Two long wooden tables are set with candles that illuminate the faces of the boys seated along either side, and the racket of their voices echoes off the high timber ceiling. Most are eating breakfast, forks scraping against plates and orange juice sloshing onto the tables, but a few are at the far end of the room playing Ping-Pong near the fireplace.
I’ve been in here before, a handful of times.
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.
“Been stuck up here since the storm,” she says. Her eyes slide across the room. “I snuck up to see Rhett Wilkes. Didn’t realize I was never going to leave these mountains again. Camp counselors weren’t happy when they found me hiding in Rhett’s cabin, but what were they gonna do?” She shrugs. “They couldn’t send me home.” Her gaze flicks away then back again, eyebrow raised. “I’ve never hated boys more in my whole life than I do right now.” Her nose twitches like she can’t shake the stench of all these boys, crowded together, smelling of wood smoke and sweat, stuck in the woods. Then her eyes narrow. “You live across the lake, right?” she asks.
I nod. Of course she knows—everyone knows where the Walkers live: the house where witches are rumored to practice the foulest of magic, where Walkers cast spells and drink the blood of our enemies. The house most locals avoid.
“What’re you doing at the camp?” she asks, white teeth gleaming, voice all drippy and cool. As if I were any other girl from school. As if we were friends. The kind of friends who stay up late talking on the phone, giggling, bedsheets pulled over our heads to muffle the sound. A thing I’ve never known. Maybe never will. A feeling that aches, that kerplunks into my stomach like a stone tossed into a deep pond. Sinking, sinking until it’s a gone.
“I found that boy who went missing,” I tell her. “I brought him back.”
She scowls, like the memory of a boy going missing sends odd spikes of pain through her chest. “I assumed he was dead,” she answers, her voice tight. “Frozen somewhere out there in the snow, and they’d find him in the spring.” At this she shudders, yet her description seems oddly callous, as if to die in the woods were commonplace up here. One dead boy, easily replaced by any of the others.
I raise an eyebrow, and she coils her long, dark hair over one shoulder, tapping a foot against the floor as if she were feeling impatient. Our conversation beginning to bore her.
The candles along the two long tables flicker briefly, sending shadows dancing up the walls, and Suzy crosses her arms, moving closer to me. Her chin dips down like she doesn’t want anyone to hear what she’s about to say. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“It gives everyone the creeps,” I answer, eyeing the strange shapes the candlelight makes on the high ceiling. Hands and faces and bones that twist at wrong angles. Boys have always complained that the camp is haunted, that the ghosts of miners rattle the halls and sway through the trees at night. The boys aren’t used to living in the woods, to the constant scratch of branches on windows and the wind against your bare neck while you sleep.
“Yeah,” she agrees softly. But I can see her mind turning it over, the itching of something along her skin. She rubs her palms down her arms and looks away from me, biting her lip. “I can’t stay here anymore,” she murmurs, more to herself. Her chin dips to her chest and she breathes slowly, like she’s trying to pretend she’s somewhere else—three clicks of her heels and poof, she’ll be back home—instead of trapped in these mountains, living with all these awful boys.