“The omens weren’t what you hoped for. They weren’t what you thought they would be. But you knew when it was yours.”

IN THE YEAR OF OMENS

That was the year of omens—the year the coroner cut open the body of the girl who had thrown herself from the bridge, and discovered a bullfrog living in her right lung. The doctor, it was said by the people who told those sorts of stories (and there were many of them), let the girl’s mother take the thing home in her purse—its skin wet and gleaming, its eyes like glittering gallstones—and when she set it in her daughter’s bedroom it croaked out the saddest, sweetest song you ever heard in the voice of the dead girl.

Leah loved to listen to these stories. She was fourteen and almost pretty. She liked dancing and horses, sentimental poetry, certain shades of pink lipstick, and Hector Alvarez, which was no surprise at all, because everyone liked Hector Alvarez.

“Tell me what happened to the girl,” Leah would say to her mum, slicing potatoes at the kitchen counter while her mother switched on the oven. Leah was careful always to jam the knifepoint in first so that the potatoes would break open as easily as apples. Her dad had taught her that before he had died. Everything he did was sacred now.

“No,” her mum would say.

“But you know what happened to her?”

“I know what happened, Leah.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

And Leah would feel the slight weight of her mother’s frame like a ghost behind her. Sometimes her mum would touch the back of her neck, just rest a hand there, or on her shoulder. Sometimes, she would check the potatoes. Leah had a white scar on her thumb where she’d sliced badly once.

“You shouldn’t have to hear those things. Those things aren’t for you, okay?”

“But mum—”

“Mum,” Milo would mumble from his highchair. “Mum mum mum mum.”

“Here, lovely girl, fetch me the rosemary and thyme. Oh, and the salt. Enough about that other thing, okay? Enough about it. Your brother is getting hungry.”

And Leah would put down the knife, and would turn from the thin, round slices of potatoes. She would kiss her brother on the scalp where his hair stuck up in fine, whitish strands. Smell the sweet baby scent of him. “Shh, monkey-face, just a little bit longer. Mum’s coming soon.” Then Milo would let out a sharp, breathy giggle, and maybe Leah would giggle too, or maybe she wouldn’t.

Her mum wouldn’t speak of the things that were happening, but Leah knew—of course Leah knew.

First it was the girl. That’s how they always spoke of her.

“Did you hear about the girl?”

“Which girl?”

“The girl. The one who jumped.”

And then it wasn’t just the girl anymore. It was Joanna Sinclair who always made red velvet cupcakes for the school bake sale. She had found her name written in the gossamer threads of a spider web. It was Oscar Nunez from the end of the block whose tongue shrivelled up in his mouth. It was Yasmine with the black eyeliner who liked to smoke pot sometimes when she babysat Leah.

“Maybe it’ll be, I dunno, just this one perfect note. Like a piano,” Yasmine had murmured before it happened, pupils big enough to swallow the violet-circled iris of her eyes. “Or a harp. Or a, what’s it, a zither. I heard one of those once. It was gorgeous.”

“You think so?” Leah asked. She watched the smoke curl around the white edge of her nostrils like incense. There were only four years between them, but those four years seemed a magnificent chasm. Across it lay wisdom and secret truths. Across it lay the Hectors of the world, unattainable if you were only fourteen years old. Everything worthwhile lay across that chasm.

“Maybe. Maybe that’s what it will be for me. Maybe I’ll just hear that one note forever, going on and on and on, calling me to paradise.”

It hadn’t been that. The omens weren’t what you hoped for. They weren’t what you thought they would be. But you knew when it was yours. That’s what people said. You could recognize it. You always knew.

When Hector found her—(they were dating, of course Hector would only date someone as pretty and wise as Yasmine, Leah thought)—the skin had split at her elbows and chin, peeled back like fragile paper to reveal something bony and iridescent like the inside of an oyster shell.

Leah hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral.

