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  stairs that just didn’t belong where they had been built. Biking

  past, Helen looked up at the Atheneum and smiled. It was consoling

  for her to know that she might stick out, but at least she didn’t

  stick out that much.

  When she got home, she tried to pull herself together, taking a

  freezing-cold shower before calling Claire to apologize. Claire

  didn’t pick up. Helen left her a long apology blaming hormones,

  the heat, stress, anything and everything she could think of, though

  she knew in her heart that none of those things was the real reason

  she had flipped out. She’d been so irritable all day.

  The air outside was heavy and still. Helen opened all the windows

  in the two-story Shaker-style house, but no breeze blew

  through them. What was with the weird weather? Still air was

  practically unheard of in Nantucket—living so close to the ocean

  there was always wind. Helen pulled on a thin tank top and a pair

  of her shortest shorts. Since she was too modest to go anywhere

  dressed so scantily, she decided to cook dinner. It was still her

  father’s week as kitchen slave and technically he was responsible

  for all the shopping, meals, and dishes for a few days yet, but she

  needed something to do with her hands or she’d use them to climb

  the walls.

  Pasta in general was Helen’s comfort food, and lasagna was the

  queen of pasta. If she made the noodles from scratch, she’d be

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  occupied for hours, just like she wanted, so she pulled out the flour

  and eggs and got to work.

  When Jerry came home the second thing he noticed, after the

  amazing smell, was that the house was swelteringly hot. He found

  Helen sitting at the kitchen table, flour stuck to her sweaty face and

  arms, worrying the heart-shaped necklace, which her mother had

  given her as a baby, between her thumb and forefinger. He looked

  around with tense shoulders and wide eyes.

  “Made dinner,” Helen told him in a flat voice.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked tentatively.

  “Of course not. Why would you ask that when I just cooked you

  dinner?”

  “Because usually when a woman spends hours cooking a complicated

  meal and then just sits at the table with a pissed-off look

  on her face, that means some guy somewhere did something really

  stupid,” he said, still on edge. “I have had other women in my life

  besides you, you know.”

  “Are you hungry or not?” Helen asked with a smile, trying to

  shake off her ugly mood.

  Hunger won out. Jerry shut his mouth and went to wash his

  hands. Helen hadn’t eaten since breakfast and should have been

  starved. When she tasted the first forkful she realized she wouldn’t

  be able to eat. She listened as best as she could while she pushed

  bits of her favorite food around her plate and Jerry devoured two

  pieces. He asked her questions about her day while he tried to

  sneak a little more salt onto his food. Helen blocked his attempts

  like she always did, but she didn’t have the energy to give him

  more than monosyllabic answers.

  Even though she went to bed at nine, leaving her dad watching

  the Red Sox on TV, she was still lying awake at midnight when she

  heard the game finally end and her father come upstairs. She was

  tired enough to sleep, but every time she started to drift off she

  would hear whispering.

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  At first she thought that it had to be real, that someone was outside

  playing a trick on her. She went up to the widow’s walk on the

  roof above her bedroom and tried to see as far as she could into the

  dark. Everything was still—not even a puff of air to stir the rosebushes

  around the house. She sat down for a spell, staring out at

  the fat, black slick of the ocean beyond the neighbor’s lights.

  She hadn’t been up there in a while, but it still gave her a romantic

  thrill to think about how women in the olden days would

  pine away on their widow’s walks as they searched for the masts of

  their husbands’ ships. When she was really young, Helen used to

  pretend that her mother would be on one of those ships, coming

  back to her after being taken captive by pirates or Captain Ahab or

  something just as all-powerful. Helen had spent hours on the widow’s

  walk, scanning the horizon for a ship she later realized would

  never sail into Nantucket Harbor.

  Helen shifted uncomfortably on the wooden floor and then remembered

  that she still had her stash up there. For years, her dad

  had insisted she was going to fall to her death and forbidden her

  from going up to the widow’s walk alone, but no matter how many

  times he punished her, she would eventually sneak back up there

  to eat granola bars and daydream. After a few months of dealing

  with Helen’s uncharacteristic disobedience, Jerry finally caved and

  gave her permission, as long as she didn’t lean out over the railing.

  He’d even built her a waterproof chest to store things in.

  She opened the chest and dug out the sleeping bag she kept in

  there, spreading it out along the wood planks of the walk. There

  were boats far out on the water, boats she shouldn’t be able to hear

  or see from such a distance, but she could. Helen closed her eyes

  and allowed herself the pleasure of hearing one little skiff as its

  canvas sails flapped and its teak planks creaked, way out on the

  gently lapping swells. Alone and unwatched, she could be herself

  for a moment and truly let go. When her head finally started to nod

  she went down to bed to give sleep another shot.

