“Welcome to this weird, beautiful day,” Ms. Jackson said, through my car radio, her gravelly smoker’s voice soothing as ever. “Seventy degrees out, sun shining like summertime. They’re saying it might get up to seventy-five. Doesn’t seem right, for the end of October. Global warming, beloveds. We’ll enjoy our nice days for as long as we can, I guess, until the rising seas swallow us up.”
Solomon and I sipped our McDonald’s coffee and picked at a pile of hash browns. Seven thirty in the morning and we were both exhausted, both looking bleary-eyed and rough. We’d driven around until McDonald’s opened, and then we’d found a quiet place with no people.
“We have to tell Connor,” I said. “We have to get him the hell out of there.”
Solomon’s eyes widened. “Oh my god,” he whispered. “Oh my god, Ash. You don’t think—”
“Hey,” I said, reaching for him.
“Oh my god,” he said again, and lowered his face into his hands. When he spoke again, I could hear how hard he was working to keep from crying. “All this time, I—”
“Mr. Barrett is a monster,” I said. “Okay? His behavior is not on you.”
“He always made me feel like I was less than Connor. Back then I kept thinking I was being punished for something. So I assumed Connor was safe. . . . What an idiot I—”
“Stop,” I said. It was so hard to think and speak rationally about something so irrational, something that made me feel so full of rage and nausea.
I took out my phone, dialed Connor’s number. No answer.
“It’s a school day,” I said, and laughed. “I forgot all about school.” I must have been way more exhausted than I’d initially thought, because I laughed a lot longer and louder than the joke deserved.
“Almost eight,” Solomon said. “So he’s probably at the high school already.”
“We’ll get him,” I said. “When school lets out, we’ll be waiting for him. Okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked out the window, to where the movie theater used to be. Everybody in town had a ton of happy memories of that place. I felt something die inside when it closed two years ago. “Can we go over to the old Greenport School?”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re missing your purple dinosaur?”
“Yeah.”
I let him eat the last hash brown, then started up the car. Outside the McDonald’s, three mummies stood around looking bored.
“What are those?” I asked Solomon.
“Mummies,” he said, like that was totally normal.
I watched them. Waited for the sun to come out from behind a cloud and reveal them as nothing more than our own harmless local meth heads.
Was I losing my mind? Was the trauma of learning what had happened to Solomon so extreme that my hold on reality had been broken? Was I falling under the spell of his world?
When we got to the Greenport School, four girls our age were sitting on skateboards and smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. I didn’t know them, though they looked familiar in that way everyone does in a small town.
“Hey, Solomon,” one of them said. “You got your guitar today? Gonna play us something?”
“Nah, sorry,” he said.
I waved awkwardly. So did they.
His allosaurus awaited us, looking rough. Paint mostly peeled off, rusted over everywhere. But he hugged her like she was the prettiest sight he’d ever seen.
I lay on my back on the gravel beside him. I tried to explain Sheffield’s Induction Ceremony. I wasn’t sure why. Exhaustion, mostly. My brain wasn’t working right. Made me talk a mile a minute. But then Solomon said, “He’s a very good student.”
“Who’s a student?”
“Sheffield. He’s like Mr. Barrett’s, what do you call it? Protégé. His power comes from him. Sheffield is nothing without Mr. Barrett, but it doesn’t go both ways. Why the hell is he still on the team if he doesn’t play anymore? Mr. Barrett probably sees something of himself in him.”
I sat up suddenly. He was right, of course.
Maybe there was nothing I could do about Mr. Barrett. Maybe he was too big and too well-respected for me and Solomon to hold him accountable.
But Sheffield . . .
I wasn’t sure how, yet, but Sheffield was the weak link we could use to break the chain.
“I need to get that film developed,” I said. “From the football team shoot. Want to come?”
Solomon stared off into the woods. Sound came, from a little transistor radio he had been carrying in his back pocket.
“What a beautiful day for Halloween,” Ms. Jackson said. “My favorite holiday of the year.”
“Solomon?” I asked, but if he heard me at all, he did not respond. I looked off to where he was staring, as if there might be something there to explain where he’d gone.
The woods had closed in on the school in the years since it shut down, tall grasses and shrubs and vines inching forward to encircle it. That ramshackle forest cut like a river through the whole town, or rather the town had been carved into the woods. Trailer parks and rows of identical duplexes and gorgeous old mansions all nestled in it.
“I used to be so scared of the woods,” I said. “Anything at all could come out of them.”
“Only animals,” Solomon whispered, and it was like he wasn’t really there. “The real monsters—they’re all human.”