Underneath the span of my hand, a line of green ink cartwheeled across the paper.

"Let me see." He gathered up my script and held it to the window, where the light shone through the page, making my writing into a vine.

Resembles a giant, it read. Clearly out of the bounds of normality. He sighed and put down the paper. It was that new, stuck-up teacher's writing. Of course, I had no idea what any of it said. He put his hand on my head, wishing he were better at stories, wishing he could make up one now where the giant wasn't bad, just misunderstood, where the princess was huge-the bigger the better-where beauty on the outside always matched beauty on the inside, wicked queens looked like the hags they were, and uppity schoolteachers were locked in towers for perpetuity.

"Why don't you come on down for something to eat?" he asked. "I think we got some tuna. I'l make you a sandwich."

And I, always eager to fil the empty place squatting in the middle of me, fol owed him down, the green description of me fluttering between my fingers like the th.o.r.n.y stem of a fragrant, poisoned rose.

Chapter Six.

Come here." August Dyerson waved one of his veined arms in my direction.

It was January and frigid in the Dyerson barn, but I was getting used to it. I made my home with the Dyersons now. Six months ago, just after my twelfth birthday, I'd gone downstairs for breakfast and found my father upright on the couch, his cheeks as hard as a piece of old sidewalk, his eyes two rounded b.u.t.tons that did nothing when I hol ered.

Serena Jane had come hustling into the room, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, and it took her about two seconds to know what to do. She covered Dad with the ratty afghan and pushed me into the kitchen.

"Try not to look," she said, then cal ed Dr. Morgan, who for the second time in his life had to stare us in the eyes and tel us we had lost a parent.

Death is different when you can remember it. When my mother died, I was just a newborn-squinty and milk-drunk, half-asleep. This time around, however, I was old enough to notice that besides Mrs. Pickerton, Serena Jane and I were that besides Mrs. Pickerton, Serena Jane and I were the only women at my father's burial. The other attendees were his customers from the barbershop -al of whom had enjoyed a nip or two from the bottle with my father.

Mrs. Pickerton, my sister, and I stood together in a smal cl.u.s.ter, away from the men, our bare knees scoured by the humid Aberdeen wind.

Next to us, the marble of my mother's headstone glowed in the mist like a half-forgotten moon. I yearned to go lay my head on the soft gra.s.s of her grave, to weep on the black dirt until it turned to mud, but Amanda Pickerton jerked my hand hard and made me stare straight ahead. In that moment, I hated her more than ever, and I hated everyone around me, too-my vain, sil y sister, who so far had refused to cry because she didn't want her eyes puffy for the funeral, the barbershop customers with their hangdog lips and eyes, even my father for leaving me alone on the earth. I was tired of people dying and tired of standing at attention in my itchy clothes. I tried to extricate my hand, but Amanda closed her fingers tighter, like a claw. "Stand stil ,"

she hissed, and gave my arm a vicious yank.

"Poor Lily. Poor Earl," d.i.c.k Crane muttered.

"Wel , he always had d.a.m.n good whiskey," Ebert Vickers drawled, stroking his stubble.

"And now the whiskey has him," added Roger Thompson.

Amanda Pickerton cleared her throat in their direction and shuffled my sister and me closer against her. Earlier that day, she had arrived at the house bearing a pair of matching vinyl suitcases.

"Whatever you want to keep, place in these valises,"

she ordered in her dril sergeant contralto.

"Everything else is going to the Salvation Army." She opened the garment bag she carried so tenderly over her arm and laid out our funeral dresses on our beds and our shoes on the floor underneath them.

Serena Jane's were patent leather, new. Mine were brown boots, but Mrs. Pickerton had shined them, at least, and put in fresh laces. "I'l be back at two o'clock." She tipped her wrist.w.a.tch to her face. "Two o'clock," she said again, tapping its face, and clipped downstairs. Before the front door even slammed, I raced into my father's room and took out the box of money he kept under his bed, splitting it even- steven for Serena Jane and me, then hesitated in front of my mother's bureau, looking for her tortoiseshel mirror. I scooped it up, too, and returned to my room.

