“Homework,” I ordered again.
Paisley rolled her little eyes and dug her laptop out of her Fjällräven bag. “There.” She turned her screen toward me. “Well?” she demanded as I scrolled through her code.
“It’s good. Despite your best efforts, you’re picking this up.”
“What a terrible shame this will be our last session.”
God, what kind of twelve-year-old talked like that?
I tsked her. “Not so fast. Unfortunately for both of us, your parents have paid through the rest of the term.”
“That was until they found out who your sisters are.” Paisley handed me an envelope. My name was written on the front in her mother’s loopy handwriting. “They’re super into Jesus. They won’t even let me read Harry Potter. Suddenly they don’t seem to think you’re such a good influence on me.” She packed her things, stood to leave. “Bye, Sabrina,” she called sweetly on her way out.
“Wow,” came a disembodied voice. “Some people are so rude.”
“Oh,” I said as a small bottle-blond figure made her way out of the stacks and pulled up the chair across from me. “Hello, Jennifer.”
In the months after Grey and Vivi had left school, when the loneliness of being without them sank so deeply into my body that every heartbeat ached, I’d desperately wanted to make friends with some of my peers. I’d never needed friends before, but without my sisters, I had no one to eat with at lunchtime and no one but my mother to spend time with on the weekends.
When Jennifer Weir had invited me to her sleepover birthday party (reluctantly, I suspected—our mothers worked together at the Royal Free), I’d cautiously accepted. It was an appropriately posh affair: Each girl had her own mini tipi set up in the Weirs’ vast living room, each frosted with fairy lights and set among a floating sea of blush and gold balloons. We watched three of the Conjuring movies into the early hours of the morning and ate so much birthday cake and so many delicate baked goods that I thought someone might vomit. We talked about the boys who attended nearby schools and how cute they were. We snuck into Jennifer’s parents’ liquor cabinet and did two shots of tequila each. Even Justine Khan, the girl who’d bullied me and subsequently shaved her head in front of the school, seemed not to mind my presence. For a handful of pink, sugary, alcohol-softened hours, I dared to allow myself to imagine a future that looked like this—and it might have been possible, if not for the now-infamous game of spin the bottle that had landed both Justine and me in the emergency room.
Jennifer Weir hadn’t spoken to me since that night, when I left her house with blood dripping from my lips.
“Did you want something?” I asked her.
“Well, actually,” Jennifer said with a smile, “I bought tickets to the gig at Camden Jazz Café tonight. I heard your sister was going to be there.”
“Of course she’s going to be there,” I said, confused. “She’s in the band.”
“Oh, no, silly, I meant your other sister. Grey. I was wondering . . . I mean, I would totally love to meet her. Maybe you could introduce me?”
I stared at her for a long time. Jennifer Weir and Justine Khan (together, they called themselves JJ), had been making my life a living hell for the better part of four years. Where Jennifer outright ignored me, Justine made up the difference: witch scrawled across my locker in blood, dead birds slipped into my backpack, and—one time—broken glass sprinkled over my lunch.
“Anyway,” Jennifer continued, her saccharine smile beginning to go sour, “think about it. It wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to you, you know—being my friend. I’ll see you tonight.”
When she was gone, I read Paisley’s note, in which her parents explained they’d heard some “concerning accusations” and asked for their advance back. I tore it up and dumped it in the bin, then checked the countdown timer on my phone to see how many days were left until graduation: hundreds. Forever. The school had a long memory when it came to the Hollow girls, and it had been my burden to bear since the month both of my sisters had skipped town.
My first class of the day was English. I took my usual seat at the front of the classroom, by the window, my annotated copy of Frankenstein open on my desk, its pages frilled with a rainbow of multicolored sticky notes. I’d read it twice in preparation for this class, carefully underlining passages and making notes, trying to find the pattern, the key. My English teacher, Mrs. Thistle, was deeply conflicted by this behavior: On the one hand, a student who did the assigned readings—all of them, always, frequently more than once—was something of a phenomenon. On the other hand, a student who wanted the right answer for a work of literature sent her half-mad.
It was drizzling outside. A flicker of strange movement caught my eye as I set up my things, and I looked through the glass over the wet gulch of grass between buildings.
There, in the distance, was the man in the bull skull, watching me.
4
I stood so suddenly and with such force that my desk toppled forward, my books and pens spilling across the floor. The entire class, startled by the sudden violent intrusion on the tedium of the school day, went silent and turned to stare at me.
I was wide-eyed, dragging breaths, my heart punching inside my chest.
“Iris,” said Mrs. Thistle, alarmed, “are you okay?”
“Don’t get too close to her,” Justine Khan said to our teacher. I had once thought she was beautiful—and she probably still was, if you couldn’t see past the veneer of her skin to the pool of venom stagnating beneath. She now wore her curtain of dark hair long and straight, and carried a brush in her backpack to groom it at recess. It was so shiny and so well cared for that it was almost embarrassing. It also served the double purpose of concealing the scars my fingernails had left on either side of her neck when she’d kissed me. “Everyone knows she bites.”
There were some titters of laughter, but most people seemed too rattled to know how to react.
“Uh . . .” I needed an excuse, a cover to get out of there. “I’m going to be sick,” I said as I knelt to shove my things into my bag. I left my desk and chair where they lay.
“Go to sick bay,” Mrs. Thistle instructed, but I was already halfway out the door.
Another good thing about being a shameless teacher’s pet: They never doubted you if you said you were sick.
Once clear of the classroom, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and bolted for the spot outside where I’d seen the man, in the shadowy slip of space between two buildings. The day was gray, grim: typical London. Muddy water flicked up the back of my socks as I ran. I could already see from afar that there was no one there now, but I kept running until I stood where he had stood. The air around me was dank with the smell of smoke and wet animal. I could see into my classroom through the mist of rain.