1
"Girls!"
No one had said that word in the house on Hemlock Road in an awfully long time.
"GIRLS!"
A woman stood on the front porch behind a curtain of rain, calling out to somebody. Could she be talking to actual girls?
There hadn't been any humans living in the house for over a year. Oh, people drove by to stare. Boys threw their rocks at Halloween. A few ran all the way up to the front porch and boasted they were brave. Sometimes in the spring, when it wasn't so gloomy, people considered moving in. Men tramped through the rooms and asked about the electrical wiring. Women hoped to find charming details under the peeling paint. There was a fancy hall tree mirror by the front door. For some reason, no one liked to see their reflection in that cracked glass.
Then, just as summer was ending and the chokeberry bush by the front porch was tinged with red, a man hurried through the rooms. He didn't even look in the attic or the basement. Soon after that, workers replaced the broken windows and swept up the trash. Painters covered the gray walls with white. Furniture was dragged in. The front hall filled with boxes. Only the lazy mice were glad--humans made it so much easier for them to find food. The spiders hated having their webs swept away. After all these years, the bats and some others just wanted to be left alone.
And yet everything could be different if girls were in the house.
"Come unpack!"
There hadn't been any yelling in the house either. There had been screaming. And shrieking. And gasping. And that odd, strangulated flutter from the back of that old man's throat. But there hadn't been any yelling like only mothers could do.
The woman had bright orange hair, cut so short it stood up. Her earrings were feathers and bits of cloth. She wore denim trousers, like everybody always did these days. Her shirt had been pieced together in odd and colorful ways. She didn't look at all like a mother. But she was. She was so angry; it was easy to know her thoughts. She was thinking how much work she had to do before her family could sleep in the house that night. She was thinking those girls were plenty old enough to help. She was thinking she hoped it wasn't a mistake to move to this house on Hemlock Road.
"Stop hiding in the car!"
A silver car was parked in the driveway, not far from the hemlock trees. Rain rattled on its roof. The fogged windows made it difficult to see in or out. But there they were, two girls sitting side by side on the backseat.
The girls both had long noses and straight brown hair, cut just above their shoulders. They were identical twins. That was the most wonderful way to have a sister. No one could be jealous of the other when they both had very green eyes.
They wore denim shorts and shirts with red words. The blue shirt had a drawing of a pigeon and the words park slope. The orange shirt had a drawing of a squirrel and the words park slope. The girls looked like they were eleven--the most perfect age for them to be.
"Hannah Anna, I'm losing my patience with you!"
One twin was thinking that she didn't recognize that yelling woman. Someone must have put an evil spell on their mom.
The other twin was wishing she had paid attention to the roads. Then she could drive them back to Brooklyn.
Which one was Hannah? Which one was Anna? Knowing their minds didn't help. Most people never said their names with their thoughts.
Their heads were bent over a notebook. Each twin made a different part of the same picture. They were good at drawing. Their straight lines were very straight. The girls knew what to make big and what to keep little. They were making a city street shaded by tall trees. The buildings on the side were all crammed together. Nine steps led up to the front doors, past tiny yards full of flowers. At the end of the street, you could see a cafe with tables where people sipped drinks from mugs. Next to it was a bookstore. One twin was drawing it. The other was drawing two girls hurrying toward the store.
Of course they were hurrying. It looked like the kind of place that anybody who loved to read would long to visit. But no one could go there. It was just a picture.
The twins thought that too. It was just a picture.
They both looked up at the house on Hemlock Road.
The house always looked gloomier when it rained. The brick walls, the shrubs, the chimney, and the roof were all very gray. Once upon a time, the walls were white. The trim around the windows was bright green. The shutters didn't sag. Red geraniums blossomed in the window boxes. The chokeberry bush was trimmed back from the porch so there was room for a wooden bench. The hemlock trees were only half as tall, so it never seemed like the sun didn't shine. Once upon a time, the house on Hemlock Road had been somebody's home. It wasn't anymore. But maybe, just maybe, it could be now.
The girls went back to their drawing. One added a book to the display in the shopwindow. The other drew a purse so they could bring money to the store.
But they already had books. There were six boxes labeled books in the hall and more upstairs by the bedrooms. The girls could open those boxes, take out those books, and read whichever ones they wanted to. Hadn't their mother told the girls to go inside? Other mothers would get very angry if they weren't obeyed. So why didn't this mother make the twins unpack their books?
Maybe they actually had a copy of the best book in the world about the funniest, most adventuresome children ever. Even if they didn't have The Story of the Treasure Seekers, there must be some good books in all those boxes. What if there weren't? What if all their books were like the two in the canvas bag by their feet? The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife. What kind of girl would want to read a book about nautical history or whetstones?
"I miss our bookstore."
"Our street."
"Our tree."
"Our squirrel."
"Nutkin."
The twins spoke quickly. They hardly needed any words to understand each other. They knew what they were thinking. They were almost as clever at reading minds as some others were. Sadly, though, the twins only understood each other.
Everybody in the car sighed a deep and painful sigh.
"But we had to move."
"Because of Selena."
Who was that?
Then, as if she had actually heard that question, one twin pointed to the second-story window on the south side of the house.
An older girl was waving at the car. She had long golden hair. It was shocking to see her there. It shouldn't have been. Lots of teenage girls had hair like that. They used it as a curtain to hide their treachery.
"She picked."
"Who cares what room we get?"
"It won't be Brooklyn."
They should care. The bedroom where Selena pranced was the second biggest. The parents would have chosen the biggest bedroom, on the south side. Nearly all the people who had lived in the house had slept there, except for that old man who made the mistake of wanting to be closer to the bathroom. The third bedroom in the back was the smallest. It had the worst possible view of the worst possible place. Why should the twins have to sleep there? Why should Selena get the second-best bedroom? Only an accident of birth made her the oldest and gave her all that yellow hair.
