CHAPTER ONE

THIS morning, I awoke to a dead girl standing beside my bed, peeling strips of skin from her arms. I closed my eyes, told myself it was a dream, and made her go away. It wasn’t the first time I had dreamed of her. She had visited me every morning for the past two years, starting the day after my dad was murdered.

Even before her appearance, my whole life had been haunted by dreams. Maybe it was because I lived in a hollowed-out town, a thighbone wasteland with its marrow sucked dry. A river crawled through it, sneaking past high-spired churches and bullfinch halls, under murky catacombs with ghosts waiting for someone to wake them and hear the secrets only they could tell. Or maybe it was because I was that someone and their secrets were waiting for me.

Before I learned about secrets and ghosts and deep dark bowels beneath our feet, I was an average girl with above-average grades who loved poetry and hockey and the dichotomy of that. As I sat in Tom’s Pub with my ma and little sister, Devon, I tried to forget my bad dreams and concentrated on stuffing a slice of pepperoni pizza into my face.

Then the kitchen doors blew open, and my best friend, Siobhan, burst through, holding a birthday cake.

A cake that was on fire.

So was Siobhan, who had stuffed lit candles into her long black braids.

“Surprise!” she screamed. Which was followed by Ma and Devon, yelling, “Happy birthday, Willow Jane!” Which was followed by me wanting to crawl under the table—I was a backstage kind of girl with crippling butterflies, not a diva who basked in the limelight.

“And now!” Siobhan clapped a frosted hand over my mouth. “We must sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the birthday girl! Because she’s a girl! And it’s her birthday!”

“Let’s not,” I said.

“Shh, my sweet.” Siobhan stuck a finger to my lips. “It’s not every day a girl turns sixteen! Right, Devon?”

“Right!” Devon sniffed the air. “Did ja know your head’s on fire?”

“Your head’s on fire,” Siobhan said sarcastically, then sniffed. Her eyes popped wide. “Again?”

She had braided her wild, staticky black hair into pigtails, and she wore faded overalls with a black Bruins tank top. Her manic mood, like an airborne virus, had spread to Devon, who needed mania like a kid with ADD needs a double shot of Red Bull.

I licked my fingers and doused Siobhan’s braid candles, then sighed heavily and closed my eyes. The last thing I wanted was a sweet sixteen, but Ma wanted one for me, and I desperately wanted Ma to be happy again.

“Just get it over with,” I said.

“Um, dois, quatro!” Siobhan sang. “Everybody, sing with me!”

She belted the first sour notes and then was joined by a chorus of regulars singing at the tops of their lungs, louder than the volume of the six big-screen TVs showing the Patriots game. “Happy birthday to you! You smell like a monkey—”

“And you look like one, too!” Devon shrieked.

The air was filled with blue-gray smoke and shouts of well-wishing. Tom’s regulars hadn’t forgotten Michael Conning. The pub walls were papered with photos of singers, and my dad was pictured in a lot of them, flashing that grin and cocking his head just so to let his green eyes glitter. The oldest photo captured a curly haired guitar player in his youth, a soon-to-be one-hit wonder. The most recent showed a faded folk singer playing for his supper. But that was before the shooting, and I wasn’t interested in his pictures anymore.

“Let the spankings commence!” one of the regulars called.

“First one of you lays a hand on my daughter,” Ma yelled and shook her fist at the guy. “Is getting a shiner to show for it!”

The crowd laughed, raised their glasses to us, then turned back to the game.

“You guys?” I pleaded. “Could you possibly be more embarrassing?”

“Yes!” Siobhan waggled her artfully unplucked eyebrows. “We really, really could and in ways even your advanced intellect couldn’t imagine.”

I looked to Ma for sympathy, but she wasn’t having it. Maggie Mae Conning was what Southies called a mere slip of a woman, but beneath multiple layers of sweaters beat the heart of an old-school mother superior. I had inherited her dimples, petite frame, and unruly flame-kissed hair, but not her personality. Ma was the crispy skin of a toasted marshmallow, and I was the soft, gooey center.

“You oughta see the look on your face, Willie!” Siobhan planted a sloppy wet kiss on my cheek. “Never saw it coming, did ya?”

