Have you read them all?
I ran into what had once been our bedroom, slamming the door shut behind me. I flung myself down on the dusty sheets and beat the pillow with my fists, sending clouds billowing into the air.
It wasn’t long until I heard light footsteps gently treading the stairs, and the creak of someone pushing the door open. I knew it was my twin, Ivy.
“Scarlet,” she whispered, somewhere near my ear.
“No,” I said, my face still in the pillow.
“No what?” she asked.
I pushed myself up and stared at her, my arms folded. “No, I’m not going back in there. And no, I’m not going to apologise!”
She sat down on the bed beside me. “I wasn’t going to say that. I don’t blame you at all. I think she should apologise. But I know she never will.”
We hadn’t wanted to go to our father’s house that summer in the first place. We’d spent most of the holidays with our scatterbrained Aunt Phoebe, in her cosy cottage. It meant cleaning and tidying and cooking because our aunt could barely remember to do that for herself, let alone us as well, but we didn’t mind. Aunt Phoebe’s house was always filled with love.
Father’s house, on the other hand, was filled with the stepmother who hated us, and our three hideous stepbrothers. I couldn’t bear it. I missed Father sometimes – or maybe I just missed the way he had been. The rest of them were a nightmare. I hadn’t wanted to go back.
But in a rare moment of remembering that we existed, Father had turned up at Aunt Phoebe’s the day before our birthday, asking to bring us home. Aunt Phoebe had thought this was a “lovely surprise” and so here we were now. I would rather have caught the plague, to be quite honest.
Unfortunately, we hadn’t had a choice in the matter. We had waved goodbye to our aunt and sat bundled in the back of Father’s motor car, dreading what would lie ahead at the end of the journey.
Our stepmother, Edith, had greeted Father warmly, and given us a greeting colder than ice. That was typical. Ivy had tried to say hello to our stepbrothers, but they had just ignored her and carried on playing with their model trains.
Dinner hadn’t gone any better. Our stepmother had given us the smallest helpings of everything, and then called me greedy when I had asked if there was any more. Her boys got portions the size of mountains, and she gave them seconds. I glared at them one by one, but they were too busy stuffing their faces to notice.
We’d spent a chilly night in our old twin beds. I spent most of it staring through the crack in the curtains at the black night sky, hoping that if I stayed awake long enough it would delay the arrival of morning. But soon my eyes slipped shut, and I woke up to the weak, watery sun rising on our fourteenth birthday.
Ivy rolled over sleepily in her bed. “Happy birthday,” she mumbled to me.
“Happy birthday,” I said back, without much feeling. I peered over at her, through the dust spiralling in the light. She was smiling. “What?”
“Well …” She sat up and hugged her knees. “You have no idea how much it means to hear you say that.”
“Sorry,” I said to the ceiling. “I know I should be more grateful not to be ‘dead’, but I’m not. I still hate that I was left there.” The time I’d spent locked in an asylum while our nasty headmistress had told the world that I’d died was never far from my mind. “And I just have a bad feeling about this birthday too.”
The bad feeling was sitting in my stomach, weighing me down. I climbed out of bed, my bare feet heavy on the old wooden floorboards.
Ivy sighed. “It can’t possibly be worse than last year.”
I hoped she was right, but I still wasn’t convinced.
We got dressed, putting on matching dark blue dresses that were some of the few clothes we owned, and headed downstairs. It was early in the morning and the house still hadn’t warmed up, even though it was the last day of August.
“I suppose a birthday breakfast is too much to hope for,” Ivy whispered.
It was. We arrived in the chilly kitchen to find our stepmother lazing in a chair, a glass of something pale and unappetising in her hand.
“Oh,” she said when we walked in. “You’re up. Well, make yourselves useful, then. Get the fire swept and lit.”
I looked at her in disbelief. “I’m not your servant,” I muttered under my breath.
Ivy gave me a wary look.
Edith stood up and slammed her glass down on the empty table, sending the drink splashing from the sides. She must have heard me. “When you’re in my house,” she said, pointing a finger at us, “you live by my rules – understood?”
I was about to protest further, but that was when Father walked in. “Good morning,” he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand, the other tugging on his tie. “Everything all right?”
It was like someone had flicked a light switch. The murderous expression evaporated from our stepmother’s face and was replaced with a calm, serene look. “Quite wonderful, dear. The girls had just volunteered to make a fire for us, hadn’t you, girls?”
I had a good mind to set fire to her pinafore just to spite her, but that definitely wouldn’t have gone down well with Father. Ivy obviously didn’t