And that’s it exactly.
Evie reaches down to scratch at a bug bite on one bare foot, and I can’t help noticing how long her legs have gotten since last summer. Plus, she’s gotten boobs. She’s finally growing up.
Evie turned sixteen last September, the youngest of us all . . . but not by much.
People down here call us the Summer Children. We started our lives as a complete set.
Ten. The most perfect number. The number of divine harmony. The number at the heart of the universe. Ten commandments. Ten plagues of Egypt.
Ten babies born to eight different families.
A real population boom for little bitty La Cachette. One hundred tiny fingers and one hundred tiny toes. All of us arriving that same year, between the vernal equinox in March and the autumnal equinox in September.
Me and Elora. And Hart.
Evangeline.
Serafina and Lysander.
Case.
Mackey.
Ember and Orli.
I wonder if the others have changed, too. Like Evie. I wonder if Elora had.
Shit.
Has.
Suddenly, there’s this ache inside me that feels big enough to fall into. And, unlike me, maybe Evie is a mind reader, because she puts one arm around my shoulders and gives me an awkward squeeze.
Only, I know she isn’t a mind reader. Evie is clairaudient. She hears things. Messages. Words. Snatches of whispered conversation. Music sometimes. Like a radio in her head. That’s her gift.
And my mother wasn’t a true mind reader, either. Not really. She saw color auras. That was her thing. Which explains how I got my name. Imagine looking at your perfect baby girl and seeing her swimming in a sea of grey.
The color of fog and indecision.
The color of nothing special.
The color of everything that’s in between.
“We’re glad you’re here, Grey.” Evie’s words are so soft. She always talks quiet, like she’s afraid of drowning out the voices in her head. If it were me, I think I’d talk loud, so I wouldn’t have to hear their whispering. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she adds. And I know she means all of them.
Well, all of them except Ember and Orli, of course, because they’ve been dead forever.
And all of them except Elora.
Because Elora’s been gone a little over three months now. One night back in February, she walked into the swamp and vanished. Almost like she’d never been here at all.
“You seen Hart yet?” Evie asks.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” I tell her. “Except you.”
“He’s not doing so good, Grey.” There’s something strange in her voice, and she looks away from me. Out toward the river. “I mean, it’s been real hard on everybody, but Hart . . . he . . .” Evie shakes her head and chews on a ragged cuticle. “You’ll see for yourself, I guess.”
It feels wrong, the two of us gossiping about Hart before I’ve even had a chance to lay eyes on him. I know he wouldn’t like it.
“Is Honey up?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Evie says. “She’s in the back room unpacking a bunch of new yoga DVDs. I just came over to bring some muffins for the boat people.”
To everyone else, my grandmother is Miss Roselyn. But I call her Honey. She runs the spiritualist bookstore, which happens to be the only real business in town. The Mystic Rose sells books, sure, but also amulets, crystals, incense, candles, healing herbs, and now yoga DVDs, apparently. On busy weekends Evie’s mama, Bernadette, makes a little money by sending over fresh baked goods and sandwiches for Honey to peddle to the hungry tourists.
“I better let her know I’m here,” I say. “She thinks I’m coming in on the ten o’clock boat.”
There are no roads that lead to La Cachette. To get here, first you drive to the end of the world, then you get on a boat and keep on going. Two hours south of New Orleans, Highway 23 dead-ends in Kinter, a tiny almost-town where you can buy groceries, gas, and round-trip “scenic” boat rides to the Psychic Capital of the World. From there, the journey downriver to La Cachette takes another half hour.
The town, if it’s even big enough to be called that, sits on a low-lying island, absolutely as far south as you can get in Louisiana, just above the spot where the Mighty Mississippi splits into three fingers and then splinters into a hundred more before it finally floods out into the bayou, eventually reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Ol’ Man River on one side and nothing but waterlogged swamp on the other.
As Hart likes to say, one way in. And no way out.
I glance at an old wooden sign nailed to a post out on the boat dock.