CHAPTER ONE

Kai

NOBODY HAD EVER TOLD Kai that she should hold her breath when passing by a graveyard, but she did it anyway. She held it and gripped the door handle of the massive powder blue 1987 Dodge pickup as her great-aunt barreled bat-crazy past a large iron gate and up the driveway. Kai gaped through the smudgy truck window at ancient crosses and crumbling white grave markers that hunched, lurking, behind the sagging iron gate. “You live by a graveyard?” she asked, squeezing the door handle like she might just jump out.

“Quiet neighbors!” Great-Aunt Lavinia yelled so Kai could hear her over the Jay-Z song blaring through the radio. The Big Ol’ Truck spat gravel as Lavinia slammed the brakes, lurching to a stop. She leaned against the steering wheel and turned to face Kai. “And they never complain about my music.” Lavinia cranked up the volume for a moment, rapping along, then switched it off with a wink. “Most people round here like country, but I can’t stand it.”

“Okay,” Kai said, because she thought she should say something. Conversation wasn’t really her strongest subject, to tell you the truth.

“You like country?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, all right, because you ain’t gonna hear much of it in my house.” Lavinia yanked open the door and spilled out. With a deft move, she put one foot on top of the rear tire and hauled herself over the edge of the cargo bed, grabbing Kai’s bag and violin case.

Kai wasn’t nearly as swift—or as smooth. Gingerly, she pulled back the handle and looked down at the gravel driveway. It seemed like it was about forty feet below her.

“Do you need me to come and get you, sugar?” Lavinia called from the front steps.

“Coming.” Clinging to the door, Kai managed to awkwardly half swing, half sprawl onto the pavement. She dusted off her hands and slammed the truck door, giving it a pat as she hurried toward the house.

And what a house!

It had a high peaked roof, and a front porch that had been nearly swallowed up by creeping vines and aggressive shrubbery. A bush with flowers big enough to sit in bloomed just beyond the vines’ reach. Everything seemed to join together at odd, tilted angles, as if the house had come home late and rumpled from a particularly wild House Party. A tired picket fence lined the property, and a crooked gate complained at every breeze. The whole place looked like it belonged in a book, but perhaps one that wasn’t very nice. I’m talking one where the children get gobbled up in the end.

A mailbox crouched at the end of the footpath. A name was painted on the sign in elegant silver letters. Quirk, it read.

You got that right, Kai thought.

So far, her great-aunt Lavinia was a bit . . . odd.

“Your father always called her Auntie Lavinia, but she’s actually your great-great-grandfather’s cousin, so she must be eighty or ninety years old by now,” Kai’s mother, Schuyler, had said right before putting Kai on a plane. “She probably needs a lot of help around the house, the poor, frail old thing. You’ll try to be helpful, won’t you?”

Let me tell you that Great-Aunt Lavinia was about as frail as a Sherman tank. Kai was never good at judging heights, but I am, and I can tell you that Lavinia was over six feet tall. She carried Kai’s suitcase like it was a pocketbook. Kai guessed that she was sixty, but this was one thing that Kai’s mother had right: Lavinia would turn eighty-seven at the end of the summer. She had a few wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and she had gray hair. But the gray hair was long, almost down to her waist, and held back in a thick braid. Lavinia wore jeans. Not the grandma kind, either, but dark-wash skinny jeans, and red Converse sneakers. Her fingers were full of chunky turquoise jewelry. She looked hip and fashionable, despite the fact that she was shaped a bit like a turnip and one of her eyes was bigger than the other.

This lady, Kai thought as she trotted after her great-aunt, does not need my help around the house.

Kai hesitated in the doorway a moment, but Lavinia was already jogging up the wide wooden staircase, calling, “Your room is up here, sweets!”

Kai followed, but she didn’t hurry. She ran her hand along the dark banister. It was the kind she had always wished for—perfect for sliding down. Back home, Kai lived in a square gray apartment building with an unreliable elevator.

At the top of the landing, Kai found a long hallway. “This one here is the guest room.” Lavinia’s voice floated to her from a room on the right. Kai followed the sound and stepped into a lovely white room with a dark wood four-poster bed and matching bureau. An old, smoky mirror reflected gentle light, and crammed bookshelves lined an entire wall. An overstuffed chair lounged in the corner near a window seat that overlooked the front lawn. At home, Kai slept on a mattress on the floor, and shoved her clothes into oversize plastic storage boxes. Her mother didn’t believe in spending money on furniture—every spare penny went to Kai’s college fund. To Kai, this seemed like a room from a magazine, or a pleasant dream.

“Two other bedrooms up here. Mine’s across the hall. One next to it’s my office.” Lavinia looked around, searching for a good place to put the luggage. “This here room’s probably thrilled to have a guest.”

“Pretty,” Kai said.

