The Untouchables of Hollowmere High

Twenty-sixth of August. Dunning, H., age 52. Forearm, shoulder. Wolf, so-called. Survived. Hollowmere Fire & Rescue notified. Site cleared by morning. No further action.

For the record, I made it to mile four.

I'm telling you that first because the rest of this is going to sound like I chickened out, and I need you to know that I ran two and a half miles up a gravel road with no streetlights, through pine so thick it felt like jogging down the inside of a throat, and I got there. Yellow metal gate. A hand-painted sign that said NO THRU. A patch of road that somebody had raked smooth, like a Zen garden, except Zen gardens don't smell like bleach.

And Ronan Holt, sitting on the tailgate of a rust-colored pickup like he'd been waiting for a bus.

"Told you," he said.

"You told me not to run. I'm standing."

He looked at my Hokas, then at the trees behind me, then at the trees behind him, which is a thing I've since noticed nobody here does unless they mean it. "Get in. I'll drive you back."

"I don't get in trucks with strangers. I'm from New York. We have an entire public service campaign about it."

He drove behind me the whole way home instead, headlights on my back, at four miles an hour. If you have never been escorted home by a pickup truck at a pace that insults you personally, I don't recommend it.

That was Sunday. Monday was the first day of senior year.

Hollowmere High is one building. One. It's brick, it has a flagpole with a flag that hasn't been taken down for weather since the Obama administration, and the entire student body would fit in a single car of the Q train with room for a guy playing bucket drums. I wore the I ♥ NY hoodie over a black slip dress, because if I was going to be a spectacle, I was going to be a spectacle on purpose.

The girl who adopted me did it before first bell. She slammed her locker, looked at my hoodie, and said, "Oh my God, you're the Harrow girl, okay, so, everybody's been talking about you since Thursday because Dot at the diner said you told Ronan Holt to go fetch, which, I don't know if that's real, but it's the best thing anyone's said to him in like four years, I'm Juniper."

"I said 'go play fetch,'" I said. "Dot's paraphrasing."

"Dot always paraphrases. Dot paraphrased my parents' divorce." She hooked her arm through mine. She had box-dyed red hair fading to orange at the ends, a Hollowmere Lumber hoodie three sizes too big, and the energy of a group chat at two a.m. "Okay. Walk with me. You need the map."

The map, delivered at a whisper-scream down the main hallway:

"Band kids, harmless. Hockey guys, also harmless, mostly concussed. That's Brynn, she's dating her cousin's ex, don't bring it up. And then—" She stopped us dead outside the cafeteria doors and lowered her voice like a nature documentary narrator. "Them."

Long table by the windows. Maybe a dozen kids, and the space around them had that subway-car force field, where the seat next to the guy eating sardines stays empty even at rush hour. Nobody sat within two tables of them. Nobody looked directly at them, either, which in a school this size takes real commitment.

"The Pack," Juniper breathed. "Locals call them that. I don't know who started it. Probably Dot."

They weren't all one group, I realized. They were three groups pretending to share a table. Ronan's end was flannel and work boots and boys built like they moved furniture for fun. The middle was all black, with sharp collars and somebody actually reading a hardcover book at lunch. The far end lounged, loose and golden, like they'd been sunning on rocks.

"Three families," Juniper said. "Holts, Crowes, Marrows. Been here since forever. They own, like, the forest. Not legally. Vibes-wise. They hate each other. Like, Montagues and Capulets and a third thing hate each other. But they sit together every single day, and if you ask why, people change the subject to the weather, and I've lived here since I was nine and I still don't—"

"Who's the one in the middle?"

"Caspian Crowe." She said it like a diagnosis. "Don't."

He was the one with the book. Dark hair, the kind of pale that says I have never once been to a Sephora, long fingers holding the page down. As if I'd spoken out loud, he looked up. He had the eyes of someone appraising a used car and finding rust.

"And the blond?"

"Elias Marrow. Definitely don't. He's nice. That's the problem. Nobody's that nice for free."

Elias was already looking at me. He smiled like we were sharing a joke and only one of us knew the punchline.

Here's where I took the risk. I'd like to say I planned it.

AP Lit, fourth period, Mr. Pelletier, who had the gentle voice of a man who has read a lot of Robert Frost alone. He asked us to share "one thing we noticed about our summer." Somebody said lake. Somebody said their dog had puppies. Elias, two rows over, said, "That the nights got louder," and a couple of kids laughed in a thin, polite way.

