Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) (39 page)

Mom steps ahead to investigate the house while Dad, Prudence and I wheel our suitcases across the bumpy ground. My parents had bought the house having only seen photos online and I guessed they weren’t really sure what they’d bought. Inside, it’s bigger than it’d looked on the outside. A high, raked ceiling reflects in the gleaming floorboards.

Dad reaches his arm around Mom. “Perfect.” His phone rings and echoes in the empty spaces, and he ambles off to talk to a client. Dad still had law cases to tie up back at home. He wasn’t sure if he was going to work as an attorney here.

Mom shows us our room, smiling apologetically.

Prudence throws her skinny arms around Mom and hugs her. “Can't wait to get everything set up.”

Mom tousles her hair. “We’ve got furniture on order, but I’m afraid we’ll all be in sleeping bags until we’re sorted.”

“We’ll just pretend we’re camping.” Humming, Prudence starts inspecting the boxes that are stacked up in a corner of the room. We hadn’t brought much with us. Prudence and I had only been allowed two boxes each. All my clothes, my photos, my things,
my whole life
was in those two boxes. Prudence didn’t seem to care about having to leave stuff behind—as long as she had a pencil and paper with which to write her poetry, she was happy.

“Cassie,” Mom says hesitantly, “are you okay? You look a little... beat.”

“Yeah. I am. Was a long car trip.”

“Yes, goodness, I had no idea this place was going to be so far from the coast. Things look so different on a map. Well, I’d better go start sorting things out.” With a smile that's tired around the edges, she leaves the room.

Prudence sits cross-legged on the floor. With nothing better to do, I join her. There’s no point getting anything out of the boxes when there’s no furniture to put anything in.

She gazes out at the mountains beyond the window—mountains that have now entirely claimed the sun. Night's moving in fast. “What do you think’s going to happen to us here?”

Stretching out my legs, I rest my feet against the wood-paneled wall. Prudence says the strangest things, things that crawl under your skin and chill your bones. I have to remember she’s only eleven and isn’t aware of the effect she has on others. “What do you mean?”

She frowns, considering her words. “I don’t know. It just feels like... you know when we play that game, hotter or colder? Like, when you hide something and then blindfold me, and I have to find it, just by you telling me if wherever I’m going is hotter or colder?” She nods at me. “Well, it feels like we’re getting hotter.”

“That’s crazy,” I tell her, then instantly regret my words. She’d heard the word
crazy
whispered about her too many times in her short life. But I hate it when she gets like this.

Her eyes cloud and she fiddles with her fingers. She’d been biting her fingers again—they were raw almost to the point of bleeding. It was a bad habit she’d started years ago and had never really stopped.

“Probably doesn’t matter where we go,” she says finally.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Seriously, you freak me out sometimes.”

She cast me a typical Prudence glance. Kind of blank but with rivers running in all directions beneath. “I don’t know. I just feel it. Things go round and round. Everything comes again. Until someone does something so differently that they change everything.”

“Like what?” I demand.

“When they do something so different to the usual that it knocks everything out of order.”

“Little sister, I think you’ve been listening to Mom and her psych talk too much.”

She shakes her head of dark locks. “No, it’s because of you. When I see the
other you
, I know she’s hurting, but there’s something she won’t let go of.” She bends her head. “I saw the
other you
... when I first walked into this room. You were waiting for me.”

I exhale a long silent breath. I wish, for the thousandth time, she’d stop with this stuff. A lot of kids had imaginary friends—but the imaginary friend that my sister had was
me
. She’d been seeing a ghostly image of me since she was a toddler. She used to stand in her cot, pointing to an empty corner of the room, calling to me. And as she grew up, she kept on seeing me—me at all different ages, from three to teenage. Of all people she could have chosen to haunt her, why me? It could have been Grandma, who was actually dead—but no.

Even my mom—the child psych—was at a loss to explain it.

Prudence studies me with troubled eyes. “You see things too. Admit it.”

I shake my head slightly as I look away. She was the weird one. Not me.

“I know you do,” she persists. “You say things in your sleep.”

“Those are just nightmares, Prue. Everyone has them.”