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  She was standing on rocky, hilly terrain, blasted so hard by the

  sun that the bone-dry air wriggled and shook in streaks, as if

  parts of the sky were melting. The rocks were pale yellow and

  sharp, and here and there were angry little bushes, low to the

  ground and lousy with thorns. A single twisted tree grew out of

  the next slope.

  Helen was alone. And then she wasn’t.

  Under the stunted tree’s crippled limbs three figures appeared.

  They were so slender and small Helen thought at first they must

  be little girls, but there was something about the way the muscles

  in their gaunt forearms wove around their bones like rope that

  made Helen realize that they were also very old. All three of them

  had their heads bent, and their faces were completely covered by

  sheets of long, matted, black hair. They wore tattered white slips,

  and they were covered in gray-white dust down to their lower

  legs. From the knees down, their skin grew dark with streaks of

  dirt and blackening blood from feet worn raw with wandering in

  this barren wilderness.

  Helen felt clear, bright fear. She backed away from them compulsively,

  cutting her bare feet on the rocks and scratching her

  legs on the thorns. The three abominations took a step toward

  her, and their shoulders began to shake with silent sobs. Drops of

  blood fell from under the skeins of rank hair and ran down the

  fronts of their dresses. They whispered names while they
cried

  their gory tears.

  Helen woke up to a slap. There was a prickly numbness in her

  cheek and the steady note of a dial tone whining in her left ear.

  Jerry’s face was inches away from hers, wild with worry, and starting

  to show signs of guilt. He had never hit her before. He had to

  take a few shaky breaths before he could speak. The bedside clock

  read 3:16.

  “You were screaming. I had to wake you,” he stammered.

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  Helen swallowed painfully, trying to moisten her swollen tongue

  and closed-off throat. “S’okay. Nightmare,” she whispered as she

  sat up.

  Her cheeks were wet with either sweat or tears, she didn’t know

  which. Helen wiped the moisture away and smiled at her dad, trying

  to calm him down. It didn’t work.

  “What the hell, Lennie? That was not normal,” he said in a

  strange, high-pitched voice. “You were saying things. Really awful

  things.”

  “Like what?” she croaked. She was so thirsty.

  “Mostly names, lists of names. And then you started repeating

  ‘blood for blood,’ and ‘murderers.’ What the hell were you

  dreaming?”

  Helen thought about the three women, three sisters she thought,

  and she knew she couldn’t tell her father about them. She shrugged

  her shoulders and lied. She managed to convince Jerry that

  murder was a pretty normal thing to have nightmares about, and

  swore that she would never watch scary movies by herself again.

  Finally, she got him to go back to bed.

  The glass on her nightstand was empty and her mouth was so dry

  it felt tender and sore. She swung her legs out of bed to get water

  from the bathroom and gasped when her feet touched the hardwood

  floor. She switched on her lamp to get a better look, but she

  already knew what she was going to see.

  The soles of her feet were cut deep and peppered with dirt and

  dust, and her shins were scratched with the hatch-mark pattern of

  thorns.

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  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  Chapter Three

  In the morning when Helen woke up and looked at her feet,

  the cuts were gone. She almost believed that she had imagined

  them—until she saw that her sheets were dirty with

  dried, brown blood and grit.

  In order to test her sanity, Helen decided to leave her

  sheets on the bed, go to school, and see if they were still dirty when

  she came home. If they were clean when she got home, then the

  whole thing was an illusion and she was only a little crazy. If they

  were still dirty when she came home, then she was obviously so

  crazy that she was walking around at night and getting dirt and

  blood in her bed without remembering it.

  Helen tried to eat a bowl of yogurt and berries for breakfast but

  that didn’t work out very well so she didn’t even bother to take her

  lunch box. If she got hungry she could try buying something more

  tummy friendly like soup and crackers later.

  Riding her bike to school, she noticed that it was unbearably hot

  and humid for a second day in a row. The only wind was the breeze

  created by her spinning wheels, and when she locked her bike up at

  the rack she realized that not only was the air still, but it was also

  lacking the usual insect and bird sounds. All was unnaturally

  quiet—as though the entire island was nothing but a ship becalmed

  in the middle of the vast ocean.

  Helen arrived earlier than she had the day before, and the halls

  were crowded. Claire saw her come in. When her face broke into a

  smile, Helen knew she had been forgiven. Claire fought the flow of

  traffic to double back and join her on the walk to homeroom.

  As they made their way toward each other, Helen suddenly felt

  like she was trying to trudge through oatmeal. She slowed to a

  stop. It seemed to her that everyone in the hallway vanished. In the

  suddenly empty school Helen heard the shuffling of bare feet and

  the gasping sobs of inconsolable grief.

