It started as a game. Evy’s game, because, looking back on it, we were always playing Evy’s games.
Evy, “with long e’s, please,” had been my best friend since we were born—in the same week, in the same hospital. She would say, “We were meant to be best friends, Les. It was destined.”
“Destined” was one of Evy’s favorite words.
We weren’t supposed to be born on the same day, but Evy was eager. From day one, her mom said, Evy never did have any patience.
Evy wasn’t just born first; she grew up faster than me. She claimed her first boyfriend in second grade. By the time we were in middle school, she’d already had at least one kind of sex with two guys—at summer camp though, so people at home didn’t talk.
She told me because she trusted me and “liked me best.”
Other girls in our class, girls who got along with boys, they split off, formed an unbreakable ring with a sharp, glittering edge. They armed themselves with contact lenses, charm bracelets, highlights, and tinted lip gloss (because “lipstick is trashy”).
But Evy stuck with me. Evy gave the rest of them a big F-you, showing up with her renegade hair that she would never cut or dye in ropey braids and tumbling curls, the definition of romantic. She edged out the sweetness with a pair of chunky, vintage glasses that she didn’t even need and a smack of hot-pink lipstick right before it was “in.”
Evy smacked her lips, and the boys went, “Oh.”
The boys were always going “Oh” when Evy looked their way.
The night the game started, we were sitting on Evy’s roof outside her bedroom window. “It’s a teenybopper TV drama cliché,” Evy liked to say of her perch, “but there’s a reason for it. This is the only place on this whole lot where we’re taller than what’s going on inside.”
I liked it because we could see the stars.
On that night they were extra sharp, crisp and bright, and the chill in the air seemed to match. We shivered in tank tops because earlier that day, when the sun was hot, we’d gone bike riding down to the village and back for no reason, just to ride.
We’d seen some guys from our class there, and Evy pushed me toward Ben, Ben of the wide smile and sideburns and paws like a bear. She’d stop pushing me if I asked her, but here we were starting tenth grade, and I’d never had a kiss, much less a boyfriend. It’s about time, I’d been thinking lately, and I didn’t mind Evy pushing me so much with Ben. The sun warmed my face, but not as much as the heat pulsing up through my skin to flirt with the cool breeze. When I wiped a slick of sweat, my cheeks burned hot to my touch.
“Hey, you’ve got a leaf,” Ben said, and he’d reached into the sweaty mess of my hair to lift it out.
Later on, at Evy’s, the night seemed to suck the last summer warmth from the air. I lay back on the roof to absorb what heat the shingles had stored.
“It’s almost fall,” I said. “Best time for witches.”
“You are too weird,” Evy said, but she didn’t mean it. She liked me that way.
“Okay, so here’s the game,” Evy said. “Every guy is either a vampire or a werewolf. Our job is to decide which.”
“How can you tell the difference?”
“It’s something you feel,” Evy said. “Take Ben, for example. Ben is clearly a werewolf.”
“Why?”
“Well, he’s stocky for one thing, like he’s compact. There’s some muscle in there.”
“I thought you said it was a feeling.”
“Yeah, but the feeling comes from a lot of things. . . . Okay, and his smile. He smiles all the time, and it’s warm, like he’s not hiding anything.”
“Don’t werewolves have something to hide?”
“Not like vampires. I mean, maybe if he were an actual werewolf, he’d have something to hide, but I’m talking essence. A vibe. A werewolf isn’t in control of what happens to him. The monster comes out and takes over, but the rest of the time he’s a regular, warm-and-fuzzy guy, like a really sweet dog.”
“So you’re calling Ben a dog?”
“No, Ben’s hot, but he’s also sweet.”
“Okay, so who’s a vampire?”
She thought for a second. “Malcolm. Malcolm Sweeney is a vampire.”
Evy had kept a thing going with Malcolm Sweeney for a solid three months, which for Evy was kind of a long time. She ended it, but I couldn’t ever tell if she was really done with him.
“Okay, so being a vampire is a bad thing?”
“No. No, not at all. I hooked up with him, didn’t I?”
Evy luxuriated—that’s the only word for it—rose up with her knees to the side, mermaid-style, and stretched her arms out in all directions, rolling her wrists so her hands did a grasping dance against the black sky. For a second, it looked like she was catching stars.
“But you get the vampire vibe,” she said.
I did. Malcolm was thin and sleek with thick, black hair that seemed immune to mussing. “His mom is half Japanese,” Evy told me once, supremely delighted to possess the secret of Malcolm’s hair.
Malcolm was nice enough, but there was an edge to him, like a constant, electrical hum. Evy pushed his buttons, but he rarely lashed out. Instead, the hum went up a few watts, Malcolm’s smile tightened, and he seemed to file the slight away, to bring out and exploit at a later date.
That was part of why it never really clicked between Evy and Malcolm. She liked immediate feedback, a pot boiling over. Malcolm simmered.
So Malcolm was a vampire, “because he’s calculating,” Evy said. “He doesn’t act on impulse. A vampire is all about control.”
“Is he draining?” I asked, fishing, and Evy took the bait, lying down beside me so close that the weight of her hair tugged against mine.
“Malcolm was exhausting,” she offered, a smirk in her voice. “He wasn’t happy with me how I am. He acted like he was, but he wasn’t. It’s that control thing again.”
When Evy had first started seeing Malcolm, I’d been jealous—a little. Not that I would ever let a guy come between me and Evy, but Malcolm . . . I sat behind him all last year in History, where Mr. Reyes taught by writing notes on the board for us to copy. Because I was fast at copying things down, I had a lot of time to study the way the light hit Malcolm’s hair—the color of the blackest coffee, I decided, or dark chocolate, shining sky white in a shaft of sun.
But all that was dumb because a guy like Malcolm wouldn’t be interested in a girl like me. In books, guys like Malcolm notice what’s inside, what’s underneath, but in real life they mostly just hook up with girls like Evy.
When they started dating, I’d been happy for them. I wrote it in my diary: “I’m happy for Evy. She should have a good guy who loves her. And if I care about Malcolm at all, I should be happy that he has Evy. She’s the best present I could give him.”
“Give him,” like I’d made it all happen.
I meant I was giving her up. Giving up so much of Evy to Malcolm was a sacrifice, one I told myself I was happy to make if that was what Evy needed.
