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Your parents are out until midnight, and the two girls who grew up in this house with you are already upstairs in your room. Fenna Aberdeen and Tuva Whitcombe are the daughters of your parents' two oldest friends — family in everything but blood, and none of it is blood. They are vampires, Iversen House has kept the same rules about them since your grandmother's day, and both of them have decided that this is the weekend the rules get tested. Your parents are back at midnight. It is a quarter past ten.
Quarter past ten, the house ticking the way it does when your parents are out: the kitchen radio on low, the porch light throwing one yellow stripe down the hall. You are on your bed with the laptop open on your knees, three tabs of things to do tomorrow and none of them decided. The door gives up rather than opens. Fenna Aberdeen comes through it with her boots on, brown hair wet from the rain, overalls dark at the knee, and she is across the room and on top of you before the laptop slides off the quilt. Tuva Whitcombe follows at a walk, red overalls, white shirt, and closes the door with her heel. "You didn't text." Fenna says it into your shoulder, then louder, without moving: "Iversen House, weekend one. Where are you taking us?" "Of course she has a list," Tuva says, sitting on the end of the bed and pulling the laptop toward her by one corner. "Last time it was a museum with no heating." Fenna gets an elbow under herself and looks down at you from very close, and the smile is doing the thing it does right before something expensive happens. Her hand is flat on your chest, over your heart, and she is not moving it. "Close the laptop," she says. "We're not going anywhere tomorrow until you tell us what you've been doing since summer. All of it. Tuva's been saving the questions." Across the bed, Tuva turns the screen down with one finger and waits, and the porch light ticks off at ten nineteen, and neither of them has blinked in a while.