Excerpt

PROLOGUE: CHURCH BASEMENT, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA, ALMOST FIVE YEARS AGO
It’s bingo night. My brother Nick and I are in the youth room next to the social hall, playing Hearts. We always play Hearts on bingo night.
Dad used to be an actor, so he never needs a microphone, whether he’s preaching or calling the numbers. We hear him boom: “O-69!”
We crack up.
Nick is sixteen, I’m thirteen, and he’s my favorite person. He’s smarter and funnier and more charming than anyone. He teaches me card tricks and dirty jokes. He says that everyone except me is a hypocrite, especially Mom and Dad. He knows the best music, the best places to go, and he hardly ever complains about his tagalong little sister.
Three weeks later, on his seventeenth birthday, he runs away.

ACT ONE: ARE YOU LOST?
scene i.
It’s my fourth time around this block. I’m idling – again – in front of an old purple house, almost invisible behind a tall, ivy-covered fence.
A dark-haired girl opens the gate, walks up to my car, and taps on my window.
“Are you lost?” she asks.
I roll the window down and hand the girl a piece of paper.
“I’m looking for this address.”
“You’ve found it. You must be Nick’s sister, right?”
I nod, pull over and park. My hands are shaking. I have pictured the end of this trip since I pulled out of Mom and Dad’s driveway six days ago, but the scenes in my head never included anyone but me and my brother.
I rub my eyes, rake my hands through what there is of my hair, open the car door, and get out.
“I’m Meryl,” the dark-haired girl says. She holds out her hand. “One of the housemates.”
“Battle,” I say.
Meryl’s curly black hair is escaping from a low ponytail tied with a bright orange ribbon. Her white t-shirt is snug under her faded green overalls, and I can see the muscles in her shoulders. When I take her hand, I feel a jolt I haven’t felt in more than a year.
Uh-oh. I didn’t picture this scene, either.
“I’ll help you unload,” Meryl says.
“Thank you. Um, do you happen to know where my brother is?“
It feels funny to say ‘my brother.’ It’s not a phrase I’ve had much occasion to use for a while.
“Nope, no idea. Let’s get your stuff onto the porch.”
“Thanks, but I need to make a quick call first.”
I’m dizzy with fatigue, but Mom and Dad need to hear that I’ve arrived safely.
They know I’m moving into a house with some people for the summer before I start at Reed College. I showed them the ad on the Internet.
They don’t know that one of the people is their son.
I dial, the phone rings, the machine picks up. “Hey, I’m here, I’m fine, I’ll talk to you soon.” I hang up.
The air feels soft. The sky is gray, with a few thin clouds, and something about the quality of the light makes the green of leaves and grass seem brighter.
“Okay, I’ve done my duty. Let me open the trunk,” I say.
Meryl and I each grab a box. Meryl reads: “’Paperbacks, white bookshelf.’ God, color-coordinated labels? Sure you’re related to Nick?”
I smile. “It’s just easier. You know.”
“No,” Meryl shakes her head, “easy is when you throw everything into the back of the truck, floor it, and get the hell out of Dodge.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I say.
But Nick would.
Meryl and I walk back and forth from the car to the porch, piling up boxes. My eyes swim and my balance is a little off, but I don’t say anything. It’s not Meryl’s fault that my brother can’t be bothered to meet me, when it’s been four and a half years since I’ve seen him, and I’ve driven across the country to move in with him.
Then I pick up one of the few boxes I’ve labeled FRAGILE, get halfway up the walk, and trip.
The box flies out of my hands, hits the ground, and opens. Styrofoam packing peanuts spill out, along with what they’re protecting: two puppets, a boy and a girl. Some broke the girl’s fall. But the boy landed right on the concrete walk.
“Are you okay?” Meryl asks.
“Fine.” I squat to pick up the peanuts before the breeze sends them all over the neighborhood.
Meryl kneels to investigate the boy.
The little gold crown he’d worn has split in half.
“Hmm, this is kind of broken,” she says.
“I think I’ll be able to fix it.” I nestle the puppets back into the box, then pick up the halves of the boy’s crown.
They look like a charm, but for what?
I put the crown halves into the pocket of my hoodie, then pick up another box.
Once we’ve gotten everything out of my car, Meryl says, “Take the stereo faceplate, too. Or at least put it in the glove compartment.”
“Okay.” This doesn’t look like a bad neighborhood. What am I not seeing?
I shove the faceplate into the glove compartment, on top of the trip planner that’s gotten me from Chapel Hill to Portland.
“Smoke break,” Meryl says, digging into the pocket of her overalls and retrieving a pack and a lighter.