Her mum had told her Yasmine had gone to college, she couldn’t babysit anymore, Leah would have to take care of Milo herself. But Leah was friends with Hector’s sister, Inez, and she knew better.

“It was like there was something inside her,” Inez whispered as they both gripped the tiled edge of the pool during the Thursday swim practice, Inez’s feet kicking lazily in hazy, blue-gray arcs. Inez had the same look as her brother, the same widely spaced eyes, skin the same dusty copper as a penny. Her hair clung thick, black and slickly to her forehead where it spilled out of the swimming cap.

“What kind of thing was it?” The water was cold. Leah hated swimming, but her mum made her do it anyway.

“God, I mean, I dunno. Hector won’t tell me. Just that . . . he didn’t think it would be like that. He thought she’d be beautiful on the inside, you know? He thought it would be something else.”

Leah had liked Yasmine—(even though she had always liked Hector more, liked it when Yasmine brought him over and the two of them huddled on the deck while Leah pretended not to watch, the flame of the lighter a third eye between them). Leah had wanted it to be a zither for her. Something sweet and strange and wondrous.

“I thought so too,” Leah whispered, but Inez had already taken off in a perfect backstroke toward the deep end.

It was why her mum never talked about it. The omens weren’t always beautiful things.

There had always been signs in the world. Every action left its trace somewhere. There were clues. There were giveaways. The future whispered to you before you even got there, and the past, well, the past was a chatterbox, it would tell you everything if you let it.

The signs Leah knew best were the signs of brokenness. The sling her mum had worn after the accident that made it impossible for her to carry Milo. The twinging muscle in her jaw that popped and flexed when she moved the wrong way. It had made things difficult for a while. The pain made her mum sharp and prickly. The medication made her dozy. Sometimes she’d nod off at the table, and Leah would have to clear up the dishes herself, and then tend to Milo if he was making a fuss.

And there was the dream.

There had always been signs in the world.

But, now. Now it was different, and the differences both scared and thrilled Leah.

“Mum,” she would whisper. “Please tell me, Mum.”

“I can’t, sweetie,” her mum would whisper in a strained, half-conscious voice. Leah could see the signs of pain now. The way her mum’s lids fluttered. The lilt in her voice from the medication. “I just don’t know. Oh, darling, why? Why? I’m scared. I don’t know what’s happening to the world.”

But Leah wasn’t scared.

A month later Leah found something in the trash: one of her mother’s sheer black stockings. Inside it was the runt-body of a newborn kitten wrapped in a wrinkled dryer sheet.

“Oh, pretty baby,” she cooed.

Leah turned the lifeless little lump over. She moved it gently, carefully from palm to palm. It had the kind of boneless weight that Milo had when he slept. She could do anything to him then, anything at all, and he wouldn’t wake up.

One wilted paw flopped between her pinkie and ring finger. The head lolled. And there—on the belly, there it was—the silver scales of a fish. They flaked away against the calluses on her palm, decorated the thin white line of her scar.

Leah felt a strange, liquid warmth shiver its way across her belly as she held the kitten. It was not hers, she knew it was not hers. Was it her mum who had found the thing? Her mum. Of course it was her mum.

“Oh,” she said. “My little thing. I’m sorry for what’s been done to you.”

She knew she ought to be afraid then, but she wasn’t. She loved the little kitten. It was gorgeous—just exactly the sort of omen that Yasmine ought to have had.

If only it had been alive. . . .

Leah didn’t know what her own omen would be. She hoped like Yasmine had that it would be something beautiful. She hoped when she saw it she would know it most certainly as her own special thing. And she knew she would not discard it like the poor drowned kitten—fur fine and whitish around the thick membrane of the eyelids. Not for all the world. Not even if it scared her.

She placed the kitten in an old music box her dad had brought back from Montreal. There was a crystal ballerina, but it was broken and didn’t spin properly. Still, when she opened the lid, the tinny notes of “La Vie en Rose” chimed out slow and stately. The body of the kitten fit nicely against the faded velvet inside of it.