“Ain’t it?” Lavinia put the suitcase down by the bed and turned to face Kai. “So, listen. I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just gonna come out and say it. I can’t help it if it hurts your feelings.” Lavinia’s fingertips dipped into the smallest pocket of her jeans. “I never did have kids. No husband, either. That’s ’cause I never wanted to, not ’cause I didn’t have offers.” Her larger eye bulged out knowingly and her eyebrows danced.

“Okay.”

“I don’t know what to do with kids.”

“Me, either.”

Lavinia cocked her head, as if she couldn’t tell whether or not Kai was teasing her. She wasn’t. Kai really didn’t get most kids. They didn’t get her, either.

Unlike her peers, she didn’t care much about gossip or crushes or screaming worship of the latest boy singer or movie star. She didn’t even have time for friends, anyway. Not really.

That was something none of her schoolmates understood: that Kai had something else that was more important than friends. She had a goal. Or at least, she thought, I used to.

In fact, the last week of school before summer vacation, someone had posted flyers all over the sixth-grade hall: The Cedar Creek Stealthy Awards! Anika Walters won Hottest Girl (of course), Mr. Anderson won Hottest Teacher (surprising), Claire McGowen won Most Likely to Rob a 7-Eleven (duh—she probably already had), and Kai Grove won Weirdest (sigh). When she saw the list, the principal flipped out, and said the class trip to the amusement park would be canceled unless someone came forward to confess or rat out the person who made up the awards. And so Kai was publicly insulted and punished along with everyone else, which, according to the principal, “Should teach you all a valuable lesson about life.”

“All right, sugar.” Lavinia gave Kai a pat on the arm. “I’m just going to do . . . what I do. I’m not going to entertain you.”

“Fine. Great, actually.”

Lavinia stood perfectly still for a moment. So did Kai. Around them, the house was enormous and silent. “Okay, then,” Lavinia said at last. “There’s food in the fridge. I don’t keep any soda or junk, though. If you want that stuff, you can go walk to the Walgreens.”

“By myself?”

“Why not? You’re twelve, ain’t ya? I was walkin’ to the store by myself at age five.”

The thought of walking around in a strange town all alone made Kai feel fizzy, like a can of soda that’s been shaken up. “Where’s the Walgreens?”

“Five blocks.” Lavinia yanked her thumb over her shoulder, toward the window behind her, which overlooked the yard. “You can go wherever you want, as long as you’re home for dinner. I don’t want to have to call your mom and tell her that I lost you.”

Excellent point, Kai thought as the fizzy feeling swooshed down to her toes and out to the ends of her hair. “What time is dinner?”

“Six.”

“Can I poke around the house?”

“Suit yourself.” Lavinia fussed with a curtain for a moment, and then she walked out of the room.

Kai turned to her bags. “Stop looking at me,” she muttered as she nudged her violin case with her foot, pushing it into the closet and shutting the door. Sighing, she hauled her suitcase onto a low table but left it closed. She stood beside the window for a moment, just smelling the air in the room. It smelled like clean, old things. White linens lay crisp across the bed. She walked over and scanned the books on the shelves. They didn’t seem to be arranged in any order. Paperbacks and hardcovers comingled, with a title about art seated beside a cheap crime novel. A leather-bound book with gold lettering on the spine caught her eye. The Exquisite Corpse, it said. Kai pulled it out. She didn’t mind creepy titles. She kind of liked them, in fact.

The title was stamped in gold on the front cover, in that curlicue-style writing that people these days think of as “old-fashioned.” Below the title was the image of a skeleton hand holding a plumed pen. Instead of an author, it listed Exquisite Corpse Co., Kalamazoo, MI. She flipped through the book, but the thick, gold-beveled pages were blank. Hm, she thought, peculiar.

Flipping through more slowly, she realized that there was a proper title page (again, no author) and one page of print.

Greetings, salutations, and welcome to the Exquisite Corpse! Just as your grandmother and grandfather used to play the old parlor game in which one person would draw a head, and then fold it over, and another would draw a body, and another would draw legs, and so on—you will breathe life into a creature of your own making. You are about to embark on a journey of magic beyond your powers of discernment, imagination, and belief! All it takes is one person bold enough to set the story in motion!

Let the magic begin!

Beneath this, someone with excellent handwriting had written the name Ralph T. Flabbergast.

There was something about the book that made her shaken-up feeling come back again. And then Kai did something that she never really understood. She pulled a pen from her pocket. After Ralph T. Flabbergast, she wrote, was a complete fool.

She looked down at the page, dread pricking across her skin on little insect feet. I shouldn’t have done that, she thought. That was rude. Not that Ralph was likely to care. He’d been dead for almost fifty years.

Kai shut the book and put it back onto the shelf. She stared at the gold letters on the spine for a moment, and then turned away.

Outside, the sun shone bright and high. She had been sitting in an airplane for almost four hours, which made her restless. There was no reason to stay indoors. Kai decided to go explore the neighborhood.

It was her second mistake.