Winterwood

The boys’ camp hosts a gathering every summer and winter where they invite locals from Fir Haven to a potluck party with music and tours of the old mining outpost. Mostly girls come up from Fir Haven—to see the boys, to kiss them behind nearby trees. Mom insisted I go the last two years, said it was good to meet new people. Make friends. As if my life is somehow lacking without a coven of girls to invite over for sleepovers on the deck in summer, sleeping bags fanned out beneath the stars. As if I couldn’t be perfectly happy without these things. As if these woods and Fin and a loft filled with books and found things weren’t enough.

Oliver and I stand for a moment, waiting for someone to look our way, to notice: Oliver Huntsman has returned.

But they continue shoving forkfuls of waffle dripping with syrup into their mouths, slurping orange juice, and laughing so heartily that I’m surprised they don’t choke.

Oliver stares across the landscape of boys like he’s trying to pinpoint the names and faces of the people he knew before he vanished, but it’s now just a muddled blur. He uncrosses his arms and turns to face me, a severe line of tension cutting from his temples down to his chin. “Thanks,” he says. “For letting me stay at your place last night.” There is no warmth in his gaze. And a cold stone of doubt settles into my chest. I may have saved him from the woods, but bringing him back here feels wrong—worse than the dark of the forest and the promise of death.

I force my lips to smile, but all I say, all that rises up from my chest, is “You’re welcome.”

This is where he belongs. Among a sea of boys.

He turns away without another word, without even a goodbye, and moves toward the row of tables—blending in with the other boys. I wait for someone to recognize him, to shout his name. But no one does. The room is too draped in shadow, too hard to discern one boy from all the rest. A boy they’ve already forgotten. Although I’m certain that once the camp counselors discover he’s returned, they will want answers. They will want to know where he’s been and what happened. Will he tell them the truth—that he’s been in the Wicker Woods all this time? Does he even know the truth? Does he even remember how he ended up way out there?

I stare after him, knowing this might be the last time I see him.

Even if he stays a whole year at the camp, he’ll be just another boy among a crowd of nameless boys. They come and they go. And soon he’ll be gone too, shuttled back to wherever he came from. One of the flat states, or the humid states, back home to his parents and his friends. He’ll soon forget this place and the night a girl found him inside the woods and let him sleep in her home beside the fire. An old memory replaced with new ones.

He vanishes among the mass of boys—my first found item that was made of flesh and a thumping heart, and now he’s gone.

My own heart betrays my head, sinking in on itself. Concaving. As though a deep, unknowable pain is squeezing it into a tiny kernel. A feeling I don’t want to feel. I refuse to feel.

I turn back for the double doors, pushing the feeling away, when from the corner of my eye I see someone approaching. Tall and slight and moving not with the hulking stride of a boy, but with the ease of a girl who is at home in her own skin.

The willowy Suzy Torrez—acorn-brown hair tied in a ponytail at the back of her head, eyelashes so long they’re like hummingbird wings—saunters toward me, lips drawn into a grin. “Nora!” she calls.

I feel my mouth dip open and my smile fade. “What are you doing here?” I ask once she reaches me.

Suzy lives in Fir Haven and goes to Fir Haven High. I only know her vaguely—our lockers were next to each other last year, but we’ve never been friends. She has a crowd of besties who do everything together and a crowd of boys who fawn over her, and I don’t have either of those things. But I also don’t want those things.

Still, I see Suzy from time to time at the lake, mostly in summer, sunbathing down by the shore, stretched out on a beach towel with all her friends—lathered in coconut oil and laughing so loudly their voices carry across the lake. She usually has a summer fling with one of the boys at camp, a seasonal crush who she swaps out when the next selection of boys arrive. I’ve always envied the ease with which her heart can flutter from one to the next. A buoyant, pliable thing.