“Does it scare you?” I realize we’re the last two people standing at the water’s edge—everyone else has gone back up to the safety of the bonfire, away from the tempting harbor—but his hand is still in mine, keeping me rooted to shore.
“Yes,” I admit, the word sending a shiver down to my tailbone. “I usually don’t come to the Swan party. I stay home and lock myself in my room.” When my dad was still alive, he would stay up all night sitting in a chair beside the front door to be sure I didn’t get drawn from my room—in case the urge to swim out into the sea was too great for me to resist. And now that he’s gone, I sleep with headphones on and a pillow over my head each night until the singing finally stops.
I believe that I’m stronger than most girls—that I’m not so easily fooled by the sisters’ ethereal voices. My mother used to say that we are like the Swan sisters—she and I. Misunderstood. Different. Outcasts living alone on the island, reading fortunes in the cosmos of tea leaves. But I wonder if it’s even possible to be normal in a place like Sparrow. Perhaps we all have some oddity, some strangeness we keep hidden along our edges, things we see that we can’t explain, things we wish for, things we run from.
“Some girls want to be taken,” I say in a near whisper, because it’s hard for me to imagine wanting something like that. “Like it’s a badge of honor. Others claim that they’ve been taken in summers past, but there’s no way to prove it. Most likely they just want the attention.”
The Swan sisters have always stolen the bodies of girls my age—the same age the sisters were when they died. As if they desire to relive that moment in time, even if just briefly.
Bo blows out a breath then turns and looks back up at the bonfire, where the party has resumed in full upheaval. The goal of tonight is to stay awake until sunrise, to mark the start of summer, and for all the girls to survive without being inhabited by a Swan sister. But I sense Bo’s hesitation—that maybe he’s had enough.
“I think I’ll head back to my camp and find a new place to sleep.” He releases my hand, and I rub my palms together, feeling the residual warmth. A spire of unnerving heat coils up the center of my chest into my rib cage.
“Are you still looking for work?” I ask.
His lips press flat, as if he’s contemplating the next few words, sifting them around in his mouth. “You were right about no one wanting to hire an outsider.”
“Well, maybe I was wrong about not needing any help.” I let out a breath of air. Maybe it’s because he’s an outsider like my dad, because I know this town can be cruel and unaccepting. Maybe I know he won’t last long without someone to keep him safely away from the harbor once all three sisters have found bodies and begin their revenge on the town. Or maybe it’s because it would also be a relief to have some help with the lighthouse. I know almost nothing about him, but it feels as if he’s always been here. And it might be nice having someone else on the island, someone who I can talk to—someone who isn’t fading into a slow, numbing madness. Living with my mom is like living with a shadow. “We can’t pay you much, but it’s a free place to stay and free meals.”
Dad has never officially been declared deceased, so there’s never been a life insurance check waiting for us in the mailbox. And shortly after he vanished, Mom stopped reading tea leaves, so the money stopped coming in. Thankfully, Dad had some savings. Enough that we’ve been able to survive on it these last three years—and it will probably get us through another two before we’ll need to find an alternative source of income.
Bo scratches at the back of his neck, turning his head slightly away. I know he doesn’t have any other options, but still he’s considering it.
“All right. No guarantees on how long I’ll stay.”
“Deal.”
*
I grab my shoes from beside the fire and find Rose talking to Heath Belzer. “I’m going home,” I tell her, and she reaches out for my arm.
“No,” she says in an exaggerated slur. “You can’t.”
“If you want to come with me, I’ll walk you home,” I say. She lives only four blocks from here, but far enough in the dark that I don’t want her doing it alone. And drunk.
“I can walk her,” Heath offers, and I look up at the soft, agreeable features of his face. Loose grin, dark eyes, reddish-brown hair that’s always spilling across his forehead so he’s constantly brushing it back out of the way. He’s cute, likable, even if the curves of his face have that mildly dopey look. Heath Belzer is one of the good ones. He has four older sisters who’ve all graduated and moved away from Sparrow, but his whole life he’s been known as Baby Heath, the kid who was beaten up by girls his entire childhood. And I once saw him save a blue jay that got trapped in the science lab at school by spending his entire lunch period trying to catch it then finally setting it free through an open window.
“You won’t ditch her?” I ask Heath.
“I’ll make sure she gets home,” he says, looking me square in the eyes. “I promise.”
“If anything happens to her—” I warn.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Rose mumbles, squeezing my hand and pulling me into a hug. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she whispers with whiskey-stained breath into my ear.
“All right. And no swimming.”
“No swimming!” she repeats loudly, lifting her beer into the air, and a chorus of echoes pass through the crowd as everyone begins shouting in unison, “No swimming!??” I can hear the chant all the way down the beach as Bo and I walk toward the bluff to retrieve his backpack, intermixing with the singing of distant voices blowing in with the rising tide.
*
Otis and Olga are waiting on the dock when I steer the skiff slowly up alongside it and kill the engine. We motored across the harbor in the dark, without even a flashlight to mark our path through the wreckage, the inviting whispers of the Swan sisters sliding languidly over the water so that it felt like we were being swallowed by their song.
I secure the ropes to the dock then bend down to stroke each cat’s slender back, both of them slightly damp and probably unhappy that I’m returning so late. “Did you wait all night?” I whisper down to them then lift my head to see Bo stepping onto the dock, carrying his backpack in one hand. He cranes his head up, looking across the island to the lighthouse. The beacon of light illuminates us briefly before continuing its clockwise cycle out over the Pacific.
In the dark, Lumiere Island feels eerie and macabre. A place of ghosts and mossy hollows, where long-dead sailors surely haunt the reeds and wind-scoured trees. But it’s not the island you should fear—it’s the waters surrounding it.