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thinking, Jayne glanced at Chris Hammond, standing at the door observing the chaos. He nodded once, then gave another of those shouts, which again created instant silence. With a hand motion, he turned the room back over to her.
    She cleared her throat. “Okay. If you can all settle down, get your bed made, such as it is, and sit on it, I will make hot chocolate for everybody. But you have to be calm. Cooking on the fire isn’t easy.”
    “You can cook on the fire?” Beth looked skeptical.
    “As long as people aren’t wrestling and throwing things nearby.”
    “Then what?” Taryn always managed to ask the hardest questions.
    Yolanda threw her pillow on the floor. “Yeah, how are we gonna get to sleep without TV or music?”
    “As I said, there are books—” Jayne began.
    “Or,” Chris Hammond offered, “I could tell you a story.”
     
    “A STORY?” Yolanda, the tall girl with a boyish haircut and espresso skin, glared at him. “You think we look like little kids?”
    Selena from L.A. snorted. “I hate those stupid fairy tales.”
    But the blonde, Sarah, asked, “What kind of story?”
    He settled into the chair near the fire. “It’s not a fairy tale, by any means. Not even fiction. This is a true story.”
    “About who?”
    He lifted his eyebrow. “What about Ms. Thomas’s instructions?” In the scurry to get their bedding straightened out, the girls didn’t notice his sarcastic emphasis on her name.
    The headmistress did, but chose to ignore him as she carried a stockpot of milk to the fireplace and set it on a three-legged iron stand above a small pile of coals she’d raked forward, out of the blaze.
    Then she sat on the hearth, too, legs curled underneath her, to stir the milk as it heated. Gradually, the girls quieted down on top of their blankets and turned their attention back to Chris.
    “So?” Monique, the troublemaker from dinner, glared at him with a skeptical curl to her lips. “What’s this story about?”
    “A boy,” Chris Hammond told them. “And a girl.”
    A raspberry sound effect greeted his announcement. “Hansel and Gretel?” That was one of the quieter girls whose name he didn’t know, a redhead with green eyes.
    “I don’t like fairy tales.” Selena began rubbing lotion into her hands and arms.
    “Are they vampires?” The one with pigtails clutched a pink stuffed rabbit. “I like vampire stories.”
    “No, not vampires.” He rolled his eyes. “And not zombies, either. Or demons or whatever other unnatural, unreal creatures you pretend stalk the earth.” Bloodsucking sounded tame compared to some of the horrors he’d seen humans perpetrate on their own kind. “Just a boy and a girl.”
    “So what’s the big deal?”
    He hadn’t expected this to be such a hard sell. “Well, theygrew up together. Had lots of adventures. Fell in love.” More derisive sound effects. “Then he killed her.”
    The girls gasped. Chris glanced at the headmistress, saw her sitting upright, motionless, staring at him. Good. He’d gotten her attention.
    The redhead broke the silence. “Why’d he do that? How?”
    “That’s part of the story. If you want to hear it, you have to settle down.”
    Mumbling and grumbling ensued, as the seven girls tucked and rolled themselves into their makeshift beds on the plush Persian carpet near the fire. Chris shifted a little in his chair, trying to get comfortable; between bruises and scrapes and a pulled shoulder, every inch of his body hurt in one way or another. He could hardly wait to lie down, even on a bare floor.
    First, though, he would tell his story. Their story. The Juliet he knew couldn’t hold out against the truth spoken aloud. This Jayne mask she was wearing would crack at some point as she relived their time together. Then he would corner her, in front of seven witnesses, if necessary, and get the answers he needed.
    “So,” he began, “they met the first time when they were thirteen years old.”
    The pink rabbit