Excerpt from The Girls with No Names by Serena Burdick, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

This gypsy dancer was something altogether different. I'd never seen anything like it. She was mesmerizing, her movements seamless and indefatigable. My sister and I stood for so long that we didn't notice the air cooling around us as the sun slipped behind the trees, leaving us in a darkness that twisted our sense of direction.

Safe now in our warm bed, with our parents none the wiser, we both agreed it had been worth it.

"What if we'd never made it home?" Luella wrapped her leg over mine.

"What if the oysterman got us?"

"And yanked me inside with his clammy ghost claw."

"And slit your throat."

"Effie!"

"What?" I could be as brave as anyone in my own fantasies.

"You don't have to be so gruesome. He could just smother me with a pillow."

"Okay, he smothers you and takes you as his spirit-wife. Meanwhile, I wander the empty house, hearing you, but unable to reach you."

"Mama and Daddy put out a search party."

"And I drown myself in the Hudson out of misery and fly up to Heaven, never to see you again because you're stuck on earth with the oysterman."

"You'd sink into hell for committing suicide." Luella was the least pious person I knew, and yet she still corrected me.

"Then the oysterman would be in hell too. Which means we'd be together, wandering in hell for all of eternity. A happy ending."

"I'm afraid you've got it all wrong." Luella twisted a piece of my hair around her finger and gave a gentle tug. "I'd never let you kill yourself for me, not even as a ghost, so the story is bunk. You'll have to start a new one."

Which, if I was going to be accurate—even in fantasies, I tried to be as accurate as possible—was true. Luella would never let anything happen to me.

When something did happen, it was Daddy who was to blame.

Excerpted from The Girls with No Names by Serena Burdick, Copyright © 2020 by Serena Burdick. Published by Park Row Books.