Do right. Fear nothing.
Good advice. And I won’t pretend I didn’t know what the right thing to do was. Sure I did. It was the “fear nothing” part I was having a hard time with. How are you supposed to fear nothing? I mean, if you’re afraid, how are you supposed to turn it off?
After school that day, I rode my bike up the long road toward the barn. My stomach felt hollow and cold like an empty canyon with a wind blowing through it. That was the fear, I guess. I was afraid of what would happen if I told Jeff I wasn’t coming anymore—and I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
It was still afternoon. There was plenty of light, but the light was starting to get that kind of rich color it gets as the day shades toward evening. The road was rugged and broken. My tires bumped over the ruts and pebbles, and I had to work hard to keep the handlebars steady. I wove between deep holes in the macadam to keep the wheels on the smoother surfaces. It took a lot of concentration. I couldn’t really pay much attention to the scenery around me.
The scenery was just trees mostly anyway, a sparse forest on either side of the pavement. When I did get the chance to glance up, I saw the light from the sinking sun pouring through the winter branches in beams. The woods were still and silent. The only sound anywhere was the rattle and bump of my bike going up the hill.
Then suddenly, there was a snap—a loud, startling crack.
Without thinking, I looked up toward the sound. The second I did, my front tire hit a rut. The handlebars twisted in my hands. I had to brake hard to keep from losing control. The bike stopped, my feet going down to the pavement to hold it steady.
I sat there, staring into the woods, staring at the place where the sound—that loud crack—had come from.
I had seen something—something moving there. Just before I stopped the bike, I’d seen a figure—a person—darting behind a tree. That sound I’d heard—it was the sound a branch makes when it’s lying on the ground and someone—or something—steps on it.
My heart started beating hard. My eyes moved slowly over the trees.
Someone was out there. Someone was in the woods.
It was an eerie feeling, sitting there on my bike, alone on the road in the afternoon with nothing but trees on either side of me, knowing someone was there, hiding, watching me. I didn’t like it.
My first thought was to start pedaling again and get out of there, get up to the barn. But I hesitated. I didn’t like the idea of running away either—especially when something I couldn’t see might be chasing after me. No, I thought it would be better to find out what was there.
So I shouted, “Hello?”
There was no answer. Silence from the woods. A big silence that seemed to fill up everything.
I was about to call out again when a movement caught my eye. A head peeked out from behind a tree.
I let out a sigh of relief. It was a girl. I recognized her right away. Her name was Jennifer Sales.
You remember Mark Sales, the track star, right? The handsome one Zoe Miller was always talking to. Well, Jennifer Sales was Mark’s younger sister. His weird younger sister, to be more precise. Weird was definitely the best word to describe her.
She was a hunched, shy, quiet girl, a small girl, small and thin. My age, sixteen. She had long, straight brown hair that framed a pale, serious face. She was actually kind of pretty in a shy, bookish way. But she always seemed to be off in her own world, living inside her own head. She kept to herself at school and moved along the hallway close to the walls as if she were someone’s shadow. When you did try to talk to her, a lot of times she’d say stuff that was . . . well, weird, like I say. Like she would rhyme words or string words together that didn’t make much sense. She did it as if it were a joke—she’d say it was a joke if anyone noticed it—and she’d laugh as if she thought it was really funny. But sometimes I got the feeling she couldn’t help doing it, that the words just came out of her before she could stop them.
A few kids had made fun of her once or twice, calling her names or laughing at her. But Mark set them straight and it didn’t happen again. Mark was a good guy, but he was a big guy too, and you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He loved his sister. He said she was just different, that’s all, like maybe she was a poet or something. Anyway, most of the kids in school were decent types and tried to be nice to her when they could. In the end, though, she just seemed to want to be left alone, and a lot of times she was.
Jennifer stared out at me from around the tree with big eyes—as if she were afraid of me, as if I might be a monster or something. Now that I knew who it was, I didn’t want to annoy her or anything, but I was a little worried about her. I mean, what was she doing out in the middle of nowhere like this, out in the middle of the woods with no one else around? If it had been anyone else, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but this being Jennifer—I don’t know, I thought she might be lost or something.
So I called out to her. “Hey, Jennifer. How’s it going?”
The minute I said her name, she seemed to relax a little. She kind of edged out from behind the tree—although she still stood close to it as if she might need to duck back behind it at any second.
She lifted her hand in a shy greeting. “Hey,” she said.
“You all right?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Sure.”
I looked around me. There was no one else in sight. “Are you all alone up here?”
She nodded. “I’m just walking. And talking,” she added—mostly, I think, because it rhymed.
I didn’t have much else to say to her, and I thought of just saying good-bye and taking off again. But still, something about this just didn’t seem right somehow. It was a long way back to town on foot. I’d hate it if I left her alone up here and something bad happened to her.
“Are you all right?” I asked again. “Are you lost or something? Do you need me to walk you back to town?”
“No.” She pointed behind her into the woods. “I have my bike. My bicycle. My-cycle. So I can go around and around. And down. Down the hill. Home.”
You see what I mean about the way she talked. It was really strange. “Okay,” I said. But I still felt bad just leaving her here. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?”
Up till this point, Jennifer had remained standing next to the tree, one hand resting on it as if she wanted to make sure it wouldn’t run away from her. She was wearing jeans and a pullover shirt with big horizontal green stripes on it. It was still pretty chilly, especially around this time of day, so she also had on a blue woolen jacket, although she kept it unbuttoned. The sun was behind her, the beams falling all around her. She stood in a little pool of shadow, a dark figure. It was hard to make out the expression on her face.
But now she stepped away from the tree. I heard the leaves crunch under her shoes as she walked slowly toward me. She stepped out into the road and kept coming, slowly, step-by-step as I sat on my bike watching her. She walked right up to me. She stood close. Really close. So close I could actually feel her breath on my face.
She leaned toward me, staring at me, studying me. I just sat there on the bike. I didn’t know what to do or say. I let her look as much as she wanted.
“Sam,” she said finally. It was as if she’d just figured out who I was. “You’re Sam Hopkins.”
“Sure, Jennifer,” I said. “You know me. You’re in my English class.”
“I know you,” she echoed. “I put you in my cell phone.” She took her phone out of her pocket and held it up—still staring at me. “I put everyone in school in my cell phone.”
“Well . . . great,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
She put the phone away again. “Your father’s a priest,” she said then.
“Well, we don’t call them priests, we . . .”
“A priest is a father,” she said. “Your father’s a Father. Father Father. Farther and farther. My father’s farther and farther away.”
She murmured all this in a low, quick voice, and all the while she went on staring at me. It was really spooky. Then she smiled. And you know what? That was even spookier. It was a sort of small, secret smile. Her eyes glittered, as if she was about to share something with me, something very special that she’d never told anyone else.
“You know what I’m doing here?” she said.
I sat there on my bike, staring back at her. I was kind of hypnotized by her, by the way she was staring at me like that, and by her secret smile and glittering eyes. I slowly shook my head. “No,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
She leaned even closer, edged even a little closer to me. And she whispered, “I’m looking for the devil.”
I felt a chill go through me and I shivered. It was a strange thing to say, and the way she said it made it sound even stranger. Up there alone in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods, just me and her, it was actually kind of frightening.
My lips parted as I tried to think of an answer.
But before I could, something even more frightening happened.
I heard an engine roar and turned to see Jeff Winger’s red Camaro racing toward us.