Down Among the Sticks and Bones

by Seanan McGuire

  “It must be awful to have such a dorky sister,” said the girls in their class to Jacqueline, who felt like she should defend her sister, but didn’t know how. Her parents had never given her the tools for loyalty, for sticking up or standing up or even sitting down (sitting down might muss her dress). So she hated Jillian a little, for being weird, for making things harder than they had to be, and she ignored the fact that it had been their parents all along, making their choices for them.

  “It must be amazing to have such a pretty sister,” said the boys in their class to Jillian (the ones who were still speaking to her, at least; the ones who had managed to get their cootie shots, and were starting to realize that girls were decorative, if nothing else). Jillian twisted in on herself, trying to figure out how she and her sister could share a face and a bedroom and a life, and still one of them was “the pretty one,” and the other one was just Jillian, unwanted and ignored and increasingly being pushed from the role of “tomboy” and into the role of “nerd.”

  At night, they lay in their narrow, side-by-side beds and hated each other with the hot passion that could only exist between siblings, each of them wanting what the other had. Jacqueline wanted to run, to play, to be free. Jillian wanted to be liked, to be pretty, to be allowed to watch and listen, instead of always being forced to move. Each of them wanted people to see them, not an idea of them that someone else had come up with.

  (A floor below them, Chester and Serena slept peacefully, untroubled by their choices. They had two daughters: they had two girls to mold into whatever they desired. The thought that they might be harming them by forcing them into narrow ideas of what a girl—of what a person—should be had never crossed their minds.)

  By the time the girls turned twelve, it was easy for the people who met them to form swift, incorrect ideas of who they were as people. Jacqueline—never Jack; Jack was a knife of a name, short and sharp and cutting, without sufficient frills and flourishes for a girl like her—was quick-tongued and short-tempered, surrounded by sycophants who flocked to her from all sides of the school, eager to bask in the transitory warmth of her good graces. Most of the teachers thought that she was smarter than she let on, but virtually none of them could get her to show it. She was too afraid of getting dirty, of pencil smudges on her fingers and chalk dust on her cashmere sweaters. It was almost like she was afraid her mind was like a dress that couldn’t be washed, and she didn’t want to dirty it with facts she might not approve of later.

  (The women on Serena’s boards told her how lucky she was, how fortunate, and went home with their own daughters, and traded their party dresses for jeans, and never considered that Jacqueline Wolcott might not have the option.)

  Jillian was quick-witted and slow-tempered, eager to please, constantly aching from rejection after rejection after rejection. The other girls wanted nothing to do with her, said that she was dirty from spending so much time playing with the boys, said that she wanted to be a boy herself, and that was why she didn’t wear dresses, that was why she hacked off all her hair. The boys, standing on the precipice of puberty and besieged on all sides by their own sets of conflicting expectations, wanted nothing to do with her either. She wasn’t pretty enough to be worth kissing (although a few of them had questioned how that could be, when she looked exactly like the prettiest girl in school), but she was still a girl, and their parents said that they shouldn’t play with girls. So they’d cut her off, one by one, leaving her alone and puzzled and frightened of the world to come.

  (The partners at Chester’s firm told him how lucky he was, how fortunate, and went home to their own daughters, and watched them race around the backyard playing games of their own choosing, and never considered that Jillian Wolcott might not have any say in her own activities.)

  The girls still shared a room; the girls were still friends, for all that the space between them was a minefield of resentment and resignation, always primed to explode. Every year, it got harder to remember that once they had been a closed unit, that neither of them had chosen the pattern of their life. Everything had been assigned. That didn’t matter. Like bonsai being trained into shape by an assiduous gardener, they were growing into the geometry of their parents’ desires, and it was pushing them further and further away from one another. One day, perhaps, one of them would reach across the gulf and find that there was no one there.

  Neither of them was sure what they would do when that happened.

  On the day our story truly starts—for surely none of that seemed like the beginning! Surely all of that was background, was explanation and justification for what’s to come, as unavoidably as thunder follows lightning—it was raining. No: not raining. It was pouring, bucketing water from the sky like an incipient flood. Jacqueline and Jillian sat in their room, on their respective beds, and the room was so full of anger and of silence that it screamed.

  Jacqueline was reading a book about fashionable girls having fashionable adventures at a fashionable school, and she thought that she couldn’t possibly have been more bored. She occasionally cast narrow-eyed glances at the window, glaring at the rain. If the sky had been clear, she could have walked down the street to her friend Brooke’s house. They could have painted each other’s nails and talked about boys, a topic that Jacqueline found alternately fascinating and dull as dishwater, but which Brooke always approached with the same unflagging enthusiasm. It would have been something.

  Jillian, who had been intending to spend the day at soccer practice, sat on the floor next to her bed and moped so vigorously that it was like a gray cloud spreading across her side of the room. She couldn’t go downstairs to watch television—no TV before four o’clock, not even on weekends, not even on rainy days—and she didn’t have any books to read that she hadn’t read five times already. She’d tried taking a look at one of Jacqueline’s fashionable girl books, and had quickly found herself baffled at the number of ways the author found to describe everyone’s hair. Maybe some things were worse than boredom after all.

