THREE
The bonfire throws sparks up into the silvery night sky. Rose and I scramble down the uneven trail to Coppers Beach, the only stretch of shore in Sparrow that isn’t bound in by rocks and steep cliffs. It’s a narrow length of speckled white and black sand that ends at an underwater cave that only a few of the bravest—and stupidest—boys have ever attempted to swim into and then back out of.
“Did you give her the forgetful cake?” Rose asks, like a doctor who’s prescribed medication and wants to know if there were any ill side effects or positive results.
After returning to Lumiere Island, after showering in the drafty bathroom across the hall from my bedroom then staring at my small, rectangular closet, trying to decide what to wear to tonight’s event—finally settling on white jeans and a thick black sweater that will keep out the night’s chill—I went into the kitchen and presented my mom with Mrs. Alba’s forgetful cake. She had been sitting at the table staring into a cup of tea.
“Another one?” she asked drearily when I slid the cake in front of her. In Sparrow, superstition holds as much weight as the law of gravity or the predictability of the tide charts, and for most locals Mrs. Alba’s cakes have the same likelihood of helping Mom as would a doctor’s bottle of pills. So she obediently took small bites of the lavender and lemon petit four, careful to not spill a crumb onto her oversized tan sweater, the sleeves rolled halfway up her pale, bony forearms.
I don’t think she even realized today is the last day of school, that I just finished my junior year of high school, and that tomorrow is June first. It’s not like she’s completely lost all sense of reality, but the edges of her world have dulled. Like hitting mute on the remote control. You can still see the picture buzzing on the TV; the colors are all there, but there’s no sound.
“I thought I saw him today,” she muttered. “Standing on the shore below the cliff, looking up at me.” Her lips quivered slightly, her fingers dropping a few crumbs of cake onto the plate in front of her. “But it was just a shadow. A trick of the light,” she amended.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, touching her arm softly. I can still hear the sound of the screen door slamming shut the night my father left the house, recall the way he looked walking down the path toward the dock, his shoulders bent away from the spray of the sea, his gait weary. I watched him leave on that stormy night three years earlier, and he never came back.
He simply vanished from the island.
His sailboat was still at the dock, his wallet on the side table by the front door of the house. No trace. No note. No clues. “Sometimes I think I see him too,” I tried to console her, but she stared at the cake in front of her, the features of her face soft and distant as she silently finished the last few bites.
Sitting beside her at the kitchen table, I couldn’t help but see myself in her: the long straight brown hair, same liquid blue eyes and tragically pale skin that rarely sees the sun in this dreary place. But while she is polished and graceful with ballerina arms and gazelle legs, I have always felt knock-kneed and awkward. When I was younger, I used to walk bent forward, trying to appear shorter than the boys in my class. Even now, I often feel like a puppet whose master keeps pulling all the wrong strings so that I fumble and trip and hold my hands clumsily out in front of me.
“I don’t think cake is going to fix her,” I tell Rose as we walk single file down the path lined with dry grass and thorny bushes. “The memory of my dad’s disappearance is so solidified in her mind that no amount of local remedies will strip it out.”
“Well, I don’t think my mom has given up yet. Today she was talking about a new mixture of bee pollen and primrose that she thinks might help unsnag the worst of memories.” We finally reach the beach and Rose hooks her arm through mine, our feet kicking up sand as we make our way to the bonfire.
Most of the girls are wearing long, layered dresses with low necklines and ribbons tied in their hair. Even Rose has on a pale green gown made of lace and chiffon that sweeps across the sand when she moves, dragging bits of driftwood and shells along with her.
Olivia Greene and Lola Arthurs, best friends and the rulers of Sparrow’s social elite, are dancing on the other side of the bonfire when we enter the crowd, obviously already intoxicated, which is no surprise to anyone. Their hair is an identical shade of gothic black with short, severe bangs, dyed and trimmed just two weeks ago for the Swan season. Normally, their locks are bleached white—long and beachy. Which will probably return in a month, when the Swan season is over and they aren’t feeling the need to dress like death. But Olivia and Lola love the dramatic, love dressing up, love being the center of attention at any social gathering.
