The Story Sisters

WHEN THE STORY sisters went back to school, people said Elv had changed. She seemed far away, an indifferent, elusive girl who painted her nails black and walked through the halls barefoot until the teachers threatened her with detention if she didn’t put her boots on. Not that the boots were any better; they were black, pointy-toed. They looked foreign and dangerous and they made the skirts she wore seem even shorter. Girls who used to sit at her lunch table were afraid of the stories she told, brutal, bloody tales in which hands and heads were cut off. People turned into frogs, ate poisonous bugs, were buried alive. No one wanted to hear stories like that anymore. The girls she’d grown up with wondered how she knew the things she knew. They kept their distance. After a while they didn’t even bother to say hello.

The boys in town were the opposite. They followed Elv around, and even the brashest among them seemed bewildered. They didn’t listen to her stories. They just stared. Elv seemed more beautiful than before, but in a hot, careless way. Boys she’d known since kindergarten begged for kisses. They telephoned late at night and threw pebbles at her bedroom window. She ignored them completely. For her sixteenth birthday Elv didn’t want a party. Her sisters were friends enough. Alan showed up with his new girlfriend, who taught biology at the same high school. Annie noticed how young she was, how she was trying to make a difficult situation less strained.

“Alan talks about the girls all the time,” the girlfriend said. Her name was Cheryl Henry and she yearned for children of her own. “They’re his pride and joy.”

“Really,” Annie said. “How nice.” She offered Cheryl a piece of cake. It was chocolate, with mocha frosting, Elv’s favorite. Not that Elv had eaten a bite. They were in the kitchen and Alan had arrived too late for the actual birthday dinner. Elv had been waiting for him, but once he was there, she didn’t even say hello.

Alan kissed her on the forehead and gave her a hundred dollars. That was her birthday present.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he’d said to her. Elv watched her father as he fixed himself a cup of coffee, then she disappeared while the others were having their cake. She got into bed and pulled up the covers. Sixteen was nothing. It was meaningless. Elv heard her mother come upstairs, open the door, see that she was in bed, then carefully close the door once more. Her mother was just as blind as her father. What had she thought that summer when Elv wept as the gardeners swept away the cocoons? “It’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. Otherwise the moths will eat all the trees,” Annie had assured her.

“I don’t care,” Elv had said. “I couldn’t care less.”

THE MORNING AFTER her birthday, Elv took the hundred dollars her father had given her and hitchhiked to Hempstead. The guy who picked her up kept looking at her, as though she was a mirage, a faerie who’d appeared in his passenger seat. “Do you have a problem?” she said coolly. She had a paring knife in her pocket, taken from the silverware drawer. “Maybe,” the guy had answered. He looked at her as if he expected something to happen, so she got out at a red light and walked the rest of the way. She found the tattoo shop. Patrons were supposed to be eighteen, but Elv looked old enough, as if she knew what she wanted, so no one asked for ID. She had two black stars tattooed above each shoulder, in the place where her wings would be. She found the pain soothing in a strange way, a gateway out of her body, into Arnelle. There was an army gathering there: the Queen had posted them at the doorway. Anyone residing in the human world was suspect, including Elv. Prove yourself, one of the guards said to her. She was wearing a black dress. Black ballet shoes. She could smell jasmine. The tattoo artist was a bit leery now that her shirt was off. He said, “This might hurt.” As if she cared about that. He covered the tattoos with white bandages. “There might be some blood seeping through,” he told her. As if that mattered.

She waited for the bus, then, once she was home, she walked along Main Street, her shoulder blades burning. She felt free in the dark. When she got to Nightingale Lane, she walked more slowly. She stationed herself across from her house and watched the family inside. Her mother and Meg and Claire and their cousin Mary Fox and Mary’s mother, Elise, were all having dinner together. Elv wished she was inside with them, pouring the spaghetti into a colander, cutting up cucumbers, setting the table. She wished she was laughing at Mary’s stories of how stupid her classmates were. But she was beside a hedge at the end of Nightingale Lane, and she could barely understand what they were saying, even though the windows were open and their laughter filtered outside.

