Boy from the Woods (9781311684776) (17 page)

“Sure,” Axel
replied.
He got up and shot a quick
glance at Gaby, whom he hadn’t directly spoken to since her and
Julia’s arrival. “Can I get you something, Miss Gloom?”

Gaby looked up, startled. “Uhm,
yes… I’d like a beer, please. Thanks.”

Julia snickered.
The fact alone that Gaby
didn’t
get her panties
in a strop about Axel using that nickname was evidence enough that
something was going on between the two of them. “Why don’t you get
me one too, while you’re at it,” she shouted after her
cousin.

Meanwhile,
Gaby had installed herself at the computer. She opened Google and
typed ‘druids oaks’ into the search bar. When Julia sat down on the
armrest and looked over her shoulder, her friend had just clicked a
link titled ‘The Magical Tree’.

“Wow,” Gaby breathed. “You
see that?
Oak trees can grow to be over
two thousand years old! And they really attract lightning somehow.
Look here – the British mythological Green Man is a forest god with
a face consisting of oak leaves.” She pointed at the image on the
screen.

“Come
outside, you nerds,” A
xel told them as he
strolled over with their drinks. “All this staring at computer
screens is gonna ruin your eyesight.”

“That’s rich,
coming from you,” Gaby shot back, getting up and taking the glass
of beer Axel handed to her. “You practically
live
at your
computer.”

She slowly
turned red when Axel slung an arm around her shoulders and replied:
“Still, no reason to follow my bad example.
Come on,
let’s go outside.
I’ll drag you away from
this infernal device and save you.”

Julia caught
the look in Gaby’s eyes
and couldn’t help
but grin at her flushed face. She started when her phone vibrated
in her pocket. One look on the display showed her that at least it
wasn’t Michael – it was her mother.

“Hey, Mom. What’s up?”

“Hello
, darling. What time will
you be home?”

“Around nine, I guess.
Why?”
Somehow, her mother sounded
anxious.

“Oh, it’s
nothing. Your father just called, and Anne was in the room with me
when we got into an argument over the phone. She went outside. I
think she took off to the woods, because her bike is
gone.”

“I’ll be home shortly.
Don’t worry.”
Julia hung up, heaving a
sigh. Anne didn’t handle conflict very well, and it was even worse
if that conflict was between their mom and their ever-absent
father. She was doubtlessly upset, so she’d fled into the woods to
cool off. In that respect, Anne was just like her. Mom was probably
feeling really guilty right now.

“I’m leaving
in a bit,” she announced
to her friends
on the terrace.
“I have to go help my mom.”

“Shall I join you?”
Gaby asked.

“Yeah, cool.”
Julia’s interest was piqued by the website Gaby had discovered. She
wanted to explore it some more back at her place. “Are you sleeping
over?”

“Good
idea
! It’s been a while since we had a
pajama party.”

In the light
of
the sun slowly sinking toward the
horizon, Julia walked to the edge of the roof terrace and looked
down at the river Salzach meandering past the house. Behind her,
she heard Tamara and Florian laughing out loud and Axel animatedly
telling one of his jokes. She tried to imagine Michael amidst her
circle of friends, then substituted him with Thorsten. Of course,
it was a pointless exercise – she knew full well Thorsten would fit
in perfectly here. And yet, she somehow couldn’t bring herself to
make that choice just yet.

Gaby joined
her at the
railing. “Are we going?” she
asked.

“Yeah, let’s. I want to be home before
dark.”

“Tamara just
offered to drop us off by car, so we can go to my place first and I
can pack a bag of clothes for my shift at the riding school
tomorrow. You know, pants I won’t mind getting stained with
horseshit.”

“Poor you.
Oh well, I wonder what’s worse working with –
horse manure or Michael.” Julia rolled her eyes. “Speaking of
which, let’s see what else we can find out about the old Celts and
their tree horoscopes tonight.”

Gaby
giggled. “Most likely, we’ll discover all people
with oaks in their horoscopes are arrogant assholes.”

Fifteen
minutes later, Tamara pulled up in front of Julia’s house. When
Julia got out of the car, she saw her mom standing at the gate,
peering into the street
in both
directions.

Ms
. Gunther’s face lit up when
she saw her eldest daughter. “Hey, sweetheart. I’m glad you’re home
early. Anne still isn’t back, and she’s not at Sabine’s
either.”

The troubled
undertone in her mother’s voice wasn’t lost on Julia. She exchanged
a glance with Gaby. “We’ll go look for her in the woods,” her
friend said decidedly.
“Come on, let’s go by
bike.”

They walked
to the shed and got the two bicycles parked there.
Julia couldn’t wipe the frown off her face when
she cycled down the street next to Gaby on their way to the forest
edge. “I am
so
going to give Anne a talking-to,” she said
grimly.
“She can’t do this.
She can’t just take off and stay out for hours on end and
get Mom worried sick. My mother already feels like she’s a lousy
parent as it is, because she can’t get my dad to show his face
around here more often. She really doesn’t need this on top of
everything else.”

When they got
to the edge of the woods, th
e girls got
off their bikes. Julia hesitantly looked at the forest path running
between the trees. It wouldn’t be long before the woods got
completely dark. Would Anne really venture out here all by herself?
She couldn’t imagine it; her sister was kind of a
scaredy-cat.

“Shall we
call out to her?”
Gaby suggested, looking
a little lost.

Julia nodded.
“Anne!” she shouted at the top of her
lungs.
“Where are you?”

“Anne!”
Gaby yelled in the other direction. “Come home!”

To Julia’s
great relief, it didn’t take more than a minute for a tiny, human
figure riding a bike to appear at the bend in the road. She nudged
Gaby. “There she is.”

