The Night Sister

She held her breath and pushed the door open.

The sight of the room hit her square in the chest. There were bloodstains on this floor, too, though not nearly as much as in the hall. Its floor had been covered in the same ugly carpet that was in the hall back when Amy lived there, but at some point they’d torn it up and painted the wide pine boards white to make the room feel bigger and brighter. Lou had Amy’s old twin bed, with its battered oak headboard. Were those even the remnants of Amy’s Scratch ’N Sniff stickers and glow-in-the-dark stars? Piper looked at the dresser and nightstand, all in the same place, as if bolted down. And were those faint traces of purple paint at the edges of the wall that had been covered over with rose-petal pink?

The room was neat. No clothes strewn on the floor, no toys and books and candy wrappers scattered everywhere. There was a shaggy bright-pink rug by the bed, and a glass of water on the nightstand. The mattress was bare except for a pile of stuffed animals mounded in its center.

And there, on the desk, an old typewriter.

Could it be?

Piper stepped forward to it and ran her fingers over the machine: a Royal Quiet De Luxe.

Beside it sat a stack of plain white paper.

Without even thinking, Piper reached for a piece, rolled it into the machine, and put her fingers over the keys. It amazed her, how effortless it was, how satisfying to give each key a hard tap and hear the gentle thwap of the letter striking the ribbon and paper. The typewriter had been kept cleaned and oiled, and the ribbon was fresh. Her fingers found the sturdy round keys: punch, punch, punch, bang, bang, bang.

Amy, Amy, Amy, she typed, thinking that perhaps the old Royal might act as a sort of Ouija Board and Amy could type out a message to her, as they’d once believed Sylvie had done.

Are you there, Amy?



Nothing. This was pure foolishness. She wasn’t a twelve-year-old girl anymore.

Still, she typed one more line:

I’m sorry



And she was sorry. Sorry for what had happened to Amy and her family. Sorry that she hadn’t made more of an effort. Amy had pushed her away at the end of that summer, and Piper hadn’t put up a fight; she’d just let her go and tried to pretend it didn’t matter at all. She was sorry that she had moved away and done her best to forget Amy and the tower and everything that had happened that long-ago summer; to put it all in a box at the back of her mind, like packing away outgrown childhood toys. Yet somehow the very act of trying to forget had made all the memories stronger, had turned Amy into an archetype that she compared everyone else with. And, somehow, no one ever measured up.

Wasn’t it true that, after Amy cut her out of her life that summer, Piper had always kept herself at a distance from people, never let herself believe any friend or lover would stick around? Sitting at the desk in Amy’s old bedroom, Piper understood suddenly that somewhere tucked deep inside her was a broken twelve-year-old girl reeling and pissed off because her best friend had dumped her. Piper took in a ragged breath. If she let herself think of all the ways this had held her back over the years, of all the relationships she’d ended because she was sure it was only a matter of time until she was abandoned, she didn’t know if she’d be able to bear it.

Yanking the paper out of the typewriter, she crumpled it up and shoved it into her purse, which she left on the desk as she went to work. She found a flowered duffel bag in Lou’s closet and quickly loaded it with underwear, socks, T-shirts, shorts, and jeans. Everything was pink and purple and covered with hearts, peace signs, glittering sequins, or a mix of all three. She threw in a pair of sparkly silver sneakers and some leopard-print flip-flops.