“They don’t have the same nightmares over and over. Not usually. I hear everything you say.” She rummages in a box and pulls out her sketch book. After flipping through a few pages, she seems to find whatever it is she’s looking for, and hands me the open book. My gaze falls upon a detailed drawing of a strange curio-cabinet. The cabinet holds dolls within each compartment. But the eyes, the eyes of the dolls are too
alive
to be those of dolls—their eyes are filled with pain and longing. Instantly, my stomach begins churning—a nausea turning my intestines inside out.

I toss the book across the room. “Why do you want to draw such weird damned stuff? Why can’t you just be like other kids?”

Her eyes glisten wetly. “It wasn’t my dream. It was yours.”

Sweat forms on the back of my neck. “I don’t remember any such dream.”

Her eyes are wide and certain. “When you have that dream, you describe the cabinet. You say that it’s twenty rows wide and three rows high. And you say a name. It sounds like
Et-ee-en-ette
. You’re scared and you’re asking her for help.”

“Just stop it, okay?” My voice rises to a low shriek. “I don’t want to know.”

“I see her too,” she whispers. “She looks like us....”

I jump to my feet. “You have to stop seeing things, Prue. You’re eleven now. Time to grow up!”

My feet pound the floorboards as I run through the house. Outside, a forest of trees bars my way like a pack of sentinels. Picking up a rock, I squeeze it in my fist so hard that it hurts, then thrust it into the forest.

Prudence is right—I’m crazy just like her. Maybe I didn’t see imaginary people, but my nightmares were so vivid that they reached far beyond the night, until I could still hear the voices when I sat at my desk at school. The dreams follow me, they claw at me, telling me there’s something I have to do.

And the most vivid dream of all... is of myself drowning. In those dreams, all I can feel is the black water all around me, knowing I will never reach adulthood. There’s a presence there, but I can’t see what it is—I just know that I fear it. I know that it wants to kill me.

At age seventeen, according to my dreams, I will die.

~.~

When summer finally kicked in around here, it came like a dragon, breathing suffocating hot air down on us.

I tug on my new school clothes. I want to wear shorts and a tank top to school, but instead have to wear a pleated, plaid skirt and a Peter Pan-collared shirt. I wonder what the other kids are going to be like. By grade ten, everyone’s in tight groups and cliques. I've already done months of grade ten back in Miami, but the school year starts in February here. Lucky me.

Out in the living room, Mom’s dressed in a tailored jacket and skirt, ready for her first day at her new job. She even has her hair up in a knot—normally she wears her long hair down because Dad likes it that way.

“Nervous?” I ask her.

“Trying not to be. You?”

I nod. “Yeah. They all talk funny here.”

She laughs. “You’ll be fine.” Glancing down at her clothing, she adjusts a jacket that doesn’t need adjusting. “Does this make me look uptight? I was going for smart casual, but I think I might have landed up with the accountant look instead.”

“Mom, you don’t look like an accountant, okay?”

Back in Miami, Mom had received a phone call from a psychiatrist in Australia. She’d heard about the innovative work Mom had been doing with troubled youth in her role as a psychologist, and she wanted to offer Mom a new career. Mom would be running her own youth crisis center—all funded by an anonymous philanthropist. It was the kind of offer that Mom could have only dreamed of—with a financial package that was too good to refuse. The only catch was that the job was in Australia. Dad had reasoned that Mom had taken a backseat with her career to stay at home with Prudence and me when we were small, and now it was her turn to move ahead career-wise. So, three months later, here we were.

A smile flits across her lips. “I guess I just want to make a good impression. The lady who runs the center comes with a very impressive reputation—Doctor Verena Symes. She’s American, but she’s been here for six months. I’m sure to end up putting my foot in my mouth.”

"Whoever this Doctor Verena lady is, she's sure to love you," I say encouragingly.

A slim figure runs into the room and spins around. “How do I look?” Prudence seems so young in her school uniform—her hair neatly back in a matching hair band.

“Just beautiful.” Mom nudges her affectionately under her chin with a finger.