Last year they pierced each other’s noses in defiance of their parents—Olivia’s is a silver stud in her left nostril, Lola’s is a hoop through the right. And their nails are painted a matching macabre black, a perfect complement to the hair. They spin in circles beside the bonfire, waving their arms in the air and lolling their heads from side to side as if to mimic the embodiment of a Swam sister. Although I doubt the Swan sisters ever did anything so idiotic-looking two hundred years ago.
Someone hands Rose a beer and she in turn hands it to me to take the first sip. On weekends, sometimes we’ll sneak beers or a half-finished bottle of white wine from her parents’ fridge then get buzzed while stretched out on her bedroom floor listening to music—lately it’s been country hits, our most recent obsession—and flipping through last year’s yearbook, speculating about who’s going to hook up this year and who might be inhabited by a Swan sister come summer.
I take a swig and look through the crowd at all the faces I recognize, at people who I’ve gone to school with since grade school, and I have the sharp thought that I hardly know any of them. Not really. I’ve had passing conversations with a few: Did you write down the chapters we’re supposed to read tonight in Mr. Sullivan’s third-period history? Can I borrow a pen? Do you have a cell phone charger I can use? But to call any of them friends wouldn’t just be a stretch, it would be an all-out lie. Maybe it’s partly because I know most of them will leave this town eventually—they will go off to college and have lives far more interesting than mine. We’re all just passing ships; no point forming friendships that won’t last.
And while Rose is not exactly climbing the social hierarchy at Sparrow High, she at least makes an effort to be friendly. She smiles at people in the halls, starts chatty conversations with her locker neighbors, and this year Gigi Kline, cheerleading captain for our struggling basketball team, even invited her to try out for the squad. They were friends once—Gigi and Rose—in elementary school. Best friends, in fact. But friendships are more fluid in grade school; nothing feels as permanent. And though they aren’t exactly close anymore, Rose and Gigi have remained friendly. A tribute to Rose’s kind nature.
“To the Swan sisters!” someone shouts. “And to another fucking year of high school!” Arms rise into the air, holding cans of beer and red cups, and a chorus of hoots and whistles carries across the beach.
Music thumps from a stereo balanced on one of the logs near the bonfire. Rose takes the beer from me and shoves a larger bottle into my hand. Whiskey—it’s being passed through the crowd. “It’s awful,” she confesses, her face still puckered. But then she smiles, wagging an eyebrow at me. I chug back a quick slog of the dark booze, and it burns my throat, sending goose bumps down my arms. I hand it off to my right, to Gigi Kline. She grins, not at me—she doesn’t even seem to notice me—but down at the bottle as she takes it from my hands, tips it to her mouth, swallows down way more than I could ever manage, and then wipes at her perfect coral lips before passing the bottle to the girl on her right.
“Two hours until midnight,” a boy across the bonfire announces, and another wave of whoops and hollers rolls through the group. And those next two hours pass in a fog of bonfire smoke and more beers and swigs of whiskey that burn less and less with each sip. I hadn’t planned on drinking—or getting drunk—but the warmth radiating throughout my entire body makes me feel loose and floaty. Rose and I find ourselves swaying happily with people who we might normally never talk to. Who might normally never talk to us.
But when it’s less than thirty minutes to midnight, the group begins to stagger down the beach to the water’s edge. A few people, either too drunk or deep in conversation to leave the bonfire, stay behind, but the rest of us gather together as if forming a procession.
“Who’s brave enough to go in first?” Davis McArthurs asks aloud so everyone can hear, his spiky blond hair pushed up from his forehead and his eyelids sagging lazily like he’s about to take a nap.
A rumble of low furtive voices passes through the mob, and a few of the girls are pushed playfully forward, their feet splashing into the water only ankle deep before they scurry back out. As if a few inches of water were enough for the Swan sisters to steal their human bodies.
