After seven straight days of running to the post office with nothing to show for it, my father pulled me into the kitchen and let out a sigh.

"Stop waiting for it. Your acceptance letter went to Eddie."

"She's got no mother, no father. If she gets to go to college, she won't be stuck in this village suffering her whole life. You're different. You're tough, you can stand hard work. You can go work the factory line and still make something of yourself."

I stood in front of the stove, and it was like someone had doused me with well water in the dead of winter. The cold sank all the way through me.

His face darkened, and he started in on me.

"Penelope Fox, Eddie grew up with you. I've thought of her as my own daughter for years. I've already worked it out. Whatever you earn on that line goes toward Eddie's tuition. She's a good girl, loyal. She'll pay you back well someday."

It felt like a coal had been dragged across my chest. But when I looked at him again, I was strangely calm.

"You're right. Since she's your daughter, then from now on, I'm not."

……

He froze, then his face went red.

"Penelope, what kind of garbage is that? She's just using your spot to go to college. Do you have to blow it up into some great injustice? We're family. You don't see Eddie acting heartless like you."

I didn't answer him. I turned and lifted the lid off the pot, where the pig slop was still cooking.

He strode over and grabbed my arm.

"Let me tell you, you'll accept this whether you like it or not. Eddie's coming tomorrow, and you'll stay home. You don't come out!"

I slowly pried his fingers off and said, easily, "Fine."

Pretending I hadn't caught that he meant to lock me in.

He hadn't expected me to agree so readily. He paused, and then it made him wary.

"You really agree?"

I scooped a ladle of water into the slop, which had gone a little dry, and said evenly, "Isn't she off to college? I bought a backpack in town a couple of days ago. Might as well give it to her, no sense letting it go to waste."

He stared at me for a long while, and seemed to decide this meek act of mine wasn't put on. The corner of his mouth eased. He clapped me on the shoulder.

"That's more like it. You've always been the sensible one. Your dad knows that."

But that same afternoon, he took my household register and my ID.

"Eddie needs them for her enrollment paperwork. Don't lose them."

He didn't look at me when he said it. He tucked both into the inner pocket of his shirt and patted it.

I said nothing.

He stood in the doorway a moment longer, like he wanted to say something, then turned and left after all.

The door shut.

I heard the lock catch outside.

Then his voice, lowered. "Keep a close watch. This girl's got a mind of her own. If she tries to sneak out, you come tell me right away."

Two unfamiliar shadows passed across the window.

Not villagers. Men he'd brought in from somewhere.

I stood by the window watching for a moment, then turned and walked to the old camphor-wood chest in the corner.

It had been my mother's.

The lock had broken long ago. I worked it open with a fingernail.

On top were a few patched old clothes. I lifted them away one by one, and underneath was a stack of yellowed envelopes.

Ten letters in all.

From the time I was eight until I came of age, my mother had left me one every year.

In her day, my mother was the first person in the village to finish high school.

Top scores in the whole school, and still she failed to get into college.

It was Eddie's mother instead, an average student,

Beatrice Swanson, who threw a three-day-and-three-night celebration in the village to mark getting in.

Everyone said my mother jumped because she couldn't bear failing the exam.

Only I knew better.

The day she died, she'd made me my favorite pot of soup.

She loved me down to the bone. There was no way she'd have hardened her heart and left me here alone.

I opened the last letter, and my mother's neat, graceful handwriting quietly surfaced:

【Penny, you've always been at the top of your class. You should be getting into college this year, shouldn't you? Mom is so sorry. I won't be there to pin a big red flower on you myself, to set off the firecrackers for you.】

Tears blurred a damp patch across the page. I folded the letter and put it back in the box.

Mom, don't worry.

This year's red flowers and firecrackers,

I'll prepare two sets.

My father didn't come home all night.

Early the next morning.

I was still cooking the pig feed when Edwina unlocked the door that had kept me shut in.

She had on a brand-new floral blouse,

the kind of fine fabric you could tell at a glance came from the county department store,

and she drifted over to the front of the stove, half-casual, half on purpose.

"Penny, up this early cooking pig feed?"

"You know, isn't heaven just so unfair? How is it that you of all people failed to get in, and I'm the one who made it instead?"

Edwina stood beside me, all smiles, raising a hand to fuss with her hair so the designer wristwatch on her wrist showed.

"Oh, right. Uncle gave me all the family's ration coupons and cloth coupons to keep yesterday. I took them into town and traded them for some money, bought myself a few new things."

She made a show of smoothing the floral blouse, smug all over her face.

"Penny, guess what? Those ration and cloth coupons aren't worth much at all. They only came to a few hundred dollars."

"Uncle said we might as well sell that plot of land on the hillside behind town too, to scrape together a thousand for my tuition."

I lifted a stick of firewood with the tongs and fed it into the stove, answering flatly, "Oh."

Edwina looked like she'd swallowed a fly. The smile thinned on her face. She took a sip of water and tipped her chin up on purpose to keep going.

"Can't be helped. Uncle says the village is too poor. If I stayed, all I could do is marry off early to some bachelor and pop out a litter of broke nobodies, and there'd be nothing to me for the rest of my life. So Uncle says he'd sell everything down to the pots and pans to put me through school in the city. He told me not to worry about the money. He said he's got it all arranged."

