On the day our story truly starts—for surely none of that seemed like the beginning! Surely all of that was background, was explanation and justification for what’s to come, as unavoidably as thunder follows lightning—it was raining. No: not raining. It was pouring, bucketing water from the sky like an incipient flood. Jacqueline and Jillian sat in their room, on their respective beds, and the room was so full of anger and of silence that it screamed.
Jacqueline was reading a book about fashionable girls having fashionable adventures at a fashionable school, and she thought that she couldn’t possibly have been more bored. She occasionally cast narrow-eyed glances at the window, glaring at the rain. If the sky had been clear, she could have walked down the street to her friend Brooke’s house. They could have painted each other’s nails and talked about boys, a topic that Jacqueline found alternately fascinating and dull as dishwater, but which Brooke always approached with the same unflagging enthusiasm. It would have been something.
Jillian, who had been intending to spend the day at soccer practice, sat on the floor next to her bed and moped so vigorously that it was like a gray cloud spreading across her side of the room. She couldn’t go downstairs to watch television—no TV before four o’clock, not even on weekends, not even on rainy days—and she didn’t have any books to read that she hadn’t read five times already. She’d tried taking a look at one of Jacqueline’s fashionable girl books, and had quickly found herself baffled at the number of ways the author found to describe everyone’s hair. Maybe some things were worse than boredom after all.
When Jillian sighed for the fifth time in fifteen minutes, Jacqueline lowered her book and glowered at her across the room. “What is it?” she demanded.
“I’m bored,” said Jillian mournfully.
“Read a book.”
“I don’t have any books I haven’t read already.”
“Read one of my books.”
“I don’t like your books.”
“Go watch television.”
“I’m not allowed for another hour.”
“Play with your Lego.”
“I don’t feel like it.” Jillian sighed heavily, letting her head loll backward until it was resting against the edge of the bed. “I’m bored. I’m very very bored.”
“You shouldn’t say ‘very’ so much,” said Jacqueline, parroting their mother. “It’s a nonsense word. You don’t need it.”
“But it’s true. I’m very very very bored.”
Jacqueline hesitated. Sometimes the right thing to do with Jillian was wait her out: she would get distracted by something and peace would resume. Other times, the only way to handle her was to provide her with something to do. If something wasn’t provided, she would find something, and it would usually be loud, and messy, and destructive.
“What do you want to do?” she asked finally.
Jillian gave her a sidelong, hopeful look. The days when her sister would willingly spend hours playing with her were long gone, as lost as the baseball cap she’d worn when she went to ride the carnival Scrambler with her father the summer before. The wind had taken the cap, and time had taken her sister’s willingness to play hide-and-seek, or make-believe, or anything else their mother said was untidy.
“We could go play in the attic,” she said finally, shyly, trying to keep herself from sounding like she hoped her sister would say yes. Hope only got you hurt. Hope was her least favorite thing, of all the things.
“There might be spiders,” said Jacqueline. She wrinkled her nose, less out of actual distaste and more out of the knowledge that she was supposed to find spiders distasteful. She really found them rather endearing. They were sleek and clean and elegant, and when their webs got messed up, they ripped them down and started over again. People could learn a lot from spiders.
“I’ll protect you, if there are,” said Jill.
“We could get in trouble.”
“I’ll give you my desserts for three days,” said Jill. Seeing that Jacqueline wasn’t sold, she added, “And I’ll do your dishes for a week.”
Jacqueline hated doing the dishes. Of all the chores they were sometimes assigned, that was the worst. The dishes were bad enough, but the dishwater … it was like making her own personal swamp and then playing in it. “Deal,” she said, and put her book primly aside, and slid off the bed.
Jillian managed not to clap in delight as she rose, grabbed her sister’s hand, and hauled her out of the room. It was time for an adventure.
She had no idea how big an adventure it was going to be.
*
THE WOLCOTT HOME WAS still far too large for the number of people it contained: large enough that Jacqueline and Jillian could each have had their own room, if they had wanted to, and never seen each other except for at the dinner table. They had started to worry, over the past year, that that would be their next birthday present: separate rooms, one pink and one blue, perfectly tailored to the children their parents wanted and not to the children that they had. They had been growing apart for years, following the paths that had been charted for them. Sometimes they hated each other and sometimes they loved each other, and both of them knew, deep down to the bone, that separate rooms would be the killing blow. They would always be twins. They would always be siblings. They might never be friends again.
Up the stairs they went, hand in hand, Jillian dragging Jacqueline, as had always been their way, Jacqueline making note of everything around them, ready to pull her sister back if danger loomed. The idea of being safe in their home had never occurred to either one of them. If they were seen—if their parents emerged from their room and saw the two of them moving through the house together—they would be separated, Jillian sent off to play in the puddles out back, Jacqueline returned to their room to read her books and sit quietly, not disturbing anything.
They were starting to feel, in a vague, unformed way, as if their parents were doing something wrong. Both of them knew kids who were the way they were supposed to be, girls who loved pretty dresses and sitting still, or who loved mud and shouting and kicking a ball. But they also knew girls who wore dresses while they terrorized the tetherball courts, and girls who wore sneakers and jeans and came to school with backpacks full of dolls in gowns of glittering gauze. They knew boys who liked to stay clean, or who liked to sit and color, or who joined the girls with the backpacks full of dolls in their corners. Other children were allowed to be mixed up, dirty and clean, noisy and polite, while they each had to be just one thing, no matter how hard it was, no matter how much they wanted to be something else.