  She spun around in time to see a dusty white figure, her

  shoulders slumped and quivering, disappearing around a corner.

  Helen realized that the sobbing woman had passed behind

  someone—a real person staring back at her. She focused in on the

  figure, a young girl with olive skin and a long, black braid trailing

  over one shoulder. Her naturally bright red lips were drawn into an

  O of surprise.

  Then the sound switched back on and the corridor was full of

  rushing students again. Helen was standing still, blocking traffic,

  staring at a glossy black braid swinging against a tiny girl’s back as

  it vanished into a classroom.

  Helen’s whole body shook with an emotion that took her a moment

  to recognize. It was rage.

  “Jesusmaryandjoseph, Len! Are you gonna faint?” Claire asked

  anxiously.

  Helen made her eyes focus on Claire, and she took a wobbly

  breath. She realized that she was drenched in cold sweat and shivering.

  She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  “I’m taking you to the nurse,” Claire said. She grabbed Helen’s

  hand and started to tug on it, trying to get her to move. “Matt,” she

  called out over Helen’s shoulder. “Can you help me with Lennie? I

  think she’s going to faint.”

  “I’m not going to faint,” Helen snapped, suddenly alert and aware

  of how strange she was acting.

  She smiled bashfully at them both to try to take the sting out of

  her words. Matt had put his arm around her waist and she patted

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  his hand softly to let him know he could release her. He gave her a

  doubtful look.

  “You’re really pale, and you’ve got circles under your eyes,” he

  said.

  “I got a little overheated riding my bike,” she started to explain.

  “Don’t tell me you’re fine,” Claire warned. Her eyes were flush

  with frustrated tears, and Matt didn’t look much happier. Helen

  knew she couldn’t brush this off. Even if she was going crazy, she

  didn’t have to take it out on her friends.

  “No, you’re right. I think I might have heatstroke.”

  Matt nodded, accepting this excuse as the only logical one.

  “Claire, you take her to the girls’ room. I’ll tell Hergie what

  happened so he doesn’t mark you late. And you should eat

  something. You didn’t eat any lunch yesterday,” he reminded her.

  Helen was a little surprised he remembered that, but Matt was

  good at details. He wanted to be a lawyer, and she knew that

  someday he would be a great one.

  Claire drenched Helen in the girls’ room, dumping cold water all

  the way down her back when she was supposed to just wet her

  neck. Of course they wound up having a gigantic water fight, which

  seemed to calm Claire down because it was the first normal response

  she’d had out of Helen in a few days. Helen herself felt like

  she had passed an exhaustion barrier and now everything had become

  funny.

  Her
gie wrote them hall passes, so the two friends took their time

  getting to their first classes. Having a hall pass from Mr. Hergeshimer

  was like getting one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—a student

  could go anywhere and do anything for a full period and not

  one teacher would put up a stink.

  In the cafeteria they got oranges for Helen’s low blood sugar, and

  while they were at it they split a chocolate chip muffin. Helen

  choked it down and miraculously started to feel better. Then they

  went and stood in front of the six-foot-tall fan in the auditorium to

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  cool down, taking turns singing into the whirling blades and listening

  to each other’s voices get chopped into a hundred pieces until

  they were both laughing their faces off.

  Helen felt so giddy after playing hooky on a Hergie hall pass and

  eating raw sugar on an empty stomach that she couldn’t even remember

  what class she was supposed to be going to. She and

  Claire were casually strolling down the wrong hallway at the wrong

  time when the bell signaling the end of first period rang. They

  looked at each other and shrugged as if to say, “Oh well, what can

  you do?”, and burst out laughing. Then Helen saw Lucas for the

  first time.

  The sky outside finally exhaled all of the wind that it had been

  holding for two days. Gusts of stale, hot air pushed through every

  open window into the sweltering school. It caught loose sheets of

  paper, skirt hems, unbound hair, stray wrappers, and other odds

  and ends, and tossed them all toward the ceiling like hats on

  graduation day. For a moment it seemed to Helen that everything

  stayed up there, frozen at the top of the arc, as weightless as space.

  Lucas was standing in front of his locker about twenty feet away,

  staring back at Helen while the world waited for gravity to switch

  back on. He was tall, over six feet at least, and powerfully built, although

  his muscles were long and lean instead of bulky. He had

  short, black hair and a dark end-of-summer tan that brought out

  his white smile and his swimming-pool blue eyes.

  Meeting his eyes was an awakening. For the first time in Helen’s

  life she knew what pure, heart-poisoning hatred was.

  She was not aware of the fact that she was running toward him,

  but she could hear the voices of the three sobbing sisters rise into a

  keening wail, could see them standing behind the tall, dark boy she