#ReadWithMC (opens in new tab)-Welcome to Marie Claire's Virtual Book Club. It's a pleasure to meet you, and for the month of July we will be reading "The Vanishing Half" (opens in a new tab) by New York Times bestselling author Britt Bennett. The novel follows twin sisters who flee their hometown and ultimately find themselves in two very different worlds, one black and one white. Read the excerpt below and learn how to join the virtual book club here (opens in a new tab). (The Vignes twins disappeared on August 14, 1954, shortly after the Founders' Day dance. Clever Stella would have predicted that the town would be in turmoil. The town square was drunk with sun as butcher Willie Lee's barbecue of smoked ribs, brisket, and hot links went on and on. Children were already fidgeting, picking bits of crispy chicken skin off the plates of their praying parents. A long afternoon of celebration followed while the band played, and the evening ended with a dance in the school gymnasium. The adults staggered home after several glasses of Trinity Thierry rum punch.

On any other night, Sal Delafosse might have peeked through the window at the two girls walking under the moonlight. Adele Vigne would have heard the creaking of floorboards. Even Lou Le Bon, who was closing the diner, might have seen the twins through the frosted glass. But on Founders' Day, Lou's Egg House closed early. Sal suddenly felt better and his wife rocked him to sleep. Adele snored while sipping rum punch and dreamed of dancing with her husband at homecoming. No one saw the twins sneak out. [It was Desiree who decided to run away after the picnic last summer. It was not surprising. For years she had told everyone that she wanted to leave Mallard as soon as possible. For Stella, leaving Mallard seemed as fanciful as flying to China. Technically, it was possible, but that did not mean she could imagine herself doing so. But Desiree had always fantasized about life outside this small country town. When the twins saw "Roman Holiday" at the Nickel Theatre in Opelousas, she could barely hear the other children of color on the balcony, noisy and bored, throwing popcorn at the white people sitting below. But she was pressed against the railing, glued to it, imagining herself gliding above the clouds to faraway places like Paris and Rome. She had never even been to New Orleans, which was only two hours away.

"Only the wildness is waiting for you up there," her mother always said, which of course made Desiree want to go even more. The twins knew a girl named Farah Thibodeaux, who had fled to the city a year earlier. If Farah, a year older than them, had done that, how difficult would it be to leave?" Desiree imagined herself going to the city and becoming an actress. Only once in her life had she starred in a production of Romeo and Juliet in the ninth grade. But as she stood in the center of the stage, she felt for a moment that Mallard might not be the most boring town in America. Desiree felt that she was the only one, not a twin, not one half of an imperfect pair, but the only one: her classmates cheering her on, Stella disappearing into the darkness of the gymnasium. The following year, however, she lost the role of Viola in Twelfth Night to the mayor's daughter. This was after her father made a last-minute donation to the school.

"You always say that," Stella said.

"You always do."

But it wasn't. She didn't hate Mallard; she felt trapped by its smallness. She carved her initials into the bottom of her mother's former school desk, which her own children would one day use, feeling the jagged scratches on their fingers. School was in the same building as always, and all grades were together. So when I moved up to Mallard High School, I didn't feel like I was moving up at all, just one step across the hallway. If it weren't for everyone's obsession with lightness, she might have been able to tolerate all this. There were Sil Guillory and Jack Richard arguing in the barbershop about which wife was paler, her mother yelling at her to "always wear a hat," and people believing ridiculous things like drinking coffee or eating chocolate during pregnancy would turn the baby black. Her father was so pale that on a cold morning you could turn over his arm and see the blue of his veins. But none of that mattered when the whites came for him.

She remembers little of him now. Life before his death seemed to be only the stories she had been told. A time when her mother didn't get up at the crack of dawn to clean the white house or take in extra laundry on the weekends, when clotheslines zigzagged across the living room. The twins loved to hide behind quilts and sheets. Until Desiree realized how humiliating it was, that her house was always full of other people's filth.

"If that were true, you'd do something about it," Stella said. [She was always practical. On Sunday nights, Stella ironed a week's worth of clothes. Unlike Desiree, who scurried around every morning looking for a pretty dress and finishing the homework that was crumpled at the bottom of her book bag. Stella loved school. She had been a top math student since kindergarten, so much so that in second grade, Ms. Belton gave her a few lower grade classes to work on. She gave Stella a worn-out calculus textbook she had used in her Spelman days. Stella lay in bed for weeks, trying to decipher the strange shapes and long strings of numbers surrounded by parentheses. Once, Desiree flipped through the book, but the formulas were spread out like an ancient language, and Stella snatched the book back, as if Desiree had defiled it. [Stella wanted to be a teacher at Mallard High School someday. But every time Desiree imagined her future at Mallard, she imagined a life that would go on forever, just as it had before, and she felt something clawing at her throat. When she tried to leave, Stella never wanted to talk about it.

"I can't leave you, Mama," she always said. She has already lost so much.

THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett, Riverhead Books, $27. Copyright 2020 © by Brit Bennett. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

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