Under Their Skin

  “Eryn, we don’t have to even things up,” he said. “It’s been great having you and Nick around for ten days, not just a week. I’d love to have you live with me all the time, if I could.”

  “Except the two of us always strive to be fair to everyone involved,” Mom had finished for him. “And what’s fair to the two of you—and Dad and me, and Michael and his kids—is to simply go back to our normal schedule, as usual.”

  So no overlap with Ava and Jackson, Eryn thought.

  Now Mom parked the U-Haul, and Eryn shoved open the door and started racing for the house.

  “Eryn—take a box with you!” Mom called off after her. “We’re going to have to go back and forth enough times as it is, without you wasting trips!”

  Eryn let out an exasperated snort and spun around. Michael had come out to the curb and already had the back of the truck open. He handed her a box.

  “Glad you’re so eager to get into the house,” Michael said. “That’s a good sign for our future as a family, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” Eryn said.

  Michael was tall and bald and had a very narrow face—had Mom picked him because he looked the opposite of Dad? Did Mom think Michael was better- looking?

  Eryn felt disloyal even thinking that.

  She carried her box up the driveway, but had to wait while Michael unlocked the front door.

  “Your bedroom’s the first one on the right, up the stairs,” Michael said.

  If it had been Mom telling her that, Eryn might have argued, What? We don’t even get to choose our own rooms? Or Did you let Michael’s kids choose first? That’s not fair! But since it was Michael, Eryn just said, “Okay.”

  Mom probably knew I wouldn’t argue if Michael delivered the news, Eryn thought darkly. She probably planned for him to be the one to tell us. I should tell Mom I know what she’s up to, and argue with her anyway!

  But Eryn might be just one staircase away from finally learning something about the mysterious stepsiblings she’d been wondering about for months. She wasn’t going to delay any more than she had to.

  She walked through the living room, where the green sofas from Mom’s house had been paired with orangey-tan end tables that must have come from Michael’s condo—they looked odd together, but maybe that was just because Eryn wasn’t used to the combination. She climbed the stairs and took her box into the first room on the right. It was slightly bigger than her old bedroom back at Mom’s. Her furniture was already here too, and it looked just as out of place as the sofas downstairs. The bed was dwarfed by the huge window above it, and the desk looked lonely all by itself on the far wall.

  What are you going to do—complain because you have too much space? Eryn wondered.

  She put her cardboard box down on the floor and went back into the hall. Nick was just stepping into the room across from hers. She tapped him on the shoulder, then put her finger to her lips.

  Nick nodded and put down the box he’d been holding. He had to be thinking just like her.

  Together, they tiptoed toward the other end of the hall, where there were three more doors. The door in the middle was partly open, leading into a bathroom.

  The other two doors were shut.

  “Their rooms,” Eryn whispered. She didn’t even have to say Ava’s and Jackson’s.

  Nick nodded again and reached for the doorknob on his side of the hallway.

  How much can you find out about two kids just by seeing their bedrooms? Eryn wondered.

  She thought about how her hyper-organized friend Megan had the books on her bookshelves arranged in alphabetical order like a library; she thought about how her craftsy friend Caitlyn always had a trail of glitter and paint scattered across the floor of her room.

  Plenty, Eryn told herself.

  She reached for the doorknob on her side of the hall and eagerly twisted it to the right.

  The doorknob didn’t turn.

  “Are, like, the doorknobs in this house backwards or something?” she hissed to Nick, twisting her hand to the left instead.

  But the doorknob didn’t turn that way either.

  Eryn rammed her shoulder against the top part of the door. Nothing. She hit it again. The door still didn’t budge.

  Nick pulled her back from slamming into the door a third time.

  “It’s no use,” he said. His eyes were wide and stunned. “The doors are locked. They’ve locked us out. Why would they do that?”

  Eryn didn’t have an answer.

  SIX

  “So, kids, how do you like the new house?” Michael asked at dinner that night. “Now that you’ve lived in it for all of six hours?”

  “It makes me feel like Bluebeard’s wife,” Eryn said, pressing taco meat down into her taco so firmly that the shell cracked.

  Dad would have made a joke about how he didn’t know Eryn had a husband now; he would have moaned, If you’re old enough to get married, how old does that make me?

  Michael just blinked vacantly—maybe he’d picked up the blinking from Mom.

  “I don’t think I know that reference,” he said cautiously. “Is it something from TV? A movie? A book?”

  “Oh, Eryn, don’t be so melodramatic,” Mom said as she passed Nick a bowl of refried beans. She turned to Michael. “Bluebeard’s wife is a character in a French fairy tale. Her husband gives her a key to a locked room, but tells her she’s not allowed to open the door. She opens the door anyway, and she finds the dead bodies of her husband’s previous wives.”

  Nick glanced down at the refried beans he’d been about to put on his plate. They didn’t look very good to him right now. In fact, they kind of looked like guts that might have spilled out of a dead body. He put the bowl down on the table and raised an eyebrow at Eryn, shorthand for, You really want to go there our first night in the new house?

  Eryn gave a tiny nod.