“Okay, so Malcolm’s a vampire,” I said, “but what about guys who don’t fit either category?”
“They all do, more or less,” Evy said.
“Jamal.”
“Werewolf. Have you seen him wrestle?”
“So werewolves are good at sports?”
“It’s an animal thing. Vampires can be strong, very strong, but they’re not so prone to . . . let it all go. It helps if you think about what they would be like in bed.”
“Okay, Ronald Hamm,” I said, because it was impossible to picture Ronald in bed. Ronald wasn’t a vampire or a werewolf. Ronald, if anything, was a goblin, at best a hobbit.
“Vampire,” Evy said, like I was stupid for even asking.
“Okay, now I really don’t get it.” If I’d had to pick, I would have put Ronald as werewolf because he was hairy: fuzz on his upper lip, a furry mole on his cheek, a thick carpet of arm hair.
“Think about how he watches people,” Evy said, “like he’s stalking them. How he hangs back. And he’s such a cold fish. A werewolf has some heat to him. Remember, vampires are technically dead.”
“Vampires are like fish,” I said, picturing Ronald flopping around on the deck of a boat.
“Not all of them, but that’s the kind of vamp that Ronald is.”
I was getting it.
“Devon Washington,” she said.
“Vamp.”
“That’s right. Tytus Ronin.”
“Werewolf,” we both said together.
Over the next few days, we went through all the guys in our class with few disagreements. One time I even convinced Evy she was wrong. Erik Strom, she agreed with me, seemed like a werewolf on the face of things, but it was all an act. Once he lured a girl in with his easygoing front, he would suck her dry.
By the time school was back, we had “won” the game by coming to a decision on every guy in school. But then the Marsh boys came to town.
The Marsh boys were brothers, one tall, one strong, and both of them handsome.
Jack Marsh, the tall one, wore cowboy boots under old jeans that actually fit him and button-down shirts. “He can dress,” Evy said.
He could do a lot of things, it turned out.
He could write—he shared a poem in English class that had Celie Vonn calling him “like the next Jack Kerchack.” We had to read On the Road over summer break, so I’m guessing she meant Kerouac.
He could swim. “He’s like a goddamn red snapper,” Alec Wernick said when Jack joined the swimming team. “It’s like he doesn’t even have to breathe.”
And Jack Marsh could charm the pants off anyone. He seemed quiet at first, but given the right opening, he’d come out with something surprising—sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, but always sharp.
Kayla, the queen of lip gloss and charm bracelets, decided to make Jack her guy. She announced it the first day he showed up at school. And he was nice to her, too nice, probably, if he didn’t mean for it to go anywhere.
Once, in the student lounge, Evy and I were talking with the Marsh boys—well, mostly Evy was talking, but I was there too—when Kayla came up, tugged at the flaps of Jack’s open vest, and said, “Jack, what does a girl have to do to get your attention?”
“You’ve got it,” he said, locking eyes with her in a way that made me nervous, but all the while disentangling himself from the creeping vines her arms had become. She tried to hang on, but he picked her up by the waist and set her down on the other side of our tight circle. The epitome of a mixed message.
I wasn’t sure where Jack stood on Kayla, but as soon as she was gone, he started scratching himself and said, “Wait, was that a girl or a rash?”
Evy laughed like a bell falling down stairs, and Jack smiled, but not with his lips. Those were parted, a promise.
“Jack Marsh,” she would tell me that night as we stirred up a potful of hot, gooey marshmallow crisps, “is a vampire.”
Hap Marsh had the same straight nose as Jack, the same winking eyes, but his “vibe” was entirely different. While Jack stayed aloof, Hap would grapple and get in your face, push your buttons, and force you to dance. Jack stayed cool, watching his brother with amusement, while Hap bounced and juked from side to side, lashing out in anger one second and laughing it off the next.
On the day that the game took a turn, Hap and Evy swing-danced in the senior parking lot just as school was letting out, holding up traffic. People honked, especially Frannie Yarborough in her fancy four-wheel drive, Daddy’s-sorry-for-something-big, monster SUV, but Hap stepped on Frannie’s front bumper and pulled Evy up past him and onto the hood. She squealed, kicked off her shoes, and kept dancing. The honks—except for Frannie’s—turned to rhythmic toots of approval. When Hap swung Evy down and dipped her with a low, swooping lunge, at least ten seniors jumped from their cars to hoot and cheer.
“Hap Marsh,” said Evy that night as she painted little monsters of her own design on each one of my toes, “is a werewolf.”
“Okay, so which one do you like?” I asked, and Evy looked up from my toes with a smirk. “Evy . . .”
“Do I have to choose?”
I loved Evy, but when it came to boys, she could be mean.
Like, with Malcolm. I saw him after Evy dropped him flat, how he wandered around, stunned and put down, for weeks. I tried not to stare, to rub it in—he would know that I knew, since I was Evy’s friend—but I ran into him once in the halls, walked right around a corner and into him so I couldn’t get away fast enough.
He put his hands on my shoulders to steady me, and when I started to duck away, he tightened his grip and said, “Wait, Les, don’t go.”
For a millisecond, the thought teased me that he was going to say, “You were the one, Les, not Evy. I got all mixed up. You were the one.”
But he just said, “What’s wrong with her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Evy. Why is she like that? So cold?”
Evy wasn’t cold—not my Evy, not to me. My tongue felt thick in my mouth, my lips dull. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I’d said, twisting out of his grasp.
I took my toes back from Evy. “Watch out,” she said, “or you’ll smudge my manticore.”
The monster on my left big toe looked more like the Blob to me, but I knew better than to complain.
“I would hate to see the Marsh boys end up like Malcolm,” I said, “or worse, end up fighting each other.”
“Wouldn’t that be a howl,” Evy said, “no pun intended, if I got them to fight over me? Wait! That’s the new game.”
“That’s in stories,” I said. “Nobody really wants that. That’s not a good thing to want.”
“Listen to you,” Evy said, “all protective. Which one do you like?”
To tell the truth, neither one of the Marsh boys really did it for me.
Or maybe that’s a lie. . . . Maybe they did, both of them, but that only magnified my unease. There was something too dead-on about them. They were the opposite of good on paper. They were good in the flesh, right here and now, but something about them felt . . . off.