Well, yes, I thought. I did.

In middle school my friends called me the Trivia Jedi because I knew the answers before the teachers finished asking the questions. I ruled games like Words with Friends and Scrabble. I would’ve won the spelling bee, too, if I didn’t forget how to breathe in front of a crowd. So when Siobhan made a grand entrance with my surprise sweet sixteen cake, I wasn’t surprised. I knew exactly what flavor (double chocolate with jimmies), what color icing (white), and what I would wish for when Devon demanded I blow out the candles.

“Willow Jane!” Devon yelled over the din of the pub. “They’re melting! Hurry up!”

Another thing I knew? The candles would relight as soon as I blew them out. That didn’t take clairvoyance—Siobhan had been pulling the same trick since third grade.

“Pull your head outta your ass, Conning!” Siobhan said, growling like our hockey coach. “There ain’t time to make it look pretty!”

“Knew you’d say that,” I said, but still let the flames burn.

Siobhan was right. My head was firmly anchored in my ass, metaphorically speaking. This morning, I had woken to waffles with maple syrup, delivered by Devon on a platter with a plastic red rose and a card written in crayon, the implement of choice for second graders. The rest of the day I had spent reliving bad memories, paying no attention to the priest at church, forgetting to take communion and getting a withering look from Ma instead of a paste-tasty wafer and a sip of sour wine.

I had sleepwalked the six blocks to Tom’s Pub and had eaten the pizza because refusing it would alert Devon to my ennui. Nobody loved malaise like my little sister. She would pounce on a foul mood with the gusto of a kitten attacking a ball of yarn.

Truth was, I’d been dreading this day for months. When Siobhan and Kelly O’Brien, my other but not quite best friend, first suggested a party, I had totally nixed it. Sweet sixteens existed to give girls yet another way to compete. Just on philosophical grounds, I opposed them, and reality check? A widow raising two kids in Boston couldn’t keep up with the Joneses—nor the O’Briens.

My plan not to plan was dashed, though, when Ma got a sudden craving for pizza, even though she had a wheat allergy and tomatoes gave her heartburn. And it couldn’t be just any pizza. It had to be Tom’s, and we had to eat precisely at 3:00 P.M.

Because I was woolgathering, as Ma called it, I barely noticed Kelly scoot through the front door. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she wore a peacoat over a knee-length dress. Kelly was, like Siobhan, almost a foot taller than me. Her face was all cheekbones and dimples, and she had a cleft chin, which Siobhan had dubbed the Butt Chin. She waved at me and Siobhan, who shot her a dirty look.

Later Siobhan would bust her for being the skid who’s late for your friend’s party, and Kelly would apologize profusely and swear to work on her recidivistic tardiness. Despite her poor grasp of time, Kelly was a trooper. She may show up late, but she would always show up, and she’d be carrying an apology in a beautifully wrapped gift bag.

“Willie!” Kelly swooped in and pecked my cheek. “Brought you a little something.”

“You’re a little something,” Siobhan said.

“Get a new joke, huh?” Kelly said without looking at her. “Sorry I’m late. Hey, you waited to blow out the candles. How sweet.”

“Woulda been sweeter,” Siobhan said, “if you’d been here a half hour ago, you big skid. Y’know, like you promised?”

“I’m here now,” Kelly said and sniffed. “You set fire to your hair again?”

“Willow Jane,” Ma said. “Make a wish before the frosting catches fire.”

Part of me had been waiting for my dad to magically walk through the door, but no amount of wishcraft could accomplish that. He always promised that no matter what, he’d be there for me. For us. “I’ve got your back,” he’d say. Who had my back now?

Still, I closed my eyes and whispered a wish. It brought back the memory of my fifth birthday, when Ma decorated the house in a Three Little Pigs motif, and I pretended to be the Big Bad Wolf.

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,” I whispered, then exhaled every molecule of air in my lungs.

The lights went out.

Not just the candles but the lights in the pub, along with the streetlights outside and the illuminated windows of the triple-decker across the street. In an instant the room turned black, and we were bathed in darkness until the sky boomed and lightning exploded in the heavens above.