  Nick thought about all the secretive strategies they’d tried that afternoon: going into the backyard and trying to peek in Ava’s and Jackson’s windows (no luck—they were covered by blinds); trying to slide a yardstick under the doors to feel around that way (the yardstick just got caught on the carpeting); trying to speculate on all sorts of possibilities while dodging Mom and Michael coming in and out with boxes.

  This afternoon they’d been so worried about getting caught. Evidently Eryn didn’t care about that anymore.

  “Do you think there might be dead bodies in Ava’s and Jackson’s rooms?” Nick asked, helping out. “Because the doors are locked?”

  Mom sighed. She picked up the bowl of refried beans and put a spoonful on Nick’s plate.

  “Even in the new house, you still have to eat a balanced meal,” she said. She turned her head so she could talk to Eryn and Nick both at once. “The two of you are being ridiculous. This is not like the Bluebeard story, because you don’t have the key to a door you’re not supposed to unlock. And there aren’t dead bodies here. Do you assume our neighbors have dead bodies in their houses just because they lock their front doors? The Bluebeard story is about patriarchal abuse of power and feminist subverting of that power. This is simply about being respectful of others’ possessions. We’ll lock your doors too, when Ava and Jackson are here. You wouldn’t want them rooting around in your rooms either, would you?”

  Nick was still stuck back on the words “patriarchal abuse of power and feminist subverting of that power.” What did that even mean?

  He decided it didn’t matter. Was Eryn maybe blowing the whole locked-door situation out of proportion? Mom was right about one thing: He wouldn’t like the idea of strange kids going into his bedroom when he was away at Dad’s.

  Then Mom turned to face Michael.

  “I’m sorry Nick and Eryn are behaving like this,” she said.

  Nick narrowed his eyes. Why did Mom feel like she had to apologize for them?
Was this what it was going to be like from now on, Mom always siding with Michael against Eryn and Nick?

  Michael looked away from Mom, toward Nick. Eryn kicked Nick under the table. Nick knew that kick meant, If Michael wants to make peace with some male bonding—like if he offers extra video game time after dinner—don’t fall for it!

  “Hey,” Michael said weakly. “Um . . .”

  Maybe Michael’s kids never argued with him or their mom. Maybe that’s how they were different. Maybe they were always obedient little angels and Michael had no idea what he’d gotten into, marrying Mom and having Nick and Eryn as stepchildren.

  Nick made sure his face didn’t show any sympathy for Michael.

  Michael took his napkin from his lap and placed it on the table beside his plate of mostly untouched tacos.

  “I was going to save this as a surprise for later, but look what I programmed some of our picture frames to do,” he said.

  He stood up and went over to a pile of frames leaning against the living room wall, waiting to be hung. He picked up one of the frames and brought it back to the table. As he walked, he touched some control on the side of the frame, and instantly the picture inside the frame changed from a nature scene of autumn leaves to a pairing of Nick’s and Eryn’s sixth-grade school pictures. Even if Nick ever wanted to pretend he and Eryn weren’t twins—or not related at all, maybe—these pictures would have prevented it. Both of them had the same dark-brown hair, though Eryn’s flowed down to touch her shoulders and Nick kept his cut short (to avoid having it turn into the same kind of curly mess that grew on his dad’s head). In the pictures, they both had the same open, trusting, friendly expression on their faces. There was probably a reason they were always the ones chosen to escort new kids around at school: They looked completely nonthreatening. They looked like even if somebody was hiding dead bodies in their house, they wouldn’t suspect a thing.

  Eryn was not wearing her school-picture expression now.

  “Let me guess,” she said sarcastically. “You programmed all the picture frames to switch from pictures of Nick and me one week to pictures of Ava and Jackson the next. And—we’re never going to be able to see any of the pictures of Ava and Jackson!”

  Michael tilted his head and peered back at her. He looked a little hurt.

  “You have part of it right,” he said. “But I was thinking we could switch out the pictures anytime we wanted. Or just have it set on an endless loop, to change every half hour or something like that. Because, of course, sure, it’s fine for you to see Ava’s and Jackson’s pictures too. Look.”

  He touched the control on the side of the frame and there, at last, was Eryn and Nick’s first view of Ava and Jackson.

  Their pictures, anyway.

  Ava and Jackson both looked to be roughly the same age as Nick and Eryn—maybe only eleven, maybe already thirteen, maybe exactly twelve. Jackson had sandy-brown hair and a little scar in his eyebrow that made him look slightly more mischievous than Nick. Ava’s curly reddish hair was the same length as Eryn’s, but that was nothing unusual—most girls Nick knew had pretty much the same length hair. Ava had a sweet smile, and she held her eyes so wide open that Nick guessed she never squinted suspiciously at anyone, the way Eryn did. Unlike Eryn, Ava probably wouldn’t ever get permanent squint lines between her eyes.

  “Are they twins too?” Eryn asked. “And are they the same age as us? Why didn’t you tell us all that already?”

  Mom touched something on the side of the frame that made the whole thing go blank.

  “The more we tell you, the more you want to know,” Mom said. “Really, Eryn, how much information is enough?”

