She moved through the world like no other woman I knew.
“What you don’t understand,” she said to me once when I told her how dangerous it was, “is that I am the thing in the dark.”
Vivi was the opposite. She tried to banish her beauty. She shaved her head, pierced her skin, inked the words FUCK OFF! across her fingers, a spell to try and ward off unwanted desire from unwanted men. Even with these enchantments, even with a zigzag nose and a wicked tongue and unshaved body hair and the dark grooves beneath her eyes carved out by drink and drugs and sleepless nights, she was achingly beautiful, and ached after accordingly. She collected each wolf whistle, each smacked butt cheek, each groped breast, kept them all beneath her skin where they boiled in a cauldron of rage that she let out onstage on the strings of her bass guitar.
I fell somewhere between my sisters. I didn’t actively try to wield or waste my beauty. I kept my hair washed and wore no scent but deodorant. I smelled clean but not intoxicating, not sweet, not tempting. I wore no makeup and only loose-fitting clothing. I didn’t take up the hem of my uniform. I didn’t walk alone at night.
I went to put the photograph back in Cate’s open drawer. A manila folder, distended with paper, sat beneath her socks and underwear. I pulled it out, flicked it open. It was filled with photocopies of police files, their edges curled with age. I saw my name, my sisters’ names, caught snippets of our story as I riffled through, unable to look away.
The children claim to have no memory of where they have been or what happened to them.
Officer █████ and Officer █████ refuse to be in the same room as the children, citing shared nightmares after taking their statements.
The flowers found in the children’s hair are unidentifiable hybrids—possible pyrophytes.
The cadaver dogs continue to react to the children even days after their return.
Gabe Hollow insists that all three children’s eyes have changed, and that baby teeth have grown back in places where they were already lost.
My stomach pressed against my throat. I snapped the folder shut and tried to shove it back into the drawer, but it snagged on the wood and split open, heaving paper onto the floor. I knelt and gathered the sheets into a pile with shaking hands, trying not to look at its contents. Pictures, witness statements, pieces of evidence. My mouth was dry. The paper felt corrupted and wrong in my fingers. I wanted to burn it, the way you’d burn a blighted crop so the rot couldn’t spread.
And there, at the top of the stack of documents, I found a photograph of Grey at eleven years old, two white flowers—real, living flowers—growing out of the paper as if they were bursting from her eyes.
3
I was hungry when I arrived at school, even after Cate had cooked me breakfast. Even now, years after whatever trauma had first sparked my unusual appetite, I was still always hungry. Just last week I’d gotten home ravenous and laid waste to the kitchen. The fridge and pantry had been stocked with food after Cate’s fortnightly grocery shopping: two loaves of fresh sourdough bread, a tub of marinated olives, two dozen eggs, four cans of chickpeas, a bag of carrots, chips and salsa, four avocadoes . . . The list goes on. Enough food for two people for two weeks. I ate it all, every bite. I ate and ate and ate. I ate until my mouth bled and my jaw ached from chewing. Even when all the new groceries were devoured, I downed an old can of beans, a box of stale cereal, and a tin of shortbread.
Afterward, my hunger finally sated, I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and turned this way and that, wondering where the hell the food went. I was still skinny, not so much as bump.
At school, I felt high-strung and jumpy. When a car door slammed in the drop-off line, I smacked my hand to my chest so hard, the skin was still stinging. I straightened my uniform tie and tried to center my thoughts. My fingers felt grimy and smelled of something putrid, even though I’d washed them three times at home. The smell came from the flowers on the photo. I’d plucked one from my sister’s eye before I left. It was an odd bloom, with waxy petals and roots that threaded into the paper like stitches. I’d recognized it. It was the same flower Grey had turned into a pattern and embroidered on many of her designs.
I’d held it close to my nose and inhaled, expecting a sweet scent like gardenia, but the stench of raw meat and garbage had made me dry heave. I’d left the files and fetid bloom in my mother’s drawer and slammed her bedroom door shut behind me.
I breathed a little easier at school, felt like I was coming back to myself—or at least to the carefully curated version of myself I was at Highgate Wood School for Girls. My backpack, groaning at the seams with books on Python and A-level study guides, cut hot tracks into my shoulders. The rules and structure here made sense. The weirdness that lurked in old, empty houses and the wildwood thickets of ancient heaths found it hard to permeate the monotony of uniforms and fluorescent lighting. It had become my sanctuary away from the baseline strangeness of my life, even if I didn’t belong here with the children of some of London’s richest families.
I hurried through the busy corridors, bound for the library.
“You’re five minutes late,” said Paisley, one of the dozen students I tutored before and after school. Paisley was a pint-size twelve-year-old who somehow managed to make the school uniform look boho chic. Her parents had been paying me decent money for weeks to try and teach her basic coding. The annoying thing was, Paisley was a natural. When she paid attention, she picked up Python with an easy elegance that reminded me of Grey.
“Oh, I’m deeply sorry, Paisley. I’ll give you a free extra hour after school to make up for it.” She glared at me. “That’s what I thought. Where’s your laptop?”
“I heard you’re a witch,” she said as she returned to tapping away at her phone, curls of mousy hair falling into her eyes. “I heard your sisters were expelled for sacrificing a teacher to the devil in the auditorium.” Wow. The rumors had gotten out of control in the last four years, but honestly, I was more surprised that it had taken this long for one to reach her.
“I’m not a witch. I’m a mermaid,” I said as I set up my laptop and opened the textbook to where we left off. “Now show me the homework I set for you last week.”
“Why is your hair white if you’re not a witch?”
“I bleach it that way,” I lied. In fact, the week after Grey and Vivi left, I’d tried to dye it darker. I’d bought three boxes of dye and spent a rainy summer evening drinking apple cider while I painted my hair. I’d waited the forty-five minutes the instructions recommended, then a little longer just to be sure, before rinsing it out. I was excited to see the new me. It felt like the transformative scene in a spy movie when the protagonist is on the run, forced to change their appearance in a service station bathroom after they go rogue.
When I wiped away the fog of condensation on the mirror, I shrieked. My hair was its usual milky blond, entirely untouched by the dye.