THE FIRST

On the last day of June, there was a knock on Aunt Sylvia’s front door. I trotted down the grand staircase to answer it, expecting another parcel from Quinn’s shopping splurges. But when I opened the door, Kaley was there.

“Uh…Come in?” I joked. “Did you forget how to walk through a door since you snuck out at five o’clock this morning?”

“Five o’clock this morning? I’ve only been gone for a day?” Kaley asked with a bizarre look, and I raised an eyebrow.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, stepping onto the porch. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

There was a crease between Kaley’s brows, the edges of her mouth were tipped down, and I glanced past her to the street, wondering if she’d been followed home or was in some kind of trouble.

“Helen,” she finally rasped after too much silence.

My sister burst into an elaborate story about how she’d been pulled through a shop door in Stratford by wind and had appeared in a basement. She spoke of a fairy named Porethius Plum who’d asked her to read and remember the Volumes of Wisdom, which she’d spent four months doing in a time pocket. It sounded like an impossible task she’d been given after an impossible story. Because no one could cross back over into Winter when the intersects were closed.

Even though the more she spoke, the clearer it became that what she was telling me was true, I couldn’t get past the one thing that rang out from her story the loudest:

She’d been to Winter. My Winter. Without me.

After all these years, my aunt had finally found her brain and begrudgingly invited us to live in her enormous house until we found something else, after the region’s health and safety board had deemed Grandma’s house “unfit for occupancy” and forced us to leave last February. Moving day had been the worst. I couldn’t have listened to Quinn’s complaints or subtle jabs about us not belonging for a moment longer. I knew full well that the Bell children didn’t quite belong anywhere.

“What did you do to your room?!” Sylvia’s scold tore my nose up from the violet tome in my hands. Her horrified face took in the evenly spaced-apart papers that covered the floor, the half-filled mugs of cold coffee abandoned on my dresser, and the scribble-covered, coffee-stained napkins I had pegged to the walls.

“Uh…I’m doing a project,” I lied, and added, “Science.”

My aunt’s face soured. “In July?”

The pause that came after was long and awkward. “Yep.”

“Well, it can’t be for school so what is it—”

“College. Prep.” My eyes darted to the window like I’d spotted a bird, which I hadn’t. “College prep. For college. To prepare.”

Sylvia hated it when I talked about science. After she got back from her Costa Rican vacation, I’d tried to explain to her why the sea tides rose and fell, and she’d walked out of the room while I was still talking.