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  “I think your mother is the most beautiful woman in the world,” Dad said in the here and now, rubbing Mom’s shoulders while she closed her eyes and made a dreamy face.

  “Fine by me,” I said. “Just get a room.”

  Dad swept his arm in a wide arc, his smile tipped sideways. “I have a whole house. Maybe you should learn to relax. I’ll rub your shoulders next.”

  My eyes cut to Sephie. She was flicking a bent corner of a playing card.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Sephie? Your neck tense?”

  She shrugged.

  “That’s my girl!” He moved to her, laying his hands on her bony shoulders. She was two years older than me but skinny no matter what she ate, all buckeroo teeth and dimples, a dead ringer for Kristy McNichol, though I’d eat my own hair before I’d tell her.

  Dad started in on Sephie. “It’s good to feel good,” he murmured to her.

  That made me itch inside. “Can we play another game of cribbage?”

  “Soon,” Dad said. “First, I want to hear everyone’s summer dreams.”

  I groaned. Dad was big on dreams. He believed you could be whatever you wanted, but you had to “see it” first. Hippie-dippie, but I suppose a person got used to it. Both Sephie and I swapped a look. We knew without saying it that Dad would not approve of our plan to transform ourselves into blondes. Girls should not try to be anything for anyone, he’d tell us. We needed to command our own minds and bodies.

  Again, gross.

  “I want to visit Aunt Jin,” I offered.

  Mom had been going half-lidded, but her eyes popped open at the mention of her sister. “That’s a great plan! We can drive to Canada for a week.”

  “Excellent,” Dad agreed.

  My heart soared. We hardly ever traveled farther than up the highway to Saint Cloud for co-op groceries, but now that Mom had her full-time teaching job, there’d been talk of road-tripping this summer. Still, I’d been afraid to suggest we visit Aunt Jin. If Mom and Dad were in the wrong mood, they’d kill that idea for eternity, and I really needed some Aunt Jin time. I loved her to death.

  She was the only one who didn’t pretend I was normal.

  She was there when I was born, stayed on for a few weeks after that to help out Mom, but my first actual memory of her was from right after Uncle Richard’s funeral. Aunt Jin was a decade younger than Mom, which put her at no more than seventeen at the time. I’d caught her staring at my throat, something a lot of people do.

  Rather than look away, she’d smiled and said, “If you’d been born two hundred years ago, they’d have drowned you.”

  She was referring to the red, ropy scar that circled where my neck met my shoulders, thick as one of Mr. T’s gold chains. Apparently, I’d shot out of Mom with the umbilical cord coiled around my throat, my body blue as a Berry Punch Fla-Vor-Ice, eyes wide even though I wasn’t breathing. I exited so fast that the doctor dropped me.

  Or at least that’s the story I was told.

  There I hung, a human dingleberry, until one of the nurses swooped in and unwound the cord, uncovering an amniotic band strangling me beneath that. The quick-thinking nurse cut it, then slapped me till I wailed. She’d saved my life, but the band had branded me. Mom said my lesion looked like an angry scarlet snake at first. That seemed dramatic. In any case, I suspect the nurse was a little shaky when she finally handed me over. The whole fiasco wasn’t exactly a job well done. Plus, Rosemary’s Baby had hit theaters a couple years before, and everyone in that room must have been wondering what had propelled me out of the womb with such force.

  “It would have been bad luck to keep a baby whose own mother tried to strangle it twice,” Aunt Jin finished, chucking me under my chin. I decided on the spot that it was an okay joke because Mom was her sister, and they both loved me.

  Here’s another nutty saying Aunt Jin liked to toss my way: “Earth. If you know what you’re doing, you’re in the wrong place.” She’d waggle her thick eyebrows and tip an imaginary cigar as she spoke. I didn’t know where that gesture was from, but she’d giggle so hard, her laugh like marbles thrown up into the sunshine, that I’d laugh along with her.

  That’s how every Aunt Jin visit began. The joke about drowning me, some meaty life quotes, and then we’d dance and sing along to her Survivor and Johnny Cougar tapes. She’d spill all about her travels and let me sip the honey-colored liqueur she’d smuggled from Amsterdam or offer me a packet of the biscuits she loved so much and that I’d pretend didn’t taste like old saltines. Sephie would want to join in, I’d see her on the sidelines, but she never quite knew how to hop on the ride that was Aunt Jin.

  I did.

  Aunt Jin and me were thick as thieves.

  That made it okay that Dad liked Sephie way more than me.

  I wrinkled my nose. He was really going to town on that massage. Mom had left to refill her and Dad’s drinks even though he’d offered, since it was taking him so long to rub Sephie’s shoulders.

  “Sephie,” I asked, because her eyes were closed and I wanted that to stop, “what’s your dream for the summer?”

  She spoke quietly, almost a whisper. “I want to get a job at the Dairy Queen.”

  Dad’s hands stopped kneading. A look I couldn’t name swept across his face, and I thought I’d memorized every twitch of his. He almost immediately swapped out that weird expression for a goofy smile that lifted his beard a half inch. “Great! You can save for college.”

  Sephie nodded, but she looked so sad all of a sudden. She’d been nothing but moods and mysteries since December. The change in temperament coincided with her getting boobs (Santa Claus delivered! I’d teased her), and so I didn’t need to be Remington Steele’s Laura Holt to understand that one was connected to the other.

