Synopsis

I hugged my sisters and they fit against my sides like two jigsaw pieces that would never fit anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine ever letting them go again, like releasing them would be to surrender the best parts of myself.

Three sisters share a magical, unshakeable bond in this witty high-concept novel from the critically acclaimed author of Audrey, Wait! Around the time of their parents’ divorce, sisters April, May, and June recover special powers from childhood—powers that come in handy navigating the hell that is high school. Powers that help them cope with the hardest year of their lives. But could they have a greater purpose?

April, the oldest and a bit of a worrier, can see the future. Middle-child May can literally disappear. And baby June reads minds—everyone’s but her own. When April gets a vision of disaster, the girls come together to save the day and reconcile their strained family. They realize that no matter what happens, powers or no powers, they’ll always have each other.

Because there’s one thing stronger than magic: sisterhood.

Excerpt - April Chapter 1

“I know too much already.”

I hate being the oldest. I hate it because I’m the one who has to experience everything first. And even if I haven’t, my sisters still think I know everything. Which I sort of do, but that’s not the point. At least, not right now.

It’s just like when my youngest sister June, on the night before the first day at our new school, sat me down on the edge of my bed (which made me wrinkle the comforter) and quizzed me about high school like it was a category on Jeopardy!

“Where do the cool kids eat?” she asked me, blowing her bangs out of her eyes so that they just resettled across her forehead. “Is it okay if I can’t drive yet? Are they going to haze me just because I’m a freshman?”

“June,” I had to tell her. “I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. I’ve never been to this school either, remember?”

“But what if I’m wearing the wrong outfit? Or it’s foggy and my hair frizzes? Do you think they’ll be all judge-y?”

Our middle sister, May, stuck her head into my room from the hallway. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in what June would call “a complete mess.” I didn’t blame May, though. It was too hot outside to worry about things like hair. “Yes,” she said to June. “Forget ever having a date for the next four years. We’ll call you Loser for short.”

“Just because you’ve never had a date,” June glared at her. “Losersquared.”

May rolled her eyes and waved her black iPod at me. “I need my headphones back so I can drown out the whining.”

“On my desk,” I told her. “And June, seriously? Unless a pack of wild dogs are released into the halls tomorrow—”

“We hope, we pray,” May muttered as she dug around on my desk, searching for her headphones and knocking over a pile of hardcover books in the process.

“—then you’ll be fine. And do you mind, May?” I restraightened my books and glared at her. “A little respect for the written word, please.”

“Only you,” May said with a sigh, “would actually read the books
on the summer reading list.”

“Are there wild dogs out here?” June asked. “I know there are
coyotes.”

“There might be a spider,” I told her.

“Or seven,” May added.

I sighed. “Can you both get out of my room so I can pretend I’m
an only child?”

I missed them after they left, though. It was weird the way I wanted
them there, and when they were there, I wanted them to leave. We
had only moved into our new house two weeks earlier, coming from
Orange County out to the Valley because our parents divorced and our
mom got a job here and because our dad took a new job in Houston
and was moving there in a few weeks. At least, that’s why my mom
said we were moving. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure that it had
something to do with the fact that May got trashed the night our parents
announced they were splitting up. No one’s really talking about
it, least of all May, and even if we did talk about it, I’m not sure what
I would say. “Way to be a cliché?” “So what’s it like starring in your
own afterschool special?” June, being the youngest at fourteen, didn’t
have a clue about May’s night of debauchery. All she knew was that
a lot of Disney Channel stars lived in the Valley, so she was excited
about the move. All I knew was that no one asked me or my sisters what
we wanted, so we went along with it. I’ll tell you this, though. If I had
known we were going to end up here, I would’ve spoken up a long time
ago. The Valley at the beginning of September is ridiculously hot.

So we had this new home now, with this jacaranda tree, whose purple
flowers permanently stained the sidewalk outside, and eucalyptus
trees in the backyard. It was pretty, but it didn’t feel like home. It was
just a house that we were living in, and if I listened really hard at night,
I could hear traffic on the 101 freeway. “It’ll be like an adventure,” my
mom had said when we moved in, and she had smiled so hard that my
sisters and I just smiled back, like we hadn’t already spent the past
three months on an adventure, watching our family reshape itself. I
might have been the only one who was shaking on the inside; I don’t
know. I don’t even want to know. I know too much already.

But things calmed down, and it was okay as it would ever be. We
started school, and on the first day, I got lost four times because the
campus was way bigger than our old school, with giant cement poles
every ten feet or so and winding paths that made me trip twice. I knew
that pretty soon, life would be normal and I would forget what it used
to be like, but that didn’t make me feel any better when I wound up
in the freshman-year geography class instead of junior-year anatomy
by accident.

I tell myself that a lot now. You’ll forget what it used to be like.

June, like 99.9 percent of the freshman class, made absolutely
no impression on anyone. May kept to her normal sophomore routine
of shuffling around in her black Converse and ignoring people,
while I just kept going along with the junior crowd. After all, why
swim upstream? All that happens is that you get tired and die faster.
Go with the flow, I say.

Or I used to say.
That was before I woke up seeing red.