Then
Daphne is aware that she is a peculiar child. Her grandfather told her as much, when Daphne stood beside the bed that smelled of rubbing alcohol and musty blankets and the less-pleasant scents of a body that could no longer tend to itself. His skin sallow, his breath rattling, Grandpa looked at Daphne by letting his eyes fall to the side, not even turning his head because it took too much effort.
“You’re a peculiar child, aren’t you? Always watching,” he said, with a kind of revulsion that made Daphne go still. She’s never forgotten that tone in her grandfather’s voice. She has listened for it ever since, and heard it a handful of times, sneaking around the edges of syllables from her teachers, her parents, even from Juliette.
Emma is different. “You’re weird. It’s cool,” she tells Daphne, when she talks to her at all, and lets Daphne babble about fungi and poisonous plants and the ancient Roman practice of divining the future in the entrails of sheep. Daphne is twelve, and somehow both an “old soul” and “young for her age,” which means she doesn’t have many friends. She has her sisters instead. Sometimes she thinks about them leaving someday and she is filled with a formless, all-powerful fear, a scuttling thing like insects under her skin that makes her want to scream or to hit things. But today that fear is far away. Tomorrow she will sit in a cold room across from Chief Ellis and lie, but today she’s with Emma at the park, and everything is perfect.
Emma sits alone under an oak tree, perched on a root. She wears black jeans and an off-the-shoulder black shirt with flowing sleeves and a half-dozen silver rings on her fingers. She’s sketching, as she so often is; her walls are covered with her drawings and paintings. The best, she has labored over all year, to prepare for her art school applications in the fall. Daphne doesn’t like to look at them. The rabbit with its leg twisted backward, caught in a snare. The church breaking open, people rushing out with expressions of frightening ecstasy.
Even the ones that should seem normal, like the portrait of Juliette at the piano, her head bent. The colors are wrong. Like rotting things. The tendons of her fingers stand out, and her hair is pulled back in a bun so tight, the skin at her hairline looks bruised. Her parents can’t seem to see that there is something wrong with the painting. They smile and say that it’s lovely, not like the rest. They don’t see that it’s the worst of all of them.
Emma hasn’t spoken to Daphne since they arrived in the park, which is typical and doesn’t bother Daphne—it’s not like they have much to say to each other. Except that now Daphne, who has been walking along the riverbank, setting each foot precisely in front of the other to make a perfectly straight line with her footprints, has remembered what they’re called. The ancient Romans with their sheep guts. Haruspex. She is about to go tell Emma this vital piece of information when Emma suddenly stands up and grins.
It’s rare to see Emma smile. A grin is unheard of. Daphne stands still and watches as Emma raises a hand and waves, then picks up her canvas messenger bag and hurries her way over to a man leaning against a picnic bench. He has a long face and full cheeks, with short, unruly hair. Daphne can’t read the look he gives Emma. Half-resigned and half-cheerful. He shakes his head and gives her a friendly fist bump.
Daphne creeps along the edge of the river, getting closer. The breeze carries the sound down toward her, and neither of them looks her way. She’s used to this. She is happiest when invisible. Getting noticed is never good for girls like her, peculiar girls who say the wrong thing and walk the wrong way and don’t want the things they’re supposed to want.
“You probably shouldn’t be hanging out with me where people can see,” the man is saying. Daphne is bad at figuring out how old people are, but she thinks he’s too old to still be in school. She doesn’t recognize him from church, and she wonders where Emma met him. Mom is always complaining about Emma’s friends, but it seems to Daphne to be a way of complaining about Emma without saying that directly. Though maybe Emma has friends Daphne doesn’t know about.
“It’s not like we’re doing anything wrong. I don’t care if people see us,” Emma says. She crosses her arms. The sun turns her shoulders freckly in the summer and sends golden darts through her hair. Daphne has only two states—pale and burned. Her mother urges her to stay out of the sun, to keep her perfect porcelain skin protected.
“Yeah, I’m not sure that’s true,” the man says. Boy? She can’t tell. He scratches his arm, looking off to the side. “People in this town gossip. Your dad would be pissed.”
“I don’t care.”
“Maybe you should,” he says.