The box felt so light it might have been empty.

Now it was October—just after the last of the September heat had begun to fade off like a cooling cooking pan. Inez and Leah were carving pumpkins together. This was the last year they were allowed to go trick or treating, and even so, they were only allowed to go as long as they took Milo with them. (Milo was going to dress as a little white rabbit. Her mum had already bought the costume.)

They were out on the porch, sucking in the last of the sunlight, their pumpkins squat on old newspapers empty of the stories that Leah really wanted to read.

Carving pumpkins was trickier than cutting potatoes. You had to do it with a very sharp, very small knife. It wasn’t about pressure so much. It was about persistence—taking things slow, feeling your way through it so you didn’t screw up. Inez was better at that. It wasn’t the cutting that Leah liked anyway. She liked the way it felt to shove her hands inside the pumpkin and bring out its long, stringy guts. Pumpkins had a smell: rich and earthy, but sweet too, like underwear if you didn’t change it every day.

“It’s happening to me,” Inez whispered to her. She wasn’t looking at Leah, she was staring intensely at the jagged crook of eye she was trying to get right. Taking it slow. Inez liked to get everything just right.

“What’s happening?” Leah said.

Inez still didn’t look at her, she was looking at the eye of the jack-o’-lantern-to-be, her brow scrunched as she concentrated. But her hand was trembling.

“What’s happening?”

Cutting line met cutting line. The piece popped through with a faint sucking sound.

“You know, Leah. What’s been happening to . . . to everyone. What happened to Yasmine.” Her voice quavered. Inez was still staring at the pumpkin. She started to cut again.

“Tell me,” Leah said. And then, more quietly, she said, “please.”

“I don’t want to.”

Plop went another eye. The pumpkin looked angry. Or scared. The expressions sometimes looked the same on pumpkins.

“Then why did you even bring it up?” Leah could feel something quivering inside her as she watched Inez saw into the flesh of the thing.

“I just wanted to—I don’t even know. But don’t tell Hector, okay? He’d be worried about me.”

Leah snuck a look at Hector who was raking leaves in the yard. She liked watching Hector work. She liked to think that maybe if the sun was warm enough (as it was today—more of a September sun than an October sun, really) then maybe, just maybe, he would take his shirt off.

“It’s okay to tell me, Inez. Promise. I won’t tell anyone. Just tell me so someone out there knows.”

Inez was quiet. And then she said in a small, tight voice, “Okay.”

She put down the knife. The mouth was only half done. Just the teeth. But they were the trickiest part to do properly. Then, carefully, gently, Inez undid the top three buttons of her blouse. She swept away the long, black curls of hair that hid her neck and collarbone.

“It’s here. Do you see?”

Leah looked. At first she thought it was a mild discoloration, the sort of blemish you got if you sat on your hands for too long and the folds of your clothes imprinted themselves into the skin. But it wasn’t that at all. There was a pattern to it, like the jack-o’-lantern, the shapes weren’t meaningless. They were a face. They were the shadow of a face—eyes wide open. Staring.

“Did you tell Hector?”

“I’m telling you.

“God, Inez—”

But Inez turned white and shushed her. “Don’t say that!” Inez squealed. “Don’t say his name like that. We don’t know! Maybe it is, I mean, do you think, maybe He . . . I mean, oh, Jesus, I don’t know, Leah!” Her mouth froze in a little “oh” of horror. There were tears running down her cheeks, forming little eddies around a single, pasty splatter of pumpkin guts.

“It’s okay, Inez. It’s okay.” And Leah put her arm around Inez. “You’ll be okay,” she whispered. “You’ll be okay.”

And they rocked together. So close. Close enough that Leah could feel her cheek pressing against Inez’s neck. Just above the mark. So close she could imagine it whispering to her. There was something beautiful about it all. Something beautiful about the mark pressed against her, the wind making a rustling sound of the newspapers, Hector in the yard, and the long strings of pumpkin guts lined up like glyphs drying in the last of the summer light.

