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  Reggie doffed his fedora when it came his turn to examine my summer’s work. Upon seeing the very first page—the one of the feline-faced abominable snowman, something of a tree-sized, man-shaped lynx, prowling across the ragged and snowy cliffs, guarding the entrance of his treasure cave; I was especially proud of that drawing—his jaw dropped into a big, openmouthed grin, and his eyes went wide. I swear, I thought he’d cry when he started shaking his head slowly, like he was my grandmother and I’d just finished my doctorate or something. “This is amazing, Lana,” he said, his words clipped and strained. He held up the drawing so I could see it too. Then he asked, narrowing his eyes, in a dark whisper, “We’re going to fight this thing?”

  I shrugged. “If you live that long,” I said.

  Cole grinned and let his head fall onto Reggie’s shoulder.

  I wasn’t sure if he was impressed or sleepy.

  “Is he the end boss?” Abraham said, leaning forward. His bangs fell in front of his eyes, and he shook them away with a jerk of his head.

  Abraham never fully closes his mouth. It makes him look sort of stupid, though we all know he’s an übergenius. The rest of our class, though, makes their own assumptions.

  I looked at the ceiling and feigned innocence. “How would I know?”

  I’m the dungeon master, that’s how. But I wasn’t talking. My adventurers would discover the campaign as intended: as they went, deep in dungeons, roaming thick forests of eternal night, in the hidden chambers under innocent-looking village taverns. Between you and me, though, no. This beast of the snowy peaks was not the end boss. He was merely a diversion—albeit a diversion that could rip a low-level fighter’s arm off at the shoulder and use it to pick the bits of the rest of the party out of his teeth after he’d finished eating.

  It had only been an unofficial meeting, of course. Officially, the Central High Gaming Club couldn’t meet without our faculty adviser, and never outside our assigned room in the school. But we’re excited little campers, or anyway I am, and I just couldn’t wait till our first official meeting on Wednesday to show the club my new monster manual. I should have waited, though. I should have kept my green notebook deep in my desk drawer, where it would have been safe from drunken, dirty boys in black.

  I grit my teeth as I cross University Avenue and pedal hard up the hill toward my neighborhood, on the other side of the interstate, where people don’t wander the streets at two in the morning, drunk and stupid, knocking innocent girls off their bikes and their most prized possessions into oily puddles in the gutter. As I pass the police station, I even think about stopping to report the drunken disorderlies—who, by the way, couldn’t have been much older than me. One of them looked like he was twelve, if I’m feeling generous, so the other probably was too. He likely had some sort of hormonal imbalance that made him taller and hairier than his age should naturally. Maybe it comes from drinking so much.

  The wind is nice now. It’s rushing down the front of my dress and over the nearly invisible hair on my arms and into the vents of my helmet, cooling me off. It’s always at this point—after climbing up from University to reach Marshall and then again over the bridge toward Summit—that I realize I’ve been biking hard, and I begin to sweat. This old bike isn’t exactly an efficient machine. I love it, don’t get me wrong. But it was built for comfort and a ladylike riding position. I can happily bike in a dress or long skirt when I want, which is always, and not worry about grease stains on the hems or pieces of cloth getting caught up in the chain. But I won’t get anywhere quickly or easily, because I’m sitting straight up and the bike itself weighs as much as me.

  I take Grand Avenue, which is weird. It’s usually so crowded with traffic and delivery trucks and people walking and shopping and sipping coffee from one of the several thousand coffee shops within a mile of my house. Now the storefronts are dark. The streets are nearly empty. Even the bars are closed, thanks to Saint Paul’s reasonable last call. I wonder briefly where those two boys in black had been drinking—probably some dank basement apartment where someone was cooking meth.

  I take a deep breath, try to relax away my anger, as I turn off Grand and slide into the cool, quiet darkness of my neighborhood. It’s only a few more blocks, over cobblestones, so I slip onto the sidewalk and coast the rest of the way. I never get tired of admiring the houses on this part of the ride, even ours. From the outside, they’re stunning—each a picture-perfect example of one or another major era in American architecture. Ours is a two-and-a-half-story house from Prairie School, immaculately cared for and boasting all its original wood detail. It’s gorgeous. Still, I don’t love it. I doubt I’ll ever love it.