"Hannah Anna! Why are you still in the car?"
Now a man stood on the front porch. He must have been the father, even though his brown hair curled over the back of his neck. He was wearing a faded shirt with the words Pink Floyd The Wall by a picture of a colorful swirl. He was thinking that this was the second-worst day of his life. He thought about the worst day too. Since it was something that had happened at his office, reading those thoughts wasn't worth the bother.
He tried to be cheerful. "Selena has some great ideas for how you can decorate your bedroom."
"Oh wow," one twin said.
"Selena had an idea," the other twin said.
The father frowned. "You aren't even trying to make the best of this situation."
The twins didn't answer. They both thought there was no best to this situation.
"I'll give you one minute."
And then what? Was he the kind of father who would tell his daughters to go cut a switch from the chokeberry bush?
"Please, Anna?" he said.
"We want to finish our drawing," said the twin who must have been Anna.
"Come on inside, Hannah. Selena will think you're mad at her," the father said.
Hannah thought that for a change Selena would be right.
"I'll tell her you're on your way." The father went back inside the house. The door blew shut behind him and bumped his rear end. Ha!
Unfortunately the twins didn't notice that little prank. They kept drawing. Hannah made a plate of cookies on the cafe table. Then Anna put a cat in the door of the bookstore.
Cats were not welcome here.
One branch of the hemlock tree waved furiously.
Although the twins understood each other, they didn't understand the wind. They didn't see the branch. They didn't even look up from the page.
Why wouldn't they go in? The house wouldn't be so bad. They had their books. They had each other. Some of the critters were friendly.
Go in.
Were they afraid? They didn't need to be, if they stayed away from certain spots. Avoided the potent places where things had happened--or things had not happened. As long as the twins did that, nothing would harm them. Really and truly, the house was not as bad as . . .
Suddenly there was a loud scream.

"EEEEEEEEK!"
No scream is as shrill as the scream of a teenage girl. No scream is as loud or as long. This scream lasted the entire time that Selena ran out of the second-best bedroom and down the stairs.
Everybody else ran too. The mice scuttled to safety under the floorboards. The mother and the father rushed out of the kitchen. And Hannah and Anna finally left the car and hurried inside the house.
The family stood in the front hall next to the hall tree mirror, panting with excitement.
"What happened?" the father said.
What had happened to make Selena's face so red and her blue eyes so wide?
"I was upstairs, in my new closet," she said.
She had gone in the closet? Even the mice knew better than to do that. But she had waltzed right in. Her clothes were all she cared about. That was obvious from how perfectly the stripes on her shirt matched the stitching on her short shorts and the color on her toenails. She was just like other teenage girls who never paid attention to anything that really mattered.
"What happened?" the mother said.
Selena searched for words. But she wouldn't find them.
"Did you see a mouse?" The mother thought about the teeth marks she had seen on some of the boxes.
"Or a spider?" Anna said.
"How about a teensy bug?" Hannah said.
"Don't tease her. Can't you see she's upset?" Of course the mother took the older sister's side. She even smoothed that long yellow hair. "Just tell us what happened, Selena."
Now Selena had a new fear--that she would sound stupid. She shrugged. "It was nothing, really. Just a weird feeling, you know?"
Did they know? Could they know?
"A feeling like maybe . . . ," Hannah said.
"We shouldn't have moved here?" Anna said.
"No!" Selena said.
"You all know perfectly well we can't move into our new house yet because it isn't ready," the mother said.
"You can't live in a house that doesn't have a toilet," the father said.
Selena thought she would have preferred that.
"Come on, let's go look," the father said.
No one moved.
"Back in the closet?" Selena's voice squeaked.
"I'm sure there's nothing there," the father said.
They all looked up along the dark curved banister and held their breaths to listen.
They hoped to hear nothing. But not even death is silent. There are always noises everywhere--especially in the house on Hemlock Road. Sure enough, something skittered across the floor upstairs. It wasn't a feeling--it was a mouse who had been chewing on a box and decided to make a break for a better hiding place. Only the family didn't know that.
The twins grabbed each other. Selena grabbed herself. The mother grabbed the father. The father grabbed the nearest object that seemed most like a weapon. Nobody in the family laughed as he held up the toilet plunger.
A parade went up the stairs. Plunger, father, mother, twins, and Selena bringing up the rear. The father stomped his feet. He thought that if he made enough noise, he would scare away whatever was in the closet. That might have been true--if it was a living thing.
At the top of the stairs, he walked along the landing toward the right. He pushed open the door to the second-best bedroom with the wooden end of the plunger. The family peeped inside. What did they expect to see? A burglar? A bum? Or maybe, as another mother used to say, a green-eyed monster was in the room.
"Nothing," the father said.
He walked more bravely now, around a bed with a white headboard, a white bureau, a white desk, and three tall boxes each labeled wardrobe. There were other boxes too. None of them were labeled books.
Selena pointed to the back of the room, where the closet door was still partially ajar. The father tiptoed over to it. He used the wooden end to pry it open. He quickly retreated, as if he expected something to jump out at him and say, Boo!
Nothing did. There was nothing in the closet. Nothing that could be seen. But now that the door was opened wide for the first time in years, a smell escaped into the bedroom.
The twins didn't notice. They had spotted something else--an opportunity to tease Selena. If she was as cruel as most older sisters, she deserved it.
Anna nudged Hannah. "Look there."
"Oh no, it can't be," Hannah said.
"Yes, it is," Anna said.
"The terrible," Hannah said.
"Terrifying," Anna said.
"Dreadful," Hannah said.
"Void," Anna and Hannah said together.