The counselors must have taken everything out. Boxed up my few belongings when I went missing, ready to ship it all back to my uncle once the road cleared. We’re sorry to inform you that your nephew, Oliver Huntsman, has gone missing from the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys. If he turns up, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s all his stuff.
I push the drawer closed, a strange hollowness sinking into my gut. My few things are gone—hardly enough to represent a life anyway. But it was all I had. All I had left that meant anything at all. Of my life before. My parents. And I hold back the threat of tears. The wretched twisting in my chest. Perhaps the counselors were already clearing away space for another boy. My single drawer, my bunk—wiped clean of any memory of the boy who vanished.
Oliver Huntsman, swept into nonexistence.
I climb the ladder to the top bunk—my old bunk—and the sad, sagging mattress settles beneath me. I stare up at the low ceiling, an arm’s length away, the wood carved with boys’ names and symbols and crude drawings. Nights when boys couldn’t sleep or were bored or didn’t want to be forgotten, they dug the blade of a knife into the wood. Proof that they were here.
Inside my coat pocket, I find the cotton pouch filled with herbs she gave me. It smells like my mother’s garden, where she used to grow thyme and potatoes and carrots we would eat straight from the soil. I press the pouch against my chest, my ribs, trying to push away the cold. Push away the memory of my mom that is a raw blade against my throat. That makes me feel alone. Awfully, desperately alone.
The boys call Nora a witch. A moon witch who is full of weird thoughts and strange words. Who lives inside a strange house, filled with strange things.
Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they only tell stories to pass the time. They tell stories about her so that no one will tell stories about them.
Maybe she feels alone too. Misunderstood. A vacant gap inside her that will never be filled.
Just like me.
The fire crackles and I close my eyes, pulling the blanket up over my head to keep out the cold. I try to sleep. To let the day melt away around me. And for a while I do sleep, but my dreams are black and bleak and I’m running through trees, eyes flashing upward, searching for the starry night sky but I’m lost and I sink into the snow and the cold until she touches my hand and I snap awake.
My eyes flutter open and I’m still in my bunk, peering up at the ceiling.
But I’m not alone.
Voices carry through the cabin. The shuffling of boots across the floor.
The others have returned.
I stay still, listening to their lumbering movements, the door shutting behind them. The cabin is dark, the sun long set, and they don’t know I’m here, hidden in the top bunk. They don’t know I’m back.
“Told you the fire wouldn’t go out,” one of them says. I recognize the voice—the voices of the boys who I shared a cabin with before my mind went blank. Before I went missing. It sounds like Jasper, his words more pitched than the others.
I hear someone add more wood to the stove, the kicking off of boots, the opening and closing of dresser drawers. The bunk below me creaks as Lin flops onto his mattress and starts tapping a foot against the wood frame.
Jasper, whose bunk is directly across from mine, says, “I don’t know why I need to learn this shit. When will I need to use a compass? After I leave here, I’m never going into the woods again.”
“You’ll probably get a job as one of the counselors,” Lin suggests below me, and laughs in a quick burst.
“Hell no,” Jasper answers.
A long pause settles between them, and the wind grows louder outside, making the fire in the stove pop and crack. Drops of rain begin to drum against the roof.
I think they’ve fallen asleep, but then Jasper says, “It’s been two weeks.”
Below him, in the bottom bunk, Rhett snaps, “Shut up, man.”
“I just wonder where he is,” Jasper adds quickly.
“He’ll turn up,” Rhett answers, his voice biting. Sharp as tacks. Maybe I should say something, tell them I’m here—but I stay quiet, a knot twisted in my stomach.
“Can you blame him for not wanting to come back?” Lin asks below me. The room falls quiet. “I’d hide too.”
Jasper makes a sound. “No shit.”
Someone grumbles, someone else coughs, but no one speaks. And soon the cabin is filled with the sounds of sleep. Of mutters and snores, feet kicking at their footboards, blankets tugged up beneath chins to keep out the cold.
Wind squeals through cracks between the thick log walls. A never-ending scream. Long and hollow. A desperate sound.
The rain turns to sleet and then snow, collecting on the windowsills. The dark outside becomes darker.
But I lie perfectly still, listening to their breathing. They don’t know I’m back. That I’ve returned from the woods. I’d hide too, Lin said.
What happened that night, when the storm rattled the walls of the cabin, when my memory blots out?
I push back the blanket and move silently down the narrow ladder, then across the room. None of them stir. I could wake them, tell them I’m back, ask them what happened that night—ask them to fill in the parts I can’t remember. But the gnawing in my throat won’t let me. The sliver of pain thrumming inside my chest tells me I shouldn’t trust them.
Something happened that my mind won’t let me remember.
Something that is more darkness than light.
I can’t stay here, with them. There are only bad memories in this place.
I yank on my boots and open the door just wide enough to slip through. I glance back and see someone stirring, Rhett I think, his head lifted. But I pull the door shut before he can focus through the dark.
Before he can see me sneaking out.
NORA
Night comes swiftly in the mountains.
The sinking sun devoured by the snowy peaks. Eaten whole.
I carry in freshly cut logs from the woodshed and drop them beside the woodstove—enough to keep Suzy and me warm through the night. If they’ll actually light.
“You found all these things in the woods?” Suzy asks, standing at the darkened window, running a finger over the items that fascinate her placed along the windowsilclass="underline" silver candlesticks and a small, palm-sized figurine in the shape of a boy and girl dancing, the freckle-faced girl’s head inclined like she’s facing an imaginary sky. These found things I know by heart. The stories they tell.
Suzy spent most of the day holding her cell phone in the air, near windows, trying to find a signal—even after I told her she’d never get reception out here. Then she’d walk into the kitchen and pick up the landline, listening for a dial tone. But there was always nothing. Just the flat silence. Finally, she turned off her cell phone again to save the battery.
Now, with evening upon us, she seems defeated, her voice low and disheartened.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “During a full moon.”
She watches the snow eddy against the window. “People at school talk about you,” she says absently, like I’m not really listening. “They say you talk to the trees. And to the dead.” She says it in a way that makes me think she wants to believe it, so she can return to school when this is all over and say: I stayed in the house of Nora Walker and it’s all true.