They were up in the bedroom, the door locked. Elv had flown at Meg, pushing her against the wall, pinching her. To Claire, the third floor felt as if it was part of the otherworld, not quite connected to the rest of the human realm. Elv had written on the walls with green ink. The floor around her bed was littered with crumpled paper and used cups and glasses.
“I’m serious,” Elv said. “Don’t ever talk to that girl again.”
“Stop it!” Meg said. She tried to pull away but couldn’t. She was crying, and trying not to let her sisters see. Red welts were rising on her skin where Elv had pinched her.
“You’re like a stupid cow, butting into everyone’s business. That’s why Claire and I hate you. You’re such a nothing, Meg.”
Meg looked down at the floor and made a sobbing sound.
Claire felt her blood rise. “Don’t talk to her like that!”
Elv turned to stare at her, stunned.
“Meg can do as she pleases,” Claire told Elv, surprising even herself. She and Elv had been each other’s so completely. But since Elv had started smoking that white powder she was different. You have to be mean sometimes, she’d whispered to Claire. You have to protect yourself at all costs. “Meg can be friends with whoever she wants,” Claire said.
Meg got into bed. She pulled up the covers. She did that whenever she cried, thinking no one would know.
“Fine.” Elv’s face was flushed. “I don’t care about Meg.”
“I do,” Claire said hotly.
“Really?” Elv said. “Would she have rescued you?”
That was the end of Meg’s friendship with Heidi. She and Claire walked home from school together. The September light was incandescent: the lawns were brown. People in the neighborhood looked out their windows and thought the two Story sisters looked like twins. In the evenings they did their homework in the kitchen while Elv prowled around town. It didn’t matter to Meg if she ever talked to Heidi again. She wasn’t really interested in friends anymore. She had Claire now. That was enough.
THE WEATHER BECAME chilly at night. You had to wear a sweater or a light jacket. The edges of the leaves were already turning. Autumn was early this year, especially welcome after the hot, humid summer. Annie had dug up most of her garden, tossing away the spent lettuce and the squash vines with their yellow-white blossoms and the singed pea pods. Meg helped, and soon Claire decided to lend a hand as well. They worked well together, in a steady rhythm, pulling weeds, turning the soil, gathering the last of the vegetables. They stepped on the fallen tomatoes and heard them squish and laughed till they nearly fell down.
“Do you think your past stays with you forever?” Claire asked Meg one day. They were removing the wooden stakes used to tie up the heaviest of the vines. “Do you think you can ever escape it?”
There was a slight drizzle, and the two Story sisters were wearing raincoats. Their mother was collecting the cabbages that no one liked. She would take them to the town hall, where there was a food pantry for the needy.
Meg shrugged. “I think you are who you are.”
“But what if you’re attacked by sharks or kidnapped? Those things change you, you know. You can’t be the same after that.”
“There are no sharks in North Point Harbor,” Meg said.
“There was one once.” Annie had overheard and now came over to join in. She loved spending time with the two girls. “It came around the tip of Montauk.”
“No, it didn’t!” Meg and Claire laughed.
“It was ten feet long,” Annie vowed, a grin on her face. She felt the way she used to, when her daughters were young and she was young, too. Even before the divorce, Alan was never around. It was just the four of them, all in it together.
“It had a thousand teeth,” Meg added to the story. “It could swallow an entire horse. A whole cow.”
“It could eat an entire town,” Annie said. “Houses, stores. And then one day it went away. It went to sea where it belonged, and never thought about the town called North Point Harbor.”
“It was lost and never found,” Claire said. She could see their bedroom window. The leaves on the hawthorn tree looked like black wings. She closed her eyes and wished that nothing bad would ever happen to Elv. She wished they could go back to who they had been before they’d become who they were now.
THE FIRST SEMESTER of school was over. Elv had failed every one of her classes. She had been picked up by the police for shop lifting, but the charges were dropped in exchange for a promise that she would no longer frequent the local pharmacy. It was only nail polish and mints, she complained. Hardly a federal offense. At least Alan had gotten a decent lawyer and paid the bill, which was substantial. The tension in the house grew worse. Elv seemed to have a different boyfriend every week. They followed her like dogs, then disappeared, replaced by someone new. It had happened slowly, but she had become a stranger in their house. She barely spoke; she drifted in and out like a shadow. Ever since the fight over Heidi Preston she’d been standoffish even to her beloved Claire. She needed room to breathe, that’s what she told Claire when Claire got into bed beside her. She told her to go away, even though she was crying and her skin felt cold and she was so alone.
Meg did the research about methamphetamine. She and Claire sat in the library and read about the effects: rashes, paranoia, violent outbursts, inability to sleep. It all seemed familiar. Meg ran into Heidi Preston, who said her brother, Brian, had been sent to school in Maine because of Elv. Heidi’s parents had found them getting high in the basement. Now Brian had run away from boarding school and they didn’t even know where he was. Meg and Claire went upstairs and searched through the shoebox. They studied the map on the wall of the closet. Claire had never before noticed that all of the roads in Arnelle were circles. Each one led to the same place.