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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Cole Nagamatsu

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover art by Sasha Vinogradova

  Internal design and illustrations by Jillian Rahn/Sourcebooks

  Internal images © Dr D Sietsema - V-SQUARE Photography/Getty Images; Nikaya Lewis/EyeEm/Getty Images; Victor Cabrera Borja/EyeEm/Getty Images; larisa_zorina/Getty Images; malerapaso/Getty Images; Tomekbudujedomek/Getty Images; jayk7/Getty Images; spxChrome/Getty Images; SCIEPRO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images; fotograzia/Getty Images; R.Tsubin/Getty Images; ioanmasay/Getty Images; robert reader/Getty Images; agalma/Getty Images; CSA Images/Getty Images; Ailbhe O’Donnell/Getty Images; gaffera/Getty Images; loops7/Getty Images; MAJA TOPCAGIC/Stocksy United, Zoltan Tasi/Unsplash; Hisu lee/Unsplash

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  for my mother

  Chapter 1

  Jonas

  On his way to the place that would be his new home, a nervous, mothy feeling beat its wings against the inside of Jonas Lake’s throat. His father had informed him that he could choose his own bedroom in the Lamplight Inn from three options, all suites with private bathrooms, and had texted him photos of the rooms in an attempt to elicit enthusiasm.

  His mother said, “He’s trying. Just try back.”

  Jonas replied with brief niceties like Cool and Looks nice and Will think it over.

  Jonas’s mother drove them in her Jetta. The suitcase in the trunk held his clothes, and his laptop waited in his backpack. He’d left everything else he owned in his room at his mother’s house—“For when you come home,” she’d said. “It’s still your room”—though there wasn’t much to part with beyond the TV and video game posters he had taped and torn and re-taped to the walls, and Jonas didn’t know when he’d go back except to visit.

  He would now be a guest in every house he stepped into.

  The closer they drove to Lamplight, the farther they got from the Twin Cities. Cornfields replaced retail, and traffic thinned until not a single car was visible for miles. Static punctuated each line of music on the radio, and Jonas wondered what home really was: a place you loved or a place you lived, and what it meant when the two weren’t the same.

  “Well, the houses down here sure have a lot of character,” his mother said.

  To their credit, the houses were less uniform and dull than the subdivisions they’d passed earlier. “Yeah,” Jonas said. “I guess.”

  When they pulled into the Lamplight Inn’s circular driveway, it too proved to have character. It was a large, squarish mansion with a nearby stone carriage house cloaked in vines. The building’s gray, green, and cream paint was caked with a darker green mildew, and the gables’ decorative embellishments had intermittently cracked or gone missing.

  It looked odd and in need of some love, and Jonas appreciated that about the place. His father had explained that the building had been a home before being converted into an inn, before being abandoned, before being made a home again. Though it retained its business sign—a hanging wooden oval with a simple oil lantern carved into its surface—it now served only as a private residence. More or less. There were some boarders there who helped with cleaning and other household chores.

  Matt Lake exited the house and stepped onto the front porch. His girlfriend, Cesca, followed. Less than a year ago, his father had informed Jonas that the two were moving in together. Matt had never offered to introduce her to Jonas, and Jonas had never asked. He was young when his parents had divorced, and he hadn’t expected he’d ever live with his father again, so there had been no reason that Cesca should matter. Now that Jonas saw her, he saw that his father had a full life that stood on its own without him.

  Matt introduced everyone in an anxious, caffeine-enhanced rush of names. He even awkwardly shook Jonas’s hand, as though it were their first meeting. Cesca greeted Jonas and his mother cheerfully.

  Both women were willowy, olive-skinned brunettes—glamorous, though Cesca’s glamour was of a different kind. Where Sara Lake wore sleek pumps, Francesca Amato bared her feet. Sara donned a pencil skirt and jewel-toned blouse, while Cesca had on a flower-patterned T-shirt dress so short that Jonas averted his eyes, trying not to stare too long at her legs. She had styled her hair into a messy bouffant and painted her eyes with winged, black liner. His father looked incongruously like an L.L.Bean ad in comparison.

  Jonas let his mind smooth over, turning the small talk into a murmur of background noise he could tune out. Then, somewhat unceremoniously, his mother returned to her Volkswagen and backed out of the driveway and out of his new life.

  Matt and Cesca gave Jonas a tour of the house, which smelled of rain-soaked wood and old wallpaper, and Jonas leaned through each doorway just far enough to feign attention. Cesca worked at an antique mall, so the building didn’t hurt for unusual decorations. The plants by the main stairwell grew from bald, ceramic doll heads, and a chipped, white
rocking horse stood sentinel by the door to the sitting room.