Then it was me.

"A man named Hank Dunning got mauled four miles from my house," I said, "and when I asked about it at the diner, everybody looked at their eggs."

You know the sound a packed subway car makes when the doors close on someone's backpack and everyone waits to see if the train's going to move anyway? That held breath? Twenty-two kids made it. Mr. Pelletier's marker hovered over the whiteboard.

"Well," he said. "That's—Hank's recovering, I heard."

"From a wolf, so-called," I said. "That's what the fire guy told my dad. So-called. What's it called when it's not so-called?"

Nobody moved. Then, from the back, a voice like the inside of a library on a Sunday:

"Do you interrogate every town you're relocated to, or is this a courtesy reserved for us?"

Caspian. Long legs crossed at the ankle under the desk, book closed over one finger to hold his place, like I was an interruption he'd budgeted thirty seconds for.

"Only the ones where people get eaten."

"Bitten," he said. "Precision is the first casualty of outrage. And how long have you lived here? Five days? Have you considered that a village which has endured winters you cannot imagine might have earned the right to its own manners around grief?"

"Grief? Nobody's grieving. Hank's alive. They're just—" I flapped a hand. "Not saying it. Which is weird. Which you know is weird."

"Is it weirder than a girl in a souvenir sweatshirt treating a stranger's injury as her first-day icebreaker?" He tilted his head about two degrees. "I ask for a friend. The friend is everyone in this room."

Somebody actually went ooh. A low one, quickly strangled.

My face was hot to the collarbones, and I'd like to tell you it was purely rage. "Wow. Did you get that out of a Brontë, or do you write your own material?"

Mr. Pelletier said, "Okay! Robert Frost," with the desperation of a man pulling a fire alarm, and the moment broke. But Caspian kept looking at me, cool and unhurried, until I looked away first. I hated that. I'm putting it on the record so I can hate it officially.

On the way out, Elias fell into step beside me. He smelled like cedar and something warmer underneath, like a sweater left in the sun.

"That was brave," he said.

"That was Tuesday where I'm from."

"It's Monday."

"It's a figure of speech."

"Mm." He held the door. Didn't go through it. "You should be a little careful, saying things like that out loud. People here have long memories, and some of them aren't—" He let it hang. Smiled. "Anyway. I liked it."

"Some of them aren't what?"

"See you around, Katie Harrow."

He knew my last name. Everyone did. But he said it like it was a word in a language he'd grown up speaking.

Ronan I didn't run into until the parking lot, which was fine, because by then I had momentum. He was leaning against the rust truck. Fittingly.

"You ran up there again this morning," he said.

"Are you tracking me? Is that a Hollowmere thing? Do you guys have, like, an app?"

"Your shoes are muddy. Mud on that road is red." His gray eyes did the trees-check again, behind me, left, right. "You don't run in these woods, city girl."

"I've run the Central Park loop at midnight. I've run from a man dressed as Elmo. I think I can handle some pine cones."

"Then run the loop around the reservoir. The town one. It's paved."

"Make me."

His jaw did something. He pushed off the truck and suddenly we were a lot closer than we'd been a second ago, close enough that I had to tilt my chin up, close enough to feel the heat coming off him, way more than a person should run on a seventy-degree day. "Don't," he said quietly, "give me ideas."

Then he got in the truck and left, and I stood there in the exhaust like a heroine in a Lana Del Rey video with nobody filming.

Let me be very clear: my heart rate was elevated because I had just been threatened.

Juniper drove me home in a Corolla with a duct-taped side mirror, narrating.

"—so nobody has talked to Caspian Crowe like that since Abby Lindqvist in ninth grade, and Abby moved to Bangor, and I'm not saying those things are related, but I'm not not saying it, and then Elias walks you out, and Elias doesn't walk anyone anywhere, he just sort of appears next to you at parties like a—"

"Juniper."

"—like a really handsome draft—what?"

"How long have people been getting attacked out there?"

She went quiet for exactly one stop sign. It was the first time I'd heard her stop.

"Always," she said. "Like, my whole life. My mom says her whole life. It's just a thing that happens. You don't go in after dark, you don't go in alone, and if somebody gets hurt, you bring a casserole and you don't ask." She chewed her lip. "I asked once. When I was eleven. Mrs. Dunning—Hank's wife—told me some questions are just fishing for bones."