“I’ll do it,” a singsong, slurring voice announces. Everyone cranes their head to see who it is, and Olivia Greene steps forward, twirling in a circle so that her pastel yellow dress fans out around her like a parasol. She’s obviously drunk, but the group cheers her on, and she bows forward as if greeting her adoring fans before turning to face the black, motionless harbor. Without any coaxing, she begins to wade out into the salty sea, arms outstretched. When she’s waist deep, she does a very ungraceful dive forward, which looks more like a belly flop. She disappears from view for half a second before reappearing at the surface, laughing wildly with her tragic-black hair draped over her face like seaweed.
The crowd cheers and Lola steps into the water up to her knees, urging Olivia back to the shallows. Davis McArthurs calls again for volunteers, and this time there is only a half beat before a voice shouts, “I’ll go in!”
I snap my gaze to the left where Rose has stepped out of the crowd, moving toward the water.
“Rose,” I bark, reaching out and grabbing her arm. “What are you doing?”
“Going for a swim.”
“No. You can’t.”
“I’ve never really believed in the Swan sisters anyway,” she says with a wink. And the crowd pulls her from my grasp, ushering her toward the cold ocean. She smiles widely as she wades out into the water, past Olivia. She’s barely up to her waist when she dives forward and slips beneath the surface. A ripple shudders out behind her, and everyone on the beach falls silent. The air constricts in my lungs. The water flattens again at the surface, and even Olivia—who’s still calf deep in the shallows—turns to watch. But Rose doesn’t reappear.
Fifteen seconds pass. Thirty. My hearts starts to clap against my chest—a painful certainty that something isn’t right. I push out from the crowd, suddenly sober, watching for Rose’s red hair to break through the surface. But there’s not even a breeze. Not even a ripple.
I take a single step into the water—I have to go in after her. I don’t have a choice. When beneath the bloodless half-moon, shattering the calm, she suddenly bursts above the waterline, reemerging several yards farther out into the harbor from where she went in, I let out a trembling sigh of relief and the crowd erupts in a collective cheer, raising their cups as if they just witnessed some impossible feat.
Rose flips onto her back and lifts her arms overhead in a fluid pinwheel, swimming toward shore—casual, as if she were doing laps in a pool. I expect Davis McArthurs to ask who else wants to go in, but the group has gotten rowdy and girls are now traipsing through the shallow ankle-deep water, but never actually going all the way in. People stretch out on the sand, some shotgun beers, and others do sloppy cartwheels into the water.
Rose finally reaches the beach, and I try to push over to her, but several senior guys have gathered around her, giving her high fives and offering her beers. I slink back from the group. She shouldn’t have done that—gone into the water. Risked it. My cheeks blaze, watching her nonchalantly wipe the water from her arms as if she is pleased with herself, smiling up at the cluster of guys who’ve taken a sudden interest in her.
The moonlight makes a path up the beach, and I wander away from the noise of the party—not far, just enough to catch my breath. I drank too much, and the world is starting to buzz and crackle and tilt off axis. I think of my father vanishing on a night when there was no moon to see by, no stars to guide his way back from the dark. If there had been a moon, maybe he would have returned to us.
I consider heading back to the marina, ditching the party and returning to the island, when I hear the heavy breathing and staggered footsteps of someone stumbling up the sandy beach behind me. “Hey,” a voice calls. I spin around and see Lon Whittamer—one of Sparrow High’s notorious partiers—swaying toward me like I’m standing in his path.
“Hi,” I answer softly, trying to step out of his way so he can continue his drunken walk up the beach.
“You’re Pearl,” he says. “No, Paisley.” He laughs, tosses his head back, his brown eyes slipping closed briefly before focusing on me again. “Don’t tell me,” he says, holding up a finger in the air as if to stop me from giving away my name before he’s had time to figure it out on his own. “Priscilla. Hmm, Pinstripe.”
“You’re just saying things that start with the letter P.” I’m not in the mood for this; I just want to be left alone.
“Penny!” he shouts, cutting me off.