When two o'clock arrived, Serena Jane and I were standing combed and dressed by the front door, our two suitcases side by side in the front hal . Her case was heavier than mine-as if her life had more about it worth keeping-but you couldn't tel just by looking at them. Instead, you'd have thought they were a perfect set, en route to a common destination. Which was why I was surprised to hear the awful wheeze of the Dyersons' truck outside the cemetery gate just as my father's funeral was ending.

"Hurry,"

Amanda Pickerton urged, closing my fingers around a hard clod of Aberdeen dirt. She jutted out her chin toward the grave. "Go on.

Throw it down and make your peace. You don't want to keep him waiting."

At first, I thought she meant my father, but as I brushed the loam from my skin, I began to have a sinking feeling in my gut. I peered through the cemetery gate, and in the back of August's truck, I saw my suitcase strapped down with a piece of frayed rope. "No," I whispered to Amanda. It was one thing to spend al day at the Dyerson farm, hauling oats to the horses and thrashing through hip-high weeds, but it would be another thing entirely to wake up there every morning to the strangled cries of their anemic rooster. "Let me stay with Serena Jane," I pleaded, but at that suggestion, Amanda drew back, dismayed. I tried to find my sister's eyes, but Serena Jane was turned away from me, stil bent over our father's grave in a world of her own, not even one of her ears taking in our conversation. I wondered where her suitcase was, then realized it was probably already at the Pickertons'-unpacked and shoved in a closet, its journey completed. And if I envied my sister anything, it was that-not her looks, not her placid ability to accept what the world gave her, just the fact that she was clearly never going to need to use that ugly suitcase again.

Amanda pasted a sickly smile across her face. "My dear, staying with us is simply impossible. We don't have room for the likes of you.

You'l be better off with Brenda and August, believe You'l be better off with Brenda and August, believe me. They're just your sort." She began steering me toward the truck. "Go on," she urged, nudging me in the smal of my back. "You'l be fine."

August helped me climb in the cab, and Amanda slammed the door. August leaned over and patted my cheek. His fingers sc.r.a.ped like twigs in a high wind, trying to be as gentle as they could. I turned around and checked my suitcase through the back window. "Don't worry," August said. "I got it tied down good."

"Thanks," I murmured, but that wasn't what I was worried about. Not at al . It had simply occurred to me that except for the suitcases, nothing about my sister and me would ever be the same again.

The Dyersons were the most genuine of upstaters.

Weedlike, they had long, complicated roots that stretched back to Tabitha's drunken brother, James.

A veteran of the Civil War, he hadn't weathered the fighting as wel as the first Robert Morgan, having lost a leg in battle along with the livelier portions of his soul. He returned home to Aberdeen on crutches, a wooden leg strapped onto his thigh, his gait unsteady not just from the unfamiliar appendage, but also from the moonshine he'd learned to distil in the hol ers of Appalachia. After his sister married Robert Morgan and moved into town, he kept company with the foxes and crows that haunted his farm, growing pale, ragged rows of corn with which to brew more hooch. When he died, the town was astonished to learn not only that James had been keeping a half Oneida woman he'd startled in the woods one afternoon as she was raiding his stil , but that he'd also fathered her child.

"That was Amelia's great-great- grandfather Jeremy Blood Moon Dyerson," August drawled with pride out in the barn, patting one of his horses on its tragical y bony flank, then reaching over to smooth the dark tangles of his daughter's hair.

"He's the one we get our powers of intuition from. It's what makes us so popular around here." He tapped his forehead and winked, and I stifled a laugh behind my mitten. Whether it was because of their mixed blood or the tangy whiff of grain alcohol that always clung to their clothes, the Dyersons were anything but popular in Aberdeen, and the same went for their unlucky horses.

August loved the beasts regardless.