  When Jillian sighed for the fifth time in fifteen minutes, Jacqueline lowered her book and glowered at her across the room. “What is it?” she demanded.

  “I’m bored,” said Jillian mournfully.

  “Read a book.”

  “I don’t have any books I haven’t read already.”

  “Read one of my books.”

  “I don’t like your books.”

  “Go watch television.”

  “I’m not allowed for another hour.”

  “Play with your Lego.”

  “I don’t feel like it.” Jillian sighed heavily, letting her head loll backward until it was resting against the edge of the bed. “I’m bored. I’m very very bored.”

  “You shouldn’t say ‘very’ so much,” said Jacqueline, parroting their mother. “It’s a nonsense word. You don’t need it.”

  “But it’s true. I’m very very very bored.”

  Jacqueline hesitated. Sometimes the right thing to do with Jillian was wait her out: she would get distracted by something and peace would resume. Other times, the only way to handle her was to provide her with something to do. If something wasn’t provided, she would find something, and it would usually be loud, and messy, and destructive.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked finally.

  Jillian gave her a sidelong, hopeful look. The days when her sister would willingly spend hours playing with her were long gone, as lost as the baseball cap she’d worn when she went to ride the carnival Scrambler with her father the summer before. The wind had taken the cap, and time had taken her sister’s willingness to play hide-and-seek, or make-believe, or anything else their mother said was untidy.

  “We could go play in the attic,” she said finally, shyly, trying to keep herself from sounding like she hoped her sister would say yes. Hope only got you hurt. Hope was her least favorite thing, of all the things.

  “There might be spiders,” said Jacqueline. She wrinkled her nose, less out of actual di
staste and more out of the knowledge that she was supposed to find spiders distasteful. She really found them rather endearing. They were sleek and clean and elegant, and when their webs got messed up, they ripped them down and started over again. People could learn a lot from spiders.

  “I’ll protect you, if there are,” said Jill.

  “We could get in trouble.”

  “I’ll give you my desserts for three days,” said Jill. Seeing that Jacqueline wasn’t sold, she added, “And I’ll do your dishes for a week.”

  Jacqueline hated doing the dishes. Of all the chores they were sometimes assigned, that was the worst. The dishes were bad enough, but the dishwater … it was like making her own personal swamp and then playing in it. “Deal,” she said, and put her book primly aside, and slid off the bed.

  Jillian managed not to clap in delight as she rose, grabbed her sister’s hand, and hauled her out of the room. It was time for an adventure.

  She had no idea how big an adventure it was going to be.

  * * *

  THE WOLCOTT HOME WAS still far too large for the number of people it contained: large enough that Jacqueline and Jillian could each have had their own room, if they had wanted to, and never seen each other except for at the dinner table. They had started to worry, over the past year, that that would be their next birthday present: separate rooms, one pink and one blue, perfectly tailored to the children their parents wanted and not to the children that they had. They had been growing apart for years, following the paths that had been charted for them. Sometimes they hated each other and sometimes they loved each other, and both of them knew, deep down to the bone, that separate rooms would be the killing blow. They would always be twins. They would always be siblings. They might never be friends again.

  Up the stairs they went, hand in hand, Jillian dragging Jacqueline, as had always been their way, Jacqueline making note of everything around them, ready to pull her sister back if danger loomed. The idea of being safe in their home had never occurred to either one of them. If they were seen—if their parents emerged from their room and saw the two of them moving through the house together—they would be separated, Jillian sent off to play in the puddles out back, Jacqueline returned to their room to read her books and sit quietly, not disturbing anything.

  They were starting to feel, in a vague, unformed way, as if their parents were doing something wrong. Both of them knew kids who were the way they were supposed to be, girls who loved pretty dresses and sitting still, or who loved mud and shouting and kicking a ball. But they also knew girls who wore dresses while they terrorized the tetherball courts, and girls who wore sneakers and jeans and came to school with backpacks full of dolls in gowns of glittering gauze. They knew boys who liked to stay clean, or who liked to sit and color, or who joined the girls with the backpacks full of dolls in their corners. Other children were allowed to be mixed up, dirty and clean, noisy and polite, while they each had to be just one thing, no matter how hard it was, no matter how much they wanted to be something else.

  It was an uncomfortable thing, feeling like their parents weren’t doing what was best for them; like this house, this vast, perfectly organized house, with its clean, artfully decorated rooms, was pressing the life out of them one inch at a time. If they didn’t find a way out, they were going to become paper dolls, flat and faceless and ready to be dressed however their parents wanted them to be.

  At the top of the stairs there was a door that they weren’t supposed to go through, leading to a room that they weren’t supposed to remember. Gemma Lou had lived there when they were little, before they got to be too much trouble and she forgot how to love them. (That was what their mother said, anyway, and Jillian believed it, because Jillian knew that love was always conditional; that there was always, always a catch. Jacqueline, who was quieter and hence saw more that she wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t so sure.) The door was always locked, but the key had been thrown into the kitchen junk drawer after Gemma Lou left, and Jacqueline had quietly stolen it on their seventh birthday, when she had finally felt strong enough to remember the grandmother who hadn’t loved them enough to stay.