“I don’t. I don’t care what he thinks. I hate him.”
“Don’t say that, Emmy,” he says. Daphne narrows her eyes. Emma doesn’t let anyone call her that. But Emma just huffs.
“It’s true. I hate them. Both of them. I wish they were dead.” Emma sounds like she’s ready to cry.
“Everybody hates their parents sometimes,” the man says. “You won’t be a kid forever. Once you’re eighteen, you can get out of the house. Go wherever the hell you want.”
“Mom would never let me. She wants to control my life forever,” Emma says bitterly. Her voice is ragged, and she bites her lip hard the way she always does when she’s trying not to cry. “She won’t let me go until one of us is dead.”
Fear wiggles its way through Daphne’s body. She doesn’t like the way Emma is talking. She doesn’t like that Emma is saying these things to a boy Daphne has never met or seen before, and she doesn’t like the way he reaches out, touching Emma’s shoulder gently.
The fear is formless and nameless. It’s like she can feel something rushing up behind her, but she can’t see it. Her chest seizes. Her breath wheezes in her throat. She can’t draw in enough air.
“Emma,” she tries to say, but it barely makes a noise. Panic scrabbles through her. She thrashes up the hill toward Emma, her breathing making a horrible whistle. Emma looks up, startled. Daphne says her name again, and Emma rushes toward her.
“Where’s your inhaler?” Emma says, sharp and authoritative. For an instant she sounds like their mother. Daphne shakes her head. “You forgot it?” Emma says, frustrated and anxious.
“What’s wrong?” the boy asks, worry drawing his brows together.
“She’s having an asthma attack. I have to get her home,” Emma says while Daphne struggles to breathe, the world closing in until all that is left is the sensation of not enough.
“I’ll drive you. Come on,” he says. Emma grabs Daphne’s arm, dragging her away. Now people are looking. People are seeing them following this boy, seeing Daphne keel into the back of his car while Emma rubs her back and murmurs words that Daphne doesn’t hear. Mom is going to hear about this. The thought makes the fear surge higher, and Daphne gasps and gasps.
He drives, looking at Daphne in the rearview mirror every minute or so. Emma keeps talking to her.
“I shouldn’t go in,” he says when he pulls up to the house, like he’s apologizing.
“I know. This is fine. Thanks, Gabriel,” Emma says. Daphne wants to thank him. She can tell that the worry in his eyes isn’t just for her. This is a risk, somehow, though she doesn’t entirely understand it.
Emma pulls Daphne along. Daphne’s feet drag. Every breath is a question mark. But they burst in through the front door and Emma leaves her leaned up against the doorway. She races inside shouting for their mother.
“What on earth is going on?” Irene Palmer says, stepping out from the dining room. Daphne tries frantically to draw a normal breath. Irene’s lips press together.
“Daphne needs her inhaler. Daph, is it upstairs?” Emma asks, afraid but focused. Daphne shrinks in on herself.
“She doesn’t need that thing. She needs to pull herself together,” their mother says, folding her arms so that her fingertips rest neatly on her elbows.
“She can’t breathe,” Emma says.
“It’s not asthma, it’s a panic attack. It’s in her head,” Mom says. She stands straight and still and tall, her hair in a perfect honey-colored bob. The light of the chandelier reflects off the shiny black of her shoes. Daphne slides slowly down the wall, trying and trying and trying to breathe.
“She needs her inhaler,” Emma says desperately. “It helps.”
“It’s a placebo, and I am done coddling her,” Mom says. Daphne squeezes her eyes shut. She needs air she needs air and there’s none, none, none. She needs to breathe. She needs to be normal—peculiar child—and if she can’t be normal, she needs to be unnoticed, and right now she is neither.
Heels click on hardwood. She senses her mother crouching before her, and opens her eyes.
“Control yourself,” her mother hisses. Her hand raises, and for an instant Daphne thinks she is going to slap her, but she only grabs Daphne’s chin, her fingernails digging in. “You’re too old for this.”
With that she drops Daphne’s face, stands, and walks away. Emma looks between them, her expression a wreck of uncertainty.
Daphne puts her head down and tries, again, to breathe.