Drink this. Eat that. Alice down the rabbit hole. Is that where I’ve returned from? Wonderland or Neverland? Or a place much worse? Filled with more monsters than sweet lemon cake and song-filled happy endings?
“You’re still at risk of hypothermia,” she adds, her lips pressed flat. “But you’re in better shape than I thought you’d be.”
I don’t feel like I’m in good shape. I feel like I’ll never be warm again. Like I can feel tree roots growing up the inside of my bones, and soon they’ll break me apart. Tear through my skin and push thorns from my eyes.
I feel cavernous. A husk of who I used to be.
I hold the mug of fragrant tea in my hands—craving something stronger. A stiff cup of black coffee, something with grit in it, thick like tar. But I take a sip of the tea without protest, wincing against the bitter taste. She watches me finish it, little freckles pinching together along the bridge of her nose—they aren’t year-round freckles, they’re scattered reminders of warmer seasons and days spent in the sun. She takes the empty mug from me, her gaze still cautious, rueful even, her fingers grazing mine. Pale white fingertips.
There is something stark about her, a wildness. That look you sometimes see when you’re driving down a back road at night and an animal crosses your path, its startled eyes caught in your headlights. That unbroken look, a creature who is more free than you could ever truly understand.
Again, a knot of fear begins to tighten inside me. She is the girl who lives across the lake. A girl to steer clear of, to avoid. She will hex you, charm you, toss you into the fire just to watch the skin peel away from your bones. But she doesn’t look at me with wickedness in her eyes, with a feral need to kill. She saved me and brought me back.
She holds the empty cup in her hand, and her mouth falls open, her gaze fixed on the floor beneath me.
I hear the odd splat of water hitting wood.
One after another.
She touches the sleeve of my coat and feels that it’s soaked through, as if I were made of ice and am now melting, making a puddle at my feet.
“We need to get you out of these wet clothes,” she tells me, a hint of urgency in her eyes. In her breathing.
I nod, my brain clicking forward on autopilot, the cold sapping any ability to protest.
I shrug out of my coat, my long-sleeve-shirt, and my jeans, right beside the fire. If it were any other day, if my mind were clear and sharp, I might feel strange standing bare chested in only my boxers, my body shivering, jaw clenching, in front of a girl I don’t know. But the cold is all I feel. All that’s left.
Her eyes sway over me, catching for a half second before she turns away. Pretending she wasn’t staring. Pretending her cheeks aren’t flushed.
I sit back on the chair and she drapes a heavy wool blanket from the couch over my shoulders, then hangs my wet clothes above the woodstove to dry. They have the scent of pine and wind and wilderness, a scent that’s hard to describe—unless you’ve trekked into the forest and returned with it clinging to your hair and the fibers of your clothes. It’s as if the woods followed me back, trailing me like campfire smoke.
“In the morning, I’ll take you back to the camp,” she says, facing the fire now, rubbing her own palms together. “They’ve been searching for you.”
“How long have I been gone?” I ask bluntly.
She chews on her lower lip, revealing a row of white teeth, and it feels like I’m seeing too much of her. Like I’m staring too closely, watching every shiver and shift of her dark eyes. “Since the storm,” she says at last, lowering her hands from the fire. “Two weeks.”
The room slips out of focus, wobbles briefly, then snaps back into place. Two weeks, two whole weeks. I shake my head. “That can’t be right,” I mutter, blinking to keep from tipping out of the chair. “I would have died out there if I’d been gone that long.”
“But you didn’t,” she answers, and she moves to the window, her reflection staring back: dark hair and dark moonless eyes. “Maybe the woods kept you safe.” I don’t understand what she means, and a gust of wind rattles the house, sending dust down from the overhead beams. “Everyone at camp thinks you tried to run away.”
I didn’t run away. But I don’t say this, because I can’t explain how I ended up in that dark forest. Where only bursts of light reached me through the never-ending dark, where trees swayed like long skeleton arms moving to some macabre ballet, the wind the only music that filled my ears. Always the wind. Cold and biting and cruel.
I blink away the memory, sharp as a nail, and let my eyes stray across the living room again—the woodstove is the only light flicking up the walls, illuminating a small kitchen, a narrow hallway, and a set of stairs near the back.
“The power’s out?” I ask.
She nods. “Landlines too. Cell phones have never worked this high in the mountains. Our only contacts with the outside world—with the nearest town—are landlines and the road. Both of which were knocked out in the storm.”
“So, we’re trapped?” I ask.
She shrugs. “The road will clear eventually. We’ve had bad winters like this before.” Her gaze slips away from mine, as if remembering. “Three years back, it was two months before the road thawed and the power flickered back on. We’re used to being on our own.” She pulls in her lower lip, like maybe she’s said too much, revealed a weak spot. “We’re used to the solitude,” she clarifies, her voice dissolving away, vanishing up into the high ceiling. “You’ll get used to it too,” she says, as if I’ll never leave these mountains. As if I’m one of the residents now, stuck here until they bury me in the ground.
A shiver rises up along my arms and I wonder: Maybe what they say about her is true—maybe I shouldn’t be here, in her home. A place of darkness and rot.
“You found all these things?” I ask, swallowing hard and diverting my attention to the magnifying glasses, the old perfume bottles, and the belt buckles lining the windowsill. My mind is pulled back to the stories I’ve heard, the stories the boys tell about how she goes into the dark woods—a place no one else will enter—where she finds lost things. How she is the only one who can, that she is made of the forest, that if you cut her open she will bleed sap just like a tree. How her family is cursed and damned and more dangerous than a winter storm. That her hair is made of stinging nettle and she grows talons through her fingernails.
“Yes,” she answers cautiously. “Just like I found you.”
A strange winding silence ropes itself around us, and it feels like we might choke on it. She steps closer to me and lifts her arm, brushing her palm across my forehead, her warm fingers against my skin—gauging my temperature. I feel myself draw in a breath and hold it there, trapped inside my lungs. “You need to sleep,” she says. “You might have a fever.”
Her dark brown eyes blink back at me, as dark as the woods, but she seems as if she’s looking into the past, a soft slant to her mouth that I can’t read. She smells like the wind, like rain on grass, and she can’t possibly be all the terrible things the boys say about her.
She can’t possibly steal boys from their bunks and bury them beneath the floorboards. She can’t possibly turn herself into a fanged beast and crash through the forest, knocking down trees. She can’t possibly be a witch who boils toads for breakfast and ties knots in her hair to bind curses that can’t be broken. She is just a girl.