  Mom returned to the dining room, a fresh drink in each hand, her attention hooked on my dad. “Another game of cribbage?”

  I leaned back to peek at the kitchen clock. It was ten thirty. Every kid I told thought it was cool I didn’t have a bedtime. I supposed they were right. Tomorrow was the first day of the last week of seventh grade for me, though. “I’m going to sleep. You guys can play three handed.”

  Mom nodded.

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite!” Dad said.

  I didn’t glance at Sephie as I walked away. I felt a quease about leaving her up with them when they’d been drinking, but I wrote it off as payback for her always falling asleep first the nights we were left alone, back when we’d sometimes sleep together. She’d let me climb in bed with her, which was nice, but then she’d crash out like a light, and there I’d lay agonizing over every sound, and in an old house like ours there was lots of unexplained thumping and creaking in the night. When I’d finally drift off, everything but my mouth and nose covered by the quilt, she’d have a sleep spaz and wake me right back up.

  I couldn’t remember the last time we’d slept in the same bed, hard as I tried on the walk to the bathroom. I rinsed off my face, then reached for my toothbrush, planning out tomorrow’s clothes. If I woke up forty-five minutes early, I could use the hot rollers, but I hadn’t okayed it with Sephie, and I’d already excused myself from the table. I brushed my teeth and spit, rinsing with the same metallic well water that turned the ends of my hair orange.

  I couldn’t reach my upstairs bedroom without walking through a corner of the dining room. I kept my eyes trained on the ground, my shoulders high around my ears, sinking deep in my thoughts. My homework was done, my folders organized inside my garage-sale Trapper Keeper that was as good as new except for the Scotch-taped rip near the seam.

  First period tomorrow was supposed to be English, but instead we were to proceed directly to the gym for an all-school presentation. The posters slapped around declared it a Summer Safety Symposium, which some clever eighth graders had shorthanded to Snake Symposium. SSS. I’d heard the rumors this week that Lilydale kids were disappearing and then coming back changed. Everyone had. Aliens, the older kids on the bus
claimed, were snatching kids and probing them.

  I knew all about aliens. When I waited in the grocery checkout line, the big-eyed green creatures stared at me from the front cover of the National Enquirer right below the shot of Elizabeth Taylor’s vampire monkey baby.

  Right. Aliens.

  Probably the symposium was meant to put those rumors to rest, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to hold it tomorrow. The break in our routine—combined with it being the last week of school—would make everyone extra squirrelly.

  I was halfway up the stairs when I heard a knock that shivered the baby hairs on my neck. It sounded like it came from right below me, from the basement. That was a new sound.

  Mom, Dad, and Sephie must have heard it, too, because they’d stopped talking.

  “Old house,” Dad finally said, a hot edge to his voice.

  I shot up the rest of the stairs and across the landing, closed my door tightly, and slipped into my pajamas, tossing my T-shirt and terry cloth shorts into my dirty-clothes hamper before setting my alarm clock. I decided I would try the hot rollers. Sephie hadn’t called dibs on them, and who knew? I might end up sitting next to Gabriel during the symposium. I should look my best.

  I was jelly-bone tired, but my copy of Nellie Bly’s Trust It or Don’t guilted me from the top of my treasure shelves. Aunt Jin had sent it to me as an early birthday present. The book was full of the most fantastical stories and drawings, like the account of Martin J. Spalding, who was a professor of mathematics at age fourteen, or Beautiful Antonia, “the Unhappy Woman to Whom Love Always Brought Death!”

  I’d been savoring the stories, reading only one a night so they’d last. I’d confided to Jin that I was going to be a writer someday. Attaining such a goal required practice and discipline. Didn’t matter how tired I was. I needed to study the night’s Nellie.

  I flipped the book open to a random page, drawn instantly to the sketch of a proud German shepherd.

  I smiled, satisfied. I could write that. My plan was to begin drafting one Nellie a week as soon as school was out. I’d already written a contract, which I’d called Cassie’s Summer Writing Duties. It included a plan for getting my portfolio to Nellie Bly International Limited before Labor Day and a penalty (no television for a week) if I did not fulfill the terms of my contract. I’d had Sephie witness me signing it.

  I set the huge yellow-covered book on my treasure shelf and stretched, checking my muscles. Did they want to sleep stretched out long underneath my bed or curled up short in my closet?

  Long, they said.

  All right, then. I grabbed a pillow and the top quilt off my bed and slid the pillow under the box springs first. I followed on my back, dragging the quilt behind. I had to squish to reach the farthest corner. The moon spilled enough light into my room that I could make out the black coils overhead.

  They were the last thing I saw before drifting off to sleep.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2019 Cindy Hager, CK Photography

  Jess Lourey is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Unspeakable Things, The Catalain Book of Secrets, the Salem’s Cipher thrillers, and the Mira James mysteries, among many other works, including young adult, short stories, and nonfiction. An Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Award nominee, Jess is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology and a leader of writing retreats. She is also a recipient of The Loft’s Excellence in Teaching fellowship, a Psychology Today blogger, and a TEDx presenter. Check out her TEDx Talk for the inspiration behind her first published novel. When she’s not leading writing workshops, reading, or spending time with her friends and family, you can find her working on her next story. Discover more at www.jessicalourey.com.