“It’s okay,” Leah told her, but even as they rocked together, their bodies so close Leah could feel the hot, hardpan length of her girlish muscles tense and relax in turns, she knew there was a chasm splitting between them, a great divide.

“Shush,” she said. “Pretty baby,” she said because sometimes that quieted Milo down. Inez wasn’t listening. She was holding on. So hard it hurt.

Inez was dead the next day.

Leah was allowed to attend the funeral. It was the first funeral she’d been allowed to go to since her dad’s.

The funeral had a closed casket (of course, it had to) but Leah wanted to see anyway. She pressed her fingers against the dark, glossy wood of the coffin, leaving a trail of smudged fingerprints that stood out like boot marks in fresh snow. She wanted to see what had happened to that face with the gaping eyes. She wanted to know who that face had belonged to. No one would tell her. From her mum, it was still nothing but, “Shush up, Leah.”

And Hector was there.

Hector was wearing a suit. Leah wondered if it was the same suit that he had worn to Yasmine’s funeral, and if he’d looked just as good wearing it then as he did now. A suit did something to a man.

Leah was wearing a black dress. Not a little black dress. She didn’t have a little black dress—she and Inez had decided they would wait until their breasts came in before they got little black dresses. But Inez had never got her breasts.

The funeral was nice. There were lots of gorgeous white flowers: roses and lilies and stuff, which looked strange because everyone was wearing black. And everyone said nice things about Inez—how she’d been on the swim team, how she’d always got good grades. But there was something tired about all the nice things they said, as if they’d worn out those expressions already. “She was my best friend,” Leah said into the microphone. She had been nervous about speaking in front of a crowd, but by the time her turn actually came she was mostly just tired too. She tried to find Hector in the audience. His seat was empty. “We grew up together. I always thought she was like my sister.”

Leah found him outside, afterward. He was sitting on the stairs of the back entrance to the church, a plastic cup in one hand. The suit looked a little crumpled but it still looked good. At nineteen he was about a foot taller than most of the boys she knew. They were like little mole-rats compared to him.

Her mother was still inside making small talk with the reverend. All the talk anyone made was small these days.

“Hey,” she said.

He looked up. “Hey.”

It was strange, at that moment, to see Inez’s eyes looking out from her brother’s face now that she was dead. It didn’t look like the same face. Leah didn’t know if she should go or not.

Her black dress rustled around her as she folded herself onto the stair beside him.

“Shouldn’t you be back in there?”

Hector put the plastic cup to his lips and took a swig of whatever was inside. She could almost imagine it passing through him. She was fascinated by the way his throat muscles moved as he swallowed, the tiny triangle he had missed with his razor. Wordlessly, he handed the cup to her. Leah took a tentative sniff. Whatever it was, it was strong. It burned the inside of her nostrils.

“I don’t know,” Hector said. “Probably. Probably you should too.”

“What are you doing out here?”

Hector didn’t say anything to that. He simply stared at the shiny dark surface of his dress shoes—like the coffin—scuffing the right with the left. The sun made bright hotplates of the parking lot puddles. Leah took a drink. The alcohol felt good inside her stomach. It felt warm and melting inside her. She liked being here next to Hector. The edge of her dress was almost touching his leg, spilling off her knees like a black cloud, but he didn’t move. They stayed just like that. It was like being in a dream. Not the dream. A nice dream.

“I miss her, Leah. I can’t stop it . . . you look a bit like her, you know? I mean, you don’t look anything like her really, but still,” he stumbled, searching out the right words. “But.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

She took a larger swallow. Her head felt light. She felt happy. She knew she shouldn’t feel happy but she felt happy anyway. Did Hector feel happy? She couldn’t tell. She hadn’t looked at enough boys to tell exactly what they looked like when they looked happy.

Suddenly, she was leaning toward him. Their hands were touching, fingers sliding against each other, and she was kissing him.