I take a step back as he leans forward, exhaling a boozy breath and almost falling into me. His dark brown hair is plastered to his forehead, and his narrow-set eyes seem unable to focus, blinking closed every couple seconds. He’s wearing a neon orange shirt with palm trees and pink flamingos scattered across it. Lon likes to wear obnoxious Hawaiian shirts in all shades of bright tropical colors with exotic birds and pineapples and hula girls. I think it started as a joke or maybe a dare our sophomore year, and then it turned into his trademark style. It makes him look like an eighty-year-old man on permanent vacation in Palm Springs. And since I don’t think he’s ever been to Palm Springs, his mother must order them online. And tonight he’s wearing one of his ugliest.
“I like you, Penny. I always have,” he mumbles.
“Is that right?”
“Yup. You’re my kind of girl.”
“I doubt that. You didn’t even know my name two seconds ago.”
Lon Whittamer’s parents own the only major grocery store in town: Lon’s Grocery, which they named after him. And he’s known for being a total narcissistic asshole. He considers himself a ladies’ man—a self-proclaimed Casanova—only because he can offer his girlfriends discounts on makeup in the meager cosmetics aisle at his parents’ store, and he uses this like a gold trophy he only hands out to girls who are worthy. But he’s also known for cheating on his girlfriends and has been caught numerous times making out with other girls in his jacked-up, chrome-rimmed, mud flap–accessorized red truck parked in the school parking lot. Basically, he’s a moron who doesn’t even deserve the breath it takes to tell him to get lost.
“Why didn’t you go into the water?” he asks slyly, inching closer to me again. “Like your friend did?” He brushes his hair back from his forehead and it sticks straight up, either from sweat or seawater.
“I didn’t want to.”
“You’re afraid of the Swan sisters?”
“Yeah, I am,” I answer honestly.
His eyes slide partway closed, and a stupid grin curls across his lips. “Maybe you should swim with me?”
“No thanks. I’m going back to the party.”
“You didn’t even wear a dress,” he points out, and his eyes slide down my body like he’s shocked by my appearance.
“Sorry to disappoint you.” I start to take a step around him, but he grabs hold of my arm and digs his fingers into my skin.
“You can’t just walk away.” He hiccups, closes his eyes again, then snaps them open like he’s trying to stay awake. “We haven’t swum yet.”
“I told you, I’m not getting in the water.”
“Sure you are.” He smiles playfully, like I must be enjoying this as much as he is, and begins dragging me with him into the shallows.
“Stop it.” I use my other hand to push against his chest. But he continues to lurch backward, deeper into the harbor. “Stop!” I shout this time. “Let me go.” I look up the shore to the mass of people, but they’re all too loud and drunk and distracted to hear me.
“Just one swim,” he coos, still smiling, slurring each word as they tumble from his lips.
We’ve staggered calf deep into the water, and I slam my fist against his chest. He winces briefly and then his expression changes, turns angry, and his eyes go wide.
“Now you’re going all the way in,” he announces more crisply, yanking against my arm so that I stumble several steps deeper, up to my knees. Not deep enough to risk being taken by a Swan sister, but still my heart begins to thump, fear pushing the blood out to my extremities and sending panic racing down my veins. I raise my arm again, ready to punch him directly in the face to keep him from dragging me in any farther, when someone appears to my left; someone I don’t recognize.
It all happens in an instant: The stranger shoves a hand against Lon’s chest; Lon’s throat lets out a short wheezing sound. His grip on my arm releases at the same time he loses his balance, and suddenly he’s careening backward, falling all the way into the water, arms flailing.
I take a staggering step back, sucking in air, and the person who pushed Lon off of me touches my arm to steady me. “You okay?” he asks.
I nod, my heart rate not yet receding.
