chapter eleven.

Simon

The house always looks quite haunted in the winter. Not that it doesn't look haunted during the spring or summer or fall; it always looks haunted. It's just something about the biting cold air and the grayish skies and the crumpled, dying rosebushes leading up the drive that make my childhood home look like less of a childhood home and more like something out of a gothic movie.

Perhaps it's not just the air, though. To be fair, the house already seems sort of eerie on the outside: four stories of pale brick and dark shutters, vines crawling up the siding, a spired roof above the attic I used to stargaze out of. It sits at the top of a grassy hill, a hill so tall the house is barely visible from the bottom of it. When I was younger it was the perfect hill for sledding in the winter and taking a tumble down in the summer. Now it's just a pain in the ass to walk up.

Pebbles of gravel pop and zing underneath the tires as Noah pulls up around the circular drive, and before the car's even reached a complete stop, people are already piling out the front doors. Mom in her favorite turtleneck sweater, Dad, oddly, in a suit, my little sister Abbie (who's sporting an extra piercing in her nose that I don't remember seeing before) in an alarmingly large sweater. Even the housemaid, Rose, is crowding around the door, just waiting to get a look at us.

In retrospect, it hasn't been too long. Three months, maybe, since we've spoken face to face. The way they're all crowding at the door, however, you'd think none of them had seen us in years.

Noah slides the car into park and wiggles his eyebrows at me. "Here goes nothing."

As soon as he's out of the car, he flashes a wide smile and waves. "Mom, Pops—good to see you. Tabitha? Why is there a jewel in your nose? Yes, I've been eating fine, Rose. Could use some more of your biscuits, though. Is Simon—? Oh, yeah. He's all good—"

As always, Noah goes into it with ease. He goes into everything with ease. I, on the other hand, take my time getting out of the car, flattening down my windblown hair, adjusting my collar. The air is snippy and cold and I want to go inside, but before I can, Mom is squealing and running towards me and squeezing me in her arms.

"Oh my little boy! How you've grown!"

"I just saw you for the fourth of July, Mom."

"Oh, July!" she repeats with a huff, letting me go and folding her arms. She looks, like she usually does, like one of those chefs on afternoon cooking shows. Bright, homely eyes. Perfectly curled hair. Dangly earrings that twinkle each time she moves her head. "That was forever ago, Simon, forever ago. I used to see you everyday. I'm still getting used to only seeing you every few months."

"Mom, I left home three years ago...?"

She frowns, combing a strand of my hair behind my ear. "It still feels like yesterday."

She doesn't say this kind of stuff to Noah, and I know why. Everyone knows why. Out of the three St. John kids, I'm the weird one that got stuck with this odd shapeshifting defect; I get all the fuss and the worrisome comments and the Maybe you should stay closer to homes.

I've certainly made it easier for my siblings. There's nothing Noah or Abbie could do that would earn either of them as much scrutiny as I receive from our parents. Lucky them.

Mom moves away to say something to Noah, and now I'm faced with greeting my father, a stone-faced real estate broker who never paid attention to science or other whimsical things before I was born. I'm the reason research is a hobby of his now. When he's not searching encyclopedias or the web, he's traveling to go to seminars or expos or TED talks. A couple of times he's visited college professors in their labs. Once or twice I've asked him just what he's looking for. Once or twice he's said, "An answer."

After enough doctor's visits, my mom was too tired to continue. My dad, on the other hand, hasn't stopped since.

"Simon," he says. "Your brother seemed to hint that you were begrudging about coming to celebrate your great grandmother's birthday?"

"Me?" I scoff, my breath forming a cloud in front of me. "Begrudging? Noah's just joking. I'm stoked to be here."

"He never says stoked," Abbie says, approaching from my side. She beams at my father and me, teeth still hidden behind clunky braces. "You never say stoked, Simon."

"Yes I do."

"No you don't."

"Yes, I do."

"No, you really don't," Abbie says. My sister is nothing else if not painfully observant, which I'm pretty sure she learned from all the cheesy crime shows she watches. She decided in third grade that she's going to be a detective, and she hasn't wavered yet. It's Abbie. I'm fairly sure she's not going to. "He's lying. He doesn't care about Great Granny Etta at all—"

"That's enough, Abbie," I say, pulling at her ear. "Don't you have somewhere else you need to go be stupid?"

Dad widens his eyes. Not like you shouldn't say that. More like, you're gonna take that?

And Abbie does. She checks the smart watch on her wrist briefly. "No," she says. "Not until four."

Dad chuckles, ruffling my sister's hair. He seems tense, like he has something to say, but he's saved from having to figure out how to say it when Rose throws the door open again and announces, "It's too cold to be out there loitering! Get in here, all of you. I made hot chocolate."

There's a chorus of cheers, and whatever it is Dad had to say dies away the moment we've crossed the threshold.

Ninety has...ninety has looked better.