One night, Evy and I were supposed to meet up for movies and “margaritas”—Evy’s mom mixed them special for us with “barely enough tequila to start a fire” (though Evy often spiked ours with more after her mom’s full-strength fire-starters knocked her out for the night).
I showed up at Evy’s, and the house was dark, no one home. Even the streetlamp on the corner of Evy’s lot was out.
My feet—one poised on my bike pedal, the other on the pavement—weighed like anchors, incapable of movement, while the rest of me might float away. What if something had happened to Evy? To her mom and whoever her mom’s guy of the month was? What if Evy’s dad had come back in town and gone into “one of his fits,” as Evy’s mom called them?
A fast heartbeat should heat a person up, right, but mine seemed to press all my blood into a tight ball of fear in my chest, leaving nothing to warm the rest of me. Cold nausea rolled through me.
Then I saw the shadows on the lawn. Their shapes, so different one from the other, gave them away: the Marsh boys, standing side by side. Jack slouched with his hand in his pocket, and Hap had his arms folded back behind his head like he was stretching.
They didn’t move or speak, and I thought about pedaling—fast, all my weight—not back toward my own neighborhood, which would mean going up a mild hill, but down, past Evy’s place, and on and on, too fast to catch.
That’s when Jack said, “Hi, Les,” and the spell broke. I started to shake, which was actually an improvement, a release.
“Hi,” I said, swallowing my silly fear, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Nice bike,” Hap said, and I swung my leg over the bar and let the bike fall to the lawn like always. I stepped toward them, the damp grass tickling and chilling my ankles beneath my capri pants.
“What’s with the lights?” I asked.
Hap shrugged. “There’s a blown transformer or something.”
“Maybe a tree took down a line,” Jack said, but it sounded like the kind of thing a person is supposed to say when the power goes out, not a real thing he thought might have happened.
“Where’s Evy?”
They both shrugged, and Hap said, “Beats me. We’ve been waiting half an hour or more.” He stubbed his toe into the lawn, kicking up a spray of dirt and grass, to show what he thought about that.
“Okay, well, she was supposed to hang out with me tonight.”
“Us too,” Hap said.
Jack smiled in his cool way. “She said you wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “No, that’s great.” But I didn’t believe my own voice, so why should they?
“Let’s wait on the roof,” Jack said. “She’ll love that.”
“On the roof?” My words were slow, dumb, because part of me didn’t want to catch up.
“Yeah, we hang out up there sometimes,” Jack said.
“Just the three of us,” said Hap.
I wanted to ask, When? Why, without me? Say, that’s impossible, because Evy and I were together almost every night, so what, had they been showing up after I left, keeping Evy up and having fun without me?
She’d looked wan over the past few weeks. She’d lost something, a little weight maybe, so that her skin hugged the bones of her face with a translucent sheen, and some of her Evy, her spark, was gone. I’d thought her mom might be keeping her up nights, and that she didn’t want to talk about it because . . . I imagined all sorts of reasons why.
The door creaked open behind the boys. Evy stood in the foyer, backlit by a single lamp. Her pale nightgown picked up the light and let it through, so we could see the shape of her. She seemed to glow.
“Evy?” I heard myself say because I couldn’t be sure for a second who or what she was. Stupid, but that’s what was there.
“What are you all doing having fun without me?” she said.
Evy flicked on the area lights. I blinked against their harshness, but everything looked more itself in the light. The sky overhead was cloudy, ready to drop, so of course it blocked out the stars. The dead streetlamp was just dead.
“You okay?” Hap said, taking my arm. I actually leaned on him a little as we walked up the front steps. He burned hot, like a furnace, and that felt nice against the shivers that had taken over me. I let his hand at my back push me up and inside. Hap followed me through the door and held it open for Jack, who slipped through and closed it behind him.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” I whispered to Evy as I pulled away from Hap’s sphere to stand beside her.
She looked down at her nightgown. “I thought it might work as a dress,” she said, and when I didn’t laugh or smile, she got irritated. “Kidding.” Her voice sounded hoarse, and the flesh under her eyes looked almost bruised. She covered a yawn. “I was sleepy,” she said, “so I took a nap. Is that allowed?”
“The house was so dark, I thought something was wrong.”
“Mom went out with some girlfriends she met at the club. She forgot to turn the lights on, or she left before the sun went down? I don’t know.”
“How long were you asleep?”
“Worrywart,” she said, and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, but she didn’t answer me.
That night, Evy never changed out of her nightgown. She lounged, held court while the Marsh boys passed an enormous bottle of Jim Beam back and forth between them—Hap had pulled it out of his backpack like that was a normal thing to carry around. Evy and I took what she called “lady sips” from a pair of tiny juice glasses. “Drinking straight from the bottle’s a recipe for date rape,” she deadpanned, and Hap laughed so hard he choked.
We were all such good friends, we could joke about rape?
Jack pursed his lips as if he at least found Evy’s joke distasteful—maybe because it’d force him to think twice about trying to make something happen between them that night.
Nothing happened, I don’t think.
I slept over, sharing Evy’s bed, and the Marsh boys crashed on the sofa and chair in the little sitting room that made up what Evy called her “basement suite.”
Once during the night, I woke up cold. The bed was empty, covers kicked to the floor, and the high window beside Evy’s bed was open, letting chilly air wash in.
“Evy?” I whispered toward the dark opening that led to the sitting room, wanting to get up and check if she was there, but wanting more not to walk in on Evy and one of the Marsh boys in a private moment.
Maybe she had taken one of them outside, but then why bother with the window? Evy’s mom probably hadn’t even come home, and she wouldn’t hear Evy walking out the front door anyway—probably wouldn’t even hear if Evy set off the alarm.
I was about to climb out of bed, to shut the window, to search for her—I wasn’t sure—when Evy appeared in the archway that led to the sitting room.
“What?” she said, a reproach.
“I woke up and you weren’t here.”
“Can’t a person use the bathroom?” Evy said, sounding irritated again. Evy never got irritated with me. She shambled over to the window, stood on the chair that I only then noticed had been pushed up below it, and used all her weight to tug the window shut.
Then she rolled back in beside me and pulled the comforter up over both of us. “Don’t fret, Les. All is well.”
The way she said it suggested I knew what to fret about, that I knew what might not be “all well,” but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her.