"They're winners in their own way," he said. "The math's just a little different, is al ," and Amelia nodded in rapt agreement. I stared at the withers of the nearest horse and then at the saggy flanks of August Dyerson and decided that if the world hated its losers, it must loathe its winners even more. What else would explain the rusted windmil decaying in the Dyersons' yard, I wondered, and the stubborn stones that bloomed in al the farm's fields, and most of al , the melancholy stare of Amelia, who, with her ink-pot eyes and ability to creep silently into a room, seemed to have inherited some of Jeremy Blood Moon's gifts of secrecy?

In my new life with the Dyersons, Amelia and I shared a room, al our meals, and even some clothing (Amelia wore what I outgrew), but I could never overlook the fact that she was the utter ant.i.thesis of my sister-dark where Serena Jane was golden, skinny where Serena Jane was plump, and, most important, mute when Serena Jane was busting with opinions about everything from the sorry state of my stick straight hair to the proper angle of the safety pin on her kilt.

It was Amelia's silence that was the hardest thing for me to adjust to. For the first time in my life, I was the one doing the bossing, and it was a lonely business, I was discovering, especial y given a subject as sleepy-eyed and reticent as Amelia.

"Do you want to go outside and play?" I would ask after Brenda had slid some eggs across the beat-up table to us. "Let's go into the woods behind the barn and look for arrowheads." But Amelia, absorbed in trailing her fork tines through the runny yolks, wouldn't answer. I would shovel down my food and stomp outdoors on my own, missing the brashness of Serena Jane, who was always tel ing me to hurry.

The woods, alive with the chattering of insects and the furtive rustling of thousands of leaves, were always a relief after the cavernous weight of Amelia's quietude.

One day, however, about six weeks after I'd arrived, she surprised me, slipping up on me so I'd arrived, she surprised me, slipping up on me so quietly that she reminded me of a deer trying to sneak past a bear. "Play now," she announced, and handed me a rooster feather.

My mouth fel slack. "You're talking." In al my time spent with the Dyersons, both before and after my father's death, I'd never heard her utter a solitary word. When she wanted something, she usual y pointed or described the object with her hands, and Brenda and Gus obliged.

"Why doesn't Amelia ever say anything?"

I'd asked Brenda.

She'd just smiled her slow smile, wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n, and shrugged. "Does it make any difference?"

"I guess not."

"Wel , then, there you go." And she'd turned back to her oven.

In the fresh air of the woods, Amelia's voice emerged rougher than I thought it would, like a curl of tree bark. "Play now," she repeated. She had a hard time p.r.o.nouncing the "l" in play.

I twirled the feather in my hands, trying to hide my surprise. "What do you want to do?"

Amelia plopped herself down right there in the dirt and blinked at me. "Story," she rasped, then closed her lips again, retreating back into her eerie calm. I ran the feather back and forth under my chin. It tickled like velvet. Amelia sat patiently at my feet, staring at me. I stared back. I marveled at the bravery it had taken Amelia to utter those few words and wondered how best to honor it. Amelia became impatient, however, and pounded her little fist in the dirt, so I opened my own mouth and just started saying whatever popped into my head.

"Once upon a time," I began, "there was a beautiful princess with an ugly name-Bugaboo.

Al she ever wanted was for folks to like her, but as soon as she opened her mouth and introduced herself, they about busted their seams laughing. Not only did she have a real sil y name, but her voice was about as croaky as an old bul frog courting in a pond.

"No one believed Bugaboo was a princess until one day, she found a magic feather, kind of like this here rooster feather." I held it up.

"She thought it was real pretty, and she tucked it in her hair, but it was cursed, and it took away her voice.

"At first, Bugaboo thought that was a bad thing, but then she realized that no one could laugh at her anymore. And so, she grew up to be the wisest, best, most beautiful princess in the whole world, and she never even needed to speak again, for people just natural y figured out what she wanted before she said it, and she lived happily ever after."

Amelia's mouth fel open. Her little hands were folded in front of her chest, as if she were a victim of frost. For a moment, I wondered if maybe she real y did have something more wrong with her than problems talking, but then she burst into applause so enthusiastic, I worried that she'd rip her clothes.

