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I

When Alice wakes the day after the party, her first and only thought is this:

The world is far too fucking bright.

Sunlight splinters through the dorm’s cheap curtains, attacking the room with daggers of white.

Alice sits up, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

She groans, a feral, miserable sound, and slumps back down, shivering as her cheek hits the damp pillow.

Her wet hair must have soaked in overnight and even though the hair dried, the down-filled cushion didn’t, and is now a damp and lumpy block under her head.

Her skull is throbbing and her mouth is dry and she is unbearably hungover.

(The first time she ever got drunk, it was on a bottle of sherry Catty swiped from the pub, shared on the picnic bench out back, and it had gone down sweet and come up sour, a headache so fierce Alice could feel it behind her eyes, and this is ten times worse.)

It takes her a moment to remember where she is, another to remember where she was last night, a third to remember that she wasn’t alone. She rolls over, half hoping and half dreading that she’ll find the violet-haired girl curled up beside her in the bed, but it’s empty.

There’s no sign of Lizbeth, either, her bed still made, as if she hasn’t been back.

Alice presses her palms into her eye sockets and tries to think. There’s something there, a memory just out of reach, something between collapsing into bed and now, something just beyond the ache inside her skull, but she’s still grasping in the dark when she hears the sound.

A soft drumming, like fingers on a desk.

“ When I was a child / I got lost in the woods, ” sings an eerie voice, and it takes her a second to realize it’s just her phone’s alarm, the song she programmed coming from the shelf beside her bed.

Alice slams her hand down on the screen, killing the alarm, and that’s when she notices the purple Post-it Note tacked to the lampshade above.

Three words, written in a slanted cursive.

Goodbye, Alice.

xo Lottie

And even with the sickness rolling through her skin, she feels a wave of disappointment at the sorry little note. There’s no call me, no number, not even a see you round. Just Goodbye. So formal. So finite.

Alice squeezes her eyes shut again and the night before comes blinking back, like a lightbulb on the fritz before it steadies; fragments of music and rain and tangled hands, and heat, and if Alice didn’t feel like death, she’d probably play the whole thing over in her head, not to relive the good, but to assess the damage.

Trace over everything she said and did, trying to decide if she’d made a fool of herself, what her classmates would think.

Play out the scene with the girl in her bed— Lottie —until the pleasure of it soured, replaced by shame over the sounds she made, the sheer, mortifying abandon of being that other, reckless Alice.

But embarrassment requires energy and she has none, and it doesn’t matter if she made an idiot of herself because Lottie is gone.

And Alice can’t stop shivering.

At some point in her sleep she must have kicked the comforter off, because the bulk is now piled down around her feet, and she’s naked except for the scratchy sheet tangled around her legs and torso.

The once-white cotton is dappled with pale purple splashes (the last dregs of hair dye, a watery ghost).

There’s another stain on the sheets.

The unmistakable red-brown of dry blood.

Alice frowns, touches the place between her legs, wondering if that’s what this is—not a hangover, just the world’s worst PMS—but her fingers come away clean.

And anyway, the stain isn’t a smudge, or a smear.

It’s three perfect drops, like someone dripped paint, and looking at it gives her the weirdest sense, a kind of mental vertigo, like she’s leaning over the place where a memory should be.

But it’s not there.

Nothing to grasp. Nothing to hold on to.

She peels off the sheet, still searching for the source of the blood, and yelps at the sight of half a dozen bruises blotting her pale skin, before she touches one and realizes it’s not a welt or a wound, but the remnant of a kiss.

Pomegranate lipstick dotting her thigh, her stomach, the inside of one wrist.

Alice shivers, less at the memory than the fact she’s naked and cold, and feels like total shit.

She looks around, searches for something in reach because the thought of getting up is just too much right now.

The old oversized T-shirt she normally wears to bed is draped on the desk chair and she tugs it on, shaking from that smallest effort as she hauls the comforter up, and curls beneath the blessed dark and tries to sleep—

Her head pounding—

Like a fist against a door—

Bang bang bang—

Until it slams shut—

So hard it bounces in its frame and—

Alice takes off, nine years old, all elbows and knees, bare feet slipping in the marshy grass as she tries to catch up with her sister.