As soon as Evy was back in the bed, I didn’t want the comforter. She brought so much body heat of her own I actually started sweating, but when her foot brushed against my leg, one of those awkward touches you’re not supposed to mention when you’re sharing a bed with a friend, her skin was ice-cold, and I shivered again. Was I getting sick?
I wanted to look in the room past the arch, to see if the Marsh boys were still there. One, or both of them?
Way off in the woods, far below Evy’s house, something howled.
Another time, several weeks later, the Marsh boys showed up at my house.
It was a Saturday, stormy and leaden, the occasional shudder of thunder and lightning the only thing bringing life to the gray day. Evy had said we could hang out later but she had to run errands with her mom in the afternoon. I wasn’t expecting company.
I was reading, a paranormal romance, the kind Evy and I both loved but had issues with too. Why were the girls always so eager to give up all their power to the guys? Why were the sexiest parts the ones where the guys didn’t listen to what the girls said they wanted, where they took control?
I’d been having dreams, dreams that Evy said were about sex. “If you do it,” she said, “you won’t be so scared of it. Everything will calm down.”
But the dreams didn’t seem to be about sex to me. They seemed to be about death.
“Same thing,” Evy said. “Haven’t you ever heard of le petit mort? It’s an orgasm, in French: ‘little death.’”
But there wasn’t anything orgasmic in my dreams about snakes and wolves.
In one, I found my lawn covered in writhing snakes—too many to step around, as if the blades of grass themselves had turned into serpents, each one eager to wrap around my ankle and poison me.
In another, a pack of wolves chased me to a clearing in a thick wood. They were starving, saliva dripping from their mouths. In waking life, I loved wolves—but these saw me as food.
I’d wake up kicking at my sheets when they lunged.
On that gray afternoon, I’d reached a scary part in my book, a part where the heroine was about to enter the lair of the vampire who might have a secret reason to want her dead, or in bed—in these books the two did seem to go together—when the hand slammed against the window behind my head.
I dropped the book and shrieked, actually shrieked, but what followed was laughter: Hap’s crowing and musical, Jack’s sharp and gasping.
My little Norwich terrier, Grizzbee, came running and barking, his hair raised.
I hid my book under a pillow, hoping they hadn’t been reading over my shoulder at the window, and tried to calm Grizzbee down.
They were waving and walking over to the door of the den like they took it for granted that I would move to let them in, like it was the most normal thing for them to be visiting. Could it be possible we’d made plans and I’d forgotten? No, of course not. Making plans with the Marsh boys—I’d remember that.
When I opened the door, Grizzbee growled and skittered from side to side. “I’m sorry, I— He’s usually friendly.”
Hap reached for Grizzbee, who snapped at his hand.
“Grizzbee! No!” I said, and told them to hang on. I collected his spasmodic little body, dumped him in the laundry room, and shut the door, but he didn’t stop barking.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling self-conscious and irritated.
They were both drenched, dripping on the mat on the back porch.
Hap said, “What a cutie,” pointing toward Grizzbee’s quieter but no less insistent grumbles, and stepped inside. I had to back up to make way.
“Hap,” Jack said, “mind your manners,” but he said it like it was a joke between them, Jack being the civilized side of their comic duo. “May we come in?” he said to me apologetically.
“Of course. Come on in.”
Jack bowed his head toward me as he crossed the threshold, and I said, “Let me get you a couple of towels. What did you do, walk here?”
“We did actually,” Hap said. “We were just over at Evy’s.”
I’d gone back into the laundry room to grab a couple of clean towels and felt lucky they couldn’t see my face when I said, “I thought she was out with her mom,” as casually as I could manage. Hap laughed.
As I handed him his towel, Jack, kinder but no more apologetic, shrugged. “You know Evy, always changing her plans.”
I wanted to ask, “Is one of you two seeing her? And which one?” but I couldn’t find the guts to do it. Instead I said, “How is she?”
“Evy’s tired,” Jack said, “very tired.”
I watched them towel off. Jack politely folded his towel up under him before sitting on the couch. Hap dropped his in a heap beside him as he sat cross-legged on the floor.
“Do you think she’s okay?” I said. “I mean, do you think she’s sick or something? She’s been tired so much lately.”
“I guess that’s partly our fault,” Jack said.
“Lot of late nights,” said Hap.
“Are you . . . What do you guys do, late at night?”
“What don’t we do?” Hap said, but it was bravado, a joke.
“You want to join us?” Jack said.
My heart thudded because I didn’t know what he was asking. He held my eyes for the longest time, and I found it hard to look away. “I don’t think so.” I tried to keep my voice light. “I never was very good at staying up late.”
“Shame,” Hap said. “We love company.”
Jack uncrossed his legs and recrossed them in the opposite direction with the grace of an old-timey dancer. He could be from White Christmas or something, one of those old movies where grown men dance all the time and it seems totally normal.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Jack asked.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I looked to Hap, but he was thumbing through one of my mom’s coffee-table books, completely disinterested.
“I don’t,” I said. “I mean, if I did, you would have met him. Through Evy. Right?”
“Right. Maybe,” Jack said, but it felt dismissive, like I wasn’t important enough for anyone, even Evy, to track my relationship status. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“Are you and Evy . . . ?” I didn’t know how not to ask it, even though I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted to hear. If he said no, the suggestion of our mutual availability would loom awkwardly between us, but if he said yes, I would look like a fool for not knowing sooner. “Are you . . . seeing Evy?”
Jack seemed more Evy’s type than Hap, even though she and Hap had been more physical at school.
Jack shrugged. “Depends on what you mean by ‘see.’ I ‘see’ you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Evy’s not the kind of girl to let a guy in, you know?”
“She’s a tough nut to crack,” Hap said, like this was something they’d discussed before.
“But . . . you’re hanging out with her all the time. I mean, if she were going to be with anyone, don’t you think it would be one of you two?”
I felt disloyal, having this conversation with them, but I wanted to know what they thought, what agenda they had around Evy.
“Evy’s not as fun as she used to be,” Hap said, looking at Jack.
“She’s tired all the time,” Jack said, as if we hadn’t covered this mere minutes earlier. “I wonder if she’s anemic?” He smirked.
And I knew. I was right.
All the things that I feared—I was right.
“She’s definitely changed,” Hap said, looking me in the eye. “Something’s . . . shifted.”
My heart seemed to press into my belly like it wanted to hide.
