The Little Woods (6 page)

I walked along the hall, my Converse squeaking on the red baked tile. The twins were not in the kitchen but another girl was. She smoked and seemed to fairly drip off the counter on which she sat. She was oddly, disconcertingly beautiful in a way that made no sense. Her hair was an ugly grayish blond, more gray than blond. Her lips, too full and caked with cherry-red matte, were shaped by nature and accentuated by character into a brutal pout, and her skin was nearly translucent.

“You’re the roommate,” she said, her voice a little too nasal. “I’m the neighbor.”

“Hi.”

“I’m Chelsea … Vetiver. Chelsea Vetiver. I tell you that because people say I don’t make sense unless you know both my
names. What do you do, anyway?” she asked, slipping off the counter.

I laughed but saw that she was serious.

“I’m in school. I’m seventeen.”

“Well, so am I, but that doesn’t, like, define me.” She opened the fridge and stared distantly at some item within. “Okay, so you don’t do anything now, but what do you want to do with yourself?”

“Like when I grow up? I don’t know.” I shrugged and thought about the book I’d been reading. “I guess I’d kind of like to be a private detective, you know, like Philip Marlowe. Like in those novels.”

“Detective novels,” she said as if she were explaining the color wheel to a slow child.

“Yeah.” I shrugged again. “I guess so. So what do
you
do, then?”

“I’m an artist. I make art. Some might even call me an art star.”

“Really?”

“No.” She removed a jar of expensive-looking marmalade from the fridge and unscrewed the cap. She almost dipped her finger into the orange goo but at the last second wrinkled her nose and looked around for a spoon, which she located in a drawer near the pantry. “Maybe someday. Right now I mostly take photographs and do things to them.”

“Like what?”

“Do you know anything about cameras?”

“No.”

“Then it wouldn’t make sense and I don’t have time to explain it,” she said, chewing on the end of the spoon, which had previously contained a little dollop of marmalade. I laughed again, but she just stared at me. “I’m going to take pictures of you sometime. I was going to use Helen but she’s too peachy. I want something a little dark, a little ghastly, you know?”

“I’m not too peachy; I’m just not a nudist,” Helen said behind me.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” Chelsea said.

“You know me.
On little cat feet
.”

The two girls hugged like porcelain dolls.

“How’s school?” Chelsea drawled.

“Horrible.”

“Serves you right for being too dumb to get into Exeter.”

“We didn’t apply,” Helen mouthed at me, shaking her head.

“Let’s go outside and have a cigarette. My brother sent me some Gauloises from France. He’s such a candyass.”

Forgetting about me, the two of them swayed out the screen door, and I realized that Chelsea Vetiver hadn’t been smoking. She was just the kind of girl who always seemed to be holding a cigarette.

Dinner was pizza eaten standing up around the kitchen counter, Magda staring at me as if I were a virulent strain of encroaching fungus, Richard dashing into the room now and then to grab a slice and make a mildly funny joke and then dashing off again to take care of some amorphous kind of business in his home office.

“He’s an investment banker,” Noel whispered as if that meant he cured cancer, and I nodded and tried to seem impressed. The girls would perk up whenever he entered, and seemed to deflate in his absence.

Freddy and Pigeon showed up just as I had solved an argument over who should have the last piece of pizza by taking it for myself. They looked flushed, like maybe they’d been drinking with dinner, and they carried grocery bags, one of which seemed to be clink-clinking with wine bottles.

I avoided drunken teenagers, Danny and his Strawberry Hill Boone’s excepted, because where there were drunken teenagers, there tended to be an inordinate amount of groping and puking. It was clear, though, that things would be different at the Slaters’. I had the impression alcohol was condoned, encouraged even, by the parents who practically extolled the virtues of adolescent drinking—stopping just short of using the phrase
on the Continent
. Everyone adjourned to the loggia, and Helen’s parents poured us each a modest amount of red wine. I waved mine off.

“Antibiotics,” I said.