Lon, a few feet away, stands up from the waist-deep water, gagging and coughing and wiping seawater from his face. His bright orange shirt is now sopping wet. “What the fuck?” he yells, looking directly at the stranger standing beside me. “Who do you think you are?” Lon demands, marching toward us. And for the first time I really look up at the face of the stranger, trying to place him—the rigid angle of his cheekbones and the straight slope of his nose. And then I know: It’s him, the boy from the dock who was looking for work—the outsider. He’s wearing the same black sweatshirt and dark jeans, but he’s standing closer now, and I can clearly see the features of his face. The small scar by his left eye; the way his lips come together in a flat line; his short dark hair flecked with droplets of mist from the sea air. His gaze is still hard and unflinching, but in the moonlight he seems more exposed, like I might be able to read some clue in the rim of his eyes or the shiver of his throat when he swallows.
But I don’t have time to ask him what he’s doing out here because Lon is suddenly in his face, shouting about what an asshole he is and how he’s going to get his face punched in for having the nerve to shove Lon into the water like that. But the boy doesn’t even flinch. His gaze looks down at Lon—who is a good six inches shorter than him—and even though the muscles in his neck tense, he seems wholly unconcerned by Lon’s threats of an ass-kicking.
When Lon finally takes a breath, the boy raises an eyebrow, like he wants to be sure Lon is done babbling before he responds. “Forcing a girl to do anything she doesn’t want to is reason enough to kick your ass,” he begins, his voice level. “So I suggest you apologize to her and save yourself a trip to the ER for stitches and a raging headache in the morning.”
Lon blinks, opens his mouth to speak—to spew some rebuttal that would probably involve more cuss words than actual substance—but then thinks better of it and snaps his jaw shut. Standing beside the two of them, it’s obvious Lon is outweighed, outmuscled, and probably outexperienced. And he must see it too, because he turns his head to face me, swallows his pride, and mutters, “I’m sorry.” I can tell it pains him to say it, his expression twisting in disgust, the words sharp and foreign in his mouth. He’s probably never apologized to a girl in his life . . . maybe never apologized to anyone ever.
Then, he turns and slogs up the beach back to the group, trailing seawater from his soaked clothes.
“Thank you,” I say, wading out of the shallow water. My shoes and the lower half of my white jeans are drenched.
The boy’s shoulders relax for the first time. “That guy wasn’t your boyfriend, was he?”
“God, no,” I snap, shaking my head. “Just some self-entitled prick from school. I’ve never even talked to him before.”
He gives me a half nod and glances past me to the party in full swing. Music thumps; girls squeal and skip along the edge of the waterline; boys wrestle and crush empty beer cans between their palms.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, squinting up at him, tracing the arc of his eyebrows where they pinch together.
“I came down to sleep on the beach. I didn’t realize there was a party.”
“You’re sleeping out here?”
“Planned to, up beside the rocks.” His eyes flick up the shoreline to where the cliff rises, steep and jagged—an abrupt end to the beach.
I assume he checked the bed-and-breakfasts in town but there were no vacancies, or perhaps he couldn’t afford to rent a room. “You can’t sleep out here,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“High tide will be in at two a.m., and that whole stretch of beach by the cliff will be underwater.”
His dark green eyes taper at the edges. But instead of asking where he should move his makeshift campsite to, he asks, “What’s with the party? Something to do with June first?”
“It’s the Swan party, for the Swan sisters.”
“Who are they?”
“You’ve really never heard of them?” I ask. I think it’s truly the first time I’ve met an outsider who came to Sparrow with no clue about what goes on here.
He shakes his head then looks down at my waterlogged shoes, my toes swimming in seawater. “You should get dry by the fire,” he says.
“You’re soaked too,” I point out. He went into the water just as far as I did.
“I’m fine.”
“If you’re sleeping outside tonight, you should probably get dry so you don’t freeze to death.”
He glances up the beach to the dark cliff wall, where he’d planned to sleep, then nods.
Together, we walk to the bonfire.
* * *
It’s late.
Everyone is drunk.
The stars sway and slip out of alignment overhead, reconfiguring themselves. My head thrums; my skin itches from the salt water.
