Chapter 1

My family was strange.

So strange that I sometimes wondered whether we were living inside one of those horror stories where you have to obey a set of rules.

On the surface, we were an ordinary family: Dad, Mom, and me.

But only I knew how strange things really were.

My parents wouldn’t let me sing and dance at home.

To be precise, they wouldn’t let me do both at the same time.

If I only sang or only danced, they didn’t mind.

But the moment I started doing both, they would fly into a rage together, leap out of their chairs, and sternly order me to stop.

Outside the house, though, they let me sing and dance all I wanted.

When I was little, I didn’t realize there was anything odd about it.

Then I told the girl who shared my desk at school. She immediately looked puzzled. “Why won’t your parents let you sing and dance?”

“I don’t know,” I said, just as puzzled.

Only then did it occur to me that this wasn’t normal.

After school, I took the question home with me. “Mom, Dad, why won’t you let me sing and dance in the house?”

They looked shocked.

A moment later, they answered in unison.

“What are you talking about? We’ve never stopped you.”

Now I was the one who was confused.

Did my parents have some kind of memory problem? Why did they keep forgetting things they’d done?

There were plenty of other things like that.

Whenever I got sick, for instance, they wouldn’t take me to a hospital or let me take medicine.

Unless I was so ill that I might die without treatment, they absolutely refused to take me.

When I asked why, they only smiled and said nothing.

They didn’t just keep me away from hospitals. Even when they were seriously ill themselves, they never went.

Stranger still was this:

Though they hated hospitals, they loved morgues.

Whenever we did go to a hospital, my parents insisted on taking me for a walk outside the morgue.

They would get very excited, huddling together and whispering about who knew what.

I hated it there. It was so cold that I shivered every time and begged them to leave.

There were lots of things like that.

My parents were odd, but they treated me well enough. I couldn’t be bothered to look too deeply into it. I put it down to their peculiar temperaments.

What puzzled me most, though, was something Dad told me when I was sixteen.

He came home from work that day in high spirits, smiling so broadly that his eyes curved into crescents.

“Nannan, did you know our family has a big secret?”

He was smiling as he said it.

As if he’d just heard the most wonderful news in the world.

But no matter what I asked, he only shook his head. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

I asked how old I had to be. He clammed up again, looking terribly mysterious.