“I’m not sure you guys should be here,” I said, trying to keep things light. I wanted to yank them to standing and shove them out the door, but I couldn’t let them see my fear. “Just because . . . my mom and dad, they don’t let me have guests when they’re not home . . . especially guys.”
“Smart parents,” Jack said.
“You never know with guys,” Hap said.
I felt sick and wanted to throw up. I could reach the bathroom, I thought—excuse myself to go, then lock myself in. They would figure it out, try to get in maybe, tell me I was being silly, try to coax me out, but they’d give up eventually.
I mean, people knew them. They lived here, were known. They wouldn’t break down the door.
“I’m . . . I should get back to reading,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do.”
Jack was in front of me in a blink, peering down.
“What are you reading, Les?” he asked. His lips parted, so I could see his teeth. His canine teeth, they weren’t anything to be afraid of, perfectly normal, but the tilt of his head, his eyes on my throat . . .
I stepped back, and he didn’t follow. Just watched me retreat from him. “Never mind,” I said.
Hap stood and shook himself, stretched in every direction. From the laundry room, Grizzbee’s growl thickened.
“It’s a full moon tonight,” he said. “Think we’ll be able to see it through the clouds?”
“Evy’s coming out with us,” Jack said. “She’s just resting up first. What’s wrong, Les? Won’t you come?”
He was moving toward the door, and the weird charge that had hung in the air fizzled. This was Jack, a guy from school, a kind-of friend. I’d been reading too many scary novels.
I didn’t see Evy that night. She didn’t call.
I tried to let it go.
I’d been invited. I knew where she was. Who she was with.
I called her at two p.m. on Sunday. She answered but sounded dead tired.
“Did I wake you up?” I asked.
“Yeah.” I heard a smile in her voice. “But I was up late. Les, you should have come.”
“Where did you go?”
“Well, we started off down by the Thorn Bridge.” That was an old covered bridge that stood on spindly legs over Thorn Creek, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere. “But we went everywhere,” Evy said.
“I miss you,” I said, before I could catch myself.
“Oh, Les, honey, I miss you too, but you don’t have to miss me. Just come with me.”
“You’re changing, Evy.”
With a low, musing hum, she laughed.
“I told the Marsh boys about our game,” she said. “Vampires and werewolves, I mean, not my plan to make them fight over me. That was a no-go. Nothing’s coming between those two. Anyway, they thought it was funny. They said there were two types of girls.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. And that you and I were each a type, but they wouldn’t say who was which.”
I almost didn’t want to know. Almost. “What were the types?”
“Well, some girls, they said, are witches, and some girls are ghosts.”
Witches, I got. That was a female archetype, but . . . “Ghosts?”
“The woman in white, haunting your dreams, the banshee, the wraith.”
“Okay, but what about fairies, or mermaids, or . . .”
“Or warlocks or Frankensteins . . . it’s no fun to muddle it up. Don’t overthink. It’s just a game.”
“Okay,” I said, “so which one am I?”
I was the ghost, of course, the invisible one who doesn’t belong in their world. Insubstantial and innocent, too innocent to keep up with Evy.
Of course, ghosts have one more special trait, and thinking about that gave me chills. Ghosts are dead.
“They won’t tell me who’s who,” Evy repeated, “but Les, it’s so cute and dumb. They think this game’s hilarious.”
So did we, I wanted to say, only weeks ago. We loved our game.
“Do you want to hang out later?” I asked, the sickness in my gut already telling me the answer.
“Oh, Les, we’re going out again tonight. The moon’s past full, but last night was so cloudy. Tonight should be bright, bright.”
“What about school?” I said. “Won’t you be exhausted on Monday?”
“I’ll be tired in the daytime, but at night, once the sun goes down, I can’t sleep even if I want to. It’s the strangest thing.”
Yes.
“I want to be outside. I want to drink up the night. I want to run.”
I felt like I’d swallowed a fist, like I needed to vomit, but if I tried I would choke.
“All right, Evy, I . . . I’m sorry, I think I should go.”
“Les, don’t be mad with me. I want to include you. I still love you best.”
“I believe you. I just . . . don’t feel well.”
“Les, listen,” she said. “Come with us once. You’ll feel so free. You’ll—”
“I’m sorry, Evy. I can’t talk right now.”
I hung up on my friend, let her go.
I made it halfway down the hall before my breakfast came up.
Evy kept coming to school, mostly.
She came late a lot, and she traded the chunky eyeglasses she didn’t need for oversized sixties sunglasses that covered half her face.
She looked pale and vibrant at the same time. As she grew thinner, her skin took on a sheen, especially at her cheeks and her brow, where it stretched tight and close to the bone.
She still sought me out, stuck close to me, but she wasn’t with me. Normally, Evy took the lead between the two of us, but now she deferred to me.
“Do you want to take lunch outside?” I asked one day.
“Whatever you want,” Evy said. “Is it cold out?”
We were standing outside, on the lawn between the main building and specials.
“What do you mean?”
“Is it warm enough for eating outside? I can’t tell.”
“Do you feel warm enough?”
She was wearing a bulky wool sweater over one of her long, flowing dresses.
“This morning, I felt shivery, but when I checked the thermostat, it was set to seventy-three. And in Ms. Michaelson’s class, I got so hot, I had to excuse myself and splash water on my face from the fountain.”
“Are you sick?” I asked, knowing the answer was yes. My best friend was sick, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Evy shrugged.
“Well, how do you feel now?”
“I think I feel normal. I keep going back and forth.”
“Then let’s eat outside, and if you need to go inside we can.”
She nodded, her eyes hidden behind the big frames, and waited for me to lead the way to the lunchroom. It was a bit like being friends with a wagon.
We started eating with the Marsh boys, just the four of us, because Evy had gotten too strange to deal with other people, and because I had to accept that if I wanted Evy’s friendship, the Marsh boys came with it.
“She’s different with you,” I said as the four of us sat at lunch. We were inside because October had taken a turn for the frigid.
Evy sat nursing a cup of hot tea, a plate of fresh fruit in front of her, untouched. I’d gotten used to talking about her in her presence. If she noticed, she didn’t seem to mind.
Hap smiled across the table at Evy. “She’s going through a strange time,” he said, “but yes, she’s different at night. She wakes up.”
“You’re a good friend,” Jack said, “to stand by her.”