“Leah,” he said, and she liked the way he said her name, but she didn’t like the way he was shaking his head. She tried again, but this time he jerked his head away from her. “No, Leah. I can’t, you’re . . . you’re just a kid.”

The happy feeling evaporated. Leah looked away.

“Please, Hector,” she said. “There’s something . . . ” She paused. Tried to look at him and not look at him at the same time. “It’s not just Inez, okay? It’s me too.” She was lying. She didn’t know why she was lying about it, except that she wished it was true. She wished it was her too. She wished Inez hadn’t found something first.

He shook his head again, but there was a glint in his eyes. Something that hadn’t been there before. It made him look the way that Inez’s mark had with its wide, hollow eyes. Like there could be anything in them. Anything at all.

“I’ve found something. On my skin. We were like sisters, you know. Really. Do you want to see it?”

“No,” he said. His eyes were wide. Inez’s eyes had looked like that, too, hadn’t they? They both had such pretty eyes. Eyes seeded with gold and copper and bronze.

“Please,” she said. “Would you kiss me? I want to know what it’s like. Before.”

“No,” he whispered again, but he did anyway. Carefully. He tasted sweet and sharp. Like pumpkin. He tasted the way the way a summer night tastes in your mouth, heavy and wet, wanting rain but not yet ready to let in October. The kiss lingered on her lips.

Leah wondered if this was what love felt like. She wondered if Yasmine had felt like this, if Hector had made her feel like this, and if she did, how could she ever have left him?

She didn’t ask for another kiss.

The world was changing around them all now, subtly, quietly at first, but it was changing. It was a time for omens. The world felt like an open threshold waiting for Leah to step through. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t yet.

The day after the funeral Leah cut her hair and dyed it black. She wore it in dark, heavy ringlets just as Inez had. She took a magic marker to the space just below the collar of her shirt, the place Inez had showed her, and she drew a face with large eyes. With a hungry mouth.

She looked at forums. They all had different sorts of advice for her.

If you say your name backwards three times and spit. . . .

If you sleep in a graveyard by a headstone with your birthday. . . .

If you cut yourself this way. . . .

Those were the things you could do to stop it, they said. Those were the things you could do to pass it on to someone else.

But nothing told her what she wanted.

For Milo, it started slowly. When Leah tried to feed him, sometimes he would spit out the food. Sometimes he would slam his chubby little hands into the tray again and again and again until a splatter of pureed squash covered them both. He would stare into the empty space and burble like a trout.

“C’mon, baby,” Leah whispered to him. “You gotta eat something. Please, monkey-face. Just for me? Just a bite?”

But he got thinner and thinner and thinner. His skin flaked off against Leah’s shirt in bright, silver-shiny patches when she held him. Her mum stopped looking at him. When she turned in his direction her eyes passed over him as if there was a space cut out of the world where he had been before, the way strangers didn’t look at each other on the subway.

“Mum,” Leah said, “what’s happening to him?”

“Nothing, darling. He’ll quiet soon.” And it was like the dream. She couldn’t move. No one could hear what she was saying.

“Mum,” Leah said. “He’s crying for you. Can you just hold him for a bit? My arms are getting tired and he just won’t quit. He wants you, mum.”

“No, darling,” her mum would say. Just that. And then she would lock herself in her room, and Leah would rock the baby back and forth, gently, gently, and whisper things in his ear.

“Mummy loves you,” she would say to him, “c’mon, pretty baby, c’mon and smile for me. Oh, Milo. Please, Milo.”

Sometimes it seemed that he weighed nothing at all, he was getting so light. Like she was carrying around a bundle of sticks, not her baby brother. His fingers poked her through her shirt, hard and sharp. The noises he made, they weren’t the noises that she knew. It was a rasping sort of cough, something like a choke, and it made her scared but she was all alone. It was only her and Milo. She clung tightly to him.

