Chapter 1 
A Peacock Playing a Pigeon 

Pepper Poppins sat perched upon the cool dark tiles of her roof. Something scurried through the overgrown lawn and she squinted into the night.
            ‘And that’s why we need to cut the grass,’ Pepper muttered. 
            A small shiver ran down her spine as she considered what creatures could be running through her garden after sunset. As she looked at the glowing lights of the town below, a thought that she had had many times before crept to the front of her brain: ‘none of them have to worry about weird things in their grass.’  
            She was right of course, because there is no room for messy lawns in a town like Stonygrove. Stonygrove is a town of routine, everyone has their place and serves a particular purpose. There is one butcher, one baker, one bank and one barber. There is the town dentist, the doctor, the cobbler, and the handyman. The men who work on the dock come from a long line of fishermen and the women at the tailors are seamstresses just as their mothers and grandmothers before them. 
            ‘Why couldn’t I have been born in one of those houses down there?’ Pepper said to the stars. ‘Might as well just paint home of the freaks right on our front door.’
            Her eyes narrowed with jealousy as she pictured the flawless suburbia below. Stonygrove is cookie-cutter perfection, on the outside at least.
                        Behind lines of neatly trimmed trees sit identical white houses. Each one looks just as the one next-door; perfect white dollhouses with picket fences and planter boxes brimming with flowers. The lawns are green and well-manicured, the driveways spotless, every surface sparkles and shines. However, there is a dirty smudge on the crisp, white Stonygrove, a sight that brings great displeasure. 
            If you follow the main road right to the edge of town, you will come to a crossroad. The left will take you out of town but follow it to the right and you’ll find yourself travelling up a hill. At the top of the hill is a house. 
            ‘A bizarre, oversized, overgrown, overall catastrophe of a house’ – as Pepper would put it.
            The house on the hill is not white. It does not have a picket fence, or sparkling windows. It does not have a quaint little porch or planter boxes brimming with flowers. It is not the way it should be. It is not Stonygrove. 
            The house on the hill sits dark and ominous, like it might chew you up and spit you out if you dared step inside. It is tall and teetering, threatening to topple over at any moment and displays an assortment of mismatched windows; some square, some round, some with stained glass, some with shutters and some without. Tangled vines crawl up the sides of the house like skinny green monsters trying to pry their way inside, and the overhanging trees look odd, like they’re alive somehow, as if they could pull up their roots and walk away. The lawn spreads far and wide, accommodating a number of absurdities including a swamp and a glass greenhouse. 
            On Pepper’s sulkiest days (like today, the day this story begins), she would wonder why on earth her parents chose the house on the hill.
            ‘It’s as if they didn’t think we stuck out enough already,’ said Pepper to the night sky.
            However, on her happiest days (not like today) her heart swelled with love for the house on the hill, with all its secret doors and hidden passageways. But Pepper knew that where she came from also meant she would be misunderstood, and she often dreamed of waking up in a perfect white house with planter boxes and a picket fence. What she didn’t realize, was that the type of house she lived in made no difference whatsoever; Pepper would always be extraordinary.                          
            Laying back on the roof, her cotton candy hair sprawled out around her, a mess of tangled peach curls. Not red, not strawberry blonde: peach. Her hair had grown this way since the day she was born and looked even more out of place against her black eyebrows. Pepper’s eyes sparkled with wonder and were steely grey in color. Not blue, not green: grey. Looking at Pepper was like catching a glimpse of another world; she appeared far too magical to have come from Stonygrove.  
            Pepper muttered to the stars and they twinkled back at her, sometimes it felt like they were the only ones that listened. The night air was still without the slightest trace of wind and yet the garden rustled noisily below. Pepper peered over the edge, crouching like a cat ready to pounce on its prey. She could hear scratching and scraping climbing higher and higher. Pepper seized a rock from the gutter.  

            A blonde head sprang from the darkness, bobbing into view and disappearing again.  

            ‘Phoenix!’ said Pepper, ‘What are you doing?’ 
            She reached down to pull him up, but her hand met the cold brass of his saxophone. Pepper rolled her eyes. ‘I wonder if he takes this thing off to shower,’ she thought.
            Phoenix scrambled onto the roof.
                        ‘I – I saw that your window was open, so I thought I’d come say hello,’ he said with a sheepish grin.  
            ‘I told you not to come up here without asking. This is my spot.’ 

            Phoenix’s shoulders slumped, and he threw his leg back over the guttering.  

            ‘No – it’s okay… you can stay,’ sighed Pepper.  