She heard a rustling. She thought there might be a demon there. She put her hand on the knife in her pocket, but when she turned she spied a boy from school creeping out of the Wein-steins’ yard. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans. He saw Elv, hesitated, then came over. His name was Justin Levy and he was madly in love with her.

“Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her beneath the hedge.

“Robbing the Weinsteins?” Elv asked.

Justin pulled two vials of pills from his pockets. “OxyContin. Mr. Weinstein has cancer.”

He took one of the pills and offered Elv one. She swallowed it, then they lay back in the grass. Elv didn’t feel a thing. She just felt quiet. She felt like she could stay under the hedge forever. Her tattoos didn’t even sting.

“What kind of cancer?” she said.

“Pancreatic. My dad works with him. My dad said he doesn’t have a chance. They’re over at my house, having dinner, not that Mr. Weinstein can eat much.”

“How’d you get in and out of the house? I thought they had a dog.”

“I brought a hot dog with me,” Justin Levy said.

Elv laughed. “I’ll bet you did.”

“He’s a nice dog.”

The Weinsteins had an old basset hound named Pretzel that woofed when anyone passed by. But if you bent down and patted his head, he instantly became your best friend. For some reason Elv felt like crying when she thought about the Weinsteins’ dog. Justin Levy must have known she was upset. He took her hand. When she glared at him, he let go. “Just so you know, I’m not interested in you,” Elv told him. “I’m never going to be your girlfriend.”

“Okay.” Justin Levy was stoned and taken aback. He’d never in his wildest dreams imagined that she would be. Every guy he knew was terrified of her and wanted to fuck her. He was happy just to lie beside her in the grass.

Elv sat up and took off her blouse. Justin Levy watched her, stunned. When she told him to remove the bandages on her shoulders, he did. There was hardly any blood, and underneath, the black stars.

“You know what it means?” Elv asked him.

“That you’re beautiful?” Justin ventured.

Elv laughed. That was too funny. People saw with their eyes and nothing else. The day she met a man who knew her for who she was would be the day she would be rescued from this pathetic human world. “That I’m invisible,” she said. There, she said to the Queen of Arnelle. There’s your proof.

AT NIGHT, AFTER Meg was asleep, Claire got into bed with Elv to hear stories about Paris. She heard about the different shades of green the river could be, about the way the rain had fallen in sheets. Claire asked for the black painting, but Elv said she couldn’t remember what she had done with it. It was ugly, any-how. When Claire wanted to know about the man Meg had told her about, Elv said he was nothing to her.

“That Meg,” she said. “What a bigmouth. She couldn’t keep a secret if you paid her.”

“Tell me something,” Claire begged. “Tell me a secret.”

“You have to swear you’ll never tell.”

“You know I won’t.”

Elv whispered to Claire that on the night she found the cat, stuffed and mewling in a burlap bag, thrown into the water like so much garbage, there had actually been two bags. She hadn’t told Meg or their ama. Elv hadn’t been able to reach the second kitten. That haunted her. She couldn’t let it go.

“You saved one,” Claire said.

“But not the other.”

She showed Claire the black stars on her shoulders. Claire was hushed and impressed. “Mom will kill you,” she said admiringly.

“She’ll never know.” Their mother was an optimist, which in Elv’s opinion meant she was a fool. “She never knows anything.”

They were whispering. They could hear the hawthorn tree and Meg’s sleepy breathing and the wind outside. Claire had a lump in her throat. They had secrets they couldn’t say aloud. “Where did he take you?” she asked. She had wanted to ask this question for four years. It had taken that long for the words to come out. Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn’t unknow. Elv had been missing for an entire day. Claire had run back and waited at the stop sign. She’d stayed there until it grew dark, until the fireflies appeared in the woods. Until Elv came back. She wouldn’t tell her then, and she wouldn’t tell now.

“Go to sleep, Gigi,” Elv said. “Close your eyes.”

IN THE FIRST week of June, there was an unexpected heat wave, with temperatures reaching into the nineties. It was the kind of weather in which people did stupid things, such as throwing themselves off a dock into the cool water, only to break their necks on the rocks. Elderly residents were warned not to go outside. Birds died in their nests. On impulse, Claire decided to have her hair cut short. She usually was a follower and she thrilled herself with her own fierce determination to make a change. She was broiling in her casts, nearly fainting with the heat. Her scalp itched and there was no way for her to scratch it. Annie took her to the hair salon on Main Street, where a young woman named Denise fastened a smock around her shoulders.

