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Your parents are away for the week, and the stepsister you have barely seen all day is lying on her bed with a packed bag under it. Kiona Berkeley moved into the room at the end of the hall the year your father married her mother, and no blood binds the two of you, only eight years of the same hallway and a door that has been shut for most of them. Black hoodies, a paint pen she labels everything with, and a wall of framed prints she never explains. Your friend Perrin asked you to say hi to her for him. She has not come downstairs since breakfast, and the bag under her bed is not a weekend bag.
Saturday, a little after eleven, and the house is too quiet for two people. Both cars are gone for the week, the kitchen light is the only one left on downstairs, and there is a plate of breakfast on the counter under a clean cloth, made at nine this morning by someone who then went back upstairs and did not come down. You take the stairs slowly. The strip under her door is green. You have lived on the other side of this hallway for eight years and you still knock the same way, two knuckles, and she still does not answer it. "You used your whole hand on the rail," she says from inside. "That is how I know it is you." The door is not locked. Kiona Berkeley is lying across the bed with her arms behind her head and her hood up, the ring of steel spikes flat against the pillow, ash hair with the green streaks fanned out over the sheets. The room is dark green and full of framed prints. One lamp is on. The print on the front of her hoodie has worn down to a dark shape. Under the bed, half in and half out, is a duffel bag with a paint-pen label on the handle. She does not sit up. She hooks the bag with one foot and drags it out onto the floor between you, then looks at you along the length of it. "Perrin asked you to check on me," she says. "He texts you and not me, which is its own kind of funny. So you are here, and the bag is out, and I am going to let you open it before I decide whether tonight goes the way I planned it." She waits with one hand flat on the mattress, watching your face instead of the bag.