  For his room, Jonas chose the suite he thought other people would find the least desirable, which seemed the place best suited to a boy no one wanted. Dingy green wallpaper peeled away from the corners of the room, and a cage filled with colorful taxidermic birds hung from the ceiling. Cesca had decorated the walls with framed prints of insects pulled from old textbooks.

  Matt and Cesca left Jonas alone in the room to unpack, shutting the door behind them, and it stayed closed in its warped frame without latching. Leaving his suitcase in the middle of the floor, he flopped onto the bed. From below, the taxidermic birds were just round, colorful bellies, a system of very small planets.

  It was difficult to imagine his father living in this house. Matt Lake was quiet. Jonas liked loud music, rap and rock that he could feel lighting up his rib cage. Matt listened to white-noise sound files with names like “babbling brook” and “summer storm.” He assembled very large puzzles that, when he’d still lived at home with Sara and Jonas, had usually taken over the surface of half the dining room table. He flossed daily. Matt knew how to use a sextant, but Jonas doubted his father could adequately roll a cigarette. Cesca could probably roll a cigarette.

  In the nightstand, where many functioning inns might have stored a copy of the Christian Bible, Cesca had The Complete Works of Hieronymus Bosch. Jonas passed hours reading the illustrations’ accompanying descriptions, and he absorbed exactly no information, the words wilting from his brain like a garden planted on a hill made of glass.

  • • •

  Lamplight had exactly seven bedrooms. There was Jonas’s, as well as the two he had not chosen, which remained uninhabited. Cesca and Matt shared the largest, and Jonas was not interested in seeing it.

  There were two tenants, who helped with the cleaning and upkeep, utilities and property taxes—the extent of their rent—and each had a suite of her own. One was Audrey, a tattoo-covered hairstylist in her twenties who hugged Jonas when she met him, much to his dismay, for he was as friendly and pliant as a stray cat. The other was a tall dancer with frizzy hair named Diana, clearly older than Sara and Matt, though not quite old enough to strike Jonas as grandmotherly.

  That left one more room for one more inhabitant. Jonas knew that Cesca had a daughter his age, or so Matt had said. Cesca appeared several years younger than his father, unlikely to have a daughter preparing for eleventh grade. Matt had assured Jonas that Noemi Amato would “show him the ropes,” as though he were unaccustomed to the concept of high school.

  Noemi’s room was across the hall from his, and while the door had been closed when he’d first arrived, it was now open. Jonas folded his immense self-consciousness into as small an animal as he could and let it burrow into the back of his mind. Eager to establish an ally close to his own age, he knocked on the door, which was not ajar enough for him to assume entry. He noticed the doorknob, a white metal swan, and thought the person inside might be gentle, like a feather or a ballet.

  Jonas had never met a swan, and so he did not know about their surly dispositions.

  “Yes?” called a voice from within.

  He pushed into the room.

  You could tell a lot about a person based on the things with which they surrounded themselves—Matt’s puzzles and star charts, Sara’s carefully sculpted topiaries, Cesca’s resuscitated old toys. Noemi’s room was half-painted: deep purple from the hardwood floor until partway up the walls, where it tapered off in haphazard streaks left behind by a roller, as though someone had soured on the color before finishing. Photos hung from clotheslines everywhere—portraits of girls wearing plain dresses outdoors, strange photos in which girls’ limbs faded from sight like ghosts’ appendages, where their hair floated above them as though they were drifting underwater when they were not. In one corner of the room a featureless mannequin wore a deer skull where the top half of its head should have been.

  Jonas had never entered a girl’s bedroom before, and he did not know whether this one was usual or unusual, or if there were such a thing as usual.

  In seventh grade, he had “dated” Melanie Nelson for two weeks, during which time neither of them spoke to each other or even made eye contact, until she dumped him for being too invisible. He had not seen her outside of school and certainly had never seen her room.

  In ninth grade he dated Abby Pierce for one and a half months, and he had seen her outside of school, but only at the movies or other public places and always with other people around. She texted him photos of herself in a new bathing suit once, and he could see part of her bedroom in those: a cork board covered with birthday cards her friends had made for her, inscribed with messages he couldn’t make out. It was not where he’d devoted most of his attention.

  He dated Katie Simms for four months (his record) last year, and he’d gone to her house when he picked her up for homecoming, but he didn’t make it past the living room before she came downstairs in a sequined dress. They skipped homecoming and went to a party at Emma Little’s house, but that was in the basement, not a bedroom. They got tipsy on Keystone Light and kissed on the love seat until their mouths felt the way raw chicken looked, but even then he couldn’t have guessed what Katie would keep inside her room.

