1
FYNN
I honestly had no idea why I decided to stop. Or maybe that wasn't being honest at all. Maybe, deep down, I knew exactly why I had stopped in Butterfield.
Physically, it was like any other small town. One main street ran through the heart of town where buildings, set on different blocks, looked as if they had sprung up in different eras. Some tall, with weathered brick facades and shallow pitched roofs and some stout, with cracked plaster walls and faded striped awnings. There was even a village green, a town center, perfect for carnivals, concerts and picnics. Only the grass had long since been replaced by weeds.
Emotionally, it was like no other small town I'd seen. As my feet tromped along the weed riddled sidewalk, it seemed sadness and loss puffed up around my shoes as if there was so much despair it had soaked into everything, the buildings, the roads, the sidewalks. Even the trees looked colorless and depressed.
Turn back. Don't bother with this place, I told myself a hundred times. But my feet kept moving. Boone trotted along next to me on his stumpy legs, his tail still twirling with the promise of new adventure.
The first time I saw her, she stepped out from behind a pyramid of Twinkie boxes. I couldn't look away. It wasn't just the obvious—the hourglass shape tucked nicely in denim cutoffs, or the blue eyes that took up half her face, or the lush pink lips that looked as if they knew their way around a kiss. There was something else about her. She looked as out of place in the sad little town as a star would look on a cloudy night. At the same time, she looked as if she was the heartbeat of the town, the one sparkle of light keeping the whole fucking place alive.
I didn't know exactly why I'd decided to stop in Butterfield, but I knew exactly why I decided to stay.
2
ELLA
"Did you see it?" Patty asked excitedly as she stepped into the market. She stopped to rearrange three bottles of aspirin on the shelf that didn't need rearranging, but in Patty's mind, life as we knew it would have ended if she'd left the bottles in their original places. And if she hadn't stopped to perform the meaningless task, it would have bothered her for the rest of the day.
After assuring that the aspirin was in perfect order, she strode through the main aisle and stopped to assess the pyramid of boxes I had spent the last fifteen minutes arranging on the display table.
She squinted at my tower of Twinkies. Her chin did the side to side slide it did whenever she saw something that wasn't quite right. She reached for a bottom corner box and moved it the slightest bit. "There. Perfect," she said in a self-congratulatory tone.
I didn't roll my eyes. I never rolled them when it came to her obsessive compulsive disorder. It was something she couldn't help, something that had started because of her sister Sheila. Butterfield Angel #8. A national paper had called them the Twelve Butterfield Angels, and they'd numbered each one. I had memorized every detail of that news article. It helped me remember them all. Not that I'd ever forget.
Angel #8 Sheila Harrold. Twelve years old. Daughter to Carl and Cynthia Harrold. Sister to Patricia. Sheila, known to her dad as Nutterbutter, loved Disney princess movies, sewing dresses for the family cats, and dunking her cookies into milk. Those were the details listed in the paper, but in my head, I amended each entry with my own details. Sheila had a laugh that reminded me of sleigh bells. In first grade, Sheila wore a purple and blue butterfly costume to the Halloween parade. She fluttered around all day in her pretty wings while I was stuck wearing the ugly scarecrow costume my mom had picked for me. The straw itched my neck all morning. By the time we got to recess, I was beyond grumpy and I told Sheila that her costume was stupid. She cried and I felt terrible for being a mean, jealous scarecrow. We made up that night while we were trick or treating, but I never forgot the horrid feeling of making my friend cry. So that was Sheila, Angel #8. She was the reason why I never rolled my eyes when Patty moved boxes and bottles.
"What did you see?" I asked, deciding to pull Patty's scrutiny away from the display before she rebuilt the whole thing.
"Oh, right." She reached up and smoothed down the flyway hairs on her head, a ritual she performed a thousand times a day, to the point that her blonde hair always looked greasy. I couldn't really blame her. She had the type of baby fine hair that always looked as if someone had rubbed a balloon over it. "You mean you didn't see it on your bike ride into town?"
"See what?"
She grunted in disbelief. "Lucky Thirteen or not, Ella, you should be far more aware of your surroundings when you're riding on a bicycle. It's like you pedal through town with blinders on. You could get hit by a car or worse," she added with dramatic flair and then lowered her voice as if the walls had ears. "There was a strange van parked just around the corner from Graham's Hardware store. You might have ridden right past a serial killer who is in town looking for his next victim."