House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland

Author:Krystal Sutherland [Sutherland, Krystal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“You are not to speak to her,” my mother warned me the morning after she threw Grey out. “You are not to speak to her ever again.” I hated Cate a little bit for that. It seemed wholly unfair. The day before, we had been a (relatively) normal and happy family, and then all it took was a drunken whisper from Grey to tear it all apart. Now one of my sisters was gone and the other—though I didn’t know it yet—was already planning to go.

Vivi left in the middle of the night two weeks after Grey, without warning or fanfare. That was Vivi’s way. Grey was dramatic. Grey liked people to know when she entered and exited the room. Vivi was the opposite. She left with nothing but a backpack and her bass guitar, and left nothing behind to mark her departure except a note on the end of my bed. Sorry, kid, it read, but it’s just not the same if it’s not all three of us together. She caught a midnight Megabus to Paris, then spent the next three years making her way east, through the jazz clubs of France and the grungy nightclubs of Berlin and the absintheries of Prague and finally to the ruin bars of Budapest, collecting tattoos and piercings and languages and lovers along the way. It was rarely an easy, carefree life. We never talked about it, but I knew from Grey that Vivi had done things to get by. Pickpocketing tourists. Selling drugs. Working the odd shift at a strip club. At eighteen, when she moved into a converted warehouse overlooking the Danube with seven other musicians and artists, she had already lived and hurt more than most people do in a lifetime.

The first six months after Grey and Vivi left were the worst of my life. They were both mostly MIA, busy transforming themselves into the women they wanted to become. I heard from them only occasionally. A message here, a phone call there. It was like a piece of me had been cut away, two-thirds of my soul suddenly sloughed off.

It was also during those months that something changed in my mother. It was then that she started collecting newspaper clippings and police files from our case, started hiring private detectives to follow leads the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t or hadn’t. Before, it had been enough for her that we had come back. It didn’t matter where we’d gone or what had happened to us, so long as we were safe and whole and home. Then suddenly, overnight, she developed this burning desire to know. To know exactly. I would wake sometimes to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me with quizzical eyes as I slept, as though searching for the answer to a question she was too afraid to ask out loud.

Please, I messaged Grey around the six-month mark. I need to see you.

Grey came that very night like Romeo and threw little stones at my window until I opened it.

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