I had never seen one with symbols carved into it before, only words. These were more like hieroglyphs, surrounding what looked like a single word, in a language I didn’t recognize. It had probably meant something to the generations of Ravenwoods who lived here before this place was falling apart.
I took a breath and vaulted up the rest of the porch steps, two at a time. Figured I increased my odds of not falling through them by fifty percent if I only landed on half of them. I reached for the brass ring suspended from a lion’s mouth that served as a knocker, and I knocked. I knocked again, and again. She wasn’t home. I had been wrong, after all.
But then I heard it, the familiar melody. Sixteen Moons. She was here somewhere.
I pushed down on the calcified iron of the door handle. It groaned, and I heard a bolt responding on the other side of the door. I prepared myself for the sight of Macon Ravenwood, who nobody had seen in town, not in my lifetime anyway. But the door didn’t open.
I looked up at the lintel, and something told me to try. I mean, what was the worst that could happen—the door wouldn’t open? Instinctively, I reached up and touched the central carving above my head. The crescent moon. When I pressed on it, I could feel the wood giving way under my finger. It was some kind of trigger.
The door swung open without so much as a sound. I stepped past the threshold. There was no going back now.
Light flooded through the windows, which seemed impossible considering the windows on the outside of the house were completely covered with vines and debris. Yet, inside it was light, bright, and brand new. There was no antique period furniture or oil paintings of the Ravenwoods who came before Old Man Ravenwood, no antebellum heirlooms. This place looked more like a page out of a furniture catalog. Overstuffed couches and chairs and glass-topped tables, stacked with coffee table books. It was all so suburban, so new. I almost expected to see the delivery truck still parked outside.
“Lena?”
The circular staircase looked like it belonged in a loft; it seemed to keep winding upward, far above the second-floor landing. I couldn’t see the top.
“Mr. Ravenwood?” I could hear my own voice echo against the high ceiling. There was nobody here. At least, nobody interested in talking to me. I heard a noise behind me, and jumped, nearly tripping over some kind of suede chair.
It was a jet-black dog, or maybe a wolf. Some kind of scary house pet, because it wore a heavy leather collar with a dangling silver moon that jingled when it moved. It was staring right at me like it was plotting its next move. There was something odd about its eyes. They were too round, too human-looking.
The wolf-dog growled at me and bared its teeth. The growl became loud and shrill, more like a scream. I did what anyone would do.
I ran.
I stumbled down the stairs before my eyes had even adjusted to the light. I kept running, down the gravel path, away from Ravenwood Manor, away from the frightening house pet and the strange symbols and the creepy door, and back into the safe, dim light of the real afternoon. The path wound on and on, snaking through unkempt fields and groves of uncultivated trees, wild with brambles and bushes. I didn’t care where it led, as long as it was away.
I stopped and bent over, hands on knees, my chest exploding. My legs were rubber. When I looked up, I saw a crumbling rock wall in front of me. I could barely make out the tops of the trees beyond the wall.
I smelled something familiar. Lemon trees. She was here.
I told you not to come.
I know.
We were having a conversation, except we weren’t. But just like in class, I could hear her in my head, as if she was standing next to me whispering in my ear.
I felt myself moving toward her. There was a walled garden, maybe even a secret garden, like something out of a book my mother would have read growing up in Savannah. This place must have been really old. The stone wall was worn away in places and completely broken in others. When I pushed through the curtain of vines that hid the old, rotting wooden archway, I could just barely hear the sound of someone crying. I looked through the trees and the bushes, but I still couldn’t see her.
“Lena?” Nobody answered. My voice sounded strange, as if it wasn’t mine, echoing off the stone walls that surrounded the little grove. I grabbed the bush closest to me and ripped off a branch. Rosemary. Of course. And in the tree above my head, there it was: a strangely perfect, smooth, yellow lemon.
“It’s Ethan.” As the muffled sounds of sobbing grew, I knew I was coming closer.
“Go away, I told you.” She sounded like she had a cold; she had probably been crying since she left school.
“I know. I heard you.” It was true, and I couldn’t explain it. I stepped carefully around the wild rosemary, stumbling through the overgrown roots.
“Really?” She sounded interested, momentarily distracted.
“Really.” It was like the dreams. I could hear her voice, except she was here, crying in an overgrown garden in the middle of nowhere, instead of falling through my arms.
I parted a large tangle of branches. There she was, curled up in the tall grasses, staring up at the blue sky. She had one arm tossed over her head, and another clutching at the grass, as if she thought she would fly away if she let go. Her gray dress lay in a puddle around her. Her face was streaked with tears.
“Then why didn’t you?”
“What?”
“Go away?”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.” I sat down next to her. The ground was surprisingly hard. I ran my hand underneath me and discovered I was sitting on a smooth slab of flat stone, hidden by the muddy overgrowth.
Just as I lay back, she sat up. I sat up, and she flopped back down. Awkward. That was my every move, when it came to her.
Now we were both lying down, staring up at the blue sky. It was turning gray, the color of the Gatlin sky during hurricane season.
“They all hate me.”
“Not all of them. Not me. Not Link, my best friend.”
Silence.
“You don’t even know me. Give it time; you’ll probably hate me, too.”
“I almost ran you down, remember? I have to be nice to you, so you don’t have me arrested.”
It was a lame joke. But there it was, the smallest smile I have possibly ever seen in my life. “It’s right up at the top of my list. I’ll report you to that fat guy who sits in front of the supermarket all day.” She looked back up at the sky. I watched her.
“Give them a chance. They’re not all bad. I mean, they are, right now. They’re just jealous. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“They are.” I looked at her, through the tall grass. “I am.”
She shook her head. “Then you’re crazy. There’s nothing to be jealous of, unless you’re really into eating lunch alone.”
“You’ve lived all over.”
She looked blank. “So? You’ve probably gotten to go to the same school and live in the same house your whole life.”
“I have, that’s the problem.”
“Trust me, it’s not a problem. I know about problems.”
“You’ve gone places, seen things. I’d kill to do that.”
“Yeah, all by myself. You have a best friend. I have a dog.”
“But you’re not scared of anyone. You act the way you want and say whatever you want. Everyone else around here is scared to be themselves.”