Prologue

My stomach churned with hunger, but the people outside were still awake. Their yipping and whining was beginning to die out, but it was still too early to be safe. Most of them wouldn't notice if I slipped out into the lobby. To them the creaking wood beneath my feet would be indistinguishable from the creaks of a settling house, but their youngest boy, the new Adam, was different. I pulled the key from Adam's old jeans that had grown tight around my waist. I clutched it to my chest, touching it against my pearl necklace. Then I waited, my temple pressed against the closet wall so that I could hear the noises echoing through the bones of the house. I pressed my thumb hard against the ridges of the key to distract myself from the twisting of my stomach. When the sounds of the family had quieted, I slid the key into the lock and turned. I liked the house better in the day, when everyone was gone and the sunlight beamed from the tall windows. It felt almost peaceful, then. The birds chittered greetings to one another and their soft calls floated through the house. At night, shadows hovered where sunlight should be and there were no birds to fill the silence. 

I left my door ajar and ran on tip-toe across the entryway to the dining room, where the ceiling was far closer. In the kitchen, I climbed onto the counter to reach the snack cupboard. The parents who lived here now had put the snacks far up when they'd suspected the children of hiding them away. I unwrapped a cereal bar and started eating as I grabbed out other things for myself: bread, sliced ham, leftover mac and cheese. 

I was closing the fridge when I turned and discovered the boy staring at me, mutely. I froze, petrified. Did I scare him? I saw myself through his eyes, a girl ten years older with unkempt, frizzy hair in a faded sweater and jeans. Or perhaps, in the darkness I was just an unfamiliar figure looming in his kitchen. He saw me. I willed the kitchen's shadows to draw me in, dissolving my form into a trick of the light, but he held my gaze and took a step forward. I dropped the food and ran back to the closet, fumbling with the lock from inside. My wildly spiraling thoughts were spelled out by my body as my heart thumped, he saw me and my blood rushed, what will he want from me? He came to stand outside the door as if listening for the whispers. But then his footsteps creaked across the wooden floor back up the winding staircase. I hoped he thought I was a dream or a ghost, but I didn't care to test it. My pulse settled down and I sank to the floor and tracked his footsteps as he crossed the floor above. I didn't breath until his door closed. 

The hissing of the bare bulb grew louder in the renewed silence until it filled my ears. It was an endless, unbroken, and far too familiar sound, one that inevitably crescendo'ed until my mind and time folded into that single infinite hiss. The light's string switch swayed ever so slightly with the air from the vent, tempting me. From where I sat, I only needed to reach above my head and I could silence the light. But I never did, not even to sleep. Just in case. In case I missed my opportunity. In case the light didn't come back on and I found that I was not when I thought I was. 

When the hiss pulls at my threads, I like to tell myself stories about who I am and where I came from. I tie each memory tight to something, stitch it into the object so that it becomes whole and completely mine. Some details change, the colors and words in the stories all shift, and some parts remain as clear as glass, like the promise or the moment he saw through me. But the heart of the memory cannot change because it is bound into the object’s every imperfection. This time, like so many others, I unfastened my necklace so that I could feel the grooves of the chain and whispered to myself the first story.