The Little Woods (20 page)

“WHY ARE YOU HIDING IN
your closet?” Helen asked.

My muscles tensed, and I banged my head stumbling out. I had been having another look at Iris’s handiwork, trying to figure out what it could mean. I shut the closet door.

“You know, we have a whole LGBT society here, Wood. People are very open-minded.”

“Good morning to you too,” I said, feeling like I’d been caught trying to blow up a mailbox. Adrenaline surged through my veins. “You were up early.”

“I went running.”

A gentle knock on the glass drew our attention. Alex, dressed in a french-blue sweater, waved from the other side.

“You should probably tell him you’re bi-curious,” Helen said, batting her lashes. “It’s me, isn’t it? I’m always making people gay.”
Ignoring Helen, I grabbed my things and went out to meet him.

“You’re gonna get kicked out for wearing that,” he said, eyeing my Sex Pistols shirt. “You couldn’t find any ones with pictures of dead puppies on them?”

“Those were all sold out.”

“You were wearing normal girl clothes for a while,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “What happened?”

“Didn’t take.”

“I thought I was having a positive influence on you.”

“I think I’m immune to good influences.”

Just before we reached the classroom, he slipped his arm around my waist, and beneath the arch of the door, he gave me a kiss. I didn’t have to look to know that Jack was watching. I could feel his gaze running up and down my spine. After I waved goodbye to Alex, I walked over to Jack and Sophie. He was laughing.

“So you guys worked out your little, um, problem, then?” he asked.

Sophie raised an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah. No, everything’s fine now, Jack. Thanks for asking.”

“I’m here for all your needs, Wood.”

“Jack, don’t be disgusting. You okay?” Sophie asked, turning to me, concerned.

“Yeah. I am totally fine, thanks.”

I tried not to look at Jack during class, but his lure was overwhelming, and I found myself constantly distracted. Eventually I had to give in and take a peek across Sophie. He was staring
at me, just staring. When he saw me look over, he gave me a smile with something like admiration in his eyes and then laughed as he shook his head.

I was both dreading and looking forward to chemistry. We had a lab, which meant my time would be largely unsupervised with Jack. He was leaning against the table, already hard at work, when I came in.

“Eager much?”

“I had third period free. I thought I’d get us out of here a little early.”

“Jack, that thing with Alex …”

“Pumpkin,” he said, looking wounded. “You can do whatever you want with your boyfriend. I really don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I have my own situation to attend to, remember?”

“You mean your secret girlfriend?” I teased, but he tensed up and looked upset, so I dropped it. “Okay, so we’ll just be friends, then?”

He smiled at me, slow and vulpine, and I felt a little dizzy, a little like I might attack him right there in chemistry lab. “BFF, Wood. BFF.”

We did finish half an hour early, and Reilly let us go. We walked in a strange sort of silence, the air between us thick and charged.

“Wood, um, I think we need to talk,” he said.

“Sounds good,” I said, tripping over my tongue, trying not to choke.

And just as we were passing the boys’ bathroom, Jack
slammed the door open and pulled me inside. He kissed me, heavily, eagerly. I melted at first but then pulled away.

“Jack, I’m with Alex now.”

“So?” he said, leaning against one of the stalls.

“So? So? I’m going out with him again.”

“So what do I care?”

“So I’m not going to cheat on him.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s wrong.”

“He cheated on you,” he said, moving closer.

“So? Two wrongs and all that.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t enjoy our little activities, because it seemed to me that you did … like, a lot.”

“Obviously,” I said, unable to keep the grin from my face.

“So?” he said, moving closer, taking my wrist gently in his hand. “Why not keep on doing it, then? It’s not like we’re having sex or anything. We’re just fooling around.”

“I can’t go out with Alex and fool around with you.”

“Sure you can. You haven’t taken any vows.”

“No. It’s dishonest. Besides, what we did the other night was kind of intense. I can’t keep doing those things with you if I don’t do stuff like that with Alex.”

“And you don’t want to do those things with him?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s great news.” He beamed. “I don’t want you to either. See, we have totally the same priorities.”

