Before You Begin

If you are looking for a book in which a cheerful little atom called Carbo sets off to find a friend, holds hands with two hydrogen atoms and cries “Now we’re a molecule!”, I am sorry to tell you that this is not that book, and I would advise you to put it down and go and find that one instead. It will be shorter, and nothing in it will be true.

This book contains a missing sister, a lie told at breakfast, a field in the rain, a swimming gala, and a stone that is older than the Earth. It also contains some very large numbers. I cannot take any of those out without making the story false, and a false story is worse than no story at all, because there are already a great many of those, and most of them, alarmingly, have been believed by somebody.

My name is Stella. When this happened I was eleven, and in my fourth week at Stanbury Hall, which is a boarding school in the Cotswolds with a lot of stone walls and not enough radiators. My sister Ada was fourteen and in Year 10, and had been at Stanbury for three years, which meant she knew which stairs creaked, which teachers could be argued with, and how to get from Linden House to the back gate without passing a single window with a light in it.

I did not know that last one until the morning she used it.

We both swim. Ada swims the way some people play the piano, as if she had been born knowing where everything goes. I had been swimming since I was six too, and I was only just beginning to understand how much there was to be bad at.

You’ll be reading Ada’s notebook too, as I did, copied in exactly as she wrote it, with her pencil drawings and her marks in the margin. Three things in this book were not in it, and you should know which, because Ada would insist. The notes that open under her marks, saying how each thing was seen or worked out, are hers, but she wrote them in the margin in letters so small that I have written them out in full, and filled in the odd one she had no room for. The little question marks are mine: they’re the steps I had to ask about. And the figures that move, the ones you can drag and slide and shake, could never have been in a paper notebook. Ada made those years later, when I told her I was finally writing this down. She said a drawing of a shaken tray is a poor substitute for shaking one. Each of them says Added later.

One more thing about me, before the sky lights up. I keep a list of words at the back of my planner: every word I meet that I don’t know, with what it means, in my own words, because a definition in somebody else’s words hasn’t really been caught yet. Ada says it is the most Stella thing about me. She is right, and she used it, as you’ll see.