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Chapter One
Diana
Fourteen years earlier…
“Don’t be-member, don’t be-member—nope, nope.” I chant the words beneath my breath, turning them into a little song as I push my toy tugboat through the bubbly bathwater.
I’m delivering a load of tiny milk bottles to the other side of the tub. If I’m not careful, they’ll tumble off the side and I’ll have to start again.
Those are the rules of Tugboat Milk Delivery Service. You have to get the six full bottles all the way from the back of the bath to the front without spilling any, feed the milk to the plastic cats waiting on the edge of the tub, and then get the empty bottles safely back to the beginning or you lose the game and have to start over.
Also, the cats will get super mad and start yowling for their supper, and no one wants to put up with that racket.
Mom says there’s nothing worse than a hungry cat—unless it’s a hungry baby wolf whining that she wants pizza instead of grilled fish and veggies for dinner.
Mom…
“Don’t be-member, nope,” I chant more firmly, tightening my grip on the boat until the tips of my fingers turn white beneath my nails.
I can’t think about that, or I’ll go back into the dark tunnel where I was before Maxim showed up and pulled me out from under the coffee table. It was so cold in the tunnel, cold and lonely, with only my wailing cries to keep me company. It felt like I was blind, like Aunt Emily who feeds the birds on the tower roof on Sundays.
She puts seed in her hand and holds real still until one of the braver birds comes and sits right in her palm to eat. Then she’ll stroke its feathers, very gentle and slow.
She says that’s how she sees them, with her fingers.
I don’t want to see things with my fingers.
I want to see things with my eyes, but only good things.
I want to see my bath toys and my favorite unicorn pajamas folded in a pile on the sink and then, later, my bedroom with the nightlight on and the covers turned back. As soon as I’m done with bath time, I’m going to go right to sleep and stay in my room until morning. And then I’ll ask Maxim to bring breakfast into my room on a tray like Mom did sometimes for a special treat.
He’s never done that before, but I bet he will if I ask real nice.
Maybe he’ll bring my breakfast to my room every day from now on.
I’ll have breakfast in my room, run straight through the apartment to the door to go to pre-school, and then have dinner with Daddy downstairs in the Atrium while he works on business until it’s bedtime again.
That way I’ll never have to be in the kitchen or the living room or Mama and Daddy’s room ever again.
Mama and Daddy’s bathroom, especially…
“Don’t, don’t, don’t be-member,” I whisper, but my voice is weak and shaky and bad pictures are already popping up in my head.
Images of Mama wrapped in a towel…
She’d just poppedinto my room for a second to tell me to clean up my block mess while she was having her bath and then promised she’d make me a snack as a reward.
I’d said I wanted apple slices with peanut butter, and she said that sounded like a healthy choice. Then she said she loved me bunches and started back to her room, but only a few seconds later someone slammed into the apartment.
It was my biggest brother, Bane, yelling so loud it made the picture frames rattle on the walls in the hall. When I peeked out of my room to see why he was angry, his colors were so pitch black it looked like there was a shadow monster crouched on his shoulders.
The monster had a huge head like a goblin and long shadow teeth. Its fingers dug into Bane’s throat, making the veins in his neck bulge like angry worms as he shouted Mama’s first name in the meanest voice I’d ever heard.
He wasn’t talking to Mama like she was a grown-up or his mom—he was talking to her like she was a bad little kid, and he was the one in charge. For some reason, that scared me even more than his mean colors.
On whisper feet, I dashed into my closet, dove into the pile of stuffed animals in the corner, and burrowed down deep to hide. I grabbed Yub Yub, my favorite round beaver stuffy that’s the perfect size for hugging and curled into a ball beneath the pile of animal friends.
I closed my eyes and wished I could close my ears, too.
