The Story Sisters. Alice Hoffman

I do,” Elv said. “I know her inside out.”

      Elv grabbed the homework assignment. It was a report on a European capital. Elv began to write about Paris. She wrote about the Louvre, where the girls had spent hours on their last visit. Later, when Elv read the report out loud, Claire told her not to change a thing. She had gotten it all right, even Claire’s stop after the museum at her favorite ice cream shop, Berthillon. “Favorite flavor?” Elv had asked. All three sisters had shouted out “Vanilla” at the same time. Even Meg knew the answer to that. Claire never varied from her one and only choice. She refused to try a new flavor. For some reason, answering in unison made them feel happy, as if nothing would ever change, and they would always know one another completely, even if no one else did.

      

      ANNIE HADN’T PUNISHED Claire after the incident with the horse. People said her girls would become sullen and spoiled if she weren’t stricter. They said that adolescence was the time when girls flirted with destiny. But Annie was convinced there was no need for Claire to pay any further for her mistake. At the end of the month Claire understood why: spending spring vacation locked away was punishment enough. They were all supposed to go to Paris to visit their grandparents, but when school let out, only Meg and Elv went to France. The sisters had never been separated before. For the first time Claire was alone in their attic bedroom. At night when the leaves of the hawthorn tree rustled, she covered her head with her blanket. She didn’t like being twelve. It was someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all. She had to count to a thousand in order to fall asleep. She missed having Elv out in the tree, keeping watch. She missed Meg’s sleepy, even breathing.

      In Paris, Meg curled up out on the couch in the red-lacquered parlor of her grandparents’ home and wrote postcards to Claire. Meg was lonely and bored. Books didn’t comfort her and even the ice cream at Berthillon wasn’t as good this year. There should have been three of them, three was the right number. Paris wasn’t the same, she complained. The weather was cold and rainy. A warm sweater and wool socks were necessary at all times. There was an old stone trough in the courtyard that had once been used to water horses but this year it had filled with ice, then cracked. The season had been so cold the buds on the chestnut tree never opened; the white buds were pasty and waterlogged around the edges, the glossy leaves more black than green. Plus, Meg and Elv weren’t getting along. They got on each other’s nerves and disagreed over everything.

      “Let’s not stay cooped up,” Elv had said to Meg one evening. Recently it had crossed her mind that if she didn’t know the human world, she couldn’t defend herself against it. She had to experience everything. Go behind enemy lines. “We should go out after Ama and Grandpa are asleep.”

      When Meg had refused, unable or unwilling to break the rules, Elv had taken to sneaking out alone at night, tiptoeing down the back staircase, slipping through the cobbled courtyard. Each excursion was the work of a daring anthropologist: Where do lovers meet? Where can peril be found, and how is it best avoided? Where do squatters live? Can demons be avoided if you don’t have the strength or the time to turn and run?

      When she read Meg’s cards, Claire couldn’t help but wonder if Elv was going off to Arnelle, if she’d found the gate under the chestnut tree, if she knocked three times, then whispered a faerie greeting. When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you’re with me always.

      That was what Elv had written on her postcard to Claire. She sat on a bench on the quay, overlooking the Seine while she wrote. She was barefoot, hunched over, scribbling furiously with a pen filled with pale green ink that she’d bought at a stationery store on the Rue de Rivoli. Paris had never been more beautiful, she told her sister, writing in Arnish. I feel free here. Me sura di falin. No one will hurt us now.

      Elv had come to believe that if she did whatever she was most afraid of, its power over her would evaporate. She held on to metal railings. She went into boulangeries and looked at loaves of bread, and she didn’t disappear the way most faeries would have. She tied her ankles together with rope, then slit the knots with a knife. If she had known these tricks, she might have been able to escape after she rescued Claire. She had come to believe that evil repelled evil, while good collected it. She could see it happening in the parks. The dark lacelike scrim, the goblins astride the billowy trees, the demons drawn to purity, unnoticed by women on the benches, children at play. A clever girl met evil on its own terms. She didn’t get caught unawares. Elv bought a pair of black pointy boots at the flea market. She took up smoking, even though it made her choke. She kept at it until she stopped coughing. She could get used to anything. That’s what she had decided. She perfected a look that said Go away in every language, most especially in Arnish. It was as though she now possessed her own arsenal of weapons. She didn’t mind that men looked at her. Their attraction to her only added to her power.

      All the while Meg lay in her bed reading novels, writing her whiny postcards, Elv was exploring the human world. She could feel herself growing stronger. She no longer panicked if the wind came up, if a stranger walked by. She wasn’t the least bit spooked when the leaves on the trees rattled, always a sign of rain. The rain in Paris was beautiful, anyway, cold and clean and green. The Queen had told her that if she faced whatever she feared most, she would win the right to sit on the Arnish throne. Water, sex, death. Elv wrote the words in green ink on the back of a postcard. She folded the card into threes and kept it under her pillowcase.

      One night Elv woke Meg from a deep sleep. It was late at night. Their ama’s guest room with its two twin beds was bathed in blue light. Elv had brought home a kitten someone had tried to drown. She’d had to wade far into the water to save it. All the while she had a fluttery feeling in her chest. She imagined the water rising over her. She imagined she could no longer breathe. He had done that to her when she started screaming. She thought about her vow to the Queen of Arnelle. Water, sex, death. In an instant, her fear was gone. It was only green water, dirty and cold. She reached out and grabbed.

      “It’s tiny,” Meg said of the kitten when Elv brought it out of the sopping burlap sack it had been tossed into. “Poor thing. It will probably die.”

      “It’s not going to die,” Elv said firmly. Why was it that Meg had to try and ruin everything?

      The kitten was indeed starving and soon began yowling so loudly their ama came running into the guest bedroom, convinced one of the girls had been struck by appendicitis. Elv should have been in trouble for being out at night, but instead she talked Natalia into letting the cat stay. They named it Sadie and gave it a bowl of cream.

      “We won’t tell your grandpa,” Natalia said. “One day he’ll look down and he’ll notice a cat and he’ll think it has always been here. Anyway, she’s a darling creature. Who would mind a little thing like her.”

      Elv looked elated, though her shoes were sloshy with river water and her clothes were soaked. “You have a good heart,” Natalia said to her. Before she went out, she kissed Elv’s forehead. Meg had felt herself burning.

      Elv was singing to herself. She ripped off all of her clothes and left them in a dank pile in the corner. She was a woman and beautiful and fearless and the queen-to-be. She struck her fear of water off her list.

      “You’re going to get in trouble if you keep going out at night,” Meg told her.

      “I don’t care,” Elv shot back. “Anyway, trouble can find you anywhere. It’s probably under your bed right now.”

      

      THE BEST PART of the trip was the art classes the girls took with Madame Cohen, at least in Meg’s opinion. Elv only seemed interested in sleeping the days away so that she’d be refreshed when she sneaked out at night. The girls had been acquainted with their grandmother’s dearest friend since they were little and had often visited her jewelry store. Her stupid grandsons were sometimes there as well, but the Story sisters ignored them; the boys couldn’t even speak English. But they respected Madame Cohen. She had once been a watercolorist of some note. She had gone to art school in Paris and Vienna. She was a stern teacher who wore black even in the summer heat, still in mourning for her husband, who’d been gone