I walk to the closet and change into black sweatpants and a thick, knobby sweater. But Suzy stays at the window, pressing her palm to the glass. “You said you found that missing boy?” she asks.
I close the closet door, catching my reflection in the closet mirror briefly—sleepy eyes and hair that needs to be brushed. “Up in the woods,” I say cautiously.
Locals know of the Wicker Woods. They speak about it in a hush, in tones never above a whisper. As if saying it aloud will draw the darkness out. Never speak of the Wicker Woods behind its back, a notation inside the spellbook warns.
“He survived out there all this time?” she asks, dropping her hand from the window.
“He got lucky,” I say. Or maybe it’s opposite of luck. To find yourself lost inside the Wicker Woods is catastrophically unlucky. One of the ill-fated, my grandmother would say if she were here. Doomed. A boy to steer clear of.
An itch trickles down my vertebrae, cold as ice, lodging itself like concrete in my chest.
“He could have ended up like that other boy,” Suzy says.
My gaze snaps to hers, her silhouette outlined against the huge windows, snow swirling against the glass. “What other boy?”
She lifts one shoulder. “The one who died.” She swivels around to face me. “The same night your boy went missing.”
He’s not my boy, I want to say. But instead I ask, “A boy died?”
Her mouth pinches flat and severe. “Yeah, the night of the storm.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. Just overheard the other boys talking about it. They wanted to call the police, but the phones have been down.”
I step closer to her. “Who was he?”
“Not sure.” She weaves a bit of hair through her fingers. Not nervously, just out of habit. “They kept it pretty quiet, no one wanted to talk about it. But I overheard their whispers in the hall, when they thought I couldn’t hear.”
“Did they say how he died?” I ask. My lungs have tightened in my chest, the breath held still at the back of my throat.
She shakes her head, her eyebrows drawn close—wincing at the thought of someone meeting their demise way out here, in these woods, in the bitter cold. “I only heard them say that a boy was missing and another was dead.”
I sink onto the edge of the bed, looking past Suzy to the window. “Someone died,” I say softly, mostly to my myself, and I run my finger over my grandmother’s ring, feeling the oval shape of the gray moonstone. As if I could summon her, hear the soothing tenor of her words whenever she told me one of her stories. But she doesn’t appear.
Suzy and I are silent for some time, the cold slipping through the walls as the fire downstairs begins to die. The room feels strangely hollow, a ringing starts in my ears, and when I blink, I think I see the walls vibrate before snapping back into place.
I must be tired. It must be from lack of sleep.
Suzy finally blows out a breath. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “It’s too awful.” And she shuffles across the room to the other side of the bed, crawling swiftly between the sheets, still in her sweatshirt and jeans. As if she could hide from it—the death of a boy. A thing easily wiped away with a shroud of warm wool blankets.
Her eyelids sink closed, and her soft, oceany hair fans out over the pillow. She smells of rose water, like an old French fragrance no longer used except by ladies in nursing homes who smoke thin cigarettes and still paint their nails cherry-blossom red.
And for a moment, I could almost trick myself into believing we’re having a sleepover, two best friends who stayed up late eating buttered popcorn and watching horror movies, curling each other’s hair, and giggling about the boys we’ve kissed at school. A different night entirely. A different life.
Others look at me and see a witch. A girl who is dangerous and fearless and full of dark thoughts. But they don’t see the parts of me I keep hidden. The loss, the feeling of being alone, now that the only person who ever really understood me, my grandmother, is gone. That I carry around a feeling of being not quite good enough. A hollow brick lodged in my rib cage.
No one sees that I have just as many wounds as everyone else.
That I too am a little broken.
Reluctantly, I slide into bed.
Suzy’s knees bump mine, an elbow to the head, and when she finally falls asleep, she snores against her pillow, a soft muttering that is almost soothing.
But I lie awake. My mind crackling.
A boy is dead. And I feel sick. A boy is dead. And we’re trapped in these mountains. A boy is dead. And I don’t know how to feel. If it were summer and the road were clear, the police would come. They’d ask questions. They’d determine cause. But none of this will happen until the road opens, and I don’t know if I should be afraid or not. How did he die? Accident or something else? Suzy skimmed over it like a footnote, something she would barely recall a year from now. Oh right, that winter a boy died, how did that happen again?
But I’ve never known anyone who has died, aside from my grandmother. And perhaps if it wasn’t for the moth, or the boy I found in the woods, I’d feel less fidgety. My mind less clacking and clicking like the grasshoppers who twitch in the tall beach grass under autumn moons. Perhaps.
But instead my thoughts writhe in circles: Does Oliver know what happened to the boy who died? Was he there when it happened? Does he remember?
An hour passes and snow collides against the windows, a storm tumbles down from the mountains. Fin scratches against the wood floor, his paws twitching—dreaming of chasing rabbits or mice.
I force my eyelids closed. I beg sleep to fall over me.
But I stare at the ceiling instead.
Until, when the night seems darkest and my mind the most restless, there is a thump against the house. Then a tap tap tap on glass.
Someone’s here. Outside.
* * *
“What is it?” Suzy mumbles, eyes still closed. She might only be talking in her sleep—not really awake at all.
“I heard something downstairs,” I hiss softly, pushing up from the bed. “At the door.” My eyes skip to the stairs, listening.
“Mm,” she answers, wriggling herself deeper and burying her head in the pillow.
The wind claps against the house, and my heart claps inside my chest. I move down the steps, one at a time, careful and quiet. A boy is dead, my mind repeats with each thud of my heartbeat.
I hear the knock again, distinct and quick, coming from the other side of the front door. It might only be Mr. Perkins or one of the counselors from camp—come to warn me that a murderer is among us. Come to tell me to lock my doors and stay inside. I used to be the one to fear in these woods, but maybe not anymore.
I walk to the front window, breathing slowly, trying to calm the adrenaline pressing at my temples, and pull back the curtain. Someone stands on the porch, hands in pockets, shoulders bent away from the cold.
My fingers slide the dead bolt free and pull open the door. Snow coils in around me, wind whipping into the living room, and he lifts his head.
Oliver.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” he says, a line puckering between his brows.
The breath returns to my lungs and I take a step back, letting him move swiftly inside. “What are you doing here?”