  At the center of Naomi’s room was a canopy bed, and she had drawn the nearly sheer, white curtains so that Jonas could see only her shadow like a slim imperfection in milky quartz. He wondered if it would be strange to approach the bed, if she meant for him to. He knew nothing about this person with whom he would now live, eat, and attend school. She liked purple, presumably, though not wholeheartedly, and she maybe took photographs and was at ease with strangeness. She did not seem as eager or friendly as her mother.

  “I’m Matt’s son,” he said to the bed. “Jonas. My room’s across the hall.”

  The canopy parted to reveal the half-moon of a small, angular face that looked little like Cesca’s. The face was olive and covered with as many freckles as a sidewalk at the start of a storm. Its owner did not smile or rise to meet him. She shook her long hair from her eyes and surveyed him as though just spotting a halo of mildew that had sneakily formed on the wall beside her door. Her gaze was heavy and her posture defensive.

  Jonas felt like a trespasser. She said “Hi” and then nothing more, and somehow it gave him the sense there might be no place in her life where he would not be trespassing.

  “You have a cool house,” he said.

  “My mom would like to hear that.” She pulled her lips into an asymmetrical smile, a dimple forming on only one cheek. She had full lips, barely a hint of a cupid’s bow. They looked soft. They probably would not feel like raw chicken. Her hair was dark brown and very curly.

  Jonas stood by the doorway, unsure of what to do with his arms. He folded them, but it didn’t feel right. Had he always folded his arms in this way? One over the other. Where did his hands belong? His body had become unfamiliar, almost hostile, a desert that would not let him get comfortable, and he second-guessed the work of every muscle.

  “Do you need something?” Noemi asked. Her voice was low and husky. Jonas didn’t know what she normally sounded like or if she had a cold. She didn’t look ill, but he had no basis for comparison. Regardless, he liked the timbre of her voice.

  “No,” he said. “Just thought I’d say ‘hi.’”

  “Well, have a good night.” She released the canopy and disappeared from sight. He had been formally and unmistakably dismissed.

  • • •

  Matt treated Jonas to dinner, just the two of them, at a diner called Hilda’s where the staff greeted Matt by name, knew his order in advance, and asked after Cesca. His father snagged a tourism brochure from a display near the register, and once they were settled in their booth, he slid it across the table to Jonas.

  Shivery, Minnesota, was a small town in the southern part of the state. It was techn
ically an “unincorporated community,” which meant the students—Jonas soon to be included among them—attended high school in the neighboring town of Galaxie. Jonas, while thumbing through the pamphlet between bites of his breakfast-for-dinner, felt vicariously embarrassed that the place might ever hope for tourists. It was home to a popcorn factory, which kept the local cinema well stocked with more flavors than it had theaters: one theater, precisely, boasting only seventy-five seats, courtesy of adjacent, mismatched couches. Also calling Shivery home was an artists’ and craftsmen’s supply store where Matt Lake—who put his philosophy degree to use building custom doors and furniture—bought some of his supplies, and a hardware store where he bought the rest of them.

  Shivery was, according to its own tourism bureau, most famous for its lupine flowers in varying shades of pink and purple that had apparently chased most other wildflowers out of town. An entire field of them was featured on postcards sold at the diner’s register.

  Finally, there was a river that bisected town and flooded “roughly all the time.” Matt’s words, not the brochure’s. The riverside storefronts were slick, window-high, with stubborn algae during bouts of rain. Matt had heard that once, the postal workers had to deliver mail from canoes. Jonas would have thought he was spinning a tall tale, but Matt wasn’t the type, unless Cesca had instilled his practical father with a sense of romanticism.

  “Sounds unlikely,” Jonas said. “I don’t believe you believe it.”

  “Well, here’s an odd thing I do believe,” Matt said. “A few months ago—and this is after I moved here, so it’s not exactly hearsay—some local kid was found drowned in the middle of the forest out by Lamplight.”

  Jonas frowned. “Does the river go down that way?”

  “No. Which is what was weird.” Matt cut his bun-less hamburger into neat, bite-sized pieces. “Ten thousand lakes, and someone managed to drown where there wasn’t so much as a puddle.”

  Jonas fiddled with his lip ring. “Isn’t that a riddle? Or one of those lateral-thinking puzzles, like, ‘There’s a plane crash. Where do they bury the survivors?’ I know it’s one of those, but I can’t remember how it goes.”