  Since then, when they needed a place to hide from their parents, a place where Chester and Serena wouldn’t think to look, they had retreated to Gemma Lou’s room. There was still a bed there, and the drawers of the dresser smelled like her perfume when they were opened, and she had left an old steamer trunk in the closet, filled with clothes and costume jewelry that she had been putting aside for her granddaughters, waiting for the day when they’d be old enough to play make-believe and fashion show with her as their appreciative audience. It was that trunk that had convinced them both that Gemma Lou hadn’t always intended to leave. Maybe she’d forgotten how to love them and maybe she hadn’t, but once upon a time, she had been planning to stay. That anyone would ever have planned to stay for their sake meant the world.

  Jacqueline unlocked the door and tucked the key into her pocket, where it would be secure, because she never lost anything. Jillian opened the door and took the first step into the room, making sure their parents weren’t lurking for them there, because she was always the first one past the threshold. Then the door was closed behind them, and they were finally safe, truly safe, with no roles to play except for the ones they chose for themselves.

  “I call dibs on the pirate sword,” said Jacqueline excitedly, and ran for the closet, grabbing the lid of the trunk and shoving it upward. Then she stopped, elation fading into confusion. “Where did the clothes go?”

  “What?” Jillian crowded in next to her sister, peering into the trunk. The dress-up clothes and accessories were gone, all of them, replaced by a winding wooden staircase that descended down, down, down into the darkness.

  Had Gemma Lou been allowed to stay with them, they might have read more fairy tales, might have heard more stories about children who opened doors to one place and found themselves stepping through into another. Had they been allowed to grow according to their own paths, to follow their own interests, they might have met Alice, and Peter, and Dorothy, all the children who had strayed from the path and found themselves lost in someone else’s fairyland. But fairy tales had been too bloody and violent for Serena’s tastes, and children’s books had been too soft and whimsical for Chester’s tastes, and so somehow, unbelievable as it might seem, Jacqueline and Jillian had never been exposed to the question of what might be lurking behind a door that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  The two of them looked at the impossible stairway and were too baffled and excited to be afraid.

  “Those weren’t there last time,” said Jillian.

  “Maybe they were, and the dresses were just all on top of them,” said Jacqueline.

  “The dresses would have fallen,” said Jillian.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Jacqueline—but it was a fair point, wasn’t it? If there had always been stairs in the trunk, then all the things Gemma Lou had left for them would have fallen. Unless … “There’s a lid here,” she said. “Maybe there’s a lid on the bottom, too, and it came open, and everything fell down the stairs.”

  “Oh,” said Jillian. “What should we do?”

  Dimly, Jacqueline was beginning to realize that this wasn’t just a mystery: it was an opportunity. Their parents didn’t know there was a stairway hidden in Gemma Lou’s old closet. They couldn’t know. If they had known, they would have put the key somewhere much harder to find than the kitchen junk drawer. The stairs looked dusty, like no one had walked on them in years and years, and Serena hated dust, which meant she didn’t know that the stairs existed. If Jacqueline and Jillian went down those stairs, why, they would be walking into something secret. Something new. Something their parents had maybe never seen and couldn’t fence in with inexplicable adult rules.

  “We should go and find all our dress-up clothes and put them away, so that we’re not making a mess in Gemma Lou’s room,” said Jacqueline, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the
world.

  Jillian frowned. There was something in her sister’s logic that didn’t sit right with her. She was fine with sneaking into their grandmother’s room, because they had been welcome there before Gemma Lou had stopped loving them and gone away; this was their place as much as it had been hers. The stairs in the trunk, on the other hand … those were something new and strange and alien. Those belonged to someone other than Gemma Lou, and someone other than them.

  “I don’t know…” she said warily.

  Perhaps, if the sisters had been encouraged to love each other more, to trust each other more, to view each other as something other than competition for the limited supplies of their parents’ love, they would have closed the trunk and gone to find an adult. When they had led their puzzled parents back to Gemma Lou’s room, opening the trunk again would have revealed no secrets, no stairs, just a mess of dress-up clothes, and the confusion that always follows when something magical disappears. Perhaps.

  But that hadn’t been their childhood: that hadn’t been their life. They were competitors as much as they were companions, and the thought of telling their parents would never have occurred to them.

  “Well, I’m going,” said Jacqueline, with a prim sniff, and slung her leg over the edge of the trunk.

  It was easier than she had expected it to be. It was like the trunk wanted her to step inside, like the stairs wanted her to descend them. She climbed through the opening and went down several steps before smoothing her dress with the heels of her hands, looking back over her shoulder, and asking, “Well?”

  Jillian was not as brave as everyone had always assumed she was. She was not as wild as everyone had always wanted her to be. But she had spent her life so far being told that she was both those things, and more, that her sister was neither of them; if there was an adventure to be had, she simply could not allow Jacqueline to have it without her. She hoisted herself over the edge of the trunk, tumbling in her hurry, and came to a stop a step above where Jacqueline was waiting.