Page 33

6

They named the puppy Nothing.

A mean name, to be sure, but chosen with good reason. To the twins’ thinking, if Mrs. Hargrove ever saw an adorable fur ball scurrying past the glass doors of the kitchen and asked “What was that?” they could honestly answer, “Nothing.” They thought they were clever. And for a while there, because Hemlock Hill was so vast, Heather and Hart were able to successfully hide Nothing from their parents.

They knew they’d have to hide Nothing because they’d asked for a dog before, and the response from their father had always been the same: “No. It’ll get into the plants.” And Nothing definitely did that.

When they walked him through Fountain Field, the first thing he did was maul the billy buttons that sprouted along the Neptune fountain. Hart and Heather convinced themselves it was because the flowers looked like small balls and Nothing was just eager to play fetch. But when they took him to the orchard and tossed a ball between the trees, Nothing ignored it, preferring the apples that had fallen to the ground. The twins became convinced that he liked bright colors and things that smelled good. So they took him to the densest parts of the property, where there were no bright colors, and no sweet-smelling foods. But even there, Nothing clamped his jaws on the wide hosta leaves beyond the golden path, tearing through everything he saw.

The destruction didn’t go unnoticed, and when their mother questioned it, the twins made up stories of all the deer and raccoons they’d seen sneaking onto the grounds. In the end, the safest place to keep Nothing was the Gothic folly between Hemlock Pond and the Meadow. It was one of the many ornamental structures that dotted the property, a small one-room building that served no real purpose. It housed no furniture, had no electricity—the most it could do was provide shelter from a sudden rainstorm. The obscenely rich equivalent of a tree house. But the folly had become a favorite play space for the kids because, except for a few windows, it was completely closed off from the grounds. It became their new home for Nothing, along with the rest of their mounting secrets.

For Hart, that was a treasure chest full of candy. Sweets were the only thing he could think to wish for. But Heather wanted more. The only problem was, none of her wishes were working out.

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” she said in the folly one day. Ever since she’d started making wishes, nothing was going right. At first, she’d wished for fairy threads in her hair. Just a few sparkly strands—nothing that stood out too much. But the second her father noticed them, he demanded she take that silliness out of her hair. Then Heather wished for a dress she’d been longing for. But since she couldn’t wear it out without her mother asking where she’d gotten it, she kept the dress in the folly, where Nothing promptly tore it to shreds.

By the time summer turned to fall, Heather began to get tired of wishing for material things that she couldn’t use out in the open, and she started wishing for divine acts.

She wished for her sworn enemy, Tommy McDuffie, to trip and fall the next time he was asked to go up to the whiteboard. She wished for her ex-friend Virginia Lewis to get every vowel wrong in her book report. And she wished Michael Wu would forget how to talk. But Tommy practically frolicked every time he went to the board, Virginia showed off the A at the top of her book report, and the day after Heather made her wish for Michael, he came up to her and told her she smelled like spider armpits.

“Why won’t the garden listen to me?” Heather asked.

Hart shrugged, pulling a long piece of sky-blue taffy between his teeth. “Maybe you should just stick to candy wishes,” he said through a mouthful of blue.

Heather shook her head. “The garden’s obviously broken.”

“You know it isn’t,” Hart said. “Mom goes all the time.”

A couple of days ago, the twins had watched from the banister as their parents fought down below in the living room. Their mother cried accusations about someone she only called “ her ,” and their father shouted denials and accused their mother of making things up. It wasn’t the only time. And Cait would always take off, into the garden. The twins could see her from Hart’s bedroom, clutching each other’s hands tightly as they looked out the window, watching their mother run toward the maze.

“It’s totally not fair,” Heather said in the folly. “The garden doesn’t like me anymore.”

“Probably ’cause you’re a dumbass,” Hart said.

Heather gasped so loud that it made Hart laugh, blue-tinted spit drooling down his open mouth. “Yeah, well, you’re a donkeyass ,” Heather spat back.

“A donkey is an ass,” Hart snickered, and he pulled the taffy between his teeth like a magician’s endless handkerchief, snorting all the while. But as the taffy tore and popped free, so did something else from Hart’s mouth. The twins both stopped laughing, their green eyes bulging as they stared at the small white thing that had plonked onto the floor. They couldn’t comprehend what they were looking at. A pebble? A bone? The longer the twins stared, the more they couldn’t deny that the hard white thing they were looking at was a tooth.

Hart began to reach for it slowly, but before his index finger could touch it, Nothing scampered over and ate it.