  Eryn squirmed in her seat.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You could just let us meet Ava and Jackson, and we could ask them questions directly. That would probably be enough.”

  “And I’ve told you that isn’t going to happen,” Mom said in a steely voice. “Subject closed. Nick, are you going to eat those beans or not?”

  SEVEN

  Eryn stood at the top of the staircase. Moonlight streamed in through the huge picture window at the front of the house, directly across from her. She glanced over her shoulder, back into the darkness where she knew the hallway ended near two locked doors.

  She wished she’d never heard the story of Bluebeard and his wife. She wished she and Nick had never brought up the possibility of dead bodies.

  Silly, you know it’s nothing like that, she scolded herself. You know Mom. You know she’s not a serial killer. You know she wouldn’t marry a serial killer.

  She could imagine the kind of joke Nick might make about that: Yeah, Mom would never keep dead bodies lying around the house. She’d say it was unsanitary.

  Eryn noticed a thin band of light under Nick’s door. He was still awake. She tapped quietly at his door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  Eryn shoved the door open and stepped into Nick’s room. In the past couple of hours he’d turned it into a familiar place. His lacrosse trophies were lined up on top of his dresser, along with the globe that Mom had bought him when he was five and he’d started telling everyone he was going to grow up to be a world-famous explorer. Eryn couldn’t remember the last time he’d told someone he was going to be a world-famous explorer. (Good thing—twelve-year-olds got laughed at for statements like that.) But the globe had always sat on his dresser back at Mom’s old house, and Eryn liked seeing it here, too.

  Either Nick or, more likely, Mom, had made Nick’s bed with his old familiar sports-themed comforter and sheets, with the random pictures of baseballs and basketballs and hockey pucks all over the place. Had Nick been in second or third grade when he got that bedding to replace the Lego-themed bedding he’d had before? Was it the same time that Eryn replaced her Disney Princess bedding with a comforter covered with hot-pink-and-purple flowers and stripes?

  If I got into Ava’s and Jackson’s rooms and saw that they still had Lego or princess bedding, then would I know everything I needed to know about them? Eryn wondered.

  She remembered Mom’s question at the dinner table: Really, Eryn, how much information is enough?

  She didn’t know the answer to that question.

  “I saw a cleat mark on the carpet downstairs,” Nick said, without turning around from lining up books on his bookshelf. “You haven’t been walking around with cleats on, have you? Maybe it’s a sign that Ava and Jackson play sports where they have to wear cleats.”

  “Maybe,” Eryn said. She sat down on Nick’s bed and watched him for a minute. He seemed to be arranging his books based on which sport the main characters in the books played. She could tell by the basketballs, baseballs, and soccer balls on the spines.

  “At least now we’ve seen pictures of Ava and Jackson,” Nick said.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Eryn said. She thought for a moment. “But didn’t something about those pictures seem kind of weird?”

  “They looked like normal kids to me,” Nick said, finally turning around to look at her.

  “That’s the problem,” Eryn said. “Didn’t they look maybe too normal? Like those pictures you see in frames at stores where it’s just some actors or models trying too hard to look like normal people?”

  She expected Nick to give her one of his You know you’re crazy, don’t you? looks. He bit his lip instead.

  “You’re right,” he said slowly. “You’re exactly right. That is what they reminded me of. I just didn’t figure that out until you said it.”

  It made her feel better and worse, all at once, to have Nick agree with her.

  “But what if Ava and Jackson would think the same thing, looking at our pictures?” Nick asked.

  Eryn stood up.

  “I’m going downstairs to look at those pictures again,” she said. “Want to come? Maybe we’ll notice something else without Mom and Michael
watching us.”

  “Sure,” Nick said.

  The two of them crept out of Nick’s room together, both of them tiptoeing. That was ridiculous—it wasn’t like they would get in trouble for going downstairs. If they needed to, they could always say they wanted a drink of cold water from the refrigerator, or they’d heard a noise and they wanted to see what it was, or . . .

  Eryn tripped on the bottom step.

  Nick grabbed her arm at the same time she caught the railing. In the silent house, the sound of his hand colliding with her arm and her hand colliding with the bannister seemed like a double thunderclap.

  Both kids froze.

  “Guess I’m not used to the new house yet,” Eryn whispered, which was the understatement of the year.

  “Do you think they heard us?” Nick whispered back.

  Eryn looked toward the door to Mom and Michael’s bedroom. It stayed closed. One of the couches blocked her view of the bottom of the door, so she couldn’t even tell if they had a light on or not.

  She began tiptoeing toward Mom and Michael’s door.

  “I thought we were coming down to look at the pictures!” Nick hissed at her.

  “I have to make sure it’s safe!” Eryn hissed back.

  She circled the couch and saw a triangle of light on the floor. So Mom and Michael were still up. She pressed her ear against the door. Maybe the walls and doors were thinner in this house than in Mom’s old one, because Eryn could hear perfectly here, even without the drinking-glass trick. Mom and Michael had soft music playing, which had probably covered over the sound of Eryn tripping. And along with the music . . .