To celebrate the milestone, here's a sneak peek into the first chapter

In which I find myself on a fictional island where Mom is informed she doesn’t know her own name.

Chapter 1

Mom and I arrive at Glenhaeven as the sun is setting over the main­land, the boat-ride over to the island having been mercifully calm. Which, trust me, is not always a given.

The land we’ve left behind has been transformed by fog and the failing light into a dark shadow of itself, the sun’s backlighting dissolving its depth, leaving it a flat, two-dimensional card­board cut-out, no more real than a set dressing far in the distance. Yeah, as if Glenhaeven needed any additional help feeling completely unreal. I can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the mansion’s looming presence high above us, caught between knowing it shouldn’t actually be here, and its own insistent, solid reality.

There is a long, winding—and only slightly harrowing—path that leads up from the beach we’re on, criss-crossing along the cliff faces that surround us. At its height, it meets the bluff at the top, where it turns and follows the bluff’s crest until it hits the mansion. At the point where it turns, however, the path’s joined by the Gray Sisters tall, eerie statues studded along its length, which cast long, distorted shadows on the beach.

Mom stops on the short dock next to me and stares up at it as well.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been here—but each time I see it, I am blown away by how impossibly real it all looks. I mean, yes, I do know that by most definitions it is real; it’s here, and we’re going to spend the next twelve weeks in it.

But, at the same time, it’s also entirely fictional, as it literally is the fictional estate built by the main character in my father’s first novel, A View from Midnight. So technically, it shouldn’t even be here in the real world. What’s more, despite knowing it’s all just about four years old; my eyes and my gut insist that this massive building with its accompany­ing statues have been here since… well, forever.

It just belongs here… way more than I do, that’s for sure.

“What are you thinking about?” Mom asks.

I startle at the question, pulled abruptly out of whatever place my head had wandered off to, stumbling backwards as I do so. Fortunately, Mom grabs my arm, saving me from pitching backwards off the small dock. Beyond the arm grabbing, however, she doesn’t react to the near catastrophe, which is truly all for the best. See, if she did react every time I flinched away from some non-existent danger, only throw myself squarely in front of a real one, her nerves would be utterly shot, and one or the other of us would almost certainly be locked in a small room with bubble wrap glued all over the walls for safety.

She’s still looking at me, waiting for an answer.

“Um, you know,” I tell her, eloquent as always. “Just listening to my contrapuntal voices doing their interweaving voice parts thing.”

She gives me a long look. “You do know that’s not...?”

I nod.

“Just checking.”

If you're as confused as I imagine you are then yes! My Job here is done.

Just kidding, I'm not quite that evil, though I am working towards it. As you may have already noticed, despite this being only a couple pages in, I have this habit of wandering off into my head and gotten lost in there. At some point Mom started calling it my fugue state and though I had no idea what she was talking about, there was no way I was going to let her know that. So as soon as she left I went and looked “fugue” up, because I know if I didn't do it immediately, it would slip through my steel trap, no sorry, steel sieve of a mind.

So, Merriam Webster’s kindly defined it for me as “a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices, and contra­puntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts.” Which of course clarified it completely... well, at least the successive voice parts as I do seem to end up arguing with myself all the time.

Of course, I later learned this has nothing at all to do with the type of fugue she’d been talking about, which is something else entirely.

In any case, I think I was telling you about how unreal Glenhaeven feels. Though to be totally honest, nothing feels truly real these days. God, so much has changed. Until last year, my life had just been me and my Mom, and I actually never even really thought all that much about my Dad, or lack thereof. My life just was what it was, and he wasn’t in it.

What definitely was in it was my perennially exhausted, single Mom who was always working two jobs so we could have these incredible luxuries like food and shelter while cohabiting with rats who were doing their absolute best to consume both of them. I, meanwhile, spent my days in overstuffed public school classrooms with teachers so burnt-out they had a distinct charcoal smell about them. In one case in particular, it might have been more brimstone than charcoal, but burning was definitely a given.

And then we moved to New Haven, Connecticut and got to live in this adorable little apartment owned by Yale, where Mom is now a registered student. Even better, it is both clean and totally rat free, some­thing my brain apparently still can’t fully accept, as I often wake up pan­icked that I’ve forgotten to lock my rat-proof filing cabinet/book safe and my precious books all have been turned into towering piles of steaming rat turds.

However, not only is that dire event apparently now entirely off the menu (as it were!), but the apartment has another absolutely amazing feature. For the first time in my entire life, I actually have my very own door. Knob, lock and everything! Working in concert, they separate the area where I sleep from the living room, a luxury I’d come to believe was only reserved for those elite one-percenters. Or movie stars or something.

It doesn’t matter to me that the room it separates is barely larger than the single bed it contains, nor that the wardrobe Mom got me can’t be fully opened without climbing onto the bed first. All that matters to me is that it’s a room with an actual door, and it’s completely, entirely mine.

What’s more, unlike the smoke enshrouded teachers I have known my entire life, I now have shiny new ones, many of whom came from Yale and wanted to stay in the area. They have this strange quality of… what’s the word… oh, yeah... enthusiasm, which just seems unnatural, if you ask me.

Seriously, my little corner of New Haven, Connecticut around the Yale campus, could not possibly have been better named. It is heaven… with just enough of a dollop of hell to make me believe it truly could be my life.

The hell, of course, is that while I am now living in a tree-lined paradise, one where the trees apparently got together and decided to actually offer us shade from the sun2... my boyfriend (Aaaah! Still not used to that word) Peter isn’t.

The summer before we moved here, Peter and I were pretty much “attached at the lip,” as Mom liked to say. And believe it or not, but I was sufficiently happy that even her saying that aloud didn’t bother me too much. I know, pretty mind-blowing. Still, as the summer drew to its inevitable end, our kisses grew more urgent, as if our lips them­selves knew that we’d soon be separated by a distance far greater than they could reach.

I spent the first night in our new, amazingly rat-free apartment alone in my door-bearing room with the door firmly closed and my tear ducts open wide. I knew Mom had to be able to hear me sobbing, but she didn’t try to come in, leaving me both grateful that she gave me the space my closed door request­ed, while simultaneously resenting her for not caring enough about me to push past it regardless.

Yeah, kinda a no-win situation for everyone involved.

Not-Dad, who you may remember is the PI who’d figured out who Dad was, and who was instrumental in getting me to Glenhaeven in the first place, had gifted both Me and Peter our very own iPhones as a kind of going away present. Since Yale had gifted us with high-speed internet, when I wasn’t at school, doing home­work, working in the library or sleeping, I was pretty much glued to FaceTime with Peter.

Actually that’s not entirely true, as Peter and I, uh, slept together on FaceTime as well. No, not like that. We’d both just been so exhaus­ted and were talking until three am or so, and apparently neither of us had remembered to end the call. I woke up the next morning to find myself looking up his left nostril in extreme close-up, which, as much as love Peter, isn’t something I’d particularly wish on anyone.

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