“Yeah, I mean . . . it’s so hard.” I felt myself blush. “I can’t believe I used to think there was anything wrong with my life. I was so ignorant.”

She shrugged. “Nobody has a perfect life. My cousins are rich, but they hate themselves.”

“Doesn’t everybody hate themselves?” I asked.

Tam’s eyes narrowed contemptuously. “No. I don’t. I’ve never done anything bad enough to hate myself. Have you?”

I felt as if our eyes were locked together. She was waiting for an answer, but I didn’t have one. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to say it.

“You’re overthinking this,” she said finally. “You’re alive, so you might as well go along with it. There’s no big secret. You live, and then you die, and that’s it.”

“That’s it?” I half laughed.

“That,” she said, closing her eyes, “is plenty.”

I carried my bags and the bundle of bedsheets to the door. “Tam, we could have been friends if you weren’t such a jerk.”

“I don’t want to be your friend,” she said, not even bothering to open her eyes. “I don’t like you.”

I closed the door and went downstairs.

I didn’t bring the toothbrush.

CHAPTER

3

I’D NEVER BEEN to a country estate before. I didn’t actually know what a country estate was, but I had a vague idea that it was where a duke or an earl would live if we had dukes and earls in America. I figured Mr. Albright was being melodramatic about what would end up being a big house in a nice suburban neighborhood.

I was wrong.

I mean, it was a big house, yes. It was enormous. But it wasn’t in a nice neighborhood—it wasn’t in a neighborhood at all. It was (as one might have guessed) out in the country. About ten minutes before coming into view of the stone pillars at the entrance to the property, we’d passed through a minuscule town with one traffic light, a small row of stores, a used-car lot, a doctor’s office, and a single-story building with a sign reading COPELAND COUNTY SCHOOL. And that was it, as far as the local society went.

I watched helplessly as the signal on my phone weakened, like blood draining from a body, and then disappeared altogether, replaced by two small words: NO SERVICE. It wasn’t that I had any friends to call, but it still felt strangely and almost spookily like being cut off from the world, or going back in time.