Winterwood

“It’s the last shot for all of us,” Lin offers up. The boys who are sent here to the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys aren’t away on a winter holiday. They aren’t here because it’s a reward or a brief escape from public school and curfews. They’re here because they’ve already screwed up. They’ve already made a mess of their other lives. This is supposed to be the place where they get righted, set back on course. Fixed. But not if a boy winds up dead. And not if they’re to blame.

“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” Rhett answers, his footsteps crossing the room again. Pacing maybe. “It already happened.”

Another voice mumbles something so low I can’t make it out. I wish they would talk louder, I wish I could just step into the room without being seen.

And then their tone changes.

“I still hear things at night,” Lin says softly, as if he were facing the floor when he says it.

“That’s what happens when someone drowns,” Jasper snaps, his voice so high it sounds like it might break, as if his mind were fraying along seams. “They fucking haunt you because they’re pissed.”

Drowned.

Drowned.

Drowned.

Haunt, haunt, haunt.

My heart is now in my nose, and I can barely breathe. I have to tell my lungs to inhale, to exhale, to not make a sound.

Max drowned. In the lake? Broke through the ice? My head throbs and the blood pumping through my veins feels too loud, a crush inside my ears. I should leave, slink down the hall before they hear me, find me, discover me spying.

“Shut up,” Rhett says, and I hold a hand over my mouth, to silence my own breath.

“I can’t sleep,” Lin argues. “I can’t take it.”

More unheard words, and then Suzy’s voice rises above the others, her inflection strange—covert. “Nora says she found Oliver in the woods.”

I feel my eyebrows pinch together—unsure why she’s saying this. Why it matters.

“She said he was there for the last two weeks, hiding or something.”

“What?” one of them says, Rhett maybe.

The music downstairs pauses suddenly, then starts up a second later with a new song. There are shouts from below, someone arguing. A drunken disagreement.

One of the boys on the other side of the wall says something else I can’t make out, and then I hear the shuffle of feet, the lazy tread of three boys and a girl walking toward the door.

I waited too long.

Rhett steps through the doorway, and for a second I think that if I don’t move, maybe they’ll walk right by me, they’ll think I am only a shadow pressed against the wall. Only a ghost. But Rhett jerks and his eyes bore into me.

“What the fuck!” he exclaims.

And in the next second, Jasper is shouldering past Rhett and grabbing my arm. “She fucking heard everything we said.” Across Jasper’s left cheek is a bright-red gash, the place where the tree limb sliced him open at the bonfire.

Rhett squeezes his temples with his hands. “Shit.”

I yank my arm back, but Jasper grabs me again, harder this time. Fingers pinching my skin. “Don’t touch me!” I shout, my body stiffening, resisting, but he’s too strong and he forces me into the room.

Moonlight glints through the window onto a bed neatly made with an embroidered patchwork quilt. The room is cold, as if there were a draft, but the window is closed.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Rhett repeats, pacing across the dark room, his voice like shards of glass, slicing me open each time he speaks.

Suzy stands in the doorway, and I flash my eyes to hers but she won’t look up, her arms crossed over her chest, like a bird with its wings folded in on itself, shielding her eyes from mine.

But Rhett glares at me like I’m an animal caught in a trap—which is exactly what I am. Trapped. I hold my arms at my sides, rigid as a girl who will bite and claw her way out of here if she has to. A girl with teeth to tear away flesh.

“What did you hear, moon girl?” Rhett asks, taking a half step closer to me, his eyes concealed in shadow, as if he’s deciding my fate.

“Nothing,” I say, my voice defiant.

“She’s lying,” Jasper snarls, still holding my arm, his tall frame towering over me. “She heard us talking about Max. She’ll tell the cops when the road clears.”

I squint up at him, a thorn pricking at my temples.

Rhett rakes a hand through his dusty-blond hair, looking for answers in the dark corners of the room. He shakes his head at me and takes a step back, toward the door.

“We can’t trust her,” Jasper adds, his gaze now on Rhett.

My eyes sweep to Suzy again and then to Lin—wearing his big puffy coat with the hood pulled up, even inside—and I wait for one of them to say something, to interject, to tell Jasper to let me go. But neither of them will look my way. They’re afraid of Jasper and Rhett, their eyes sunk to the floor.

“You’re staying in here,” Rhett says, his pupils like black bottomless holes, “until we figure out what to do with you.”

I move toward him, but Jasper still has a hold of my arm. “You can’t lock me in here!” I shout.

Rhett’s shoulders draw back. A cold pallor washed over his face.