“But do you want to keep hooking up with someone else’s girlfriend?”

He nodded and smiled. “Yes. Yes I do. I absolutely do. Alex
cheated on you.” He moved closer to me, and I could feel his breath hot on my neck. I backed up against the wall, and slowly, softly he pressed into me. “You have carte blanche right now.” He leaned in and kissed me. “I think you should use it.”

It happened again, strange and electric, and in the boys’ bathroom, of all places. We clung to each other like frightened children, our hands seeming to move of their own volition. This was not my personality, not my typical behavior. When we’d exhausted ourselves, he held me close against his chest like he didn’t want to let me go. I knew that what Jack had said to convince me didn’t make a ton of sense. I wasn’t a moron. But my time with Jack was in some ways the only honest time in my life. With him I simply was. There was no narrating every detail:
Now Alex’s hand slides up my waist. Now he is kissing me. Kiss him back
. With Jack it was more of a deranged psychosis, and I loved it. But there was something I needed to know.

“Jack,” I said, trying to get my clothes back in order. I could see him in the mirror, leaning against a stall watching me, his eyes soft and gentle.

“Mmm?”

“I need to know one thing if we’re going to keep doing this.”

“Anything.”

“I need to know who you’re seeing in secret—I mean, besides me. I need to know who the other person is.”

He shook his head.

“I really can’t tell you. I’m sorry. I don’t want to keep things from you, but this is beyond my control.”

He started to approach me, but I stopped him.

“I need to know that it’s not Sophie.”

He frowned incredulously. “Sophie? Like our Sophie? You think I’m seeing Sophie?”

“Obviously, or I wouldn’t have asked.”

He shook his head, a strange set to his eye. “Of course not. She’s my best friend. No. Not Sophie. God, I can’t even think about Sophie messing around with anyone, let alone someone like me. I’d kill anyone who touched her.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling kind of jealous about his protectiveness. “Enough. So it’s not Sophie, then? You promise?”

“I absolutely promise you. I swear on my life.”

That was all I needed. And finally, at last, the true charm of boarding school became overtly, achingly obvious to me.

I sat with Noel at dinner, but she didn’t say much, and she ate even less. I wanted to help her, but I felt powerless.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” I asked, watching her push food around on her plate.

She gave me a weak smile. “I’m fine. Would you stop worrying about me?”

I gritted my teeth, not knowing what to say. “Remember over spring break when you were talking about suicide?”

“Yeah.”

“That was all theoretical, right?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be naïve.”

“What do you mean? Why am I naïve?”

“It’s not like I’m obsessed with suicide or anything. It’s just
that we talk about it sometimes, so I’ve been, like, relating stuff back to it lately. You know when that happens? When you’re studying, like, owls or something, and then you start seeing owl symbolism everywhere?”

“Not really,” I said, laughing.

Noel shrugged. “Well, that happens to me.”

“Wait,” I said. “Who’s
we
? You and Asta?”

“No,” she said, her cheeks flushing.

“Who, then? You and Helen?”

“No one,” she said, her voice weak. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She stood abruptly, leaving her plate on the table. “I gotta go. I’ll see you later, Wood.”

That night when Alex came to get me after study hours, I didn’t know what to say to him.
It’s no big deal, but I’ve accidentally hooked up with Jack Deeker twice in the last two days
? I didn’t think that would go over too well, so I decided to omit it.

Walking with Alex, I could almost forget what had happened with Jack. Alex had an easy kind of charm about him. There wasn’t the strange, muddled electricity that I felt whenever Jack was near, but that just meant I could relax around him. He slipped his hand into mine and stared down at me with almond eyes, a faint smile playing on his lips.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“Kind of intense, actually,” he said. “We had an unscheduled prefect meeting tonight, and it’s just been a really tough
time. You have to keep this on the DL, but Harrison told us the police found a bag in Iris’s pocket that had trace amounts of psilocybin.”

“What?”

“Psychedelic mushrooms. That girl was tripping balls when she died. Harrison’s really upset,” he sighed. “You can see how this looks for the school. He wanted to know if we’d heard of anyone in possession of something like that, and wants us to be on the lookout from now on. Pretty intense.”

