Page 23 (1/2)

PrologueHelenaI’irls Every single quadruplet birth, generation after generation, it’s always girls

This generation’s crop yielded the usual, but instead of four perfect, beautiful dolls, there were three

And me

And today, our twenty-first birthday, is the day of harvesting

That’s the Scafoni family’s choice of words, not ours At least not mine My parents seem h

Harvesting is always on the twenty-first birthday of the quads I don’t know if it’s written in stone somewhere or what, but it’s what I know and what has been on the back of o

There’s an expression: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it Well, that’s bullshit, because we Willows knoell our past and look at us now

The sa in the old library, their surfaces softened by the feet of every other Willow Girl who stood on the same stumps of wood, and all I can think when I see them, the four lined up like they are, is how archaic this is, how fucking unreal How they can’t do this to us

Yet, here we are

And they are doing this to us

But it’s not us, really

My shift is marked

I’m unclean

So it’s really my sisters

Someti this insanity generation after generation, or the Scafonithe sacrifice

“It’s tirave

He’s aged these last few months I wonder if that’s remorse because it certainly isn’t backbone

I heard he and ue once, exactly once, and then it was over

He simply accepted it

Accepted that tonight, his daughters will be made to stand on those horrible blocks while a Scafoni bastard looks us over, prods and pokes us,his choice Before taking one of my sisters as his for the next three years of her life

I’h to be unsure what that will mean exactly Maybe my sisters are, but not me

“Up on the block Now, Helena”

I look at my sisters who already stand so meekly on their appointed stuht and I swear I can hear their hearts pounding in fear of what’s to come