  I hop off when I reach our driveway and enter the garage through the side door to put away my bike. Inside, the house is dark, and with my tote—which is still damp—on my shoulder, I move through the dark kitchen and into the front hall. It’s a grand thing, with parquet floors and a Tiffany chandelier. Just off it is Dad’s den—we all use it now and then, but it’s got his records and his liquor cabinet and two leather couches that make me want to barf—and I don’t let myself glance inside. I never do after dark: it’s cavernous and empty, high ceilings and huge windows on the far side letting in moonlight and heebie-jeebies. It’s like living in a Gothic horror, but with tackier furniture.

  I climb the two flights to my attic bedroom, ducking as I go in. I never planned to be so tall that I’d have to, but there it is. It’s still worth it, though. Having the highest bedroom in a house—and a whole story to myself—has its obvious advantages. Plus, since my darling parents see the attic bedroom as rather a bonus space, I’m allowed to do whatever I like in it, decor-wise, from eclectic wispy drapes in all the little windows, to painting the cantilevered ceilings with murals in shining, glittery paint. I have room up here for a drafting table, a small desk for my laptop, and another for my sewing machine. There’s even a half bathroom. If the rest of the house were somehow destroyed, I’d still be okay up here. I might miss the kitchen.

  I should probably get a small fridge up here. It will come in handy in college anyway, right?

  But now I’m exhausted. It’s nearly three, and my body is sore from biking halfway across Saint Paul, so I get ready for bed, put Berlioz’s “Marche au supplice” on the iPod system on my nightstand, and slip under the gossamer canopy over my sliver of a bed along the wall. My eyes are closed, and my mind is taking me back to the snowy peak as the accused is climbing the scaffolding to his beheading in the symphony. Before I drift off, though, little eight-year-old feet sound from the steps, and I can picture Henrietta on the stairs, in her cotton pajamas, maybe with her stuffed sea monster tucked under her arm, climbing the steps to my bedroom. She’s probably stopped in my open doorway now, watching me, wondering if I’ve fallen asleep yet. She probably holds a lock of her long white-blond hair—our only common trait, our parents like to say—stroking it slowly in the self-assured way that she does.

  “Are you okay?” she whispers into my artificially starlit room.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You were out late.”

  “Mmhm.”

  She’s still there. Her footsteps do not retreat. So I ask, “Are you okay, Henny?”

  “Mmhm,” she says. A few seconds pass. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  I’m asleep before I’m aware of her footsteps on the stairs—for all I know, she falls asleep in the bundle of throws on the beanbag chair in the corner; it’s happened before. But I’m somewhere else now, at the top of the snow-covered mountains, high above the village, facing the entrance to the treasure cave. The giant feline monster has already been killed, and his body lies across the cave mouth, his black-red blood staining the snow. I must climb his body to reach the entrance, so I begin to, but his fur is still warm, and so soft and thick, and I find I want to curl up in it to sleep.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  CHAPTER 3

  LESH TUNGSTEN

 

  Greg is a gamer of the finest order. I’ve played console games—who hasn’t?—but Greg is far beyond anything most people would consider healthy. His pasty skin, dark, greasy hair, and Tshirts that honor the obscure and well-known alike from the realm of gamer-geekdom are all clear indicators of this aspect of Greg’s life. We get along because (A) we have been best friends since the age of four, and (B) because when we were eleven, I told him I wouldn’t be his friend anymore if he kept throwing game-related tantrums or brag sessions. He slips up now and then, but it’s never been so bad that I’ve had to separate myself from his being, which is a good thing, since he lives on my block and neither of our parents are likely to move any time soon.

