Stealing Snow Read online

  To my family, Mommy, Daddy, Andrea, Josh,

  Sienna, and Fi, and every girl who wanted

  to be a princess but became a queen …

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgments

  First kisses sometimes wake slumbering princesses, undo spells, and spark happily ever afters. Mine broke Bale.

  Bale burned down a house when he was six. He was a patient at the Whittaker Psychiatric Institute like me, and he was also my only friend. But there was—he was—something … more. I told him to meet me where we could be alone, at the one place where we couldn’t see the iron gates that hemmed us in. Our kissing would have a time limit, though. The time it took for the White Coats to notice that we were gone.

  Bale met me in the darkest crook of the hall, just as I knew he would. Bale would meet me anywhere.

  We were clumsy at first. My eyes were open. He had not leaned down quite far enough. And then we weren’t clumsy at all. His lips were warm, and the heat washed over me. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I leaned into him and felt his body against mine. When we finally broke apart, I rocked back on my heels and looked up at him. I felt myself smiling. And I rarely smiled.

  “I’m sorry, Snow,” he said, looking down at me.

  I blinked up at him, confused. He was kidding.

  “It was perfect,” I asserted. I was not the type to be mushy. But he was not allowed to joke about this. Not ever this.

  I pushed his shoulder lightly.

  “I see what you are now,” he said, grabbing my hand and holding on a little too tight.

  “Bale …” I felt something snap in my palm, and a sharp pain ran up my wrist and arm. I cried out, but Bale just looked at me with steady eyes, his grip and gaze suddenly cold and unyielding.

  Not like a prince at all.

  It took three orderlies to get him to let go of my wrist, which I later learned was broken in two places.

  As they pulled him away, I noticed through the double-paned windows down the hall that it was snowing. It was too late for snow. It was May. But it was upstate New York, and weirder things had happened. The snow stuck to the glass and melted. I touched the cold pane. If things had played out differently, the snow would have been a perfect punctuation to a perfect moment. Instead it made it that much worse.

  Bale went on the cocktail after that. I went on it, too, after they refused to let me see him. That was the usual procedure for Whittaker kids who never outgrew their imaginary friends, the dream catchers and time travelers, the cutters and kids who couldn’t eat or couldn’t sleep. And for me, who tried to walk through a mirror when I was five. I still have the scars on my face, neck, and arms from the shards of glass, though they’ve faded now to faint white lines. I assume Becky, the girl next door who I had dragged through the mirror with me, still has them, too.

  Dr. Harris said they’d found pills under Bale’s bed. He hadn’t been taking his meds. He couldn’t help what he did to me.

  I wasn’t sure that was the whole truth, and I didn’t care. The broken bones were temporary. What stuck with me was that perfect first kiss. And the shock of what he had said.

  That was a year ago. Bale hadn’t spoken since.

  1

  In the distance I could see a tree that seemed to scrape the sky in every direction, with gnarly branches and the strangest, almost luminescent white wood. The bark was covered from top to bottom in intricate carvings. I had seen this tree before. I felt a pull to walk right over to it and run my fingers along the carvings. But instead I turned away from the tree toward a loud, constant crashing sound: water. It was running fast and deep. I looked down and saw that I was hovering on the edge of a steep, rugged cliff, when something or someone came at me from behind, shoving me hard.

  I fell and fell and fell until my body hit the water. It was freezing cold. Cold like none I’d ever felt. The water cut at me like little needles piercing my skin. And then when I could not stand it a second longer, I opened my eyes and saw something in the murky deep: tentacles and gills and gnashing teeth coming at me in the icy blue.

  My arms flailed. I needed air. Which was worse? That thing in the water or drowning? I opened my mouth to scream as the thing reached me, wrapping its icy tentacles around my ankle.

  When I woke that morning, Vern, one of Whittaker’s orderlies, was standing over me.

  “Hush, child,” she said quietly. She had a syringe in her hand, and she was prepared to use it.

  I caught my breath and threw back the covers to check my leg for the mark made by that thing in the water. The sheets were drenched. But it was my sweat. There was no mark and no water creature to blame.

  “Snow?”

  The orderlies—or White Coats as we liked to call them—weren’t really our friends even though they were the only people we saw every single day. Some of them spoke to us. Some mocked us. Some laughed and moved us from locked room to locked room like furniture. But Vernaliz O’Hara was different. She treated me like a person even when I was a completely drugged-out vegetable and even when I had the shakes. She didn’t know which person I was at the moment, hence the syringe.

  “I’d rather not knock you out today. Your mother is coming,” Vern said in her maple-syrupy Southern accent. Her low, long brown ponytail swung behind her as she stepped away from my bed and slipped the syringe back into the pocket of her scrubs. Looking up at her, I marveled at how close her head came to the ceiling. At six feet nine, she was an abnormally tall woman. I half expected to feel a breeze from the whiplash of Vern’s hair.

