The majority of her things were still in her room in New York. She hoped that her mom wouldn’t decide they had to leave the house in Briarwood—Heidi’s place was within walking distance and her school was only a couple of blocks away. But eight weeks in Washington was a long time, and she’d brought enough with her to turn her space into a livable bedroom. She didn’t want to think about the fact that this place may very well become her father’s permanent home. Yet if she was going to be bouncing back and forth between Briarwood and Pier Pointe, she had to make her bedroom comfortable. Her parents must have thought so, too, otherwise they would have argued that she had packed too many things for such a short trip.
With her pajamas cold and wet against her skin, she tore open one of the suitcases that had made it out of the truck the night before. It housed the clothes her mother had deemed vacation-appropriate. Suspiciously, most of those vacation-appropriate selections were the clothes her mother hated—black band T-shirts, tattered jeans. Vee imagined her closet back home was perfectly respectable now, not a shred of her dark period in sight. Pulling out a shirt and pants, she made her way to the bathroom next door.
The bathroom was hideous—pastel blue as far as the eye could see. But Vee had been sharing a bathroom with her parents since she could count to three. This bathroom may have been super-ugly, but at least it was hers. Stepping into what she’d already dubbed in her mind as the “blue room,” she shut the door behind her and peeled off her soaked pj pants, dropping them into the sink with a plop.
Uncle Mark yelled something downstairs—an exclamation of distress. Vee pictured him carrying a box that was either way too big or way too heavy. Her dad replied with a laugh, and she smiled to herself as she pulled her wet sleep shirt over her head and replaced it with a dry one. But her smile was short-lived.
She liked seeing her father happy, yet she couldn’t help but wonder just what he had to be happy about. Neither he nor her mom had said much about their separation, but she knew they were going to get a divorce. Bouncing between coasts would become the norm. She’d get to live in two separate houses—one where her dad would be lonely all by himself, and one where Kurt Murphy hung around like a plague. Unless her mom decided to move in with Kurt. Oh my God. She’d just about die if that happened. Living under Kurt’s roof would mean she had to respect him. How was she supposed to respect a guy who was responsible for tearing her parents’ relationship apart? For ruining her life?
And then there was her social life. Would her dad expect her to spend every summer in Pier Pointe? What would that do to her relationships back in New York? Or, worse, what would happen if she met someone she liked here and couldn’t see them for nine months out of the year?
She stared into the mirror of the medicine cabinet and narrowed her eyes. Maybe she was part of the problem. The brooding. The attitude that infuriated her mother. She had rebelled against her parents’ constant fighting by putting on a cold and callous disguise. She’d hidden herself away as a form of protection. But perhaps it was her very hiding that had brought Mr. and Mrs. Graham to this point. Now her mother loathed Vee’s dad so much that only an entire country separating them would do.
Vee turned her eyes away while a familiar pang of shame scratched at her brain. Tugging on a dry pair of undies before pulling on her jeans, she stared at her sopping top and pants lying in the sink. She hadn’t seen a clothes dryer in the house, and even if there was one, she wasn’t about to crawl into a creepy old basement during a rainstorm just to get her pj’s up to spec. Especially not after seeing that guy outside. His weird smile was still lingering at the back of her mind. That scream was still a worry. What if she went down to the basement only to find him waiting there for her? He had appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the orchard, so what was to keep him from appearing out of nowhere inside the house? Wringing her clothes out in the sink, she turned to the bare tension bar that ran across the top of the tub. If she hung them there, they’d be dry by bedtime. The basement, if there even was one in the house, would be altogether avoided.
As it turned out, she wasn’t tall enough to reach the rod; even when she went up on her tiptoes she couldn’t reach the bar. Pressing her left hand flush against the tiled wall, she carefully placed her bare foot along the edge of the ugly blue tub. It was a maneuver her mother would have screamed at her for even considering, let alone going through with.
What if you slip? You could break your neck!
And what if I did? she wondered. Would it be enough for you to forget everything that’s happened? Would it get you both to love each other again?
With her feet teetering along the bathtub’s ledge, Vee flopped her pajama pants over the bar. She tried to arrange them in a way that would lend to quick drying, but she stopped short of tossing her shirt over in the same way. She froze where she stood, poised like a tightrope walker, her gaze fixed on the reflection in the medicine cabinet’s mirror.
“What . . . ?” The word slipped past her lips, a mere whisper. Because while she could see the lip of the tub, the tension rod, and the blue tile that lined the wall behind her, she couldn’t see herself. Her brain immediately screamed vampire! She had yet to read Dracula, but Tim had. As soon as he discovered Vee had read the likes of Twilight, he’d schooled her in classic Nosferatu folklore. Real vampires could shape-shift. Their shadows could move independently from their owners. They didn’t spend eternity going to high school, didn’t sparkle, and, most importantly, they had no reflection because they had no soul.
She blinked hard, convinced that if she squeezed her eyes shut for long enough, her brain would trip back into what it was supposed to see. There she’d be, reflected back at herself.
But instead of seeing herself, she opened her eyes to a girl staring back at her—a person that most definitely was not Vee.
The girl in the reflection was pale, with hair blond like Vee’s, except stick straight rather than curly. She wore an old, stretched-out sweater, and she would have been pretty had she not rolled her eyes into the back of her head. Vee opened her mouth to yell, but she couldn’t catch her breath to produce any sound.
The girl moved.
Her mouth began to open.
Wide.
Wider.
So wide that it turned half her face into a gaping hole.