My heart felt like it was being roasted over a flame, burning until it ached.

A small place too poor, no future in it. And yet he had me sitting at a factory line.

And he had me earning the money to put Edwina through college, telling her not to worry about her living expenses?

In that dizzy moment,

I even started to doubt which of us was really his own daughter.

I gripped the tongs tighter, the iron faces rubbing my palm raw,

but my face gave nothing away as I set the firewood steadily into the stove.

Watching the crackling, popping flames, I answered softly,

"That really is wonderful."

Edwina was about to say more when footsteps came from outside.

My father stepped over the threshold, gave Edwina a warm, smiling look, and praised how nice she looked in those clothes.

Then his face went cold and he told me to stop feeding wood so often, that I was wasting it all, before he went on:

"I'm planning to take Edwina on as my daughter. Until school starts, she'll be staying here with us, and as her older sister you can help her get familiar with the material on the entrance test."

The state university wasn't like other schools. Before enrollment, there was an exam for incoming students.

A kind of placement test, really. It had no effect on your spot at the university.

My father had even arranged a small thing like this for Edwina.

Get familiar with the entrance test?

It sounded fine,

but what it meant was that I'd be teaching her, with my own hands, how to impersonate me.

Edwina agreed brightly, said she'd go home and pack her bags, and left.

My father was about to go too. Stirring the feed in the pot, I asked him, like it was nothing,

"Dad, Mom's grades were so good back then. Why did she fail to get in?"

The step he'd taken out the door stopped on the threshold.

He was silent a long while before he said,

"Plenty of candidates fail to get in. Maybe she just didn't want to go to college herself. What are you asking about all this old business for?"

She didn't want to go?

I almost laughed out loud.

My mother had the top scores in her whole school. Going to college in the city was the thing she dreamed about.

How could she ever have just given it up?

I lifted my eyes and looked straight at him.

He rubbed his nose, uneasy, then turned and pulled the door shut hard behind him as he left.

That afternoon he came back on the heavy old bicycle, Edwina riding behind him.

They each carried a woven sack, and not long after they came inside,

the back room filled with the sound of drawers being yanked open and things tossed around.

A moment later Edwina walked out with an armful of things and dumped them on the table.

The enamel basin, the warm thermos, towels, soap, and a pair of cloth shoes I'd just finished sewing the night before.

"This enamel basin's really nice. And I happen to be short a thermos too."

"Penny, all this stuff was for you to take to college, right? Such a shame, you had bad luck and didn't get in. And I happen to need it for school, so Dad won't have to spend money buying me my own."

She chattered on to herself, lifted the cloth shoes for a look, then curled her lip in distaste.

"These shoes are just too tacky. What decade is this? Who still wears these. Throw them out."

She flung them out the door without a second thought, and my heart jumped right along with them.

The letter to the state education board, hidden under the insole, was about to slide loose.

Laurel Lambert, carrying her water buckets, caught the whole armful by sheer chance.

She was about to hand them back to me when I narrowed my eyes and gave her the smallest shake of my head.

Laurel froze, glanced at the strange man standing guard outside our house,

dropped her eyes, tucked the shoes against her chest, and went on her way with her buckets.

"The fabric on these is so good, perfect for my oldest girl to wear out in the fields. No sense wasting it."

Edwina and my father didn't notice a thing.

Once they'd gone through every usable thing in the house, they turned and left.

I lay on the bed and didn't sleep all night.

The next morning, in the first gray light, a fierce argument broke out beyond the door.

I pulled the curtain aside and saw Laurel being dragged back into the yard by my father and Edwina,

and the stone that had been sitting on my chest leapt clean out of my heart.

My father had the opened letter clenched in his hand, his face an iron gray.

"Penelope Fox, I knew you wouldn't stay quiet."

The words were barely out before the two strange men at the door moved.

One pinned my shoulder, the other pulled a coil of rope from his waist,

and in a few quick motions they wrenched my arms behind my back and bound them tight.

The coarse rope cut into my flesh, and the pain made me suck in a sharp breath.

I forced my head up. "Dad, what are you doing?"

He ignored me, crouched to check the knot, gave it two more tugs,

and only when he was sure it was tight did he stand.

"You ask me what I'm doing? Grown your wings, have you, bold enough to write letters and report us?"

"If that letter had gone out, Eddie wouldn't get into college, and you wouldn't have an easy time of it either!"

His eyes were bloodshot as he looked at me,

without a trace of guilt or pity in them, nothing but calculation.

Laurel rushed over with her hair loose, finding the nerve to speak up for me,

only for my father to threaten her daughter's life and scare her off.

As she went out the door, her eyes were still wet with tears.

A sour ache rose in me, but I let out a steady breath.

"Dad, I'll ask you one thing. How exactly did my mother fall from that building back then?"

His pupils froze for an instant. Then his lips curved into a smile.

"She just couldn't get past it on her own. If she'd been a little more generous, not so stubborn, it never would've come to that."

Each word was a knife carving into my chest.

My whole body shook, and even my voice trembled.

"My mother was murdered by you and Edwina's mother, Beatrice Swanson."