ALICE BROADWAY

SCHOLASTIC INC.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this
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Copyright © 2017 by Alice Broadway

This book was originally published in hardcover by Scholastic Press in 2018.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-338-33169-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 2 0 21 2 2 2 3
Printed in the U.S.A.  23
This edition first printing 2019
Book design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
chapter 1

I
was older than all my friends when I got my
first tattoo.
My mother loves to tell the story. I wish she wouldn’t. At
two days old you’re meant to get your birth mark, but I got sick
instead, and Mom canceled the ceremony.
Mom’s friends said, “You need to get her marked, Sophie.
What are you going to call her?”
But Mom told them she would wait until I was better. I
would be named and inked then. She ignored their whispered
warnings of what happens to babies who die unmarked. And so
2 - ALICE BROADWAY

for twenty days I remained formless and void u

­ ntil one day my
­mother said, “Let her be Leora.”
And I was Leora. The word was punched with minuscule
­needles into my flesh. Tiny letters that have grown with me for
sixteen years.
• • •

We are not afraid of death. When your marks are safe in your
book, you live on a­ fter you die. The life story e­ tched onto your
body is kept forever—if y­ ou’re worthy. When we preserve the
words, pictures, and moments imprinted on our skin, our story
survives for eternity. We are surrounded by the dead, and, for as
long as their books are still read and their names are still spoken,
they live.
Every­one has the skin books in their homes: Our shelves are
full of my ancestors. I can breathe them in, touch them, and read
their lives.
But it was only ­after my f­ather died that I saw the book of
someone I’d r­ eally known.
• • •

We w
­ ere lucky r­ eally, seeing death walk up from a distance. It
meant we could be prepared. We massaged his skin with oil; he
told us the stories of his ink and smiled when he showed us the
tree on his back with our names on it. He was ready when he went,
and his skin was prepared too. I watched his strong arms deflate,
leaving the skin wrinkled like an old apple. I watched his straight
back bend as though he’d been hit in the stomach. He stopped
looking directly at us a­ fter a while; the pain was all he saw. It
 - 3

seemed like the sickness sucked him away, just leaving his shell.
But the shell is what counts.
People had brought us flowers and food to make those final
days easier. Little love tokens for Dad when there was nothing
else they could do. We weren’t the only ones whose hearts were
breaking; Dad was precious to so many. The kitchen smelled of
wilting petals, stalks moldering in stale water, and the casserole
we hadn’t gotten around to eating. It was like death was catching.
Mom wrapped the blankets more tightly around him and wiped
sweat from her brow. Dad shivered and his breath sounded
crackly.
Yet when death came that bright day, in late autumn, I was
not ready. I could still taste the coffee I’d drunk at dawn after
Mom woke me with a frantic whisper.
“Sweetheart, wake up. I don’t think he has much time left.”
I hurried to his side. The gaps between his breaths grew lon-
ger. Mom and I leaned close and held his hands. I wondered
which would be the final gasp, the last silence before he woke in
the afterlife and breathed again. Suddenly, with a gasp, Dad’s
eyes opened and he looked straight at me. His hand gripped
mine. He eased his other hand from Mom’s and grasped the
pendant he always wore around his neck. It was a slender, rough-
hewn wooden leaf with a suggestion of veins etched into it that
hung from a leather string. It was as much a part of Dad as his
ink; I’d never seen him without it.
“Leora.” His voice was hoarse. “This is for you. Leora, don’t
forget. You won’t forget me, will you? Please, don’t forget me.”
4 - ALICE BROADWAY

Tears came to his eyes as he begged me. “And promise me

you’ll watch out for the blanks. Be careful, my ­little light, my
Leora.”
I nodded and, through sobs, whispered, “I promise.” I looked
at Mom, her lips tight and her face strained. She reached up and
untied the leather that circled his neck, and Dad passed the pen-
dant to me. I rubbed the smooth wood, and tears fell from my
eyes as I blinked. He turned to Mom and made certain hers was
the last face he saw. He went from the land of the living hearing
Mom’s “I love you, I love you, I love you” and feeling her kisses on
his hand.
And he left us. Just like that, he went. The sun dimmed. A
source of true goodness had gone from the world, and it was
colder and darker without him.

­After he died, the embalmers came to our h

­ ouse. They dripped
oil over his body and rubbed spices into his skin. They wrapped
him in blue cloth and took him away. He looked like a king.
He’d always seemed that way to me. For days a­ fter, I would go
into the room and inhale the fragrance of his anointing. Maybe
if I could breathe him in he would burst out of my lungs, fully
formed and laughing.
But the next time I saw him, his life had become pages. He
would come home to us once the weighing of the soul ceremony
had found him worthy. For now, we had to go to the museum
if we wanted to be with him. We walked t­ here in the light of an
amber sunset, permitted to enter the museum ­after normal
 - 5

opening hours for this intimate viewing. In a private room that

smelled of ancient wooden furniture and the perfume of who-
ever had been for a viewing before us, we were presented with my
father in his new form. We placed the small casket with his skin
book inside on the table. Mom appeared at my shoulder, her eyes
wide. She had been tense and on edge ever since his death—less
sorrowful than snappish and distracted. Sometimes I’d come
into a room and find her staring into space, her hands clasped so
tightly together the knuckles gleamed. I was starting to feel irri-
tated by it; I didn’t want to have to think about her, not just now.
I wanted my Mom back—my calm, capable Mom, who always
knew the right thing to say.
As we lifted the lid, a smell of wax and spice wafted through
the room, raising a toast to him. And there he was. His skin taut,
smooth, and slightly shrunken. With each page we turned, we
touched him again and remembered the roughness of his fore-
arms, the smoothness of his back. Every stiff page told his story.
Mom seemed nervous at first; her shoulders were tense under
my arm, but she became calmer the further we read. The cover of
his book, which was made from the skin from the back of his
shoulders, showed a picture of us and the ink from his birth
showing his name—Joel Flint. A good title. A good man. A good
introduction. We turned a page and saw the tree from his back
telling the tale of his family—me and Mom; the girls who cap-
tured his heart. I saw my name there and traced the letters with
my finger. There were marks I hadn’t seen since I was a child.
They looked much fainter now, blurred with time.
6 - ALICE BROADWAY

We turned a page and Mom laughed and closed her eyes.

“You might want to look away, Leora,” she said with a blush and
pursed lips that hid a smile.
She was right, I ­didn’t want to see it, but the flower that had
been on his buttock was intricate and delicate. Stretched into the
page of his book, it looked like any other part of him, but it was
secret. It was their marriage mark—­added to each year, getting
more and more beautiful as their love grew. Mom’s laughter
suddenly blended with tears and she put her palm across her
mouth as if stopping the sadness and reminding her of the kisses
she missed.
We turned the page.
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