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sisters were supposed to stay big.
    Had she played hide-and-seek in the empty hallways of what was now my dorm? Had she drawn her looping flowers on the chalkboard of my math classroom? Early that night—the night they’d disappeared—a fire had started in the woods. The campus went to bed thinking it was under control, but it wasn’t, not really. At some point the wind blew the wrong way, and thewhole forest lit up like a Christmas tree. When they evacuated the school, when they came knocking at the door, the girls weren’t in their beds. They found no sign of forced entry, and Ms. Snow had heard nothing while she slept.
    They had wandered off into the woods, they said, two little girls stealing away from their beds just past midnight, to play some unknowable children’s game. They must have ended up in the woods, they said. They must have ended up in the heart of the fire. Those were the actions of normal children, they said, of difficult children, but Clare hadn’t been a difficult child.
    I wasn’t there, so I didn’t see the frantic search, the inevitable failure. I missed the heroism of the firefighters who put out the flames, who saved the school and the town from destruction. I missed the aftermath and the fruitless hunt for remains. My dad was there soon enough, of course. The heartbreak of it, the futility, was probably what killed him in the end. I was hundreds of miles away, and a child, so what did I know? But part of me had never believed that Clare would do something so stupid, so dangerous. Part of me would always hear a string of chords just beyond the range of sound, a leitmotif that ran through my life, whispering that the truth of what had happened that night was someone else’s secret.
    Later as I was dressing for bed Helen asked me if I wanted to “take a Saturday night” at her house.
    “I don’t know what that means,” I said, pulling on my yellow moose pajama bottoms.
    “The first weekend of the semester, a lot of the parents arestill around, so after Saturday classes, we can go off campus. The others are going out to dinner with their parents and then staying the night with my family at our lake house. You can come too. You can even come to dinner if you want.”
    “Um, I don’t know,” I said. As far as I was concerned, the jury was still out on Helen, and I didn’t want to end up the butt of some joke.
    “Some of the boys are going to come over later that night too. Alex Reese will be there.”
    “That guy from bio?” I could feel myself blush.
    “Should I sign you up, then?” she asked, flopping back down on her pillow. “I’ll fill out the request for you. You won’t have to lift a finger. And Noel and I will drive you. My parents got Harrison to let us keep a car on campus for emergencies. Special dispensation.”
    “Yeah, I guess,” I said, climbing under the covers. And then my body went rigid. “Wait, we have class on Saturdays?”
    “Did you even read the viewbook before you applied?”
    I shook my head and turned out the light.
    “Oh, Cally, my Cally. Welcome to hell.”

CHAPTER THREE
    SOMETIMES I HEARD THE OTHER kids complain about what a drag it was to be at boarding school and how they wished they were back home. I felt similarly, only I didn’t want to be back home. I just didn’t want to be at St. Bede’s.
    I could tell that other kids missed their families, but I didn’t miss my mom. I missed the idea of her, but not the actuality of her. I loved her, but she was gone most of the time, even when she was there. It wasn’t her fault. She had lost a child and a husband in the same year, and she had been left with nothing, unless you counted me, which I didn’t.
    St. Bede’s kind of sucked, but it wasn’t so bad, considering. Back home, I had a few guy friends, but school had been pretty awful. I was shy, and a little weird, and when I was younger, before I figured out I needed to do my own laundry, my clothes were sometimes dirty. Kids could tell