“Are you sure? You have such beautiful hair. It seems a shame.”

Claire was sure. Denise cut her mane of heavy black hair to just below her chin. They would donate what had been shorn to Locks of Love and a wig would be made for a cancer patient. Claire loved her hair short—it was so much cooler—but when her sisters saw her they were horrified. The older girls were at home watching an old black-and-white movie about a werewolf. They had been captivated by the poor werewolf’s plight, enough so that they actually didn’t argue the way they usually did. When they saw Claire’s haircut, each let out a shriek. Elv said, “Who did that to you? I’ll bet it was Mom’s idea.” Meg, near tears, cried, “Oh, Claire. Now we don’t look alike.”

Meg’s own long black hair was braided and clipped atop her head. She didn’t like anything to change. She favored long, involved books like Great Expectations, wherein the villains turned out to be heroes and there was always someone who would save the day just when it seemed all had been lost.

“Now we’ll never look alike,” Meg said sadly.

“There’s only one way to do it,” Elv advised, once their mother had left the room. “If that’s what you want,” she said to Meg. “But you’re probably all talk.”

Meg tilted her chin. She knew her sisters had secrets. She could hear them whispering in bed. “You think so?” she said. “I’ll go first. Then we’ll see if you have the nerve.”

They went upstairs and sat on the floor. Elv lit a black candle she had brought home from Paris. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt she’d found at a shop on the Rue de Tournon. It had been hideously expensive, but she’d wanted it so. She slipped it into her purse when the shop owner wasn’t looking. You could see right through the fabric but Elv didn’t care. She went to get the scissors and a towel to drape around Meg’s shoulders. Then she locked the bedroom door.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she pressed. “A thousand percent sure? This isn’t something you can change your mind about later.”

Meg nodded. She was very calm. She hadn’t had her hair cut since she was ten years old. She thought of it as her only good feature. She was just as beautiful as Elv, but she didn’t realize it. Now she unplaited her hair. Perhaps she was even more beautiful than her sister when she wore her hair down.

Claire sat on the edge of Meg’s bed. She felt guilty and responsible. “I only cut mine because I’m so hot in my casts and I can’t braid my own hair. I can’t even wash it. Maybe you shouldn’t, Meg. You don’t have to.”

It was a surprise when Meg was suddenly decisive, as she was now. They had always looked alike and that was what she wanted. She firmly ignored Claire’s protests.

“There’s no other way. Cut it.”

Elv unclasped Meg’s braid and began to cut. It took a while because the scissors were old and hadn’t been sharpened. She handed Meg the braid when she finally managed to saw through. She kept cutting after that, to even out the edges. Hair continued to fall on the towel and the wooden floorboards.

“You can donate it to Locks of Love,” Claire suggested. “For a sick child.”

“Or you can burn it and put a hex on someone,” Elv recommended as she clipped some more. She was concentrating hard. She’d never cut someone’s hair before. At last, Meg went to look in the mirror. Elv had cut her hair very short. Too short. The ends were raggedy from the dull scissors. She looked like a boy.

“It just has to grow out a little,” Claire said. “Right?”

“I need a break,” Elv said. Once things were changed you couldn’t go back. She knew that. Now Meg would know it too. She went out through the window. The leaves outside their window were rattling. Claire could hear her climbing down the hawthorn tree. Meg was still looking at herself in the mirror. She seemed in shock. “She did this on purpose.” Meg’s face was blotchy, as though she might cry. She ran a hand through her hair. It stuck straight up. “She’s not going to cut hers.”

“Of course she will,” Claire assured Meg. “We always look the same.”

They waited, but Elv didn’t return. She didn’t come home until it was almost morning, climbing in through the window, exhausted. She’d spent the night in Justin Levy’s bedroom. She’d made him sleep on the floor. He did whatever she told him, which was pathetic, really. They smoked weed, which didn’t affect her in the least, and then she told him to get on the floor. She dreamed of black stars, black water, a black sun in the center of the sky. When the other girls woke up, Elv was finally asleep in her own bed, her long hair knotted, still in her clothes, as if she’d been out dancing in Arnelle all night long.

