raging about our grandmother, about her strangeness, her habits.

Eccentric

was the word the Firecracker used, which, as a child, I had thought was

electric

; I kept waiting for our grandmother to light up like a Christmas tree.

“You know where she lives,” my sister said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, you have the address. And you remember the house.”</p

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