Because Catty is running away.

Not away away (because if Catty were serious, she’d have headed for the train station instead of the hilly slope at the edge of their yard), but away from the house, and the dinner, and Eloise Martin.

Eloise, who walked into their lives a year ago, and upended everything.

Eloise, who hails from Edinburgh and has an accent so soft it might as well be English, who never raises her voice, and who once made the fatal error of telling Catty to “call me whatever you like.”

An offer that Catty put to rude use until Dad intervened.

Eloise, who was apparently Dad’s childhood sweetheart, way back before he went to uni and met Mum.

A fact they just learned about that night at dinner, because Eloise has friends visiting from Leith, and while dessert was cooling on the counter, she took Dad’s hand and said that maybe they were meant to be, which Catty took as Eloise saying their mum wasn’t, and did that mean that Mum was meant to die, and no, of course that wasn’t what Eloise was saying, but it was too late, the chair was scraping back, and the door was slamming, and Catty was off.

It’s the second time she’s run—the first was after Dad came home from that first date, looking almost happy, like the lights were finally coming on again inside his house, and it was such a relief—or so Alice thought—but Catty saw only a betrayal.

As if there was an unspoken agreement that when they buried Mum, the grave would follow them home, a six-foot hollow in the bed, a hole at the table, a plot of land left fallow for their entire lives, and then Dad broke his word by planting something there.

The first time Catty ran, Alice didn’t go after her, but only because it was dark, and her sister was gone before Alice could see which way she went.

She had cried herself sick, and when Catty finally showed back up the next morning, Alice made her promise—not to stay, but at least, next time, to wait, to take her with her.

But she’s twelve now to Alice’s nine, and fast —so fast that Alice can’t catch up, the distance between widening a little more with every stride.

“Catty!” she calls out.

(Catty, not Catherine, or Cathy—Alice couldn’t make the th sound when she was small, so it came out Catty, and then one day their neighbor Mary Galford tutted at the name, said it wasn’t nice, so of course her sister went and looked up the meaning— mean, nasty, spiteful —after which she gleefully declared she’d answer to that and nothing else.)

“Slow down!” shouts Alice now as Catty lopes up the hill, but of course, she doesn’t slow down, doesn’t look back, just tells her to “Catch up!”

Catch up, as if that’s easy, as if she doesn’t have three years on Alice.

Three years that don’t feel like much, not unless she’s running. Or the subject of Mum comes up, which it doesn’t—not directly, but it’s always there, like a hazard, a pothole they have to skirt, and every time they hit it, the years between them open up.

The difference between missing and memory.

Because Catty remembers their mum.

And Alice doesn’t.

It’s not her fault—she was only five when Sarah Moore died, and the few memories she has are mostly smudges, like old dreams.

Here is what she does remember: the sadness that hung over the house like a shroud, the sound of her dad weeping into a dishcloth when she was supposed to be in bed, the way his shoulders bowed beneath a weight no one could see but everyone felt.

The way the air in the house got lighter after he met Eloise.

But still, Catty is too fast.

She crests the hill, and vanishes, and a strange terror grips Alice, that she’s crossed some invisible threshold, one long stride carrying her forward, out of Hoxburn, out of the world, and by the time Alice scrambles, breathless, to the top, she’s convinced Catty will be gone.

But she isn’t.

Alice sees her, a dozen strides down the hill’s far side, fetched up against the low stone wall like it’s a finish line, one that holds instead of breaking.

(The hills around Hoxburn are dotted with sheep and crisscrossed with dozens of low stone walls that always look as if they’re about to crumble but never do, and for a long time Alice assumed it was some kind of magic, or imagined that the walls went deep, deep beneath the ground and that’s why they never fell, but now she knows that there’s a mason who walks the walls once a season and patches them up.)

Alice slows, gasping for breath.

Catty’s back is turned, but even from here she can see how hard her sister’s gripping the wall, her knuckles going white, and Alice is sure one of them will break—the rock or her fingers, she doesn’t know which—so she starts forward, ready to pry her sister’s hand away.

But Catty hears her coming, and lets go, scrubbing a palm across her cheeks.

“Hey, Bones,” she says.