I wasn’t sure about that. I knew as far as Jack was concerned, I’d be a better friend if I joined her, but we’d all agreed that wasn’t going to happen.
The strangest thing was that as Evy faded, something in me began to shift as well. For the longest time, I didn’t trust myself with myself. I needed Evy beside me, pushing me, holding me up. But with Evy waning, I thrived.
A new energy filled me from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair. It pulsed out through my fingertips: life. I wouldn’t always have it, but today, this minute, I had it in spades, enough to share. It radiated out of me. Anybody I deigned to touch would expand with it, just as I had.
I needed to share it, to float with it, to let it sail out of me and into another soul.
“You’re so transparent,” Jack said, and I jolted back to the table.
My eyes, and my thoughts, had flown across the lunchroom . . . to Ben. He was sitting among a group of kids I liked—at a table where Evy and I might have sat before.
If I went up to him now, feeling the way I felt, he’d be mine.
“Go for it,” Hap said. “You want to.”
I looked to Evy. “Do you mind?” I asked.
She picked up a piece of melon, sniffed at it, set it back down.
“Do you mind”—I waited for her to look at me—“if I leave the table?” Leave you here with them? But I knew the answer. She was with them all the time now.
Evy looked toward Ben, and her lips tipped up in a little smile. “I always thought you should go for him,” she said, and looked back at me, “but I was wrong about him being a werewolf.”
Hap snorted into his hand.
“You think he’s a vampire?”
Jack looked to the ceiling.
“No,” Evy said, “he’s just Ben.”
I pushed my seat back, leaving my tray—let Jack clear it—and crossed the space between tables in a few long strides.
The others at the table looked up at me in surprise, but Ben smiled. “Had enough of the Marsh boys?” he asked.
“You could say that,” I said, and I pulled out a chair and sat down.
Ben offered me a ride home that day, and I took it. Normally I would ride with Evy, but Evy couldn’t drive anymore, not in the daytime anyway. I’d been biking because carpooling with the Marsh boys and Evy felt too weird.
They were hers. She was theirs. I didn’t even think about whether she was seeing one of them anymore. It was more like they were family.
And I was the embarrassing in-law Evy couldn’t quite shed.
And yet, with Evy so . . . changed . . . I was the one they talked to, joked with. I was their daytime friend.
It felt like a betrayal of Evy, in a way, that I wasn’t doing more, trying harder, to help her.
Ben had an ancient car called Gracie—“She was my granddad’s,” he said. “He left her to me so my parents wouldn’t junk her.” She whinnied a little on hills, so Ben would pat her on the dashboard and say, “Come on, Gracie, you can do it. Don’t give up on me now.” But she got the job done.
“I like her,” I said.
“You just passed the first test.” Ben turned to flash me a smile. He had a dimple in his chin, as if a sculptor had pressed a thumb there for a finishing touch. I wanted to see how my thumb fit.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” I said, surprising myself.
“Okay,” Ben said easily, “where do you want to go?”
I wanted someplace where we’d be all alone, someplace that felt apart from every place else.
“The Thorn Bridge,” I said.
He looked at me sideways, and I worried for a second that I’d thrown him. The Thorn Bridge had a reputation for being a place where people drank and hooked up, a place where you could get away with a party and no one for miles around could hear.
It was too deep in the woods, in an unincorporated part of town, for the police to bother with it, and if they ever decided to patrol, it’d be easy to hear them coming a mile away.
“Do you like that place?” he asked. A charged question.
“I like how old it is. I’ve only been there once or twice, with Evy,” I said. “We took pictures. In the daytime.”
He exhaled and smiled again. Oh God. For a second, Ben Grable thought I was too wild for him.
“What’s going on with Evy?” he asked, and I stiffened. “Is she on drugs or something?”
When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “God, that was rude, Les, I’m sorry. I don’t really think she’s on drugs, I . . .”
“No, I know that’s what people think.” It was the only real-world explanation that made sense. That the Marsh boys were dealers, or at least users, that they’d drawn Evy in. Some people said she was trading sex for drugs. Some people said I was a bad friend for watching that happen and not stopping it.
“She’s not on drugs,” I said. “I don’t think I— Evy doesn’t tell me everything the way she used to.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said. I’m sure he could hear the emotion in my voice.
“I’ve . . . I’ve been really lonely since the Marsh boys came.”
He reached over to put his hand on my hand and squeezed.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I know you and Evy . . . That sucks.”
I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and made myself focus on the warmth of his hand. “It really does.”
He turned down the narrow road that would take us to the Thorn Bridge. It had been a bad idea maybe, to take him to a place I associated with Evy and the Marsh boys. What was I thinking? It was like asking to make the day turn sour and sad.
But I wanted to be there, to see the place and to see, I don’t know, if there was anything, any sign, of what happened down there. Anything I could use.
We pulled up to the Thorn Bridge, not onto it. There were no warning signs or guardrails, but the bridge didn’t look sturdy enough for a car. And there wasn’t any reason to drive across—the road beyond the bridge had been reclaimed by woods long ago.
The bridge, of course, was supposed to be haunted. By the ghosts of a pair of lovers who’d committed suicide because they couldn’t be together. By the ghosts of children who had died as the bridge collapsed under the weight of their wagon. People said if you parked on the bridge in neutral, ghost children would push you to safety with their little hands, but no one would risk their car to test that theory, so of course it stayed true.
Ben opened his door first. I hadn’t expected to feel so off balance here.
The place felt like Evy. When the wind rattled the dying leaves of the big oaks and maples that arced across the river, it reminded me of Evy’s fingers shredding bay leaves for a tea. Where the water reversed itself against a huge boulder near the bank, the shiny chaos made me think of Evy’s hair.
Evy was haunting the Thorn Bridge.
Ben and I stood at the opening. Weirdly anachronistic graffiti decorated the walls, but at the bridge’s center, darkness swallowed all detail, allowing a crosser to slip back in time.
We stepped onto the bridge, and I imagined the wood bending under our feet, giving way. A lot of the graffiti was vulgar, but there were love messages too, including one deeply carved heart with initials that were supposed to belong to the lovers who haunted the bridge. I traced that one with my finger and said, “It’s supposed to be good luck.”
So Ben traced it too, meeting me at the heart’s point and taking my hand.
He pulled me to face him, and I put the finger that had traced the heart on his chest, traced his heart while he watched.
“You’re different,” he said, in a whisper.