Annie took Meg to the salon. Denise did the best she could, but Meg’s hair wound up being even shorter. She looked like an Olympic swimmer wearing a boy’s haircut. When they got back home, she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. Annie and Claire waited in the kitchen. They could hear her quietly sobbing.

“What made her do that to herself?” Annie wondered.

It was ninety-nine degrees, utterly sweltering, and the meteo-rologists were predicting triple digits and thunderstorms. True summer wasn’t even here and it was already unbearable. Annie began phoning around to see if she could have central air-conditioning put in. There were fans set up all over the house. Some folks were paying double for air conditioners being sold out of the back of vans on Northern Boulevard.

Annie felt panic-stricken. Three teenaged girls took up a lot of space in a house. They grumbled and were moody; they kept secrets and cried for no apparent reason. They were moving further away from her. She could not remember the last time they’d all sat down for a meal together, had a discussion, watched a movie. Claire was trying to get Meg to come out of the bathroom, speaking that awful Arnish. The panic spread into Annie’s chest. She called around for air conditioners, but there were no air conditioners to be had on all of Long Island. Everyone was hot and dissatisfied and out of sorts. If she wanted an air conditoner she’d have to buy it from one of the scam artists, who were over-charging like mad, and she wasn’t about to do that.

“It’s a good thing we cut our hair,” Claire said when Meg finally emerged from the bathroom, her face splotchy, eyes red.

Claire was getting her casts off at the end of the week. Maybe she’d be happy then. Maybe everything would finally be set right, the way it used to be when she didn’t always feel she had to choose between her sisters. “At least we’ll be cool during the heat wave,” she said to Meg. “And you-know-who won’t be.”

Their mother was still busy on the phone in her search for an air conditioner. Meg leaned in close. She didn’t want Annie to overhear. She didn’t even want it to be true, but it was, and it was her duty to let Claire know.

“Elv isn’t who you think she is,” Meg said in a strange, small voice. “Watch out for her.”

ON THE DAY Claire had her casts taken off, the heat finally broke. It was wonderful and odd to suddenly have her arms back. She felt spidery and ill at ease. She was awkward doing the simplest tasks—pouring a glass of orange juice, brushing her teeth. She’d cut her hair, and now Meg and Elv weren’t speaking. When they passed each other in the hall, they looked away, as if a shadow was passing by, one they needn’t recognize. School would soon be over. Next year everything would be better. They would all go to Paris in the spring; it would be the three of them, the way it was supposed to be. In every fairy tale there were always three sisters: the eldest was brave, the middle one was trustworthy, and the youngest had the biggest heart of all. Elv had hung a map of Arnelle in their closet. Sometimes Claire sat in the closet with a flashlight and tried to memorize it. The rose gardens, the thorn-bushes, the huts made of stone and straw, the paths to the castle, the lake where the water was so deep no one could ever reach the bottom, the meadow where the horse that had been rescued wandered freely, without a saddle or reins.

AS THE SCHOOL term neared its end, Annie was called in to the principal’s office. Elv was barely passing her classes. She fell asleep in Latin. She talked back to teachers. Annie could see her through the glass door, out in the waiting room. Just last week Elv had refused to take the SATs. She didn’t want to go to college. She wanted something different. Maybe she’d live in Paris and work for Madame Cohen and sit in cafés in the evening and walk along the river.

The principal called Elv into his office when he and Annie were done with their meeting. “Did you have anything you wanted to say?”

“Ni hamplig, suit ne henaj.” Elv looked at the floor. You’re a pig and a dog, she had told him. A little smile played around her lips.

“I think you see what I’m talking about,” the principal remarked to Annie.

“Can’t you just go along with things and be polite?” Annie said as they walked out to the car.

“Is that what you want? For me to be polite?” Elv yanked the door open and folded herself into the passenger seat. She flipped down the visor so she could look into the mirror as she applied green eyeliner. In Arnelle, members of the royal family all had green eyes. She hadn’t had the heart to tell Claire that she was not included in the top echelon, although she would have loved to let Meg know. Meg who was so perfect, who didn’t know the first thing about real life.

“Are you upset about something?” Annie said. “You can talk to me. You used to talk to me.”