“Don’t worry, nobody smokes in the house,” she adds, grinning to reveal small, crooked, slightly yellow teeth.
While Meryl smokes, I take a closer look at the purple house I’m moving into. It’s old – Victorian maybe? – and huge, with lots of windows that have that ripply-looking glass. Nick didn’t even tell me how many people live here, just that I’d like them.
Where is he?
“So how long did it take you to get here?” Meryl asks.
“About a week. It would’ve been faster, but I stayed in hotels for a couple of nights.”
“Swank.”
I shake my head. “More like anti-swank. This one place had a patch of fluorescent orange mold growing on the carpet.”
“Ew, and you stayed there? I’d have left.”
A cab screeches to a stop in front of the house. My pulse thuds in my throat. Nick drives a cab now, he told me.
“That’s probably him now,” Meryl says.
But it’s a woman who steps out. She’s about my mom’s age, and it looks like she spends a lot of time on her eyebrows. They’re perfectly arched. Her black hair is growing out, though – I see about an inch of gray roots.
She stomps up the porch steps. “I need nicotine.”
She takes two cigarettes from Meryl’s pack, puts one in her mouth, cups the other in her palm like a tiny doll. “Flame,” she demands. Meryl leans in with her lighter.
“Oh God,” the woman says. “This day. This goddamn day. What is all this?”
She waves at my stuff, then notices me.
“Oh! Excuse me, you must be – what did Nick tell me your name was?”
“Battle.”
“Excellent. A fierce name. We need more of those. Battle, I’m Aurora – not a fierce name, alas —“
“But you make up for it,” Meryl says.
“Thank you. Anyway, Battle, I’m Aurora, and I own this place. Welcome to Forest House.”
“Thanks.”
“If I were a good person, I’d help you move everything up into your room, but frankly, after the day I’ve had, the very idea exhausts me, so my proposal is that we wait for your lovely brother to turn up and make him do it.”
“Okay. Can you tell me where a restroom is?”
“Past the kitchen on the left.”
As soon as I step inside, I see why Aurora calls it Forest House. There are more plants here than I’ve ever seen inside a building, in pots, in hanging baskets, in planters — from African violets like the ones Grandma always had, to rubber trees with branches that graze the ceiling. Jungle House would be more accurate.
Though a jungle wouldn’t have so many books. Some are stacked on brick-and-board shelves, some are in teetery piles on the floor. It looks and smells like a greenhouse crossed with a used bookstore.
There are even plants growing inside the dirt-filled clawfoot tub. God, I hope there’s another bathroom upstairs, and it’s not that everyone in the house is opposed to bathing.
When I get back out to the porch, Aurora’s in the middle of a sentence:
“ – all over the damned play! Lovers and madmen. Love in idleness. The course of true love. Love love love love love. Blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera.”
Aurora looks up. “Battle! You’ll bring a fresh perspective! Tell me: should I get married?”
“Um…to whom?”
“Mister Robert Cracknell. You’ll meet him soon, he lives here too, I hope that doesn’t shock you – ”
“It doesn’t.” If anything, I’m shocked that she’s asking my opinion after having known me for less than fifteen minutes.
“Good, because if it did, I’m sure you’d be far more shocked by…hmmm…well, never mind, you’ll meet everyone soon enough. Anyway, Robert has asked me to marry him. I can’t imagine how he could have even thought of asking me when he knows we’re about to start Midsummer!”
“Hey, the show’s all about the weddings,” Meryl says.
Aurora sighs. “It is, and it isn’t. It’s really a lot about hierarchies, and overturning them – and how you don’t come out of the forest unchanged – but it is about love and marriage, too, certainly. So I think it was very manipulative of him to make this…proposition just now. Don’t you think so, Battle?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Where the hell is Nick?
“It’s really the idea of marriage, how it shuts off all kinds of options, the idea of giving up forever those very first moments you have with someone new, before you’ve even kissed, when you just get that connection – ”
Meryl grabs my hands and stares dreamily into my eyes. Aurora laughs and says, “Yes, exactly! When you’re oblivious to the world, just absorbed in each other.”
The way Meryl’s hands feel almost takes my mind off my brother. I can’t meet her eyes.
Meryl doesn’t let go, and Aurora goes on, in an even softer, sweeter voice, “But you’re not sure yet, you can’t take anything for granted, I mean, what if you’ve misinterpreted all those signs you thought you saw? You can’t know, until somebody makes that first move – ”
I feel hypnotized. I lean closer. Meryl leans towards me, too.
My brain isn’t working. It’s not telling me that it’s crazy to be millimeters away from kissing a strange girl because an even stranger woman says she misses what it feels like to have a crush.
“Well – no introductions necessary, I see,” my brother says.