“What do you mean?”
I locked eyes with him, and the life in me, my overflowing life, danced in the space between us.
“This. You’re . . . less shy. You’re . . . well, you’re all lit up,” he said.
I reached for his lips with my lips, and he met me. His were warm and firm, and he tasted like fall.
Then we hugged. He held me and rocked me on the Thorn Bridge, and I put a hand out to brace myself against the wall, needing to feel something steady. I was sobbing.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing. You’re wonderful. It’s just—I’m happy. And I—I would talk to Evy about you, about this. She’s the only person I would talk to,” I said quickly, not wanting him to think I was the kind of girl to kiss and tell. “But I can’t talk to her anymore.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, and he held me tight and kissed my tears, and then we kissed some more.
I still felt so alive, so full, and to feel that way, in spite of losing Evy . . . well, she made her choice, and doesn’t life go on?
I don’t know what I’d expected to find on the bridge: Evy’s initials with H. M. or J. M. carved with them? A trace of blood or fur?
There was nothing solid there, nothing to give me a hint of what she and the Marsh boys got up to at night.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Ben. “I’m really happy to be here with you. But it’s a place that reminds me of Evy. It probably wasn’t the best place to come.”
“You do what you’ve gotta do,” Ben said. This was a guy I could love.
“I want to do something stupid,” I said. “You don’t have a pocketknife, do you?”
“We’ve only just begun,” he said, kind of joking, but I put him at ease.
“It’s not for us. It’s for me and Evy. I just—I want to leave something here.”
“Hang on,” he said. “I’ve got a Swiss Army knife in the glove box.”
He fetched it, and I picked a spot on the wall that hadn’t been touched. On it, I carved, very small, an E. and an L., and I made an infinity symbol looping around them. “Forever,” I whispered, “however long that might be.”
Not long after that, Evy stopped coming to school.
The Marsh boys were there, but they didn’t have any answers for me.
“Evy’s fine,” Jack said. “She’s outgrowing this.” He gestured in a wide circle.
“What? School?”
He tilted his head, and it reminded me of the day he had scared me so badly.
“She’s outgrowing . . . me?”
“Why didn’t you try harder?” he said.
“What?”
“Evy asked me and Hap, just the other night. She said, ‘I’m almost grateful. If Les had tried to pull me back, if I thought she needed me, I might have had to stay.’”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Les is changing too.’ I said, ‘Les doesn’t need you. She’s becoming you.’”
I stood there, not looking at him but at his shirtfront.
I was not becoming Evy. But I was changing. I was becoming more myself.
“It’s not too late,” Jack said, “if you want her back. She might listen to you.”
When I looked back up at him, his smirk told me what he thought of me, of my change.
I didn’t defend myself. I didn’t argue. I walked away. And all day I thought about what he’d said.
All day, while the Marsh boys were at school and Evy wasn’t. Where was Evy?
Maybe she did need me, needed to hear from me that I wanted her here. That I wanted us back how we were.
But I didn’t. I wanted Evy, my friend—of course I wanted her—but I didn’t want to go back to how I was.
I’m the witch. I’m the witch, and Evy’s the ghost.
Almost.
A hand gripped my shoulder, shaking me, and I stifled a scream. This was school. School was safe.
It was Ben. Just Ben. He beamed down at me, and I smiled up at him, and I forgot for a little while about Evy.
That night, Ben and I made pizza at my house. He knew how to toss the dough. We got flour all over the kitchen, but Mom smiled. Dad and Ben talked about all of Dad’s old bands, which he couldn’t believe that Ben knew.
I thought about calling Evy, but Ben was there, and then it was late, and then, then, she’d be out with Jack and Hap, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t want to hear from me.
Those are the things I told myself.
The next day Evy didn’t show up at school again, and the Marsh boys didn’t come either. With them gone, it was like a dam burst on my worry. I pictured Evy huddling in the dark while the Marsh boys laughed, Evy pale as the moon, her eyes blank and hungering.
All day, she haunted me.
Ben found me at a break between classes. “What’s happened?” he asked.
But I shook my head. “Not now. I can’t,” I said, and walked away.
I tried visiting her house in the afternoon, but all the lights were out and nobody answered.
When I called Evy’s cell, I got her message. It hurt to hear her voice, recorded months and months ago, sounding so Evy, so alive. When it beeped, I almost hung up right then, but I listened to the silence for a second or two, and then said all I knew for sure to say: “It’s me, Les.”
When I called Evy’s house, her mom seemed confused—maybe she was drunk, but I didn’t think that was all. She said, “Evy? I don’t know who you’re talking about. Are you . . . Are you a prank caller? I report prank callers.”
I hung up, and I didn’t call back.
That night, I borrowed Mom’s car, told her I was going to study with Ben, and drove down to the Thorn Bridge. I parked with the high beams on to light up the dark tunnel at least partway, and I grabbed Mom’s giant Maglite from the glove box.
I found I didn’t want to make any noise even though the lights blazoned my presence, and I left the door hanging open so as not to have to slam it shut. I stepped onto the gravel road and listened.
The forest animals were having a party. There were chirrups and rustlings, singsongs and creakings. A barred owl called his “Who-who-huh-WHO-owl!”
On any other night, I would have answered the owl’s call, to bring him closer, keep him going, but this night, my voice froze in my throat.
The sheer amount of noise told me no one else was near.
I had to step onto the Thorn Bridge.
At night, with the headlamps picking out every bit of moisture swirling in the air and making the shadows darker, it felt even more haunted. But it wasn’t just the light. The place had an aura about it, extra energy—it was simply the feeling, I realized, of another person, or persons, present and watching. That no one—no one visible—was there made the feeling uncanny.
With my first step onto the bridge’s wood floor, a wave of vertigo made me put a hand to the wall. The planks where I stood lay over solid earth—safe.
I steadied myself and kept going, letting my fingers feel along all the carvings in the wall. When I got to where I thought my carving should be, I started searching with the Maglite.
It was right in front of me, the sideways figure eight with an E. and an L. inside.
Except something had changed.
The swooping curves of the infinity symbol, which I had been so careful to make curves and not slashing straight lines, were wet, shiny, and black under the harsh light.
I reached up and touched the shape I had made. Against my skin, the blood showed up for what it was. But whose?
Evy’s? Had she found my gesture and signed it in blood?