"That's insane."

"I know."

"Someone knows."

"I know." Her eyes cut to me, bright, delighted, and a little scared. "You're gonna do something dumb, aren't you."

"I'm going to find out what's in those woods and tell everyone, loudly, probably on a local news station that still uses Comic Sans." I stuck out my hand. "Halloween. If I haven't blown this open by Halloween, I'll—I don't know. I'll take off the hoodie."

Juniper gasped like I'd offered her a kidney. "In public?"

"I'll wear a Hollowmere Lumber shirt to school."

"Oh my God." She shook, hard, one hand on the wheel. "And if you win?"

"You come visit me in New York when we move back."

Her grip went a little soft at that, and she didn't comment. She just said, "Deal," and turned up the radio, which only got one station, and that station was playing Shania Twain.

Home was the usual six-kid zoo. Owen on the couch, headset on, murdering something on his Switch with total silence. Lucy on the stairs with a library book so thick it qualified as furniture. Mom in the kitchen, fighting an electric stove like it owed her money.

Bea met me at the door in her rain boots and her nightgown, which is her preferred outfit for all seasons.

"Katie. Katie. There's a big kitty in the garden."

"Like a barn cat?"

"Big." She held her arms as wide as they'd go, and then a little wider, wobbling. "He sat by the tomatoes. He has ear-tufts. He's friendly."

"Did you touch him?"

"No." Scandalized. "You don't touch kitties you don't know. He just looked at me nice."

I looked past her at the garden, the half-dead tomato plants the last owners left, the fence, the dark line of trees beyond it. Nothing. A pine branch moving, maybe. The wind, probably. There's a lot of probably out here.

"Mom," I said, "Bea saw an animal by the fence."

"There are animals everywhere, Kate, it's Maine," Mom said, and then the stove made a noise like a dying robot and she swore at it in a way I'd never heard her swear in Manhattan.

Dinner was mostly silence and forks. Dad came in late, kissed Mom on the top of the head, and kept his left hand in his pocket like it was cold. When I said, "Fun fact, I'm apparently famous at school for asking about Hank Dunning," he set his fork down so carefully it didn't make a sound.

"Kate."

"What? You said leave it. I left it. In a classroom. Very public. Very safe."

Mom looked at him. He looked at his plate. Lucy turned a page loudly, the way she does when she's listening. Max kicked Mia under the table, and Mia kicked back, and neither of them looked up, and I clocked it the way you clock two people on the platform who are about to make out or fight.

"Phones down," Dad said, to nobody in particular, and went to check the back door. Deadbolt. Chain. Then he stood there with his hand flat on it for a long time.

At 11:40 I heard the twins' window, the one over the porch roof, slide up. Two soft thuds on the shingles. A third, lighter, on the grass. I got to my own window in time to see two shapes crossing the backyard in the moonlight, Mia's hair in the ponytail she only wears when she's planning to do something stupid, Max's phone flashlight bobbing.

Toward the road. Thank God. Toward the road, not the trees.

I put my hand on the glass, and that's when I saw the bird.

A raven. On my windowsill, outside, so close I could see the oily blue sliding over its feathers when it shifted. Huge. Bigger than a pigeon, bigger than anything I'd want to meet in a stairwell. It had a beak like a letter opener and it was looking at me—not toward me, at me—with one bright black eye, head cocked the way you'd tilt your head at somebody who'd said something incredibly stupid in AP Lit.

"Don't," I told it, "start."

It didn't move. Out in the dark, beyond the fence, a pine branch dipped low under some weight and swung slowly back up. Max's flashlight winked out at the end of the driveway. The night smelled like cold needles and woodsmoke, and somewhere deep in the Greywood something called once, long and low, and didn't call again.

I backed away from the glass, got into bed, and pulled the hoodie strings tight. My phone buzzed.

Juniper: ok so I was thinking about the bet

Juniper: you know how nobody ever says anything about the attacks

Juniper: my aunt cleans the town hall. she says there's a room in the basement that's always locked and old Mr. Abbott goes down there every time somebody gets hurt and comes back up with ink on his fingers

Juniper: like he's WRITING it down

Juniper: she says the key's on a hook behind the clerk's desk. town hall's open till 7 on wednesdays

I looked at the raven. The raven looked at me.

Me: what time does your aunt start on wednesday