People in town said Elv was a witch after she took to wearing the bone necklace. But Claire thought the necklace was sad and beautiful. Elv let her try it on once. They stood together in front of the big mirror in their bedroom. Even with her short hair, Claire was pleased to see how much alike they looked.
As for Meg, she thought the necklace was a travesty. “She can’t even let the dead rest in peace,” she murmured to Claire once after Elv had left the room. Their older sister released so much energy and turmoil, it was as if a storm had been trapped in a jar, then set free on the third floor every time she was around. When Elv drifted back into their bedroom, Meg fell silent.
“What’s wrong with you?” Elv asked her sister. In Arnelle, everyone understood that it was possible to cry without tears, to be brave even when riddled with fear. But Meg didn’t understand anything. “Cat got your tongue?”
In Arnish, cat was pillar. Said aloud it sounded vicious.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Meg said.
Elv knew what she meant. It’s you. Always you.
THE WEATHER WAS changing. It was September and school had begun. In the evenings, Elv began to smoke a white powder. She used a glass pipe that looked as if it would catch on fire when she inhaled. Claire sat out in the hall on the third floor, guarding the bedroom door. “Thanks, Gigi,” Elv would say when Claire came back into the room. “Now I can breathe.”
When Claire asked what was in the pipe, Elv said, “The antidote to humanity” and laughed. “Seriously, it’s nothing. It’s chalk dust.”
Even though school was in session, Elv often didn’t come home until dawn. She didn’t mind getting wet as she ran across the damp lawn; she was burning up under her skin despite the change in the weather. At the hour when her sisters got ready for school, she would creep into bed, naked and wet. If you shook her, she didn’t budge. If you talked to her, she didn’t answer. She was exhausted most of the time, but agitated. When she managed to go grab some sleep, she talked through her dreams, always in Arnish.
Claire would perch at the foot of her sister’s bed on these school-day mornings, worried. She had begun to dread the future. Elv was being swallowed up. Claire wondered if the door to Arnelle could close when a person least expected it to, shutting her into that underground world. She whispered Elv’s name, but there wasn’t an answer. She traced a finger over the scars Elv had left on her own skin. Would she know how to rescue Elv if the time ever came? Would she stand there mutely and watch her sister be carried away or would she dare to be brave?
MEG BEGAN TO hide everything she cared about. She kept it all in the guest room closet, which she secured with a lock she bought at the hardware store, keeping the small key in her backpack. Things had been disappearing: headbands, jewelry, clothes. Elv had burned her own belongings, and now she was taking whatever she wanted. Elise phoned Annie to say that Mary had come home to find Elv going through her closet. Elv had pried open a window and managed to climb into Mary’s bedroom. When Mary walked in to find her cousin loaded down with her belongings, Elv threatened to burn down the house if she told. Mary had had such a bad asthma attack afterward that Elise had rushed her to the hospital.
After that, Annie stopped seeing her cousin, just as she avoided most people in town. She didn’t want to hear about anyone else’s children, their high SAT scores, their good grades, their bright futures. She didn’t want to see the looks of pity when they asked after Elv. People in town talked about Elv endlessly. Her antics provided for a steady stream of conversation. She was seen sitting in the graveyard, barefoot, smoking, haunting the plot where Jason Levy was buried. She’d talked back to the history teacher all the other students feared, and now Mrs. Hill was out on medical leave. She stole handfuls of prize roses from Mrs. Weinstein’s yard and hung them over her bed on a string, a charm of mintas for protection, she said. “So the goblins don’t eat us alive,” she explained when Mrs. Weinstein came knocking on the door. “Or would you like that to happen to us? Would you like us to die the way Pretzel did?” Pretzel the basset hound had been hit by a speeding car earlier in the month. He was too old and blind to stay outside, but Mrs. Weinstein had kept him out of the house anyway. Elv had egged Mrs. Weinstein’s Honda, a crime Mrs. Weinstein hadn’t unraveled. When people on the street turned to look at Elv’s black outfits, her pointy boots, she shouted out, “What the hell are you staring at?”
“People in this town are so stupid,” she confided to Claire, who was beginning to wonder if there was such a thing as being too fearless. She had begun to have nightmares, about the horse in Central Park, the boy on Elv’s bed, the dog down the street. “Trust me, you have to watch out for yourself,” Elv assured her little sister. “Otherwise you’ll just get dragged down by all their asinine rules.”
A girl Meg knew named Heidi Preston said her brother boasted that he could have sex with Elv whenever he wanted in exchange for drugs. He had access to methamphetamine and OxyContin and Ritalin. Heidi didn’t seem judgmental about this; she told Meg as if she were a newscaster, merely reporting the facts. For a couple of weeks Meg let Heidi be her best friend. She found Heidi’s knowledge about drugs and sex to be fascinating and quite unexpected. Then Elv spied them together. Outraged, she pulled Meg aside that afternoon when she got home from school. “Stay out of my life,” she snapped. “And keep the hell away from Brian’s sister.”