3

I was hungry when I arrived at school, even after Cate had cooked me breakfast. Even now, years after whatever trauma had first sparked my unusual appetite, I was still always hungry. Just last week I’d gotten home ravenous and laid waste to the kitchen. The fridge and pantry had been stocked with food after Cate’s fortnightly grocery shopping: two loaves of fresh sourdough bread, a tub of marinated olives, two dozen eggs, four cans of chickpeas, a bag of carrots, chips and salsa, four avocadoes . . . The list goes on. Enough food for two people for two weeks. I ate it all, every bite. I ate and ate and ate. I ate until my mouth bled and my jaw ached from chewing. Even when all the new groceries were devoured, I downed an old can of beans, a box of stale cereal, and a tin of shortbread.

Afterward, my hunger finally sated, I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and turned this way and that, wondering where the hell the food went. I was still skinny, not so much as bump.

At school, I felt high-strung and jumpy. When a car door slammed in the drop-off line, I smacked my hand to my chest so hard, the skin was still stinging. I straightened my uniform tie and tried to center my thoughts. My fingers felt grimy and smelled of something putrid, even though I’d washed them three times at home. The smell came from the flowers on the photo. I’d plucked one from my sister’s eye before I left. It was an odd bloom, with waxy petals and roots that threaded into the paper like stitches. I’d recognized it. It was the same flower Grey had turned into a pattern and embroidered on many of her designs.

I’d held it close to my nose and inhaled, expecting a sweet scent like gardenia, but the stench of raw meat and garbage had made me dry heave. I’d left the files and fetid bloom in my mother’s drawer and slammed her bedroom door shut behind me.

I breathed a little easier at school, felt like I was coming back to myself—or at least to the carefully curated version of myself I was at Highgate Wood School for Girls. My backpack, groaning at the seams with books on Python and A-level study guides, cut hot tracks into my shoulders. The rules and structure here made sense. The weirdness that lurked in old, empty houses and the wildwood thickets of ancient heaths found it hard to permeate the monotony of uniforms and fluorescent lighting. It had become my sanctuary away from the baseline strangeness of my life, even if I didn’t belong here with the children of some of London’s richest families.

I hurried through the busy corridors, bound for the library.

“You’re five minutes late,” said Paisley, one of the dozen students I tutored before and after school. Paisley was a pint-size twelve-year-old who somehow managed to make the school uniform look boho chic. Her parents had been paying me decent money for weeks to try and teach her basic coding. The annoying thing was, Paisley was a natural. When she paid attention, she picked up Python with an easy elegance that reminded me of Grey.

“Oh, I’m deeply sorry, Paisley. I’ll give you a free extra hour after school to make up for it.” She glared at me. “That’s what I thought. Where’s your laptop?”

“I heard you’re a witch,” she said as she returned to tapping away at her phone, curls of mousy hair falling into her eyes. “I heard your sisters were expelled for sacrificing a teacher to the devil in the auditorium.” Wow. The rumors had gotten out of control in the last four years, but honestly, I was more surprised that it had taken this long for one to reach her.

“I’m not a witch. I’m a mermaid,” I said as I set up my laptop and opened the textbook to where we left off. “Now show me the homework I set for you last week.”

“Why is your hair white if you’re not a witch?”

“I bleach it that way,” I lied. In fact, the week after Grey and Vivi left, I’d tried to dye it darker. I’d bought three boxes of dye and spent a rainy summer evening drinking apple cider while I painted my hair. I’d waited the forty-five minutes the instructions recommended, then a little longer just to be sure, before rinsing it out. I was excited to see the new me. It felt like the transformative scene in a spy movie when the protagonist is on the run, forced to change their appearance in a service station bathroom after they go rogue.

When I wiped away the fog of condensation on the mirror, I shrieked. My hair was its usual milky blond, entirely untouched by the dye.

“Homework,” I ordered again.

Paisley rolled her little eyes and dug her laptop out of her Fjällräven bag. “There.” She turned her screen toward me. “Well?” she demanded as I scrolled through her code.

“It’s good. Despite your best efforts, you’re picking this up.”

“What a terrible shame this will be our last session.”

God, what kind of twelve-year-old talked like that?

I tsked her. “Not so fast. Unfortunately for both of us, your parents have paid through the rest of the term.”

“That was until they found out who your sisters are.” Paisley handed me an envelope. My name was written on the front in her mother’s loopy handwriting. “They’re super into Jesus. They won’t even let me read Harry Potter. Suddenly they don’t seem to think you’re such a good influence on me.” She packed her things, stood to leave. “Bye, Sabrina,” she called sweetly on her way out.

“Wow,” came a disembodied voice. “Some people are so rude.”

“Oh,” I said as a small bottle-blond figure made her way out of the stacks and pulled up the chair across from me. “Hello, Jennifer.”

In the months after Grey and Vivi had left school, when the loneliness of being without them sank so deeply into my body that every heartbeat ached, I’d desperately wanted to make friends with some of my peers. I’d never needed friends before, but without my sisters, I had no one to eat with at lunchtime and no one but my mother to spend time with on the weekends.

When Jennifer Weir had invited me to her sleepover birthday party (reluctantly, I suspected—our mothers worked together at the Royal Free), I’d cautiously accepted. It was an appropriately posh affair: Each girl had her own mini tipi set up in the Weirs’ vast living room, each frosted with fairy lights and set among a floating sea of blush and gold balloons. We watched three of the Conjuring movies into the early hours of the morning and ate so much birthday cake and so many delicate baked goods that I thought someone might vomit. We talked about the boys who attended nearby schools and how cute they were. We snuck into Jennifer’s parents’ liquor cabinet and did two shots of tequila each. Even Justine Khan, the girl who’d bullied me and subsequently shaved her head in front of the school, seemed not to mind my presence. For a handful of pink, sugary, alcohol-softened hours, I dared to allow myself to imagine a future that looked like this—and it might have been possible, if not for the now-infamous game of spin the bottle that had landed both Justine and me in the emergency room.