I wiped my finger against the rough wall, the blood mingling with dust—not really coming off, just blending.
I rubbed my finger against my jeans.
And then a rush of air made me swing my light to the opposite end of the Thorn Bridge.
They stood in a row, the three of them, Jack and Evy and Hap.
Each one had a wide stance, and their faces—at this distance, the light couldn’t show me details, but their faces seemed sharper, eyes blacker. There was no reflection of light, I realized. Their eyes soaked it up.
“You came,” Evy said. “To see me off? That’s sweet.”
Her voice was hoarse, shredded, but she sounded more alert than she had in weeks.
I felt self-conscious about the blood on my finger, as if she could tell from that distance, see in the dark, scent across space, or read my mind. Who knew what this new Evy could do?
“Where are you going?” I said dumbly.
Evy smiled, and I tried to see her teeth.
Within a second, she was on me, had taken the light from my hand and tossed it behind her to Hap, who caught it without even taking a step and then switched it off.
“The light was too bright,” she said, close to my ear. “I can see in the dark now.”
“I can’t,” I said. I blinked, trying to adjust, trying to make out the contours of her new face. As if she could read my thoughts, she took my hand, the one I had used to touch the blood, and lifted it to her face.
She led my fingers along her cheekbone, higher and sharper than it should have been, and—this was what made me flinch, try to pull away—downy with . . . fur. It was as soft as the hair on her head, a smooth, short coat close to the skin—so fine I hadn’t seen it at a distance—but it wasn’t right.
She held my hand tight until I relaxed and then drew my fingers along her cheek, farther than seemed possible. Her jaw protruded. The fur thinned close to her mouth, where her skin felt normal. Her lips seemed like normal lips, but her teeth . . . She flexed back her lips to allow me to feel.
She had fangs.
“What are you?” I said.
“It turns out you don’t have to be just one thing,” Evy said. “I’m a monster in the dark. Will that do?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
It was my fault. I hadn’t fought hard enough. I had let this happen.
“Shh, shh, sweetie,” Evy said. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not.”
She kissed my cheek with her strange new mouth, and I had to restrain myself from shoving her away.
“Are you ready, Evy?” Jack said from the mouth of the bridge.
“Almost,” she said.
“Wait, where are you going?” I said again.
“Why? Do you want to come?” Evy asked, and the meager light from the tunnel’s mouth caught her teeth as she stretched her jaw wide.
“No, no, I just . . . Why do you have to go?”
“She has to feed,” Hap said. “Once that happens, it won’t be safe for us here.”
“Feed?”
“Life costs life,” Evy said. “It’s an exchange we all make. I’ve just moved up the food chain.”
“You’re going to . . . eat someone?”
Hap kicked a leg out to his side, and a shadowy lump at his feet shifted . . . and groaned. I hadn’t noticed it, had taken it as part of the landscape, until it moved.
“It’s time,” Jack said, “while the moon is high.”
Close to me, Evy nodded. “Come,” she said, and pulled me toward the Marsh boys.
Evy wouldn’t hurt me—she couldn’t—but would she let them?
“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “This is a happy time.”
She dragged me back to the Marsh boys and passed me off to Hap, who pulled my back against his chest, wrapped his arms around me in a bear hug, and rested his chin on my head. It might have been comforting, big brotherly, under any other circumstance, but now it was one more wrong thing in a world of wrong.
Evy, preternaturally quick, swooped down to the form on the ground. Even though he looked bigger than her, she lifted him with zero effort and cradled him against her chest.
“Look who I picked,” she said.
Malcolm, with the shiny-slick hair and the puppy-dog eyes.
“No.”
Hap squeezed me tighter.
Malcolm seemed dazed, and his face was wet, like he’d been drooling, or crying.
Evy looked down on him, almost lovingly. “I always kind of thought I’d come back to him, like he was going to be important in my life. I just couldn’t understand how.”
“Evy, this isn’t you.”
She looked up at me. “No,” she said. “It isn’t. You always liked him, Les. Why didn’t you say anything? Why did you let me mess with his head? I would have given him to you.”
“You don’t give a boy to your friend,” I said.
“But now you have Ben,” she said, “so it’s all right. You don’t need Malcolm anymore.”
“I don’t want you to hurt him,” I said. “A person can’t help who he likes. He wanted you.”
“And now I want him,” she said. And she bit.
I woke up in my room, all tucked into my bed, wearing my pajamas even.
It was still mostly dark out. My window was open wide—the morning chill and damp filled the air, and the scent of the woods. It could have come in from outside, but I felt like it was on me. I pressed a hank of my hair to my nose and breathed deep. I had been outside, hadn’t I?
If the past night had been a dream, it was the most vivid I’d ever known. Feeling like an idiot, I pressed my hand to my throat, felt along the smooth skin, and, finding nothing amiss, ran my fingers along my own cheekbone—just the slightest curve to the bone, as it should be, and peach fuzz.
I made myself move—my whole body felt stiff, achy, and chilled—wrapping the comforter around my shoulders to peer out the window.
It scared me to stand close to it, even though that wasn’t a rational fear. After all, it had been open all night. My mom’s car was parked in the driveway, right where it should be.
I wanted to ask my parents, did they remember me coming home last night? Did they remember who drove the car? But it was too early to wake them, and I had a feeling they wouldn’t have any answers, that they might sound a lot like Evy’s mother had sounded when I’d called.
I tried Ben instead. He answered on the second ring, sounding groggy but very much himself.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Are you okay? Les, what’s wrong?”
“I just had a bad dream,” I said. “I needed to check. I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“No, it’s nice to hear your voice.”
“I’ve been worried about Evy,” I said. “You know, Evy?”
My heart thudded while I waited to hear if he recognized the name, or if she’d been erased, leaving me as the only one with the knowledge she’d been here at all.
“Yeah, I know Evy,” he said, sounding wry but troubled. “I’m worried too. For your sake. If you want, I’ll go with you and we can visit her after school.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, knowing already the lights would be out, no one home.
I could call Malcolm’s house. That would tell me for certain whether last night was real. But that might be dangerous if he’d gone missing.
It was better to stay quiet, wait and see.
I hung up with Ben and reached to pull the window shut.
Way off in the woods, something, several things, howled.
The moon had set. The stars were fading from the sky. Soon they would move on.
I slammed the window shut.