“So, girls, what’s all the gossip?” Magda asked, staring over her wineglass.

“Well,” said Freddy, leaning back and giving her wine a little swirl, “I’m starting to think being president is no fun. I want a dictatorship.”

“Next on to the White House, am I right, Miss Bingham?” Richard laughed and poured himself a plentiful glass of red.

“God willing.”

“That’s the spirit,” Richard said, taking a seat across from
me. He had sharp, clean good looks that he’d passed down to his daughters and a set to his jaw that made him seem jaunty and fun. Guys like him always creeped me out.

“We’re all holding out hope,” Noel said, sipping lightly.

“And how are your parents, dear? Still spending a lot of time on the Continent?”

There we go
. Where was I? What was I doing with these people? I felt like a foreign exchange student struggling to understand inscrutable customs. I wondered if it would be rude to excuse myself and head up to bed. But just then, a knock sounded on the glass loggia door, and I jumped a little in my seat.

“My God, Calista. You are such a chicken,” Pigeon said, laughing. “It’s only the boys. Don’t worry, I won’t tell them about how you are such a chicken.”

Alex Reese strolled through the front door with Brody Motley. My heart simultaneously leapt and constricted. I’d forgotten about the boys. I wasn’t ready for this. I was one step away from crawling into my moose pajamas. I’d thought I was in girl territory. I’d thought my actions were allowed to be sleepy and safe. Now I was going to have to sit up straight and tuck in my tummy, worry about how my boobs looked and check for crap in my teeth. I didn’t have that kind of energy.

I liked the idea of being around Alex Reese, but I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I set myself talking to Brody, a hockey-player type with shaggy brown hair and a sweet way about him.

The parents went up to bed after the boys arrived, and soon several bottles were uncorked and the wine started flowing
more freely. At some point, Alex got up to go to the bathroom, and when he came back, he sat in the big easy chair next to my end of the sofa. He smiled and leaned over to me.

“So how are you liking St. Bede’s?”

“It’s nice, I guess.” I shrugged.

“Nice?” He laughed. “St. Bede’s is a lot of things, but nice isn’t one of them.”

“You don’t like it here?”

“Like it? Of course I like it,” he said, then took a big easy sip of his wine. “This place is my ticket to the Ivy League. It’s just competitive, that’s all. But tell me about you.”

For a moment I considered telling him the truth, but no one wanted to hear about dead family members and drunken moms. I knew there were certain kinds of girls—damsel-in-distress types—who could expose their family dysfunction and still be attractive to boys, but I wasn’t one of those girls. I was more of a Wednesday Addams type, and since my new mission statement was basically just
try not to freak anybody out
, I decided to play it cool.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

“You have a boyfriend back home?”

“No,” I said. “Boyfriends are boring. They always want to, like, hold hands or make out to Coldplay.”

“I’m not boring, and I don’t listen to Coldplay,” he said.

“Good to know.”

He nodded, and when he held my eyes for a moment too long, I began to wonder if something was going on between us. But just then Chelsea Vetiver materialized, a thick swamp cloud of effluvium gusting into the room.

“Reese, Brody, what’s up?” she asked, planting herself firmly on Alex’s lap.

He lit up when he saw her, the dumb-puppy-dog look washing over him like so much syrup. She had won the battle, but maybe I could still participate in the war. Though, I had to admit, if she’d won the battle simply by walking into the room, things did not look especially good for me.

“So are you guys
creeching
?” she asked, and rolled her eyes.

“What’s creeching?” I asked, sipping the soda water Noel had given me.

“It’s when you sneak out of your dorm at night,” Helen said. “It’s pretty much the worst thing you can do other than cheating.”

“Wow,” I said. “Next you’ll be mainlining battery acid. Kids these days.”

“Yeah, pretty wild, right?” Alex said.

“So you walked here?”

“There’s a trail through the woods behind school. Lets out basically right here.”

“It was scary as hell with just two of us, though,” Brody said. “I’m used to meeting up with the whole crowd.”

