And above them, in the winter air all around them, the echo of Kit’s voice, saying please.
Later, long after she’d curled back onto her side of the trundle bed in Mel’s room—after she’d awakened the next morning to her friend lying beside her, softly snoring—Lilly would recall that word, please, and know for certain that it had been Kit’s final plea for her life. That if only she had stayed, or shouted, or called for help, maybe things would have gone differently.
Maybe her sister would still be alive.
Part One
Chapter One
Before
AN OLD SAYING: ALL GOOD things come in threes.
Or was it that all bad things came in threes?
Pushing his too-long hair out of his face, Boyd drove the lawn mower across his dad’s quarter-acre of grass. The early September sun cut jagged lines of shadow through the scattered cottonwoods.
Some of the places he’d seen over by Detroit, where distant cousins lived, boasted that cookie-cutter perfection you dreamed of when you thought of a small town, all even squares and matching houses in a row like straight little teeth—one big suburban grinning mouth—but out here in Devil’s Lake, the yards ran amok, mangy and undefined, lapping over one another and swarming in constant land disputes and neighborly grudges. Always a roamer buck hunting or firing pellets at squirrels on someone else’s property.
That’s why he’d convinced his dad to go in on a used John Deere—the kind of mower you got up on and rode like a tractor—and now he actually enjoyed this chore, this chance to work outside and hover above things for a little while, carving out a space that belonged to him.
Evening was coming on, though, and the sunlight left its weight on his shoulders somehow, like it felt tired and had to rest from a long summer of burning itself up. He could smell fall’s approach, too: the early hint of decay, of mud hardening, preparing itself.
Boyd probably should’ve prepared, too, he thought. It was junior year, starting tomorrow. The year of all the tests that supposedly determined your future, slapped a number on you and sorted you like cattle. Some ended up in college. Some ended up working seasonal land jobs. Some ended up leaving town with no good plan at all except to get away.
He should’ve been thinking about graduating, about what would come next—about whether what came next would take him far, far away from Devil’s Lake.
Or at least about final papers. Maybe he’d write one up on Chizhevsky, something that would make Tessa smile when she read it. She read nearly all his homework, either her or Kit, to catch all the spelling nicks. Never Lilly; her schoolwork was a mess, like his.
As usual, Boyd couldn’t stay concentrated too long on school, though. All he could think about right now—on this warm almost-evening that had his skin prickling with a pleasant layer of sweat—were the three girls next door. They’d lived there most of his life—moved into the area with their mom after their dad died in combat off in some location Boyd only learned about later and still couldn’t pronounce.
He’d been about six at the time. He’d never seen anything like this tribe of women.
All good things come in threes.
His mom had once taught him about the constellations—or at any rate he had a memory that she had told him about the stars, even though he probably shouldn’t trust that memory, because she died when he was two and who remembers anything from then? Anyway, he liked to imagine the Malloy sisters that way: three bright points in his sky, their bedroom lights coming on every night, then flickering out a little while later, and with each, he felt connected, rooted to something.
Everything else might be completely fucked—an unending string of garbage news on the television, angry politics, countless hours of half-inspired homework and his dad getting uptight all the time, about jobs going sparse and bank accounts shriveling into shells and bottles running out too soon, or their aging dachshund, Jimmy, shitting on the living-room carpet again.
But the Malloys shimmered through it all—livelier than stars, really. More like lightning bugs you caught in a jar—the three of them living in the house next door, so close to his, moving about in the routine of their lives, crying out to one another like fighting cats in the night, cursing under their breath or, sometimes, singing, loud and off-key. Whispering. Scheming and assessing, the way sisters do. Building a world in which your part was only ever passing by, on the periphery.
He had been close to the inside most of his life—over the years they’d made him their pirate overlord and beast prince, their evil doctor, their pony, their priest. They’d teased him and tagged him and angled to have him take their side over the others, though he never could for long. He had even brushed and braided their hair. This was long ago, and at the time, that fine silkiness in his hands had given him an otherworldly shiver—Kit’s golden, Tessa’s pale, and Lilly’s firelike. It made him kind of mortified to think about it now.
Mortified, but still proud. Because they were his, after all, even if he couldn’t explain how or why. They were Narnia, or Terabithia, straight out of one of those old magical books they loved to read out loud: living dream, accessible through some trapdoor in the universe that just happened to be right here where he could reach it—a door that opened into a constantly unknown and yet intimately familiar landscape of balding dolls and hairballs, catfights and tears and egg-salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off and only-green grapes, the kind whose skins were always splitting, overfull of juice. A world of rules and vows and secrets and allegiances and competitions and handshakes and the intoxicating scent of—
“Hey!”
Boyd yanked his headphones off his ears to catch his father calling him in. Probably needed him to run an errand. Boyd could guess what kind. He’d been to the bottom of more than one bottle since dawn. Sometimes there were just bad days.
The sun was drooping now, darker red at the center, then bleeding out like a shot animal.
He leaned forward to shut off the engine and got jolted forward as the machine let out a whining grunt. Probably ran over a stray rock or an old shoe. Weird shit ended up out here, who knew how—dragged by wild animals, coyotes maybe, or local kids from his school with nothing better to do (not always a huge difference between the two). Definitely not by Jimmy, though—the dog was too old to drag his own tail most days.
Boyd hopped down off the mower and examined what had gotten jammed in its teeth. In the failing light, he squinted at the shiny piece of crushed plastic for a second, finally identifying the stuck object as an old Barbie, its hair chopped at a crude diagonal, its too-big eyes squished onto either side of a flattened head, one arm bent backward and the other snapped off entirely.
Odd. He used to see these things over at the Malloy house all the time, but they’d outgrown Barbies long ago. The doll had super-shiny golden hair, reminding him of Kit.
A big smudge of dirt darkened its squashed face, and out of some deranged instinct, Boyd thought to swipe it clean with his thumb. This broken detritus of girlhood. This piece-of-shit bit of plastic once shaped to look aspirational and sleek, with its red satiny outfit, all torn up. It seemed, now that he thought about it, kind of slutty and cheap. Kind of sad.
He shoved it into his pocket, kept it like a piece of crucial evidence, this birthing of the backyard muck, a relic, a reminder of the Malloy sisters’ unchanging ever-presence. It would make an okay chew toy for Jimmy, at any rate, he thought as he headed inside to see what his dad wanted now, trying not to wonder too much about how it had ended up out here, on his lawn, in the first place.