The Night Sister

Piper knocked on Amy’s front door now, with Margot beside her. Her shin stung and throbbed from yesterday. When she’d pulled back the gauze this morning, it was red and puffy. Piper had smeared on some bacitracin and covered it in Band-Aids. She’d managed to hide the injury from her mom, quickly throwing on a pair of sweatpants before her mom got home from work. If Mom saw it, she’d freak and might forbid Piper and Margot to go to the motel. She already didn’t really approve of Amy and her family and worried that the old motel might be dangerous. Piper didn’t need to give her proof.

“I really don’t like you girls spending all your time over there,” Mom had told them. “There are other kids your age around, you know. What about that boy who lives in C Building? He seems nice. Maybe you should spend some time with him.”

“Jason Hawke?” Piper snorted. “Mom, please. He’s a dweeb.”

“He is not,” Margot argued. “He’s got this cool telescope, and star maps that glow in the dark.”

Piper rolled her eyes dramatically. “I rest my case. Total dweeb.”

Piper knocked on Amy’s front door again, louder this time. Grandma Charlotte had a hard time hearing. And if Amy had the music on upstairs, she wouldn’t hear, either.

“Are we going to start searching all the rooms today? Or that old trailer?” Margot chirped.

“Don’t know,” Piper said. “We’ll see what Amy’s got planned.”

“I’ve got all kinds of awesome stuff planned, but it would help if you two would get your butts over here a little earlier!”

Amy had sneaked up behind them. She was rocking back on her heels, practically dancing. She had on a Joan Jett T-shirt and the same ripped cut-offs she’d worn yesterday.

“I’ve been waiting for you for hours!” she said.

“Sorry,” Piper said. “Mom went into work late, and she wanted to do this family-breakfast thing, and then we had to call our dad.”

Last year, their dad moved to Texas with his new wife, Trish. Piper and Margot only saw him for one week in the summer and one week in the winter. Piper didn’t mind. She really hated Trish, who had been the family’s dental hygienist. It made her want to gag, thinking about how this woman had once had her gloved hands inside her mouth; had scraped and polished and forced floss between Piper’s teeth. She’d had Piper chew the red tablets that showed, like bloodstains, the places she’d missed when she brushed.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Amy said. She had very little patience for anything that wasn’t directly connected to her. “Come on, let’s go to my room. I want to show you something.”

Amy slipped between Piper and Margot and yanked open the front door.

“Who’s there?” Amy’s grandma called out from the kitchen.

“Just me, Grandma.”

“Oh, Sylvie! You startled me.”

“It’s Amy, Gram,” Amy called back. “Still just Amy.”

The staircase was opposite the front door. Amy started up the wide, carpeted steps, the other girls right behind her. She took a right at the top of the stairs and went to her bedroom, at the end of the hall. “Come on, come on—wait till you see what I found! You guys are gonna flip!”

Amy’s room had belonged to her mother and Sylvie once upon a time, and still held some relics from those days—the twin bed and dark headboard with hazy old shellac, two banged-up wooden dressers her mom and Sylvie had used, and a matching bedside table. But there were differences: the boom box dominating the bedside table; the posters of Guns N’ Roses and Annie Lennox; the vivid purple that Amy had painted the walls and ceiling. There were plastic beaded curtains hanging in the window, and when the sun hit them, prisms of color shot out and danced around the room.

Piper loved being in Amy’s room. It was like being let into a magician’s secret chamber—you never knew what you’d find, what Amy might do next.

“Look at this,” Amy said. She was over at her desk. Piper saw that the old typewriter from the attic was sitting on top of it, a piece of paper fed into the machine. She moved closer and saw the words Amy had been typing:

Sylvie, Sylvia Slater, Miss Sylvia Slater, Where did you go, Miss Sylvia Slater?????



The hypnosis book was there, too, on a pad of paper, with a bookmark stuck inside. Amy had started reading it and taking notes.