What We Knew (26 page)

thirty

The shack was calling. Lisa was calling. But it was dark and I couldn’t see my way. I ran and ran until suddenly the sensor lights blazed, and there it was, with its black tarp roof and carpeted lawn, Lisa beckoning from the doorway.
Where have you been?
The inside was bigger than I remembered. I followed Lisa through a maze of halls to a room with a bricked-up fireplace and a bed and a chair. Katie’s and Ryan’s cheeks glowed from the cold, but something else made them shiver: a dark cocoon oozing from the shadows. Long gray teeth. Pits for eyes. My knees quaked as he rose up, towering above us, but then Lisa sang softly, gently, and he slumped over, scaly hands reaching blindly for his chair. The yawning holes in his face searched for something. Katie knew. She fetched two blues from the box on the mantel. They shone brightly beneath his waxy lids. But he wanted something else, too. His eyes skimmed the room, landing on a book, thick and ancient and heavier than anything I’ve ever lifted. I swallowed my fear, and knelt before him, and settled it on his lap. Lisa brought over a lamp. Cross-legged on the bed, Katie and Ryan exchanged nervous glances and squeezed hands. His jagged fingernail lifted the cover. The pages were blank, but he read the white space, his voice rasping gently.

Once upon a time, two girls were lost in the woods …

The happy face above my bed fluttered in the dark, waking me. The curtains billowed with an end-of-summer chill. Slipping out of bed to close the window, something cold knocked against my chest. My hands shook as I switched on the light and unfastened the clasp at my neck. The room started spinning. I knew what it was before I saw it: Lisa’s gold heart, caked with dirt, the thin chain kinked and rusty. I rushed to the window, but the light behind me made it impossible to see anything except the pink sliver of sky above our neighbor’s roof. I clutched the heart tighter, its point piercing my palm. Someone had been in my room. Not the man from the woods. Someone else. Something else. Something bent on perpetuating its existence. I fought the urge to hide the necklace—just crawl back in bed and pretend it was all a dream—because I had to know. I examined my room, searching for signs. My eyes stopped on the black trunk.

Heart thumping, I lifted the lid and dug through layers of old jeans and ugly sweaters, feeling for the cold, hard glass, but my fingers came up empty.

My mom knocked gently. “Hey, Trace,” she whispered, poking her towel-wrapped head in the door. “I’m done in the shower if you want to get in there.”

The first day of school always fills me with a mix of hope and dread, but that morning something else gripped me as I forced down breakfast and headed out the door, my mother’s voice following me down the steps, reminding me to come straight home. It was a half day, but I was grounded. Not so much for trashing the house, but for drinking. My mom doesn’t blame me for what I did to Larry’s. It got Mrs. Grant’s attention. I think Mrs. Grant was thinking like Lisa’s grandma: if she closed her eyes, it might all go away. But it doesn’t go away. I hate comparing what happened to me to what Lisa went through. But rape is rape. That’s what the counselor said during our first meeting.

My phone chirped. Lisa wanted to know if I’d found my way to school without her.
Not yet,
I responded. My head was somewhere else, but my legs crossed the street out of habit. Skirting the shadow of Hillhurst Middle, I watched a pack of girls drag their friend to the curb and point to the woods across the way. There wasn’t enough concealer in the world to hide the distress darkening the chosen girl’s face. It wasn’t just the itchy sweater and stiff jeans, the tender blisters throbbing inside her new shoes. It was the look of not wanting to chicken out on a dare.

“Don’t go in there,” I said. “He’s real. Trust me.”

The leader whispered something and everyone laughed. They looked so small, so fragile, but tough, too. They’d survive. We all do. As the girls strutted toward the playground, the spared one, bluffing for her friends, turned and rolled her eyes at me. I didn’t care. Fear is good. It keeps us safe. Not always, but it keeps your eyes wide, alert. But sometimes it keeps you from living. It’s hard to know which is which. You have to trust your instincts.

Trusting mine, I sprinted across the street and into the tangle of brush. Branches snatched at my face, my arms, my legs, but I pushed on, moving swiftly. I was running late.
Please wait for me,
I thought. At the top of the stairs, I stopped to catch my breath. The back of my knees tingled. It was a long way down, with no one to catch me. The shelter was gone. No ropes cinched the trees. No black tarps sucked up sun. Just a mountain of garbage. Tires and barrels and broken furniture. For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel like I was being watched. It was just me, alone.

Clutching the heart at my collar, I plunged forward, down the stairs, through the trees, pulled by something more powerful than fear. My head and heart had called a truce. Fighting my way through the prickly scrub edging the woods, he was right where he’d said he would be, waiting on the other side. I kissed Foley and he kissed me back. We needed to start from the beginning. The beginning beginning.
If I can do this,
I thought,
I can do anything.