Chapter 1

Mica moves carefully. Not only is the room dark and her hold slippery, but she’s also trying to be quiet. This is it. There’s just this one tiny step she has to complete and once she does it, she’ll have managed to sneak away undetected. Long will she crow in victory—to herself and maybe to Randy—that she managed to get passed her sneaky brother and his friend. Oh, she can almost taste it. Sweet, sweet victory.

Just a little bit more, aaaand…There’s a light in the room. It’s the small light from her old baby monitor. Since then, it’s been the in-home communication system because it seems silly to get one expensive machine that they’ll only use for a few years. But it shouldn’t be turned on. It’s gone from its place on her desk and now it languishes on her bed, its perpetual movement gears laughing at her with their soft whir.

They know.

“Shit,” Mica mouths.

But she still hopes, alright? They might have caught her sneaking out, but until they catch her coming back in, she has a case. She can argue that…ah. Actually, it doesn’t have to make sense, personal accomplishments are like that.

Now, how to get on the bed and avoid any squeaking?

Mica has these heavy bones that just weigh a lot so she can just throw herself on the furniture. She’s not a big girl, in fact, Ollie calls her twig and it’s not because she’s young. Though she is that too. But it’s mainly because she’s skinny so she doesn’t know where the weight comes from. She heard somebody respond to the accusation that they were fat by answering that they were big-boned and it sounded good enough. Mica’s tall so she has enough bone to make sense for her too.

In this instance, it’s almost impossible for her to sit without a sound. More than that, she’ll have to move the monitor to get under the covers. It’s cold outside and storming, and there’s no way she’ll fall asleep without her mountain of blankets. They are there more to relax her—she gets twitchy when it rains out and the stronger it rains, the worse it gets. Wes found out when she was little that the blankets help and she will forever be grateful to her brother for it. She wouldn’t even know where to start to figure out an answer, but he managed, having only her gestures and the volume of her crying as guides.

Wes, may or may not be the best older brother ever. Actually, at the end of the day, he was her dad. He raised her since she was little and their parents died. She doesn’t remember them, but Ginnie thinks he’s her dad for true and that’s why Mica’ll refer to him as her brother. Even in their little mutt town people turned up their noses at illegitimate children.

And it’s not like they look like each other much, anyway. Except for the eyes, almond-shaped and black, they don’t have any features in common. He is dark-skinned, and not like he is a hybrid either, but like any of the people in one of the real towns. She, though, has white skin. Not as pink tinted as Ollie’s but white none the less. She has a birthmark that he doesn’t have, the strands of hair right above her ears are white, and she’s going gray. At seventeen, ugh. This used to be another thing she had in common with her brother, their long, glossy black hair, but…oh, well. They don’t even have the same skill. Or rather, he has one and she doesn’t.

Her point is, she doesn’t take after Wes and she would if they were father and daughter.

Ginnie said that’s just more proof that she had a mutt mother and they had a baby and, at this point in the conversation, Mica just gives up. There’s no convincing Ginnie. Mica will do what she can to preserve her brother’s reputation, but she can’t stop people like Ginnie from talking, no matter how badly she wants to.

But, coming back to sneaking out and Wes’s title as the best brother she could have wished for, one thing that annoys Mica is that Wes is, above all, smug. Ollie too. Both of them just won’t accept that it doesn’t look good on a person. They’ll continue to hold petty things above her head forever. She won’t be able to escape the teasing. She can just imagine herself being an old lady in a clockwork rocker that she managed to swindle from Randy and Wes suddenly saying, Remember that time you sneaked out and thought that we wouldn’t catch you? And Ollie would laugh like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard and…No.

Maybe Mica is slight enough to be able to completely envelop herself in the blankets and not disturb the monitor. She can do it. Yes, she can. She can—she freezes. The monitor just made a noise.