memory put things. Either they had been moved, or she had misremembered, but either way, this might as well have been her first time in this house.
She realized she was calculating the value of the knife Diana used to spread the peanut butter on the bread and turned her face away, ashamed. These things weren’t hers. She had come back to steal once, when she’d been younger and less equipped to understand that a thing being in her house didn’t mean she had a right to it. This time, she had come back to say goodbye. Fair value for robbing this family of a daughter was a year, nothing more. Certainly not a year and all the silverware.
“Do they have peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches where you’ve been?” asked Diana casually.
Lundy raised her eyebrows. “You’re trying to trick me into telling you.”
“Well, yeah.” Diana slapped creamy goo onto the right sides of two pieces of white bread. “I don’t like secrets. Everything’s been secrets, all the time, since you disappeared. Where’s Katherine, where’d she go, did she run away or was she kidnapped, oh she’s back, where’s she been, now she’s off to boarding school, why, why, why ?” She stabbed the knife back into the jar with more force than strictly necessary. “I guess it’s good, since I was so small when you went, and this way I never got to forget you. But it’s stupid. We’re a family. I should have been allowed to know stuff. I should be allowed now.”
Lundy looked at her, seeing the similarities between them, seeing the differences. Diana was sharper than she’d been at that age, a knife poised to slice into the world and keep slicing until it gave her what she needed. Lundy had always been more of a needle, careful and precise, following the lines laid out by the rules, never stepping over them. Perhaps that was why the Market had come for her, and not for her sister. Perhaps it had known it could never give Diana fair value.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I promised.”
“Like you promised to stay for a year?” Diana dropped the knife and folded the pieces of bread viciously in half, pressing the marshmallow hard against the peanut butter. “That’s nothing. You won’t see me get to high school, or be there to talk to me about boys, or nothing. You might as well not have come back at all if you’re only going to come back for a year.”
“It’s what I have,” said Lundy weakly.
“No, it’s not.” Diana turned, thrusting one of the folded-over sandwiches at her like an accusation. Lundy took it. “You have your whole life. You have my whole life. Two whole lives that we could spend being sisters, and you’re going to give me a year. That’s not fair.”
“You don’t really know me.”
“You’ve never let me.” Diana glared. “A year isn’t anything.”
“Tell that to the calendar,” said Lundy. The sandwich was heavy in her hand, weighted down with sweetness. “Are we going to spend the whole year fighting? Is that what’s going to make it okay for you to let me go?”
“I don’t want to.” Diana nibbled on the edge of her sandwich. “I’d rather be sisters.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Diana shrugged. “I’ve never had one before.”
Lundy smiled. “So let’s find out.”
* * *
THE EXAMS were easier than Lundy had feared. Either her halting patchwork education in the Archivist’s shack had been more extensive than she’d realized, or the schools of this world were woefully unchallenging for their students. Whatever the explanation, she passed them all, save for the history exam—and as her father had been expecting that, she was already set to be nestled snugly in the bosom of the remedial history class, where her lack of knowledge about current and past events wasn’t as likely to trip her up.
Monday morning, she found herself bundled into the back of her father’s car, belted in next to Diana, who was fiddling with her slide rule. She didn’t object to the seating arrangement. She had never, in all her life, been allowed to ride up front, which was a privilege reserved for adults and older brothers. It would have seemed too strange to be seated there now. It would have seemed like she was claiming an adulthood she didn’t really want.
The school, which was dauntingly, terrifyingly full of bodies—other students, some of whom remembered her as “Katie from my second-grade class,” more of whom remembered her as “that