Excerpt

I'm allowed days off training when we have company, so summer provides plenty of breaks. But I have to admit I'm a little relieved when, after lobster night, after a movie day because it was too hot to hang around the house, after staying up too late, sticky with marshmallows from the s'mores, and after sharing everything I know about boys with Gretchen and her with me, the Campbells finally leave. Only five months 'til Solstice. And it's my turn this year. My very first turn.

We can't train when people are here in summer because it's too hot in the attic and Mama said imagine them wondering what we were clomping around about up there anyway. We need the back yard in the evening when the air has started to cool. We aren't all training, that doesn't happen 'til fall, but I want to get ahead, and Martina has offered to work with me a little.

After Mama and Dad are in bed, I worry because Martina has started breathing a bit heavier. I can tell she's going to sleep.

"Martina." I whisper and poke her. I whisper yell, "Martina." But she groans and turns over.

"Nooo." It comes out as a moan.

"You promised!"

"We've got like months."

"You promised." I slip on my shorts and walk over to her bed. I don't totally sit on her. I hover my butt against her shoulder and just press.

"Quit it."

I think she has a crush on Josh. I think she's realizing it's never going to be a thing. Because we are nowhere near our periods yet, and this is definitely a mood.

"It's my year."

She rolls over and sits up, way more awake than I thought she was. She looks at me, one eyebrow dangerously up and cautions, "Take the night off. Enjoy it. This is the last year…" she stops herself. "Just fucking enjoy it, okay? And let me sleep."

There's a finality in her answer I know I can't get past, so I open the door and slip out into the hallway, closing it behind me. Our bedroom door opens on a room we call an upstairs hall, but it's really the size of a living room, with a banister at the center that wraps into the stairs going down. Mama and Dad's room, Jeffrey's room, and the guest room all open onto the upstairs hall, so you have to be extra quiet.

In the daytime, it's a warm, friendly space with colored sunlight filtering through the stained-glass window at the head of the stairs. At night, it's dark as crazy and the stairwell looks like a giant black mouth you have to walk down into, slowly and around. But this is my year. I've got to be braver than that. And I definitely can't be afraid of this completely harmless part of the house during this completely harmless time of year.

I grab the banister and follow it down, stepping softly to avoid the squeak on the left at the top, the squeak in the middle halfway down.

This is such a big house, and we are lucky to have it. The youngest member of the family inherits it. Mama was the youngest, which is why we get to live here, and because I'm the youngest, the house will one day be mine.

The house was built in 1902, a big yellow clapboard "revival of Greek revival," Dad calls it. He can go on until your eyes glaze over about the columns (Doric) on the ornate front porch, the gabled attic, the broad lovely windows framed with black slatted wooden shutters. The windows on the first two floors are simple two-paned sashed wood for maximum light. In the attic, they are detailed with intricate panework. It's is only eighty years old, but the inheriting part about the land has been going on since our ancestors—Mama's ancestors—got here all those years ago, when the original house was just a shack on the top of a hill with a lot of land around it. The family sold the land off, but this little quarter acre of it, this house, and Winter Solstice are our birthright. I like how solid and comforting that sounds: birthright.

I creep through the dark front hall and down to the pantry, which is called the pantry even though it's a hallway. Everything in our house is named kind of wrong, our den is called the study, our attic is called the den, but it's part of what makes it special.

Gainsly sighs in his sleep. I hope he doesn't wake up and start to whine for me.

The kitchen is lit by the dim orange light on the stove and I open the back door, squeaking the back screen open slooowly so as to keep it quiet. I step out onto the porch and survey the back yard. It's one of those funny, overcast, orange-tinged nights where the light pollution means it's never really going to get that dark. It's cooler than my room, so that part is good, but I realize there is no way I'm going to find a stick in this light.

I sneak back in, trying like hell not to squeak, and find my way in the dark, down through the pantry, through the living room into the study, where I feel along the mantel carefully past Dad's prize ship model of the Admiral Colpoys—touch it and you're toast—to the right hand side of the fireplace and down. My hand hits the fireplace tools stand too quickly and there's a rattle. Shit. I stop for a second, listening in the dark. I hear nothing until the house sighs.

Our house breathes. You can't hear it in the summer, what with people coming and going and the din of the crickets outside. It's most obvious in winter, but in the summer, once in a while, when things get really quiet, you can tell it's still there.

I'll really freak myself out if I listen too closely. Before I can hear beyond the next inhale, I clamp the poker in my hand and hustle it out the back door. I need a flashlight, but it's up in my room and I don't want to wake everyone by going up there again, so I grab the heavy wooden pepper grinder from the kitchen table as a substitute. I take great care with the back door again and step out into the yard.

I follow the stepping stones carefully down to the part of the yard where Gainsly can't reach. I don't need to add dog shit to this exercise. Poker gripped in the right hand, pepper shaker in the left. The substitute flashlight isn't a big deal, I just need the weight for training, but having a real poker makes me feel more serious, braver.

It's two swishes to the left with the light, then stab right with the poker, advance.

Two swishes to the right with the poker, left with the light, advance.

Then three stabs straight forward with the poker and make sure not to look.

Don't look. No matter what you hear or think you see, do not look directly at it. This is very important.

A few rotations, steps forward and it's no longer cool outside, it's sweaty. I try to remind myself it will be cold when I do this for real. It's hard to even imagine in this balmy, mosquitoey air. Jeffrey says at Solstice, it gets so cold you don't even want to hold the poker. That you get so tired you don't think you can even swipe again. That's why the training. You have to be able to do this all night.

I practice until my right shoulder burns, until I am so sweaty, I start to stink, until the light pollution sky convinces me it must be dawn.

When I look at my clock radio when I go back to bed it reads only 2:30. How will I keep it up for a whole night? I have to train harder.