We find a place to sit on an open log, and I untie my shoes, leaning them against the ring of rocks encircling the bonfire. My cheeks already feel flushed, and my toes tingle as the blood circulates back through my feet. The fire licks at the sky, licks at my palms.
“Thank you again,” I say, looking at him from the corner of my eye. “For the rescue.”
“Right place at the right time, I guess.”
“Most guys aren’t so chivalrous around here.” I rub my palms together, trying to warm them, my fingers cold to the bone. “The town might be required to give you a parade.”
He smiles full and big for the first time, a softness in his eyes. “The hero requirements in this town must be pretty low.”
“We just really like parades.”
Again he smiles.
And it means something. I don’t know what, only that I’m intrigued by him. This outsider. This boy who glances at me from the corner of his eye, who feels both familiar and new all at the same time.
Down near the water’s edge, I can see Rose still talking to three boys who’ve taken a sudden interest in her after her swim, but at least she’s safe and out of the water. Half of the crowd has wandered back up to the bonfire, and beers are handed around. My head still feels swimmy from all the whiskey, so I set the beer in the sand at my feet.
“What’s your name?” I ask the boy as he takes a long sip of his beer.
“Bo.” He holds the can loosely in his right hand, casual, noncommittal. He doesn’t seem uneasy in this foreign social setting, in a new town surrounded by strangers. And no one seems to think he looks out of place.
“I’m Penny,” I say, glancing at him, his eyes so green it’s hard to look away. Then, twisting my hair over my shoulder to ring out the small amount of seawater from the ends, I ask, “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
I press my hands together between my knees. Smoke from the fire swirls over us, and the music continues to blare. Olivia and Lola stumble up to the edge of the bonfire, hugging each other around the waist and looking completely trashed.
“Are those the Swan sisters?” Bo asks. Olivia and Lola do look alike, with their jet-black hair and matching piercings, so I can see why he might think they’re related.
But I let out a short laugh. “No, just friends.” I dig the toes of my right foot into the sand. “The Swan sisters are dead.”
Bo turns back to me.
“Not recently,” I amend. “They died two centuries ago—drowned in the harbor.”
“Drowned on accident or by intention?”
Olivia, who is standing on the other side of Bo, laughs hard and sharp. She must have overheard his question. “It was murder,” she answers for me, peering down at him. Her coral lips arch into a smile. She thinks Bo is cute—who wouldn’t?
“It wasn’t murder,” Lola counters, swaying left then right. “It was an execution.”
Olivia nods in agreement then looks across the bonfire. “Davis!” she calls. “Tell the legend.”
Davis McArthurs, who has his arm around a girl with pixie-cut dark hair, grins and walks closer to the fire. It’s tradition to recount the story of the Swan sisters, and Davis seems rather pleased with himself to be the one to do it. He finds an open stump and stands on top, peering down at everyone around the bonfire. “Two hundred years ago—” he begins, voice booming, far louder than is necessary.
“Start at the beginning,” Lola interrupts.
“I am!” he shouts back. He takes a drink of his beer then licks his lips. “The Swan sisters”—he continues, glancing around the group to be sure everyone is watching, everyone is listening—“arrived in Sparrow on a ship named . . . something I can’t remember.” He raises an eyebrow and grins. “But that’s not important. What’s important is this one thing: They lied about who they were.”
“They did not,” Gigi Kline yells up at him.
Davis scowls at this second interruption. “All girls lie,” he says with a wink.
Several guys around the fire laugh. But the girls boo. One even tosses an empty beer can at his head, which he just barely dodges by ducking.
Gigi snorts, her head shaking in disgust. “They were beautiful,” she points out. “It wasn’t their fault that all the men in this town couldn’t resist them, couldn’t help but fall in love, even the married ones.”
They weren’t just beautiful, I want to say. They were elegant and charming and winsome. Unlike anything anyone in this town had ever seen before. We grew up knowing the stories, the legend of the sisters. How the locals in Sparrow accused the three sisters of being witches, of possessing the minds of their husbands and brothers and boyfriends, even if the sisters didn’t intentionally set out to make the men fall for them.
