wall, and whispered something in her ear. A needle. A pinprick. Something that was so small, so quiet, I didn’t hear it. Cate was still. Then whatever Grey had said splintered through her, electrifying her. She was a tree split by lightning. One moment a woman, the next something wild and ruptured. She slapped my sister so hard across the face that Grey’s lip split; there were still three brown specks on the wall where her blood had soaked into the plaster.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Cate had ordered in a low, steady voice, “and don’t ever, ever come back.”
The sudden violence of it had made me hyperventilate. For years, as my father’s delusions had swollen inside his mind, I’d become more and more afraid that he would hurt us, put a pillow over our faces while we slept. It wasn’t unusual to wake in the middle of the night to his shadowy form hovering at the end of my bed, whispering softly. “Who are you? What are you?” Yet even as the spools of himself unraveled, he never laid a finger on us.
Then here was Cate Hollow, a small, gentle woman who had done something so brutal, so indefensible. I still wasn’t sure what terrible thing Grey had said to her to make her snap like that, to pull her so far out of herself.
Grey hadn’t cried. She’d set her jaw and packed her bags and done what our mother asked: left the house and never come back, except once, to clear out her room. They hadn’t spoken since that night, four years ago now.
“Should we call the police?” I asked. “Should I not go to school?” It was a tempting thought. I wondered what fresh punishment JJ had in store for me for embarrassing them last night.
“You are going to school,” Cate said as she pointed from me to Vivi. “One day of cutting class with your miscreant sister is tolerable, but no more.”
“I think you meant to say ‘genius rock-goddess sister,’ but okay,” Vivi said.
“I would like a doctor in the family,” Cate said, her fingers crossed on both hands. “Or at least one daughter to finish high school. So go and get ready.”
“What if we don’t hear from her?” I asked.
I looked to Vivi, who shrugged. I was immediately frustrated by the sense that if Grey were here and Vivi were missing, Grey would know exactly what to do. There would be forward motion. There would be a plan. Grey was like that: There was no problem so large that it couldn’t be solved. The universe seemed to bend to her will. Vivi and I, in comparison, were too used to being foot soldiers under our eldest sister’s rule. Without our unifying central command unit, we were lost.
“I was supposed to fly back to Budapest this afternoon, but I guess I can push my flight until tomorrow,” Vivi said. “I’ll call her agent and manager after nine. I’m sure they’ll know where she is.”
7
I called Grey on my walk to school and again between each of my classes, already knowing it would go to voicemail. I checked Find Friends—Vivi and Cate were both at home—but Grey’s location came back as unavailable. I was distracted in class, refreshing Instagram and Facebook to see if she’d posted anything new.
By lunchtime, I wondered if JJ might just let me get away with the sin of having Vivi for a sister. Justine had ignored me in English, and I hadn’t yet seen Jennifer—and then, when I sat down to eat, I found the picture. A piece of printer paper had been folded twice and slipped into my backpack. On it was a medieval image of three women burning at stakes, their hands clasped behind them in irons as flames licked at their toes. Their faces had been digitally altered to look like my sisters and me. There was no accompanying note, though the message was loud and clear.
You will burn.
I sighed. My first instinct was to throw it away or take it to a teacher. Instead, I folded it up and put it back in my bag. Grey would like it, would probably find it funny, would appreciate the artistry that had gone into making the burning women look like us. It was the kind of thing she would have framed and hung on her bedroom wall when she was my age.
I picked up my phone to call her, forgetting, for a moment, that she was unlikely to