“Pretty baby,” she murmured as she carried him upstairs. “Pretty, little monkey-face.”

It was only when she showed him the little kitten she had tucked away in her music box that he began to quiet. He touched it cautiously, fingers curving like hooks. The fur had shed into the box. It was patchy in some places, and the skin beneath was sleek and silvery and gorgeous. When Milo’s fingers brushed against it he let out a shrieking giggle.

It was the first happy sound he had made in weeks.

What were the signs of love? Were they as easy to mark out as any other sort of sign? Were they a hitch in the breath? The way that suddenly any sort of touch—the feel of your hand running over the thin cotton fibres of your sheets—was enough to make you blush? Leah thought of Hector Alvarez. She thought about the kiss, and the way he had tasted, the slight pressure of his lips, the way her bottom lip folded into his mouth, just a little, just a very little bit, like origami.

Leah checked her body every morning. Her wrists. Her neck. She used a mirror to sight out her spine, the small of her back, the back of her thighs.

Nothing. Never any change.

The stars were dancing—tra lee, tra la—and the air was heavy with the fragrant smell of pot. They passed the joint between them carelessly. First it hung in his lips. Then it touched hers.

“What are you afraid of?” Leah asked Hector.

“What do you mean, what am I afraid of?”

Leah liked the way he looked in moonlight. She liked the way she looked too. Her breasts had come in. They pushed comfortably against the whispering silk of her black dress. They were small breasts, like apples. Crabapple breasts. She hoped they weren’t finished growing.

She was fifteen today.

Tonight the moon hung pregnant and fat above them, striations of clouds lit up with touches of silver and chalk-white. It had taken them a while to find the right place. A gravestone with two dates carved beneath it. His and hers. (Even though she knew it wouldn’t work. Even though she knew it wouldn’t do what she wanted.)

The earth made a fat mound beneath them, the dirt fresh. Moist. She had been afraid to settle down on it, afraid that it wouldn’t hold her. Being in a graveyard was different now—it felt like the earth might be moving beneath you, like there might be something moving around underneath, below the sod and the six feet that came after it. Dying wasn’t what it used to be.

“I mean,” she said, “what scares you? This?” She touched his hand. Took the joint from him.

“No,” he said.

“Me neither.” The smoke hung above them. A veil. Gauzy. There were clouds above the smoke. They could have been anything in the moonlight. They could have just been clouds. “Then what?”

“I was afraid for a while,” Hector said at last, “that they were happy.” He was wearing his funeral suit. Even with grave dirt on it, it still made him look good. “I was afraid because they were happy when they left. That’s what scared me. Yasmine was smiling when I found her. There was a look on her face . . . ” He paused, took a breath. “Inez too. They knew something. It was like they figured something out. You know what I mean?”

“No,” she said. Yes, she thought.

Her mother had been cutting potatoes this morning. Normally Leah cut them. She cut them the way her dad had taught her, but today it was her mother who was cutting them, and when the potato split open—there it was, a tiny finger, curled into the white flesh, with her dad’s wedding ring lodged just behind the knuckle. Her mum’s face had gone white and pinched, and she dropped the knife, her fingers instinctively touching the white strip of flesh where her own wedding ring used to sit.

“Oh, god,” she whispered.

“Mum,” Leah said. “It’s okay, Mum. It’ll be okay.”

But all she could think was, “It should have been me.”

Because it was happening to all of them now. All of them except for her. When Leah walked down the street, all she could imagine were the little black dresses she would wear to their funerals. The shade of lipstick she would pick out for them. Her closet was full of black dresses.

“I’ve never felt that way about anything. Felt so perfectly sure about it that I’d let it take me over. I’d give myself up to it.”

“I have,” she said. But Hector wasn’t listening to her.

“But then,” he said, “I heard it.”

“What?”

“Whatever Yasmine was waiting for. That long perfect note. That sound like Heaven coming.”

“When?”

