Chapter One Until she left the farm for good, I never thought much about what made me different from my sister, what set me apart from her beyond our looks, beyond her hair color (unnatural blond) and mine (unremarkable brown), her body type (tall, thin) and mine (neither). She had always been fickle where I had been firm - mean to my kind. She shone brighter than me, for sure, but sometimes painfully so, like the way the sun hurts to look at when you have a head cold. But it wasn't until I left the farm years later that another difference made itself clear: unlike with Beth, men had mostly been good to me; it was women who broke my heart. First our mother, then Beth. I was almost sixteen the morning she left Lou and me for school in New York, her packing so purposeful that the whole house seemed windy with her escape. As I watched her, my slippered feet swinging off the side of her bed, I don't remember thinking that I'd never leave myself. I hadn't planned to stay forever in the same house, town, and country in which I was born. Do stayers do that? Do we toddle around as babies, then children, then teenagers, fingering the chipped Formica, the cat-mangled armchairs, the muggy drapes, thinking, I'm pretty sure this old house and these burnt fields are as good as it's ever going to get for me, think I'll stay? I didn't do that. That's not how it happened. "Throw me that belt, Peach," Beth said, half-awake, sipping coffee Lou had carried upstairs on a tray. "Dammit, I hate my clothes. I'm gonna have to steal some new outfits." "Go ahead. Dad says you're old enough to go to jail now and he won't bail you out this time." She gave me an arch look. "Want these?" She excavated her roller skates from the bowels of her closet and was holding them up in her clothespinned fingers. "Can't be bombing around campus in these. Or can I? Maybe that could be a cool way of getting around. Short shorts. Maybe a little felt cap?" I could picture it too, Beth on the way to class roller-skating backward, wearing her Walkman. "Nah, on second thought, they're stinky and old. You have them," she said, gently tossing them with the rest of her castoffs engulfing me on the bed. That's how Beth parted with things. Even then, I was aware that in order for Beth to let go of something she had to convince herself that she had never wanted it to begin with. "How about this?" she asked, pressing her long silver prom dress to my shoulders. It was an unsettlingly grown-up gown, a mermaid-style confection she had daringly paired with hippy-type sandals and rows of leather bracelets on her upper arms. Beth had also brought an actual grown-up to the gala, a twenty-four-year-old professional hockey player with a drinking problem and an ex-wife. "Maybe someone will ask you next year if you put down a book and put on some lipstick. And if they do, Peachy, go, okay?" Prom night had turned into a lost weekend for Beth, during which time we received no fewer than a dozen phone calls from her date's ex, threatening murder. As for me, I'd spend my own prom night with Lou, coaxing a wounded raccoon out from underneath the porch. We had seen it get hit by a car on the highway, had watched it quickly amble to the farmhouse, ducking under a break in the lattice. For days Lou hunkered under the house to move the flashlight across its face to see if the raccoon's eyes reflected back at him. I would periodically place sardines on the end of my field hockey stick and wave it in front of its nose, pleading with it to take a bite, Just a bite, come on, please? Poor thing took four days to die. We buried it in a laundry bag by the willow stump that served as the farm's morbidly crowde Excerpted from The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.