“What? Why is it your job to inform on your classmates?”

“We’re prefects. That’s one of our responsibilities.”

“So you guys are like narcs?”

“We have responsibilities, that’s all.”

“You’ve never done it, though, right? You’ve never turned anyone in.”

“Yeah I have.” He smiled. “This kid back in November. I caught him smoking pot in his closet under my watch. Not cool. I got his ass thrown out.”

“But
you
do drugs,” I said, my gut telling me that something was off.

Quickly he looked around, then lowered his voice. “Cally, that was different. God, I can’t believe you’d say something like that out in the open. What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “I just can’t believe you got that kid kicked out.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said, clearly disappointed.

We continued on, an uncomfortable silence between us. As we walked through the grass, my thoughts fell to Iris and the
mushrooms. Had they been her decision, or had someone manipulated her into taking them? Had her killer drugged her before taking her life, and if so, why use mushrooms? I shook my head and tried to put it from my mind. It seemed that every time I got closer to understanding what might have happened that night, something else crept in to complicate it.

The next day, sitting alone on the balcony, I found I barely had the will to finish my lunch. For the billionth time, I wished I had my dad to talk to. Back home I had Danny, but he wasn’t much for emotions. He would have suggested we find whoever had sent me the puzzle box and beat the shit out of them. The main thing that got under my skin was that I felt like a victim—like I’d been chosen because of Clare’s death—and it felt like someone gouging my wounds with stinging nettles.

I took a bite of my sandwich, something slowly settling onto me. If Clare was the reason I’d been contacted, then was it possible that Asta had been contacted as well? I noticed that at the thought of Asta, my blood pressure dropped to a nice, easy level. She had said to talk to her if I had a hard time at St. Bede’s, and I was pretty sure that was what I was having. She seemed kind, and she seemed to really like me. Maybe it was okay to reach out to her, to trust her.

I left lunch early and headed down to the bio lab, thinking I could catch her alone between periods, but when I walked in, I found her with Noel. They sat across a lab table from each other, and Noel flinched when she saw me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll come back later.”

“No, Cally.” Asta smiled. “Please stay. In fact, you might be exactly what this discussion needs.”

“I’ll finish up the display cases,” Noel said, not making eye contact.

“Perfect,” Asta said. “You keep an eye to your work and an ear to the conversation, and we can kill two birds with one stone.”

“What’s up?” I asked, still unable to place the vibe in the room. I felt like I’d just walked into the middle of an uncomfortable situation, but Asta seemed perfectly at ease.

“Well.” She smiled and slid one of the jars of oil and dead flies across the table toward me. “We were just discussing the morality of killing all these flies. Of course we all know that releasing them outside would be potentially harmful to the ecosystem, but Noel here was saying that by killing them, we might be doing something wrong.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. I feel kind of bad killing them too.”

“That’s good.” Asta nodded. “Illogical on some level, but good. Tell me, why do you feel bad about it?”

“I don’t know. They’re living things. It doesn’t seem right for me to decide whether they should live or die.”

“Are you religious, Cally? Do you think that taking a life is a sin?”

Images of Clare flashed before my eyes. Was that what she was talking about? This felt strange, inappropriate.

“No, I’m not religious,” I said slowly, holding her eye contact. “But I know that as far as humans are concerned, no one has the right to take anyone else’s life away. If they do, they
should pay for it. Whether that extends to insects, I can’t say. I hope not. I’d hate to think we’re all going to hell or whatever for taking AP bio.”

Asta laughed, her gaze warm. “I’d hope not too. Think how many times I’ve taught AP bio. I’d probably end up down in the seventh circle with Pol Pot. But there’s more to what Noel and I were discussing. We were wondering if, hypothetically, killing fruit flies was a sin if we would be able to atone for it, either in this life or the next. Noel thinks not. I say absolutely. I feel that no matter how grave the crime, when we leave this earth, whether we go on to Elysium, or we return here for another life, our soul is cleansed, that the very act of dying cleanses us.”