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By Root 1174 0

her friends at her old school. Had they remained in Pennsylvania, she and Garnet were going to get cell phones for their eleventh birthday this coming summer, but cell phones seemed less important here: There wasn’t any coverage at their new house, so how could they text their friends—assuming, of course, they eventually made some new ones? Hallie imagined bringing a laptop out to the greenhouse and getting a page on something like Facebook, just like the older kids, and surfing and posting and chatting for hours, but the router would have to be mighty powerful. She guessed they would spend a lot more time snowboarding here than they had in Pennsylvania. After all, the mountain was only twenty minutes away; they could see it from one of the house’s porches. And yesterday they had seen—and heard—snowmobiles racing across the farthest edge of the meadow, and so she thought it was possible that maybe she’d take up snowmobiling.

Now, here was something that might interest Dad: snowmobiling. The connections in her mind were the roar of the engines and the sense of speed. Like a jet, a snowmobile was fast and it was loud.

Based on the few days that she and Garnet had been at their new school and their first visit to their new dance studio, it was clear that she was going to have to take the lead if she and her sister were going to make any new friends. That probably was to be expected. She had always been more popular than Garnet back in Pennsylvania, so why wouldn’t that be the case here? Hallie understood that her sister was going to be a part of any group largely because she herself was. Moms seemed to love Garnet’s red hair, but kids thought it was almost too red. This wasn’t strawberry blond stuff. It was more like just strawberry. (Hallie was thankful every day that they were fraternal twins only; she liked her dark brown hair much more than Garnet’s, and she knew she had a much prettier nose.) And then there were the trances. And those overnight stays at the hospital over the years for EEGs and testing. It was only a matter of time before Garnet would have a seizure here and the kids would view her simultaneously with the contempt wolves feel for the wounded and lame, and with the terror they feel for someone who is chronically ill.

And yet the sense that Garnet was an outsider, a little different, also gave her twin a certain control over her: Hallie knew that often she would defer to Garnet’s wishes when they were alone, the motivation existing somewhere in that realm between sympathy and loyalty.

So far they hadn’t brought any of their new schoolmates—her new schoolmates, really—over to play. Not Molly or Lily or Adele. There hadn’t been time. But she guessed she would soon. Molly, perhaps, who sat at her classroom table, even though she and Molly really didn’t have all that much in common. Or maybe it would be Lily. She hoped she and Lily would become friends. Good friends. Lily was nice. So was Lily’s mother, though the woman seemed to hover a lot. When they were introduced at the school and Lily’s mother figured out that she and Garnet were twins—the new twins, she had cooed—she had been weirdly excited. Hallie could tell that it had made the school principal, who happened to be in the classroom at the time, a little uncomfortable. But Lily’s mom was friends with Reseda, the lady who’d wound up being their real estate agent after Mr. Carter died, and Reseda seemed to be nice enough. She was sweet—and she was very, very pretty, in an exotic sort of way.

Hallie heard Garnet calling for her now, yelling that Mom and Dad said the car was packed and it was time to leave for the mountain. As she closed the greenhouse door, she made a mental note to ask Mom if she was making new friends. She hoped that her mom and Reseda would become pals.

When the girls had been in the second grade, a plane had crashed outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, killing all forty-four people onboard. Apparently, a combination of ice and wind and inexperience had been the culprits. It was a turboprop—a Dash 8—not one of the planes Chip flew.