“It wasn’t love,” Davis barks. “It was lust.”
“Maybe,” Gigi agrees. “But they didn’t deserve what happened to them.”
Davis laughs, his face turning red from the heat of the fire. “They were witches!”
Gigi rolls her eyes. “Maybe this town just hated them because they were different. Because it was easier to kill them than to accept that the men in this place are thick-skulled, misogynistic assholes.”
Two girls standing near me break out into laughter, spilling their drinks.
Bo looks at me, eyes piercing, then speaks low so only I can hear. “They were killed for being witches?”
“Drowned in the harbor with rocks tied to their ankles,” I answer softly. “They didn’t need a lot of evidence back then to find someone guilty of witchcraft; most of the townspeople already hated the Swan sisters, so it was a pretty swift verdict.”
He stares at me intently, probably because he thinks we’re making the whole thing up.
“If they weren’t witches,” Davis counters, staring down at Gigi, “why the hell did they return the following summer? And every summer since?”
Gigi shrugs like she doesn’t want to have this argument with him anymore, and she tosses her beer can onto the flames, ignoring him. She staggers away from the bonfire down to the shore.
“Maybe you’ll be taken by a Swan sister tonight!” Davis shouts after her. “Then we’ll see if you still think they weren’t witches.”
Davis pounds the rest of his beer and crushes the can in his grip. He’s apparently completely over the idea of retelling the story of the Swan sisters as he clumsily steps down from the stump and slings his arm back over the pixie-haircut girl.
“What did he mean ‘return the following summer’?” Bo asks.
“On the first of June the summer after the sisters were drowned,” I begin, staring at the flames working their way through the dry beach wood, “locals heard singing from the harbor. People thought they were imagining it, that it was only the horns of passing ships echoing off the ocean’s surface, or the seagulls crying, or a trick of the wind. But over the next few days, three girls were lured into the water, wading out into the sea until they sank all the way under. The Swan sisters needed bodies to inhabit. And one by one, Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel Swan slipped back into human form, disguised as local girls who emerged from the harbor, but not as themselves.”
Abigail Kerns staggers up to the bonfire completely drenched, her usually frizzy, dark hair slicked back with seawater. She crouches down as close to the fire as she can get without tumbling into it.
“That explains all the soaking-wet girls,” Bo says, looking from Abigail back to me.
“It’s become a yearly tradition, to see who is brave enough to go out into the harbor and risk being stolen by one of the Swan sisters.”
“Have you ever done it—gone into the water?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“So you believe it could really happen—that you could be taken over by one of them?” He takes another drink of his beer, his face lit by the sudden burst of flames as someone tosses another log onto the coals.
“Yeah, I do. Because it happens every year.”
“You’ve seen it happen?”
“Not exactly. It’s not like the girls come out of the water and announce that they’re Marguerite or Aurora or Hazel—they need to blend in, act normal.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t inhabit bodies just to be alive again; they do it for revenge.”
“Revenge on who?”
“The town.”
He squints at me, the scar beneath his left eye tightening, then he asks the obvious question. “What kind of revenge?”
My stomach swirls a little. My head pulses at my temples. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much. “The Swan sisters are collectors of boys,” I say, pressing a finger to my right temple briefly. “Seducers. Once they have each taken a girl’s body . . . the drowning begins.” I pause for effect, but Bo doesn’t even blink. His face is hardened suddenly, like he’s stilled on a thought he can’t shake. Maybe he wasn’t expecting the story to involve actual death. “For the next three weeks, until midnight on the summer solstice, the sisters—disguised as three local girls—will lure boys out into the water and drown them in the harbor. They’re collecting their souls, stealing them. Taking them from the town as revenge.”
Someone to my right hiccups then drops their beer onto the sand near my feet, the brown liquid spilling out.
