Vacations From Hell by Claudia Gray, Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson, Libba Bray, Sarah Mlynowski

walls were covered in artsy photographs: some of the landscape and some of Henri and a woman, who I presumed was his wife. In one, near the top of the stairs, the woman was completely naked…but it was very tasteful and French and kind of touching. There were piles of books absolutely everywhere and a few dog toys on the floor.
    The bathroom was right at the top of the steps, as he said. It was a stark room with blue tiles. There were no towels, no bath mat, no curtains, no toilet paper, no shower curtain—nothing soft. No soap, even. It was as ifno one lived here, no one used this bathroom at all.
    When I came back downstairs, Henri was standing in the wide-open doorway. A wind had kicked up, and the big red door banged away on the hinges into the face of the house. The wind whipped into the hall and sent things fluttering all over the place. None of this seemed to bother Henri.
    “A storm, I think,” he said. “I think tonight. Can I offer you something to eat?”
    “No,” I said quickly. “I should get back. My sister…she’ll worry.”
    “Ah, yes. Your sister.”
    “The pictures are really nice,” I said. “Is that your wife?”
    He looked as if he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
    “The pictures along the stairs,” I said, pointing back at the dozen or more framed prints.
    “My wife,” he repeated. “Yes. My wife.”
    “We’ll be around for a while,” I said, slipping past him and out the door. “And I’ll keep an eye out for a lost dog.”
    I walked back toward our house quickly, wanting to put as much distance between Henri and me as possible. The wind blew like hell the whole way back, throwing dirt and pollen in my eyes. I was a half-blind wheezing mess when I got back to our bedroom, where Marylou was inthe same exact position, her tiny feet tucked up on the chair. She had closed the heavy blue shutters on the bedroom window to block out the wind, so now the room was fairly dark, lit only by an ancient lamp in the corner.
    “People around here are weird,” I said.
    Marylou looked up from The Big Book of Crazy .
    “Define weird,” she said.
    “Weird as in I passed one house on the way, and the guy in it was just standing around like a zombie looking for his dog, and all he talked about was the French Revolution and the spirit of murder and something about some suspect law. He was very creepy. He didn’t have anything in his bathroom—”
    “Charlie,” she said, putting her thumb in her book and closing it. “I thought you stopped that.”
    “I’m serious.”
    But it was clear that she didn’t believe me.
    “We should just go back to Paris,” I said. “Get back to town, take the same train we came in on. This place sucks.”
    “Except that Claude’s probably on his way here. So we’d get there and have nowhere to go. Didn’t you have any luck with the phone?”
    I shook my head.
    “Well, Erique brought the groceries while you were out. We should eat, I guess.”
    Erique had brought delicious food for us—roastchicken, bread, tomatoes, and soft cheese full of lavender. There was yet more warm Orangina. The wind battered the house as Marylou set our Hobbit-y table with the heavy blue-and-white plates from the cupboard. She closed the kitchen shutters as well, and the room went dark. I sat on one of the benches, staring at the pattern of knots and ridges in the wood of the table.
    “Come on,” she said. “Eat. It’s not that bad here. Try this.”
    She tore off some of the chicken with a fork and cut me a hunk of the cheese and bread. It was all delicious—the crisp chicken studded with thyme, the cheese with the pretty purple flecks of lavender. I think I should have felt content and French, safe and snug inside, with the wind whistling outside. But I didn’t. I felt just slightly sick.
    “What is with you?” she asked.
    “It was that guy and his weird-ass story.”
    “All right,” she said, spreading cheese thick on a piece of bread. “What did he