  Here’s the upshot: for the last two years, Greg has been deep in an MMORPG—a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, that is. He hardly plays anything else, and his homework, aside from math, and his social life would have suffered if they weren’t already in barely working order. As it is, when we hang out at his place, he has the game going the whole time, even if it’s just so his “toons”—that’s what he calls the characters he controls—are just fishing or learning to sew.

  Yes, really. Fishing and sewing. These are things your toons too could excel at in this magical fantasyland of dragons and heroes and voluptuous elven women.

  My parents and Greg’s have a longtime and ongoing understanding that the boys can sleep in either house, no notice, period, so as I’m in no condition to go home, I crash at his place. Yeah, it is on the close-to-sunrise side of three a.m. when I crawl into a sleeping bag, so why not walk home and sneak in? Because sneaking into a hundred-year-old house with creaky floors and creaky stairs and a light-sleeping dad is pretty much impossible.

  Greg’s house isn’t much bigger than ours, so when I crash, I crash in a sleeping bag on his bedroom floor. So you won’t blame me, I think, for snapping at Greg as he sits in the desk chair several millimeters from my prone form, flicks on his desktop computer’s huge display, and logs into that damn MMO. (You can just say MMO; the RPG part usually gets left out. I don’t know who decides these things.)

  “What the hell are you doing?” I close my eyes tight against the bright images flashing across the display and throw my arm across my face. “Turn it off!”

  Greg is already in deep pose: his back forms an admirable hunch, and his face is much too close to the screen. His jaw hangs open, just a bit, and sometimes he forgets to breathe. “I’m just going to check my auctions.”

  This game has its own economy. Greg has explained it to me on numerous occasions, but never while I was listening. In fact, the moment he starts to explain anything about the game, I stop listening.

  “Nice,” he whispers, practically begging for me to ask him what exactly is nice. I don’t, of course, because I don’t actually care what’s nice, but he explains anyway. “I sold that world drop for almost a thousand gold.”

  “Wonderful,” I say, which is dumb. It just eggs him on to get any kind of reaction. He’s a lot like a toddler in that way.

  “My stacks of elementium aren’t moving at all,” he goes on. “Some dink has cornered the market at way too low a price. Moron.”

  “Shut,” I say. “Up.”

  He does shut up, aside from some whispers under his breath, and now and then I hear the computerized sound effects of sword on sword and spells being cast. In ten minutes, though, I’m dead to the world and soaring on the slowly spinning and tumbling—finally not entirely unpleasant—vodka ride. I don’t know when Greg leaves his fantasyland and gets into bed himself, but when his mom taps gently on the door, it’s the bright morning of the next day—Sunday—and Greg is snoring, completely covered by his crazy black quilt, the one his mom made from a few years’ worth of retired geek Tshirts.

  Okay, that’s pretty cool. Obviously the kid is my best friend, and I don’t hate him as much as I’m making it seem. Let’s move on.

  “Come on down for pancakes, you two,” his mom says.

  The words hit my skull like a heavy dinner plate. In my mind, the plate is covered with ten-inch flapjacks, swimming in butter and syrup, maybe slices of banana and granola crumbles. I groan and Greg’s mom shuffles away, calling as she goes, “They’ll get cold.”

  Is anything more vomitable than cold, untouched pancakes? Probably, but I won’t try to figure out what, at least not while I’m feeling like this.

  Greg rolls over. “Pancakes?” he says in a dry voice pitched about an octave lower than normal.

  I manage to sit up and put my head in both hands. “Where’s the water?” I say, thinking for an instant of the big plastic bottle we bought. Then the rest of the movie starts to play: the bottle soaring through the air over the row of shrubs next to the sidewalk, and I rewind a little more, and the bottle is slipping from my hands and I’m shouting, and a little farther, and the girl in the long skirt on the old-fashioned three-speed barrels into me—or I walk into her.

  “Crap,” I say, and Greg agrees. “What time is it?”

  His head is back under the quilt, but one arm pops out and grabs his phone, pulls it back under the covers. “Almost ten,” he mumbles. “Mom was feeling charitable this morning, I guess. She probably heard us come in.”