“Every year, boys drown in the harbor,” I add, staring straight ahead into the flames. Even if you don’t believe in the legend of the Swan sisters, you can’t ignore the death that plagues Sparrow for nearly one month every summer. I’ve seen the boys’ bodies being pulled from the harbor. I’ve watched my mom console grieving mothers who’ve come to have their fortunes read, pleading for a way to bring back their sons—my mom patting their hands and offering little more than the promise that their hurt would eventually dull. There is no way to bring back the boys who’ve been taken by the sisters. There is only acceptance.
And it’s not just local boys; tourists are persuaded into the water as well. Some of the boys standing around the bonfire, whose faces are flushed from the heat and the alcohol in their bloodstreams, will be discovered floating facedown, having swallowed too much of the sea. But right now, they aren’t thinking about that. Everyone believes they’re immune. Until they’re not.
It makes me nauseous, knowing some of these boys, who I’ve known most of my life, won’t make it through the summer.
“Someone must see who drowns them,” Bo says, his curiosity evident now. It’s hard not to feel drawn in by a legend that repeats itself without falter or fail each season.
“No one has ever seen the moment when they’re taken into the harbor—their bodies are always discovered after it’s too late.”
“Maybe they drown themselves?”
“That’s what the police think. That it’s some sort of suicide pact devised by high school students. That the boys sacrifice themselves for the sake of the legend—to keep it alive.”
“But you don’t believe that?”
“It’s pretty severe, don’t you think—kill yourself for the sake of a myth?” I feel my heart beat faster remembering summers past: bodies bloated with seawater, eyes and mouths caught open like gutted fish, as they were pulled onto the docks in the marina. A chill sweeps through my veins. “Once a Swan sister has whispered into your ear, promised the touch of her skin, you can’t resist her. She will lure you into the water then pull you under until the life spills out of you.”
Bo shakes his head and then finishes his beer in one gulp. “And people actually come to watch this happen?”
“Morbid tourism, we call it. And it usually turns into a witch hunt, locals and tourists all trying to figure out which three girls in town are inhabited by a Swan sister—trying to determine who is responsible for the killing.”
“Isn’t it dangerous to speculate about something you can’t prove?”
“Exactly,” I agree. “The first few years after the sisters were drowned, many local girls were hanged because they were suspected of being taken over by one of the sisters. But obviously they never hanged the right girls, because year after year the sisters kept returning.”
“But if you were inhabited by one of these sisters, wouldn’t you know it, remember it? Once it was all over?” He rubs his palms together and turns them toward the bonfire—worn hands, rough in places. I blink and look away.
“Some girls claim they have a cloudy recollection of summer, of kissing too many boys and swimming in the harbor, staying out past curfew. But that could be from too much booze and not because a Swan sister was inside them. People think that when a sister takes over a body, she absorbs all the girl’s memories so the girl can resume her normal life, behave naturally, and no one will suspect she’s not herself. And when the sister leaves the body, the sister blots out all the memories she doesn’t want her host to recall. They need to blend in because if they were ever found out, the town might do something awful just to end the curse.”
“Like kill them?” Bo asks.
“It would be the only way to keep them from returning to the sea.” I press all my toes down into the warm sand, burying them. “Kill the girl whose body they inhabit.”
Bo leans forward, staring into the flames like he’s recalling some memory or place that I can’t see. “And yet you celebrate it each year,” he finally says, sitting up straight. “You get drunk and swim in the harbor, even when you know what’s coming? Even though you know people are going to die? You’ve just accepted it?”
I understand why it seems odd to him, an outsider, but this is what we know. It’s how it’s always been. “It’s our town’s penance,” I say. “We drowned three girls in the ocean two centuries ago, and we’ve suffered for it every summer since. We can’t change it.”
“But why don’t people just move away?”
“Some have, but the families who’ve been here the longest choose to stay. Like it’s an obligation they must endure.”
A soft breeze rolls suddenly through the crowd, and the bonfire snaps and flickers, sending sparks up into the sky like angry fireflies.
“It’s starting,” someone calls from the waterline, and those clustered around the fire begin moving down to the beach.
I stand up, still in my bare feet.
“What’s starting?” Bo asks.
“The singing.”