PROLOGUE
Once upon a time . . . in the summer of 1985
“Code Hot Pink” was the only thing the person on the other end of the phone said before the line went dead.
Tennyson O’Rourke stared at the harvest-gold handset before hanging it back on the cradle. With five O’Rourke kids in the house, she was lucky she was able to get the message at all. Her sister Bronte had been on the phone for hours with her boyfriend, talking about which girls at the high school were cool and which ones were sluts. If Tennyson heard another “gag me,” she was going to literally, well, gag.
Code Hot Pink meant one thing—she had to rendezvous.
Tennyson pulled on her jellies and tried to get her unruly sandy-blonde hair into a scrunchie. Luckily, she’d already brushed her teeth and done her chores.
“Hey, that’s my scrunchie, you little brat,” Bronte screeched from the hallway, hands fisted at her sides as she came through the living room, heading for Tennyson. Tennyson yelped, flung open the front door, and took off through their front yard. Bronte stood framed in the doorway, her face a mask of rage. “And stop using my nail polish, cretin.”
“Bye, Bronte,” Tennyson called back in a singsong voice, knowing she’d have to stay out until their mother got home. Tennyson’s mom was getting her classroom ready for the new school year, and the O’Rourke children were on their own until dinnertime.
She sped around to the backyard, jetting through a split in the chain-link fence toward the grassy area cut by a concrete ditch. They weren’t supposed to play near the culvert when it had been raining because once a little boy had tried to swim in it, and rushing waters had swept him away. Tennyson’s mom had taken a JELL-O salad to his wake, but that was before Tennyson was old enough to remember good. She just remembered her mother crying and the way the green JELL-O had pieces of peach in it.
The culvert separated her very middle-class neighborhood of Broadmoor from her best friend Melanie Brevard’s upscale one. Most days the girls got together in their meeting spot—a cooler area beneath the shroud of a willow tree—but their summer days of running wild were about to be curtailed by the dreaded first day of fifth grade.
But that was tomorrow.
Today they had a Code Hot Pink to deal with.
When Tennyson arrived at the meeting place, she found Melanie sitting on the broken lawn chair they’d found on the side of the road. In her lap, she held a cardboard box.
“Hey,” Tennyson said, pulling up the other chair they’d redesigned by bending the legs so it was flat to the ground. She plonked into it. “So what’s the emergency?”
Melanie looked funny. Like she’d seen something scary. She grudgingly lifted the box she’d been holding like it was a bomb or something. “I thought we’d gotten in the stickers we ordered. I wanted to take them with me tomorrow.”
“Don’t remind me about tomorrow. I wish you didn’t have to go to St. Ignatius. It’ll be weird going to school without you. Who will calm me down when I see bees?” Tennyson said, taking the box from Melanie.
She was so allergic to bees.
On Tuesday, they would start the fifth grade . . . at different schools. Melanie’s parents were making her go to private school because someone had found a condom in the boys’ bathroom at Glenbrook Elementary. Tennyson wasn’t sure exactly what that was, but she’d overheard her mother telling their neighbor about it, and the way her mother had whispered the word made her think it had something to do with s-e-x.
“I don’t want to go to St. Ignatius, either. Penny loafers and blazers are my worst nightmare.”
Tennyson turned the box over. “So if this isn’t our stickers, what is it? There’s no name on it.”
“I don’t know what it is. I mean, I do, but I don’t.” Melanie sounded like she wanted to cry. What could be that bad?
Tennyson traced the Brevard address with a finger. Her fingernails were painted carnation pink. She’d “borrowed” the polish from Bronte. Her sister pretty much hated her and had told her repeatedly, “Keep your grubby hands off my shit.” Tennyson would have told their mother about Bronte using cuss words, but she knew no one liked a snitch. Melanie was lucky when it came to sisters. Her sister, Hillary, wasn’t mean as a snake like Bronte. Sometimes, Hillary played salon with Tennyson and Melanie, doing their nails and hair.
But Bronte was a bitch.
Tennyson opened the flaps of the box, shaking it so the contents fell out into her hand. When she caught what was in the box, she blinked a few times. She rotated the object, taking in every inch, her eyes widening with each second. Then she quickly put it back into the box, closing the flaps emphatically. “Whose is this?”
Melanie’s lip trembled. “I don’t know. What is it? I mean, is it, um, really bad?”
“It’s stuff we’re not supposed to mess with.”
Tennyson knew what it was. Having two older brothers had taught her a lot, and usually she liked knowing things that Melanie didn’t. Her best friend was what Tennyson’s mother liked to call “sheltered.” Melanie didn’t get to listen to rock and roll. Her parents made her listen to Bach and Beethoven. She also had to play the violin, which Melanie hated. Tennyson didn’t think she would mind playing the violin or the piano. Her grandmother had wanted to buy their family a piano so she and Bronte could learn something useful in life, but Tennyson’s mother had said they didn’t have room in the house. Not even for an upright.
“What do I do with it?” Melanie asked, looking at the box like it was a snake, then looking up at Tennyson with eyes that pleaded for help.
Thing was, Tennyson wasn’t sure what to do with the box. She wasn’t going to take it back home with her, that was for sure. There was no privacy at her house. Melanie should probably take it back and put it where she’d found it. Then try to forget about it. Or they could toss the box into the culvert right in front of them. But someone else might find it. And the Brevard’s address was on it. “I don’t know . . . yet. Let me think.”
Melanie set the box away from them.
Usually a Code Hot Pink wasn’t so . . . serious. Once, Melanie had burned off her bangs with Hillary’s curling iron. Another time, Tennyson had stepped on a nail and had to get a tetanus shot. Oh, and then there was the time Shaun Angelo had found the note they’d passed in math class. But this was . . . serious serious.
“You know what? Let’s lie out. I want to get some more sun before we start school. That will give us time to think about what to do with”—Tennyson looked over at the box—“that.”
“I guess so,” Melanie said. They both flipped their T-shirts up and tucked them through their necklines so they looked like Daisy Duke. Then Melanie carefully rolled up her shorts.
They pulled the chairs out into the sun and sweated in the dry heat for ten minutes, neither saying a thing. Finally, Tennyson pulled her shirt from where she’d tucked it between her nonexistent breasts and sat up. “Did I get any sun on my stomach?”
Melanie squinted. “Um, I think so?”
Tennyson frowned down at her red belly poking out over her cutoff jean shorts. She’d probably made the stupid freckles on her cheeks worse. She hated her complexion and had tried all kinds of ways to get rid of what her daddy called her cute “sprinkles,” but nothing worked. Her only chance was God working a miracle, so she whispered a prayer each night along with ten Hail Marys. Her mother had once told her that she had said ten Hail Marys every day when she wanted to have children. It worked, ’cause her mother had had five of them.