The Story Sisters. Alice Hoffman

a flashlight and tried to memorize it. The rose gardens, the thorn-bushes, the huts made of stone and straw, the paths to the castle, the lake where the water was so deep no one could ever reach the bottom, the meadow where the horse that had been rescued wandered freely, without a saddle or reins.

      

      AS THE SCHOOL term neared its end, Annie was called in to the principal’s office. Elv was barely passing her classes. She fell asleep in Latin. She talked back to teachers. Annie could see her through the glass door, out in the waiting room. Just last week Elv had refused to take the SATs. She didn’t want to go to college. She wanted something different. Maybe she’d live in Paris and work for Madame Cohen and sit in cafés in the evening and walk along the river.

      The principal called Elv into his office when he and Annie were done with their meeting. “Did you have anything you wanted to say?”

      “Ni hamplig, suit ne henaj.” Elv looked at the floor. You’re a pig and a dog, she had told him. A little smile played around her lips.

      “I think you see what I’m talking about,” the principal remarked to Annie.

      “Can’t you just go along with things and be polite?” Annie said as they walked out to the car.

      “Is that what you want? For me to be polite?” Elv yanked the door open and folded herself into the passenger seat. She flipped down the visor so she could look into the mirror as she applied green eyeliner. In Arnelle, members of the royal family all had green eyes. She hadn’t had the heart to tell Claire that she was not included in the top echelon, although she would have loved to let Meg know. Meg who was so perfect, who didn’t know the first thing about real life.

      “Are you upset about something?” Annie said. “You can talk to me. You used to talk to me.”

      Elv laughed. “A hundred years ago.” In Arnelle, a hundred years went by in an instant. Time was transparent. You could see right through it. Look through the glass, the Queen had told her. See how simple it is to walk back in time?

      Elv leaned forward to get a better look in the mirror. As she did, her sleeveless T-shirt pulled back. You could see her flesh through the fabric. Annie saw a flash of one of the black stars.

      “What is that?” she asked. She had a tumbling feeling. She’d been shy as a girl and had felt a sort of desperation whenever she’d had to speak in public. She felt a wave of desperation now.

      Elv gazed at her shoulder and pulled her shirt over her skin. “I’ve had it for a long time,” she said coolly. “You just never noticed.”

      “Elv. Please. Talk to me.”

      “I’m not going to be polite, if that’s what you want to talk about. You can forget about that. “ Elv had a strange feeling in her throat. If she wasn’t careful, she might say something. She turned to look out the window. Everything looked the same in North Point Harbor, everything was green. It was a relief to be invisible, to be marked by stars. She didn’t have to listen to another word her mother said, even if she begged Elv to talk to her, even if she was crying.

      “Can we just go?” Elv said.

      Her mother started the car.

      

      MEG WAS THE one who found the marijuana in the closet. It was in a shoebox, along with matches and some rolling papers. She pulled Claire inside and they sat there under the green map of Arnelle in the dark. Meg flipped on a flashlight. Claire had grown and was now as tall as her sisters. If only there hadn’t been that stupid disaster with the haircuts, people would have thought they were triplets. They would have had great fun in school, tricking teachers and classmates alike.

      “It probably belongs to Justin Levy,” Claire said. “She spends a lot of time with him.”

      Meg grimaced. “I doubt that. Justin’s not her friend. He’s more like her slave. Everyone knows she’s just using him.”

      Justin had his own car and would drive Elv anywhere she wanted to go. She didn’t even walk to school with her sisters anymore.

      Claire held the baggie up to her nose. “It smells like feet,” she said.

      “The question is—do we tell Mom?”

      “No,” Claire said. “Definitely not.”

      “We have to say something,” Meg insisted.

      “Why?”

      “If you keep someone’s secret, you’re just as guilty as they are. You’re an accomplice.”

      Claire felt hot in the closet. There really wasn’t any air.

      “Fine,” she said. “We’ll talk to Elv tonight.”

      

      ELV DIDN’T COME home for dinner. Annie and Claire and Meg had pizza and a salad. The sisters exchanged a glance when Annie asked if they knew where Elv was. They shrugged and said they had no idea.

      “Is that Justin Levy her boyfriend?” Annie wanted to know.

      “Hardly,” Meg said. “He’s just madly in love with her.”

      “Meg!” Claire said.

      “Well, everyone knows he is. He spray-painted that thing on the wall.”

      “What wall?” Annie said.

      He had spray-painted I would tear out my heart for you on the side of the old Whaling Museum in town. Everybody was talking about it.

      “The salad’s good,” Claire said.

      “I would tear out my heart for you,” Meg said.

      “That’s about Elv?” Annie had noticed the shaky writing, the yellow spray-painted declaration of love.

      “Yep,” Meg said.

      “We assume, but we don’t know,” Claire said. She gave Meg a look. “Justin Levy has emotional problems.”

      “Major ones,” Meg agreed.

      “For all we know, that graffiti could be about Mary Fox,” Claire ventured.

      They all laughed.

      “I would tear out my cerebellum for you,” Meg joked.

      “I would conjugate Latin for you,” Claire piped in.

      “I would love you all the days of my life,” Annie said to her daughters, glad that she wasn’t Justin Levy’s mother.

      

      THEY WERE UPSTAIRS doing their homework when Elv finally came home. She smelled like burning leaves. “Hard at work?” she said. She picked up one of Meg’s books—The Scarlet Letter—and thumbed through. “Who would name someone Hester?”

      Meg reached under her bed and brought out the shoebox.

      “Well, well,” Elv said when she saw it. She put down the book. “Look what the little detective found.”

      “We don’t want you to get in trouble,” Claire told her.

      “Trouble with a capital T?” Elv sat down on Claire’s bed. She was sitting on Claire’s feet, but Claire didn’t complain. “I wish you wouldn’t look through my personal belongings,” she said to Meg. “Just because you’re jealous.”

      “Jealous?” Meg laughed. She didn’t sound very happy.

      “It started in Paris and you know it. You couldn’t stand that you didn’t have the guts to do what I did.”

      “You mean sleep all day? Or be a whore?”

      Elv reached over and slapped her sister. “You’re a jealous bitch and you know it.”

      Meg clutched at her burning cheek.

      “You wanted to blame me for cutting your hair, but