Winterwood

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.