Prudence whirls around to me to show off her brand new clothes. I want to be happy for her. But I can already hear the taunts of the other kids in my ears. I’m already cringing inside, wondering how long it will be before she starts coming home in tears. She can’t hide who she is, and anyway, kids can sniff out any sign of oddity from a mile away. And my sister is more than odd. Far, far more than odd.

~.~

Heat burns through the asphalt into my shoes. The kids stare at Prudence and me like we’re aliens as we cross the quadrangle. I walk her to the office of her elementary school. In Miami, she'd already started middle school, but here, elementary went up to sixth grade. It was the one good thing about starting school here. Being in the first year of middle school is bad enough, but starting it in a strange country is even worse. And just being Prudence is bad enough to begin with.

She squeezes my hand before I leave. Some of the excitement has faded from her eyes, and she swallows tightly as she stands outside the principal’s office. I give her a quick hug, and she’s happy again. I often think how ridiculously easy it is to make my sister happy, especially considering all the crap she’s had thrown at her in her short life.

Heading back to middle school, I unfold the faint printout I’ve been given and try to work out which way to go. I tell myself to remember they don’t call it middle school here—they call it high school.

I don’t know where I’m supposed to be going. Like some kind of idiot, I walk all the way to one end of a corridor, only to have to turn around and go back the other way. The school here isn’t half as big as the one I left behind in the US, but I still can't figure out the map.

A group of girls stand on the stairs—a pair of twins with wet hair like they've just been swimming, and a tall girl with startlingly aqua eyes. At first, I don’t notice the other girl who stands almost behind them. She moves back against the wall as though she’s trying to disappear—her hair a colorless white and her eyes as guarded as prisons.

“Hey, I’m Aisha.” The tall girl with the aqua eyes flashes a smile at me. “The twins are Brianna and Caitlin. And this is Lacey. I saw a new name on the list for our environmental studies class. I bet that’s you.”

“I’m Cassandra... Cassie. And yes, I did apply for that class.”

“Thought so,” Aisha nods. “So you’re American. Man, I so want to go there. I want to go everywhere.” Her eyes light up. “What’s your first class this morning?”

Tucking my hair behind my ears, I produce my timetable. “I’ve got math up first I think. Room 2A.”

One of the twins points upward. “Okay, the maths department is upstairs and to the end of the corridor.”

I had to remember, here they call it maths, not math.

Thanking them, I make my way up the stairs. Kids jostle past me, a few staring my way without even trying to disguise their curiosity.

A boy lets his mouth drop open suggestively as he gazes at me—his hair in a blonde surfer style. His friend punches him in the arm—a boy with aqua eyes who looks a lot like Aisha. “Give the poor girl some air.”

“Stuff you, Raif.” Unperturbed, surfer-boy continues to stare.

Walking away quickly. I reach the top landing of the stairs.

Here, a boy leans with both elbows on the railing. The casual way he wears his uniform, the slant of his body, the assuredness of his expression—everything about him says he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.

Girls look his way, trying to capture his attention. It isn’t hard to see why. His face is beautiful and vulnerable and cocky all at once.

At first when he notices me looking, a frown crosses his forehead, like there's something about me he doesn’t understand. Then his mouth pulls into a grin that makes my insides churn like butter. But the smile isn’t like a boy smiling at a girl—it’s more like the smile of a brother-in-arms, a comrade, an acknowledgment. He doesn’t want to be there at school either. I see a restlessness in his sepia-colored eyes... and I’m close enough to breathe the scents that drift from him, scents of sunlight and the forest.

I have the strangest sense about him—as though I know him. As though I’ve always known him.

My instinct is to keep walking. It’s what I always do—I run from anything that seems too intense. Being the sister of an intense little kid like Prudence has made me want to shut anything like that out.

But I stop and a word leaves my lips. “Hi.”

“Hello.” His voice vibrates through my chest. I should have known his voice would match his face—both taking my breath from my lungs.

As he raises his hand in a wave, a notebook falls next to my shoes. Bending, I scoop it up. The notebook opens on some kind of ugly picture—tree roots twisting all over the page. There’s a poem on the page next to the picture—something about seeing someone on the other side, something about mirrors.