The next day, she brought me a circlet of twigs she'd bound with rawhide and demanded another Bugaboo story, so I told her about the time Bugaboo made a raft out of wood and sailed a sea so wide, it took her a year to get across it. Soon, I had an entire col ection of Amelia's found objects cluttering up the drawer in the chest between our beds, every day adding something new, until gradual y I came to see that I wasn't entirely alone and that Aberdeen stil held some gifts for people like Amelia and me, even if we did have to make them up for ourselves.

Now that we had bonded, Amelia began tagging after me like a sticky shadow, whether I wanted her to or not. I even started taking her with me when I ventured into town to meet Serena Jane at Hinkleman's soda fountain on Sat.u.r.days-the one day Mrs. Pickerton had decreed that we could visit.

Mr. Hinkleman shook my sister's pearly hand as though she were a highborn lady and gave her extra cherries for her soda, but when it came time for him to push Amelia's and my drinks across the counter, he never said anything, and he always made sure never to touch our skin when he plucked the sticky quarters from our palms.

"Bad luck slips off easy as soot," I heard him tel ing the pimpled counter boy as he swept the shop in aimless circles. My stomach did a flip-flop, but I ignored it. Without moving my eyes, I lifted my soda and drained it in one greedy swal ow, pushing al the sweetness into me at once, letting it fizz good and hard right in the center of my bel y. Next to me, swinging slowly from side to side on her stool, Amelia sipped her drink more conservatively, Amelia sipped her drink more conservatively, savoring the burn of bubbles in her throat, mixing pleasure with pain until the one became the other. I turned away from her and faced my sister on the other side of me. In public, I never bothered to talk to Amelia. She wouldn't respond, I knew, just furrow her brow and suck harder at her straw.

"She talks," I'd insisted when Serena Jane had made fun of Amelia. "She just won't do it around strange people." But Serena Jane had just tossed her curls and sniffed that Amelia was the strange one.

"What would you rather have on a desert island?" I inquired of my sister now, hooking my feet on the stool's rungs. "Tools or food?" I was aware of Amelia picking at her cuticles. She seemed to be considering the question, even if she was going to answer it only in her head.

Serena Jane half shrugged and glanced at the clock. Amanda Pickerton was going to take her to the movies at one. "Who cares?" She tired easily of my games. In her new life, apparently, Serena Jane never had to make choices of any kind.

When I'd asked her what she got for breakfast after we'd been apart for the first week, she'd looked at me as if I were from Mars. "Whatever I want," she'd said. "Mrs. Pickerton just ties on her ap.r.o.n and whips it up. She produces marvelous cuisine."

"But what if you wanted both pancakes and eggs," I'd pressed, trying to imagine Brenda offering that choice and failing. Breakfast at the Dyersons' was whatever the hens decided to give you. "Which one would Mrs. Pickerton fix?"

Serena Jane had flipped her hair over her shoulder. "What a stupid question, Truly. Why would I ever eat that much at one sitting?" I'd looked at my sister's white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda's eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her- surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought-and dip my fingers in.

Instead, I tried to make her make choices. I stuck us on theoretical desert islands, stranded us in dark jungles, dropped us out of smoking planes into cities in which we were the only two people alive. Then I presented some options.

Starvation or cannibalism? Escape or befriend the natives? Hunting or fishing? I was the one who ended up doing most of the answering.

"I'd pick tools," I said now, "because then you could catch fish and stuff, and make your own food." I stretched my hand out toward hers a little on the counter. "I'd catch some for you, too. If we were on a desert island, I'd share everything I had."

Serena Jane stifled a yawn, then squinted at my overal s. Now that I'd been liberated from the wardrobe clutches of Amanda Pickerton, they were al I ever wore anymore. "Real y, Truly,"

Serena Jane said, flicking a piece of lint off her cardigan, bored with my fantasies, "you might at least acknowledge that you're female."