Rose has wheeled my great grandmother into a corner of the kitchen, and though Rose placed a mug of hot chocolate in the cup holder of her wheelchair, Great Granny Etta makes no moves to reach for it. She doesn't make many moves at all, except to smile and nod and make little hmm noises through her teeth when one of us says something to her. She's a kind little woman with folds of skin over her eyes and fine wrinkles in her face like lines in sand, and as long as I've known her, I can't remember her saying much other than "Good morning, Simon," once. Sometimes I wonder if she even knows our lovely family secret; I wonder if we dug deep enough, the "answer" my dad keeps looking for would turn out to be right in front of us.

Despite Great Granny Etta's relative absence, the kitchen's still buzzing with life, and just for a moment, it almost feels like it did eight or so years ago when all of us still lived here. Noah has his binder on the island, flipping through it and showing Abbie all the projects he's been working on. (God help her, she's bored, but Noah talks too much to notice.) Dad's craning over Rose as she stirs something tomatoey in a pot, telling her it "Smells great!" Mom, though, is in the corner by herself, stirring her hot chocolate listlessly, frowning at the snow outside as it kisses the ground.

On my way over to Mom, I pat Great Granny Etta on the shoulder, wishing her a happy birthday. I stand there for a moment, waiting to see if she's going to reply, but once again she merely nods her head and says, "Mm-hmm," practically under her breath.

At the window, I knock my mug against Mom's, drawing her attention to me. She smiles, a gentle crease forming around her eyes. "Hey, Ginger Snap," she says, briefly pinching my cheek. "I missed your face around here, you know."

"Which one?"

She narrows her eyes, but other than that, her expression barely changes. "Yours," she repeats. "Always yours."

I sigh, slurping up more of Rose's hot chocolate. It truly is heavenly; it's rich, viscous, like melted fudge. Heavy cream and cocoa and a dollop of whipped cream on top. I forgot how fun it is to have someone cook for you.

I wish there was a way to tell them—Noah, Mom, all of them. I wish there was a way to make them believe that I didn't ask for this, that if I'd ever had the option to shut this propensity to shapeshift off, to reverse it, I would have. But I've gained control of it over the years; it was the bane of my existence once, but now it's a tool of mine. Somewhere, somehow, that has to be good enough.

"Mom?" I say, then. There's something on her mind. There's always something on her mind; I'm pretty sure the constant introspection is some sort of trait I got from her. But this...this seems like a different something. A somewhat worrying something. "Everything okay?"

She opens her mouth to speak, hesitates, starts over. "Before your father called Noah to send for you two, we got some...disturbing news from Rose."

I grip my mug a bit tighter, shooting a clandestine glance towards Rose. She's stopped stirring whatever was in the pot and is now wiping down the cutting board. Dad's wafted away from her and towards Noah. Dad seems to be showing him how to properly swing a golf club, despite the fact he's not holding a golf club. "What sort of disturbing news?"

Mom frowns at me. In the pallid winter sun, her fair hair's an even lighter blond, a ribbon of sun-kissed honey. "Rose was at the bus station, heading back here from downtown. She told us she saw Larry while she was waiting."

"Larry?" I nearly choke on the name as it leaves my mouth. Larry, my second-cousin, who I have not seen—who no one has seen—since my high school graduation. Larry, the no-good sleaze bag who's quite skilled at lying and cheating and not much else.

Larry, the only other shapeshifter I have ever known.

"What do you mean she saw Larry?" I demand, resting my hot chocolate on the window sill. My hands are so shaky that I can't hold the mug anymore. "What did he look like? Where was he headed? Where was he coming from? Was he with anyone, or—"

"Simon," Mom says, setting her mug down as well and taking my hands. "Simon, baby, I don't know. Nobody knows. I just pray that he's headed away from here, far away from here, because God knows he only causes trouble when he's around."

This is true. More than once, I remember him showing up on our front porch—as various people—and explaining that he'd gotten in another pinch with the cops and could use some extra cash. Larry's a bad shapeshifter, but he's a worse family member.

"Mom," I say, squeezing her hands. The thought enters my head with no prelude, and it refuses to leave: "What if he's looking for me?"

"Looking for you? Why would he be looking for you?"

"Well, you know," I say, shrugging a little, "he and I never agreed on some of the moral aspects of the whole shapeshifting thing. He tried to get me to run this whole heist with him, once—"

Mom's jaw tightens. "A heist?"

"Well. You weren't supposed to know that," I say, pulling my hands from hers. "Anyway, it's not important because I didn't do it. But practically since forever he's been trying to get me on his side, and he hasn't yet, so maybe he's looking for me?"

"That's ridiculous, Ginger Snap," Mom says. Beside us, Rose bangs a spoon on a champagne glass to announce the table's being set in the dining room. Dinner's about to be served, and Noah, Abbie, and Dad are already making their way for the table. "If he hasn't given up on that after all this time, he's more of an idiot than I already thought he was."

"Mom—"

She pats my hand. "Let's eat.We'll talk more about this later, yeah?"

I watch her whisk away into the dining room after my siblings, and realize I asked the wrong question. It's not so much what if he's looking for me. It's more:

What if he finds me?