  But I’m barely listening, really, because I’m remembering when the helmet came off, and maybe I’m a little fuzzy in the head—I definitely am, really—but it’s a beautiful picture, and my hand goes back to my head when I remember the bonk we had, like two coconuts passing in the night.

  “I’m going home,” I say, but I don’t move. The very thought of standing up creates a heavy void in my gut.

  “No pancakes?” Greg says.

  “The next person who says ‘pancakes’ will die,” I say.

  Of course, from Greg comes: “Pancakes pancakes pancakes …”

  On and on he goes, so I find my sneakers—heavy, black, and ragged enough that the brand is indiscernible; spoiler alert: they’re from Target—and pull them on. I’ve slept in my jeans and everything else, so—sucking my tongue and wishing that water bottle hadn’t flown away—I head out.

  “Call me later,” Greg says. “After you recuperate.”

  I salute as I close the bedroom door behind me. Greg’s mom is at the bottom of the steps.

  “Morning, Elizabeth,” I say to her smiling, in-on-the-joke face. My own face must be pale and pallid, betraying my hangover—and like Greg said, she probably heard us come in. “I think I’m going to skip breakfast this morning.”

  She nods slowly. “A good idea.” From behind her back, she pulls a glass of water cold enough that its outside is fogged and wet. “Here.”

  I say thanks with the glass already at my lips and down the whole thing in one go. When I pull it away again and hand the slippery glass back to Ms. Deel, I’m woozy a minute and the cold water sits in my stomach like a cannonball. But it passes, and then I want another glass.

  She thumbs over her shoulder toward the front door. “Git.”

  “On my way,” I say, and I can feel her watching me leave when I pull the door closed behind me. The morning is cool and drizzly, so I pull on the hood of my sweatshirt and duck my head for the half-block walk.

  No one’s home when I get there, which is nothing new. I’m an only child, for one thing, and for another my folks work whenever they can. My dad works for himself; my mom works at Target. If they give her hours—especially weekend hours—she takes them.

  The only evidence of parentals is hanging from my bedroom door, suspended by a wrinkled piece of cellophane tape. The handwriting is Mom’s—specifically, angry Mom’s, because the ink is dark and the letters angular. It says:

  Do NOT leave this house today AT ALL.

  Translation: she spoke to Elizabeth Deel, and I’m grounded. Now I get to decide if I’ll actually obey the note. I mean, it’s just a not
e. I tear it from the door—the tape holds and the note rips—and crumple it in my fist, then toss it toward my wastebasket. The shot’s wide, and the way I feel, I’m not going anywhere anyway. I hit play on my laptop—it’s been paused all night—and Whitechapel bursts from my tiny desk speakers in mid-blast-beat. Then I sit on the edge of my bed and let myself roll back and to the left, listening to the rain get heavier on the skylight above the bed—the one Dad installed so I would feel like I was sleeping in the attic, which I am—and I’m asleep.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  CHAPTER 4

  SVETLANA ALLEGHENY

 

  It’s raining the next morning, and I’m sitting at my sewing desk, penciling an embroidery design onto a new tote, listening to the rain on my window and Björk on my iPod system. The drunken disorderlies stained my favorite bag, and I’d been looking for an excuse to start a new one anyway. I found this new gold hologram thread that’s going to look amazing on a green tote I’ve been saving. I’m thinking of a huge tree, with a short fat trunk and a giant leafy canopy. If I get the details right, it will look positively epic. But as I’m starting, there are fast heavy steps on the stairs, and now Dad stands in the low doorway of my room, bending at the neck and shoulders just a little, like the roof might fall on him. “So,” he says.

  “So,” I say. I move my embroidery to my lap and turn slightly, not quite to face my dad and the door, but enough so he can see I’m busy. I’m not going to put it aside unless this turns out to be an actual conversation, rather than an imprecise, indelicate prod, my dad’s specialty. I’m also not going to turn down the music, even though the track is “Pluto,” which my dad once spent fifteen minutes deriding as the most grating piece of supposed music he’d ever been exposed to.