Elv laughed. “A hundred years ago.” In Arnelle, a hundred years went by in an instant. Time was transparent. You could see right through it. Look through the glass, the Queen had told her. See how simple it is to walk back in time?

Elv leaned forward to get a better look in the mirror. As she did, her sleeveless T-shirt pulled back. You could see her flesh through the fabric. Annie saw a flash of one of the black stars.

“What is that?” she asked. She had a tumbling feeling. She’d been shy as a girl and had felt a sort of desperation whenever she’d had to speak in public. She felt a wave of desperation now.

Elv gazed at her shoulder and pulled her shirt over her skin. “I’ve had it for a long time,” she said coolly. “You just never noticed.”

“Elv. Please. Talk to me.”

“I’m not going to be polite, if that’s what you want to talk about. You can forget about that. “ Elv had a strange feeling in her throat. If she wasn’t careful, she might say something. She turned to look out the window. Everything looked the same in North Point Harbor, everything was green. It was a relief to be invisible, to be marked by stars. She didn’t have to listen to another word her mother said, even if she begged Elv to talk to her, even if she was crying.

“Can we just go?” Elv said.

Her mother started the car.

MEG WAS THE one who found the marijuana in the closet. It was in a shoebox, along with matches and some rolling papers. She pulled Claire inside and they sat there under the green map of Arnelle in the dark. Meg flipped on a flashlight. Claire had grown and was now as tall as her sisters. If only there hadn’t been that stupid disaster with the haircuts, people would have thought they were triplets. They would have had great fun in school, tricking teachers and classmates alike.

“It probably belongs to Justin Levy,” Claire said. “She spends a lot of time with him.”

Meg grimaced. “I doubt that. Justin’s not her friend. He’s more like her slave. Everyone knows she’s just using him.”

Justin had his own car and would drive Elv anywhere she wanted to go. She didn’t even walk to school with her sisters anymore.

Claire held the baggie up to her nose. “It smells like feet,” she said.

“The question is—do we tell Mom?”

“No,” Claire said. “Definitely not.”

“We have to say something,” Meg insisted.

“Why?”

“If you keep someone’s secret, you’re just as guilty as they are. You’re an accomplice.”

Claire felt hot in the closet. There really wasn’t any air.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll talk to Elv tonight.”

ELV DIDN’T COME home for dinner. Annie and Claire and Meg had pizza and a salad. The sisters exchanged a glance when Annie asked if they knew where Elv was. They shrugged and said they had no idea.

“Is that Justin Levy her boyfriend?” Annie wanted to know.

“Hardly,” Meg said. “He’s just madly in love with her.”

“Meg!” Claire said.

“Well, everyone knows he is. He spray-painted that thing on the wall.”

“What wall?” Annie said.

He had spray-painted I would tear out my heart for you on the side of the old Whaling Museum in town. Everybody was talking about it.

“The salad’s good,” Claire said.

“I would tear out my heart for you,” Meg said.

“That’s about Elv?” Annie had noticed the shaky writing, the yellow spray-painted declaration of love.

“Yep,” Meg said.

“We assume, but we don’t know,” Claire said. She gave Meg a look. “Justin Levy has emotional problems.”

“Major ones,” Meg agreed.

“For all we know, that graffiti could be about Mary Fox,” Claire ventured.

They all laughed.

“I would tear out my cerebellum for you,” Meg joked.

“I would conjugate Latin for you,” Claire piped in.

“I would love you all the days of my life,” Annie said to her daughters, glad that she wasn’t Justin Levy’s mother.

THEY WERE UPSTAIRS doing their homework when Elv finally came home. She smelled like burning leaves. “Hard at work?” she said. She picked up one of Meg’s books—The Scarlet Letter—and thumbed through. “Who would name someone Hester?”

Meg reached under her bed and brought out the shoebox.

“Well, well,” Elv said when she saw it. She put down the book. “Look what the little detective found.”

“We don’t want you to get in trouble,” Claire told her.

“Trouble with a capital T?” Elv sat down on Claire’s bed. She was sitting on Claire’s feet, but Claire didn’t complain. “I wish you wouldn’t look through my personal belongings,” she said to Meg. “Just because you’re jealous.”