Once
Anne
came to a stop in front of them,
Julia flung her arms around her little sister. Suddenly, she
couldn’t be angry anymore. All she felt was immense gratitude for
Anne being there. “What happened?” she asked gently, stroking
Anne’s soft hair.

“They were
fighting again,” Anne replied in a small voice. “I didn’t want to
listen to it.”

“Mom’
s sad. You shouldn’t have
stayed out this long.”

“I know. I’m sorry.
I just didn’t know what to do.”

“Well, we’re glad you’re here,” Gaby said
kindly, putting a hand on the little girl’s shoulder.

They all got
back on their bikes. “So where were you?”
Julia asked
curiously.

Anne remained silent for a
moment.
“I’m not telling,” she replied
resolutely, cycling away ahead of Julia and Gaby. Julia stared at
Anne’s back, blinking her eyes in astonishment. That was an odd
reaction – Anne could have just told her ‘everywhere and nowhere’
if she wanted to be vague, but she hadn’t. Maybe she had a special
place in the forest she didn’t want anyone to know about, just like
her.

Julia sighed.
Her own
‘special place’ had lost most of
its luster – Michael’s accident had happened near the oak, and
moreover, her hugging tree looked moribund as of late. It was
probably sick, or maybe it had truly been hit by lightning in the
storm, like in the Druid myth. Her thoughts turned to Silke’s
stories and the information Gaby had found online. It was time to
do some research once they got home.

Her mother pulled Anne inside with a mixture
of relief, indignation and coddling. Gaby and Julia grabbed some
potato chips and soda from the pantry and disappeared upstairs to
put the spare mattress in Julia’s room and start up the laptop.

“Google
Detectives at the ready,” Gaby declared, double-clicking the
Firefox icon. It didn’t take her long to get back to the
s
ite they’d checked out earlier. They
continued reading, captivated by the many stories the website
featured. There was info about the oldest oak trees in the world,
the meaning of the oak in different cultures, as well as a long
paragraph about the Druids and their meditation techniques. Julia’s
eyes widened when she got to some familiar info.
“Hey,
look. This is what Silke told us.”
She
pointed at the screen and read out loud: “The oak connects the
cosmic fire of lightning with the powers of the earth. In addition,
the power of this tree opens a doorway tapping into the
supernatural powers of summer on Midsummer’s Day.”

“Midsummer,”
Gaby mumbled, scrolling down. “Which is
–
let me look for it.
Oh, here it says.”

Julia gaped at the
screen.
She couldn’t utter a single word.
Incredulously, she stared at the table of Celtic holidays on the
screen. Midsummer was on the twenty-first of June.

The day of Michael’s accident.

8
.

“I
t’s almost as if he brought
something
back
with him when he regained consciousness.” Julia
was sitting on the bed, munching on some chips.

“Something?” Gaby prompted.

Julia
stalled. She’d sound like a lunatic, but she just had to get this
off her chest.
“Yes. Something otherworldly.
A strange kind of energy. It feels like there’s
some sort of supernatural force changing him from the inside. Maybe
that’s why he survived the accident.”

Gaby looked at her pensively. “So that whole
Celtic saga about the oak and the force of lightning could actually
be true?”

“I have no
idea.” Julia stared at the screen of her laptop, which was now
switched off. “I know Druids were held in high esteem in earlier
times, so they can’t have been completely crazy. But it sure
sounds
crazy, I’ll give you that.”

“Crazy with a
capital C,” Gaby agreed. “Something
peculiar is going on with Michael, though.
Even I can see that.”

Julia let out a deep
breath.
“The stupid thing is I want him
to notice me, while at the same time I can’t
stand
the fact that
he’s sweet-talking to me, pretending we’re best buddies as if
nothing happened.
I mean, that doesn’t make
sense.
He hasn’t even apologized.” She
had a flashback to their strange conversation in the bookstore.
What was it Michael had said to her? ‘I’m sorry he hurt you like
that.’ Had he been talking about his former jerk-persona? She
couldn’t figure him out.

That night,
Julia dreamed
about the bookstore.
Michael kept popping up wherever she went despite her attempts to
avoid him, and Thorsten was there too, wanting to buy an old
encyclopedia at any cost. When the alarm clock woke her up, she
felt far from rested. It was like she’d already been at work all
night long.

Still half-asleep, she dragged herself to the
bathroom for a quick shower and padded back to her room to wake up
Gaby.

The door to
Anne’s room was ajar, and when she looked inside, Julia saw Anne
sitting at her desk writing something in her diary. She pushed the
door open to come inside and give her sister a quick
hug.

Anne
’s head jerked up and she
quickly snapped her diary shut. “Can’t you knock?” she said
sharply.

“Excuse me?” Julia gaped
at her sister.
“Why the formality all of
a sudden? Should I request an audience next time?”

Anne pulled
the diary toward her and
clutched it to
her chest as if it contained a pile of hundred-euro notes.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “You just startled me. I was busy
writing.”

“Ooh, that sounds
nice!
Are you going to write a story of
your own?”

Anne shrugged.
“Maybe.
But you’re only allowed to see
when it’s done.”

Julia chuckled. “Yeah,
yeah, I know the drill.
Just like your
tree house, right? You’re testing my patience, sweet
pea.”

Anne got
a
peculiar look in her eyes.
“Yes, just like that. Sorry.”
She
opened her desk drawer and shoved the diary inside.
“Are we having breakfast yet?”

“Hmm,”
Julia
muttered. Anne was behaving oddly
as of late – or maybe it was just her having difficulty to adapt.
Her little sister was growing up fast and was starting to develop a
strong will of her own. She’d probably get even more pigheaded once
she hit puberty.