  Depending on which patient you asked, Vern was a giantess. Or an Amazon. Or a Jörd, the giant Norse goddess who gave birth to Thor, the god who sometimes shows up in comic book movies. I’d looked up Vern’s condition in Dr. Harris’s collection of old encyclopedias in the library. Vern suffered from acromegaly, a hormonal condition that occurs when too much growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland, which resulted in a larger-than-everyone-else Vern. But “suffered” was the wrong word. Vern owned her size, and it made her the perfect muscle for Whittaker. No patient could find his or her way around the wall of woman she was. Not even me.

  I held out my hand. “Fine,” I mumbled.

  “She speaks,” Vern assessed, her oversize green eyes lighting up with surprise.

  Vern wasn’t being sarcastic for a change. Because of the meds, I didn’t speak often these days except for swear words. And also because I didn’t have anyone I wanted to talk to. Except my mother when she was visiting … and of course, Bale.

  Vern was the only one of the White Coats I could even stand to be a
round.

  I had bitten Vern once—right after Dr. Harris had told me I couldn’t see Bale last year. I had expected Vern to treat me differently after that, but she didn’t. She was the same kind Vern. I always wanted to ask her why. But I never did.

  “Did you have the dream again?” Vern asked with the same level of anticipation she had for the next episode of The End of Almost, one of her “stories” that we watched during supervised recreation hours.

  I shook my head, a lie my body told automatically. They encouraged talking about the subconscious at Whittaker. But I didn’t like to. I was determined to keep my dreams mine and no one else’s. Even though they were often twisty and dark, they were the only place I got to be close to Bale. I had slipped and told Vern once. A fact she would not let me forget.

  Last night’s dream had been Bale-free. And a little stranger than usual. The tree was in it again, huge and looming, taking up the whole sky. Then there was that thing … The memory of it flooded in, distracting me, pulling me back into the cold, dark water. Patiently, Vern waited for me to sit up, pulled out a fresh pair of Whittaker gray sweats for me to wear, and sighed a heavy, breezy exhale that denoted her disappointment.

  I slipped out of my paper-thin cotton pajamas in front of her and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the plastic mirror on the door of my closet. Since the kiss, I was still searching for whatever it was about me that had spooked Bale.

  My face looked the same to me. Brown eyes. Pale skin because of the lack of sun. The trail of white scars tracked down one side of my body, most densely on my left arm. Despite multiple surgeries, my arm and torso would forever bear the weblike tattoo of the day that had brought me here.

  The white streaks that wove through my ash-blond hair had grown only more pronounced this year. Vern blamed it on the new drug cocktail, but I didn’t see any other patients going gray, and plenty of us in Ward D were taking the same prescription.

  “Maybe we should put some new art up. You’re really getting good,” said Vern.

  I shrugged, but I felt a surge of pride well up underneath the gesture. I had begun drawing as therapy. But I kept doing it for me.

  Sometimes I drew the other patients. A lot of my drawings were of Bale. There were dozens of them, in fact. I drew the inmates as they were and as they wanted to be. Wing thought that she was an angel or something, so I gave her wings. Chord believed in time travel, so I’d draw him anywhere or anytime he wanted to be. He once told Bale that he “blinked” from place to place. That was what he called it: blinking. He could come and go from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in a single blink. Time was infinite and different for him. I envied him that. I would give anything to blink back in time to before the kiss with Bale.

  Sometimes I sketched Whittaker. The asylum had a lot of rooms. But there was a dividing line between what the parents saw and what the patients saw. My room was pretty spare: white sheets and walls, a white cabinet, a full-length plastic mirror on my closet door, plus a small white desk. The only decorations at all were the drawings hung everywhere with duct tape. I had Vern to thank for that. The rest of Whittaker looked like an English manor —with high ceilings, fancy furniture, and wrought-iron sconces along the walls. The irony was Whittaker wasn’t that old. It was built sometime last century. And rural New York was a far cry from England.

  Sometimes I sketched my dreams, which ranged from stark, blinding-white landscapes to creepy execution scenes that I couldn’t really explain. The worst was the one with me standing on a mountaintop, and below me there were bodies, blue as ice and covered in a blanket of snow. I was smiling in it, like I had a secret.

  Or there was the one with the armored executioner who was wielding an ax, about to swing it into something—or someone—off the page. I was proud of how I captured the blowback of blood on his armor.

  Dr. Harris thought drawing was a good way to channel my anger and imagination by putting pen to paper and seeing the “ridiculous” things in my head. By getting them out of my mind, he thought it would help draw a dividing line between what was real and what was just a fantasy.

  It worked for a while, but ultimately Dr. Harris wanted the drawing to be a gateway to my talking about my feelings. That rarely happened—or at least not in the way that he liked.

  “Almost time for visiting hours,” Vern pressed. She had turned to her cart and was grabbing the familiar tiny white paper cup that contained today’s pill.

