Chapter One
By the time I turned fourteen, it was a joke.
The sleepwalking.
The first time it happened, it scared me. Five years old, I woke up in the front yard in nothing but my princess pajamas, knee-deep in snow. It was dark and freezing and dead silent. My fingers were numb. My toes were blue. I couldn’t feel my knees. There was something getting into the trash can at the end of the driveway, its eyes glowing neon through the dark, staring right at me, and I was so scared and so cold that my tears froze to my face before I got back inside.
I didn’t tell anyone. Mostly because I wasn’t sure at all what had happened, but partly because I didn’t know how I’d gotten all the way out of bed and down the stairs without tripping on the third step, the one with the loose nail and the creaky board.
I always tripped there.
The next time, it wasn’t quite as scary, but I still kept it to myself. Who wakes up in the front seat of the family car with the keys in their hand and their tiptoes barely reaching the gas? Certainly not the average six-year-old. I couldn’t even see over the steering wheel. I don’t know what my brain was thinking, don’t know where it thought it was going. I had been dreaming of the desert, the kind where the trees turn to rock, and the sand turns to sky, so maybe I was going there.
By the time I was fourteen, there was no more hiding it. I was going too far. Too often. Too publicly. The whole thing had become a joke. I was front page news more often than Ralph, the town drunk who had a penchant for stripping naked and high-stepping the streets in his birthday suit. I was more entertaining than the Mitchells, the couple over on Third Avenue who’d gotten married and divorced and remarried more times than anyone could remember to count. I was the little pin at the center of the gossip mill, the talk of the town, the ever updating sitcom.
Bella Swan, in shorts and an old tank top, flat on her back in the middle of the football field.
Bella Swan, in sweats and a sports bra, standing spread-eagled on the steps of the library.
Bella Swan, in her underwear and nothing else, nearly three miles out of town, tiptoeing the yellow highway lines like a tightrope.
When Alice went missing, they blamed the sleepwalking.
When Alice went missing, they blamed me.
It’s been three years since that night, and I know ten things for certain:
One.
I will always surprise myself.
There is no getting the best of me. There is no “one step ahead.” No matter what I did to curb myself, no matter how I tried to contain myself or wake myself or stop myself - nothing worked. I locked my bedroom door and nearly broke my leg falling through my second story window instead. I tied my ankle to the bedpost and woke up when it dislocated, limping around for a month before the bruising went away. I rigged the front door up with bells and found them in my fist when I woke up underneath the birch tree at the edge of Ashburn park.
If I ever go to jail, I’ll bet I could sleepwalk my way right out of there.
Two.
It’s better to be prepared.
I figured this out after I showed up in nothing but my red and white-striped boy underwear in front of the gas station on South and Main last year. I woke up to Tommy Meyers, the sad, dark-haired boy who dropped out of school last year because he knocked up his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, staring at me through the big plate glass window with the phone to his ear and his jaw to his chest. That was when I started wearing sweatpants to bed. I started wearing socks, even though I hated socks. I started wearing a hat because the middle of the night is cold, no matter what time of year. I started wearing gloves. My rain boots. A jacket. I started keeping a five dollar bill in my pocket in case I needed a bus or a pay phone or a bribe to get home.
Three.
Forks High School is a cesspool, and I am at the very bottom of the pond. Lower than the math nerds. Lower than the band geeks. Lower than Macy Phillips with her acne and her lazy eye and her one tooth that sticks out at an odd angle and makes all her words come out wonky. I hover somewhere above the creepy dude who sits in his car two blocks away with his dick in his hand watching the kids walk to school, but lower than the janitor.
I am the sleepwalker. The outcast. The girl with the dead sister.
The girl who maybe murdered her dead sister.
Four.
You cannot ignore whispers. They may be soft and spoken behind hands or around corners, behind your back, but you cannot ignore them.
Five.
My mother will send a card at Christmas, and she will call on my birthday, but she won’t want to talk to me. My dad will hold the phone to his ear for less than four minutes before he hangs up, and he’ll have that same look on his face that he always did when she’d bitten his ear off. He’ll avoid my gaze for the rest of the night. He still hasn’t told me where she went, but I found a letter under his bed in her shitty handwriting that described a farm with a bunch of people who grow their own food and don’t wear clothing and believe that some guy named Rashiki was the second coming of God and would save them from a comet that is going to hit earth in four years.
Six.
My father will never be the same. He went from big and burly and bright to utterly wasted in a single afternoon. From loud and boisterous to silent and staring off at nothing, his coffee going cold, the crossword going undone, and the house slowly sinking into the ground. He used to fish. Used to hunt. Used to hike to the tops of the cloud bank mountains. Now, he holds down a spot on the couch, puts in extra hours at work, and turns on football games but doesn’t watch them. He investigates lead after lead after lead, and none of them go anywhere.
Seven.
The best way to fuck up your family?
Murder your sister. Supposedly.
Eight.
No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want to, no matter how you try to push it away or block it out or deny it - you will never, ever, ever, forget the smell of fresh blood.
Nine.
Every town has a tragedy. Every tragedy has a devil.
Ten.
That’s me.
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