“Last night.” His eyes were all pupils. When had they got that way? Had they always been like that? The joint was just a stub now between her lips, a bit of pulp. She flicked it away.

“Please don’t go away, Hector,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “You’ll see soon. You’ll know what I mean. But I’m not scared, Leah. I’m not scared at all.”

“I know,” she said. She remembered the way Milo had been with the kitten. He had known it was his. Even though it was monstrous, its chest caved in, the little ear bent like a folded page. It was his. She wanted that, God, how she wanted that.

And now Hector was taking her hand, and he was pressing it against his chest. She could feel something growing out of his ribcage: the hooked, hard knobs pushing through the skin like antlers. He sighed when she touched it, and smiled like he had never smiled at her before.

“I didn’t understand when Yasmine told me,” he said. “I couldn’t understand. But you—you, Leah, you understand, don’t you? You don’t need to be scared, Leah,” he said. “You can be happy with me.”

And when he kissed her, the length of his body drawn up beside her, she felt the shape of something cruel and mysterious hidden beneath the black wool of his suit.

That night Leah had the dream—they were on the road together, all four of them.

“Listen, George,” her mother was saying. (What she said next was always different, Leah had never been able to remember what it actually was, what she’d said that had made him turn, shifted his attention for that split second.)

Leah was in the back, and Milo—Milo who hadn’t been born when her father was alive—was strapped in to his child’s seat next to her.

“Listen, George,” her mother was saying, and that was part of it. Her mother was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear her probably. So he turned. He missed it—what was coming, the slight curve in the road, but it was winter, and the roads were icy and it was enough, just enough.

“Is this it?” Leah asked. But her mum wasn’t listening. She was tapping on the window. She was trying to show him something she had spotted.

Leah knew what came next. In all the other dreams what came next was the squeal of tires, the world breaking apart underneath her, and her trying to grab onto Milo, trying to keep him safe. (Even though he wasn’t there, she would think in the morning, he hadn’t even been born yet!)

That’s how the dream was supposed to go.

“Listen, George,” her mother was saying.

The car kept moving. The tires kept spinning, whispering against the asphalt.

“Is this what it is for me?” Leah tried to ask her mother, but her mother was still pointing out the window. “Is this my sign?”

And it wasn’t just Milo in the car. It was Inez, too. It was Oscar Nunez with his shrivelled-up tongue, and Joanna Sinclair, and Yasmine with her black eyeliner, her eyes like cat’s eyes. And it was Hector, he was there, he was holding Yasmine’s hand, and he was kissing her gently on the neck, peeling back her skin to kiss the hard, oyster-grey thing that was growing inside of her.

“Leah can’t come with us,” her mother was saying. “Just let her off here, would you, George? Just let her off.”

“No,” Leah tried to tell her mum. “No, this is where I am supposed to be. This is supposed to be it.”

And then Leah was standing in a doorway, not in the car at all, and it was a different dream. She was standing in a doorway that was not a doorway because there was nothing on the other side. Just an infinite space, an uncrossable chasm. It was dark, but dark like she had never seen darkness before, so thick it almost choked her. And there was something moving in the darkness. Something was coming . . . because that’s what omens were, weren’t they? They meant something was coming.

And everyone had left her behind.

When Leah woke up the house was dark. Shadows clustered around her bed. She couldn’t hear Milo. She couldn’t hear her mother. What she could hear, from outside, was the sound of someone screaming. She wanted to scream along with it, oh, she wanted to be part of that, to let her voice ring out in that one perfect note. . . .

But she couldn’t.

Leah turned on the light. She took out the mirror. And she began to search (again—again and again and again, it made no difference, did it? it never made a difference).

She ran her fingers over and over the flawless, pale expanse of her body (flawless except for the white scar on her thumb where she’d sliced it open chopping potatoes).

Her wrists. Her neck. Her spine. Her crabapple breasts.

But there was still nothing there.

She was still perfect.

She was still whole. Untouched and alone.