  “What’ll it be today, Vern. Sleepy or Dopey?”

  I had affectionately named my myriad pills after some of the seven dwarfs. Each one corresponded to the effect it had on my mood. Sleepy made me sleepy; Grumpy, etc. One by one, they all came to represent—even Sneezy.

  Today there was a green pill in the little cup.

  “Happy.” I grimaced. That one didn’t really work anymore.

  “You are chatty today,” Vern half questioned, cocking her head.

  I pulled the nondescript hospital uniform shirt over my head, and I pulled on the pants. Vern handed me the paper cup and waited for me to gulp down the pill, which was so big that it scraped down the back of my throat even with a sip of water. Vern took back the cup and waited for me to open my mouth to check that I had actually swallowed the pill.

  In that half-a-heartbeat pause, a second of resentment flooded in. It was that moment in our everyday routine that kept us from being friends—that, more than the lock on the door or the syringe in Vern’s pocket. It was her job to check, not to trust. And it reminded me every day that even though she was the only person who really talked to me, she was paid to be here.

  2

  At Vern’s skyscraper-ish side, I walked down the hall of Ward D, peeking inside the small, square double-paned windows to the other rooms along the way that made up the most secure wing of Whittaker. Through the one to my left I could see Wing perched on the edge of her chair, ready to take flight. She couldn’t really hurt herself from that high up, but her White Coat, Sarah, a birdlike woman with surprising strength, was attempting to coax her down from the chair anyway. Wing didn’t look it, but she was probably the patient the White Coats were most afraid of. One open door, one loose restraint, and Wing would find the highest surface she could and throw herself off it. Wing thought she could fly.

  I walked away the second she “took off.” There was literally nothing sadder than seeing Wing’s face when she landed and realized that her flight was over.

  In the next room, Pi was scratching things in his notebook. He thought he was writing an equation that would save the world, or break it. According to Vern, who liked to fill me in on the other patients, he was done with his alien abduction phase and he had moved on to some new kind of government-conspiracy-cloning thing that involved code breaking.

  Magpie’s room was empty. But I knew that underneath her mattress there were dozens of tiny things that she’d stolen from all over Whittaker. Magpie was our resident thief and my sometimes nemesis. I had been so distracted with Bale over the years, I hadn’t noticed that for the better part of our lives she had a head start on hating me. But I was playing catch-up now. It was something to fill the time, at least.

  Then there was Chord, who was just sitting, staring out the window. Statue still, blinking. Finally, I hesitated by the last cell, Bale’s. Bale was staring with intent at the wall. By the white-knuckled grip he had on the arms of his chair, I knew he was thinking about fire again. He was probably trying to set fire to the drywall with his mind right now.

  Bale came to Whittaker like we all did: against his will. But he also came without a name. He was only six, like me. I had spent a whole year at Whittaker without him. An angry year. A sad year. A lonely year that I would never get back. And then there was Bale.

  They said he had been left alone, starving and scrounging for food in an old house. His parents had left him there—parents he said he didn’t remember. He was emaciated and dirty when he arrived—and not just from the soot from the flames. They said th
at he had stood and watched his house burn down after setting it on fire. He didn’t try to run away. He just wanted, maybe needed, to watch it burn down to ashes. He claimed that he didn’t remember anything about his parents even though he was old enough to remember. Dr. Harris said he was choosing subconsciously or unconsciously to forget. And he didn’t know how to read or write, which some of the Whittaker kids made fun of. Just because we all lived in glass houses of insanity didn’t mean that we could not be cruel.

  That first day he walked through the Whittaker gates, I thought Bale had been sprung directly from my imagination, his red hair spiked up on his head like a little skeleton devil. He looked like he’d literally walked out of the fire instead of just setting one. One of the other kids ran and hid, but I walked right up to him and touched his face to make sure he was real. I can’t say that I loved him at first sight, but I’ve been walking toward Bale from the second I met him.

  Bale was a complete mystery to all of us. He didn’t even know his own story. I had had so much therapy with art and dolls and stories already that I confused it for play.

  “Why don’t we make your story up?” I had suggested.

  “Why would I want to do that?” he’d asked.

  “For fun,” I had countered with six-year-old logic. “I do it all the time about other people.”

  I pulled out my sketch pad and began to write: Once upon a time…

  Bale looked at me like I was crazy, but he didn’t retreat. I looked at his profile and drew a quick sketch of him.

  “That’s me,” he’d said, pointing at his own chest. How he found himself in my collection of rudimentary lines made me want to draw him out, make him tell his story even more.

  “Now you tell me who you are,” I’d urged, doing my best Dr. Harris impression. “Once upon time, there was a boy named …,” I singsonged, and waited.

  “Bale,” he had replied quickly. “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Bale who lived in a house made of wood. The monster made him cry like no mother or father should. Then his family went away. But made Bale stay. And Bale burned it all down one day.”