I gazed down at the bulging universe of my body. "Why?"

"Because you are."

I spun a quarter on the counter, watching it wobble harder and harder before it fel . I was a lot of things. Bigger than most boys. Stronger, too. But that didn't matter if you were a girl. Al anyone ever saw about me, I thought, were the parts that were missing: lovely clothes, and proper manners, and tidy hair. No matter what Brenda did to it, my hair refused to curl or behave in any kind of reasonable way. Amelia had long hair that could have held promise, but she always wore it tied up in a single braid she wove herself, and that suited Brenda just fine. "Doesn't matter anyway," I mumbled, slurping the dregs from my soda. "I'l never be pretty."

Serena Jane sighed. "That's not the point."

"Then never mind." I smashed my straw down in my gla.s.s. But I knew what she was trying to say, even if I didn't like it. She was trying to make me make a real choice before the world up and did it for me.

Al that winter after my father's death, Amelia and I learned to play five-card stud and rummy in the bittersweet air of the barn, the pungent odors of horses and hay wavering around us. By the end of January, August had taught us how to twist and throw a pair of dice so that one number, at least, would end up low and we wouldn't lose our shirts. "That's what you cal evening up the odds," August said, squatting next to us, the better to a.s.sess our technique.

Amelia fixed him with her clear and steady stare. Only in the barn with her father did her words come clear and easy, maybe because given August's track record, it was impossible to believe you could disappoint him. "It's what you cal cheating," she said, and August let loose a great bark of laughter.

"Who would have thought it?" he said. "A Dyerson on the straight and narrow!" And Amelia scowled.

"Come on now, girl," August soothed.

"Let's see what the cards got in store for us today." In the weathered air of the barn, his breath bil owed out in defeated clouds and mingled with the exhalations of the horses. It looked as though halfhearted angels were descending, as though something almost wonderful were about to happen. Amelia and I were at the age where wonderful things sometimes stil did happen, but far less often than they used to.

August pul ed a deck of cards from the sleeve of his coat, shuffled, cut, and then told us to take the one from the top. He took a card for himself, then asked us to pick again.

"Hold 'em close now. Don't let me see." I clutched the pair to my chest, the laminated cards slipping back and forth between my mittens. Amelia looked at hers once, then closed her fist around them and stared at the ceiling. August took another card for himself, then frowned.

"Now, it don't matter what color you got or what the shapes on the cards are, al that matters is how many things you got. Are you good at your numbers, Truly?" I shrugged. Miss Sparrow had tried with me, rapping her pointer on the blackboard so hard that she'd sometimes gouged the slate, but I couldn't seem to keep anything straight.

"Now, do either of you have a picture of a lady on any of your cards? Or a king?"

I checked and shook my head. Amelia didn't answer.

August paused, then continued his instruction. "Okay, that's good. So just go ahead and count up what you got."

I ran my eyes over the black-and-white shapes on the cards. "Six hearts on one card and eight black things on the other."

"What about you, Amelia?"

"A king and a queen."

August whistled. "Wel , now, that's pretty d.a.m.n good. I'd stick with that." He turned to me.

"And you've got fourteen altogether?" He bent down, and I could see the yel ow tobacco stains on his teeth, the crow's-feet lurking at the edges of his eyes. "The aim here is to make al your cards add up to twenty-one. Royals are ten. Aces can be one or eleven. You can ask for another card if you want, but it might put you over. You stil got another seven to go, Truly, so I'd go for it, but it's up to you." He straightened up and stood over me like a judge while I tried to make up my mind. I'd never expected that one tiny thing would matter so much.

"Okay," I final y announced. "Give me another card."

August's face bloomed into a panoply of creases. "Good girl." He grinned. "Take that one right off the top." His thumb slid out another card. But when I took it, drew it to my chest, and peeked at it, I when I took it, drew it to my chest, and peeked at it, I saw that I had the king of hearts, his narrow eyes suspicious as a trout's, his helmet of curls cut severely along his jaw. My face fel .