            Phoenix sprawled out on the roof, his smile so wide and so bright it could easily be seen in the darkness. 
            Phoenix was Pepper’s neighbor; he lived below her on the hill. His bedroom window faced Pepper’s house and he had a telescope that he claimed he used for stargazing, but it was much handier for spying on Pepper. He meant well, he simply didn’t understand that she had grown up on her own and often needed her space.  

            ‘We can have space together,’ Phoenix would say, ‘I promise I won’t talk.’  

            Pepper felt guilty when she turned Phoenix away; he was the one and only person who didn’t think she was a freak. In fact, Phoenix was a fellow misunderstood outcast.  

            His blonde hair fell in shaggy curls, a startling contrast to his brown eyes, so dark they were closer to black. They were deep and expressive, the kind of eyes that drew you in and told you just how he was feeling even if he hadn’t meant for you to know.  

            Phoenix had a wild, cheeky smile that lit up his entire face like lights on a Christmas tree. He was wiry and uncoordinated, but you could tell that one day he would grow to be quite beautiful. Of course, Pepper would never tell him that.
                        He never did fit in with the other children because like Pepper, there was something within him that sparkled in a way that didn’t fit with Stonygrove.
            The difference between Pepper and Phoenix, was that Phoenix didn’t seem to mind.
            ‘It’s almost as if you don’t even care if people like you,’ Pepper would say.
            ‘I don’t.’
            Pepper would roll her eyes at him because she knew that deep down, everyone wanted to be liked.

            Phoenix had three favorite things: music, aliens, and Pepper. Naturally, his favorite thing to do was sit with Pepper, play his sax and search the sky for UFOs.
            ‘Any aliens out tonight?’ said Pepper.  

            ‘I thought I saw something suspicious earlier, but it turned out to be nothing.’  

            A falling star shot across the sky.  

            ‘Hey Pepper, make a wish.’  

            ‘I wish that people would like me.’  

            ‘I like you,’ said Phoenix.  

            ‘I know, I guess I just wish I had some more friends. You know, friends that are girls.’  

            ‘Why do you care about those girls? They’re nasty.’ 

            ‘Easy for you to say. You don’t know what it’s like to be the only girl in school who’s never had a sleepover or had someone to braid their hair or –  

            ‘You don’t even brush your hair.’ 

            ‘That’s beside the point.’ 
            Pepper felt that being a twelve-year-old girl was far more complicated than being a twelve-year-old boy. 
            ‘Nobody would even want to come to my house, because of the way it looks.’
            ‘It’s always been that way though. People just have a weird thing with this house,’ said Phoenix.  
            ‘That’s not true. Your sister told me it used to be beautiful, back when the Thornewoods owned it.’
            ‘My sister’s an idiot. How would she know anyway? She was like two when they disappeared.’
            ‘Well, everyone thinks it’s strange, how nobody else wanted to move in after they left,’ said Pepper.
            ‘I dunno. Maybe people were scared? It was a bit weird how they left all their things behind.’
            ‘I guess.’
            ‘Pepper… the Thornewoods literally vanished into thin air and it creeped everyone out, it’s got nothing to do with you. People like you.’ 
            Pepper wasn’t sure she believed Phoenix. Although, she had to admit that people did think the house was strange even before her parents moved in. So strange in fact, that they had tried everything in their power to conceal the house on the hill, but nothing worked. 
            The planted trees were struck by lightning, the stone wall collapsed. One year they constructed an enormous Ferris wheel, which was swallowed by a mysterious sinkhole one month later. The house on the hill remained, a black cloud over the perfect snowy town. For years it lay abandoned, until the arrival of Frank and Elma Poppins.   

            They lay in silence for a while, Phoenix stealing sideways glances at Pepper.  

            ‘Well, I’m going to bed.’  

            Pepper sprang to her feet and disappeared through her window. Phoenix turned to see it close with a snap.  

            ‘Goodnight,’ he said to himself.
            As Pepper climbed into bed, she replayed something Phoenix had said over and over in her mind. 
            ‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ he’d said. 
            But of course, it had something to do with her. She wasn’t stupid, she’d heard the rumors. The disappearance of Victoria Thornewood coupled with her mother’s accident had sent the town into frenzy. Some believed the house on the hill to be haunted with their ghosts; others said the house was cursed, and that any woman who lived there was destined to die.  
            Pepper closed her eyes and wondered what it would be like to wake up in a normal house, with a normal family. No matter how hard Pepper tried, she could not escape the life of an outcast. She was an extraordinary pretending to be ordinary, a peacock playing a pigeon. But a peacock cannot hide her colors forever.