“I was there, man. I had your back.”

“You’re big, but I bet you’d just lose it if you saw a ghoul or demon or whatever the hell’s out there.”

“You guys are a couple of weenies,” Chelsea said, lighting a cigarette. “There’s nothing scary in these woods.”

“Like hell there isn’t.”

“Chelsea, dude,” Alex said, adjusting her on his lap so he could look her in the face. “All due respect, but everyone knows
these woods are straight-up haunted. We do this walk all the time, and there’s always some scary fucking noise that can’t be explained. Ask anyone.”

“That’s such nonsense. I grew up in these woods. You’re hearing coyotes.”

“We’re hearing fucking Bigfoot or the yeti or some shit,” Brody said, laughing.

“I’ll tell you what we’re hearing,” Alex said, leaning in, his voice lowering to a moody whisper. “We’re hearing the lost girls.”

Helen straightened up. “That’s not funny, Alex. Don’t talk about it.”

My chest clenched.

“Oh my God, you guys, Wood doesn’t know,” Pigeon said, getting all flustered and gesticulating haphazardly. “The woods are haunted. These two little girls were murdered out there.”

I coughed, and the cracker I was eating went spewing all over the glass coffee table.

“They weren’t murdered,” Noel said, color rising in her cheeks. “They died in a fire.”

“No.” Pigeon shook her head dramatically. “Seriously, you guys. They wandered off into the woods or whatever, but they were totally murdered.”

I clenched my teeth and tried to slow my breathing. This was not the turn I’d expected the conversation to take.

Chelsea stood up and circled the group, leonine, in search of something to pour into her empty glass. “Um, why have I never heard this story?”

“Because you don’t go to our school,” Brody said, pretending to snarl at her. “Why are you even here, Chelsea Vetiver? Aren’t you supposed to be at Exeter?”

“The semester hasn’t started yet. Anyway, I call bullshit.”

“No,” Noel sighed, resigned. She poured more wine into Chelsea’s glass and then into her own. “It’s true. It was before you and your grandparents moved here. One of them was our bio teacher’s daughter.”

“Yeah,” Freddy said, shaking her head with the appropriate level of detached sympathy. “The little girl and her friend died in a fire out here in the woods. It was incredibly tragic.”

“So, what,” Chelsea sneered, “they just wandered out into the blazing forest and died? And one of them was your bio teacher’s kid? What the hell?”

“I know, right?” Pigeon expectorated. “You’d think she’d be, like, all weird, with too many scarves or something, but she’s totally normal. Like nothing ever happened. People only act that innocent when they’re guilty, am I right?”

Helen raised her eyebrows. “Pigeon, tell me you’re not suggesting that Ms. Snow killed her own child.”

Noel drew in a sharp breath. “Pigeon.”

“I assume she set the fire too?” Helen sneered. “Think before you speak, Pigeon.”

“No, it’s like … suspicious, right? They never found the bodies. How did they just disappear?”

“Whoa, Pidge,” Alex said. “Watch it.”

“No. She’s probably right,” Chelsea groaned, draining her glass. “It’s always the parent. Hey, Wood, you okay there? You’re looking a little peaked.”

I tried to get myself together and smile along with the rest of them.
God, what an idiot
. How naïve of me to think they wouldn’t know about Clare just because she was before their time. Of course a thing like that lingered. It was, I knew, now or never. I would never be able to go back to this moment and say,
Hey, you know, that was my sister who died in that fire. I guess I just forgot to mention that
. If I kept quiet and someone found out later, it would be a disaster. The smartest thing would be to tell them right then and there. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Clare was a part of me I didn’t share.

I furrowed my brow and cleared my throat. “Doesn’t it seem weird to you guys, though? I mean, I just got here, like, five days ago, and this is already the second story of disappearing girls I’ve heard. So is St. Bede’s, like, the Bermuda Triangle of boarding schools or what?”

That got an unexpected laugh from Alex Reese.

“They didn’t disappear,” Helen said snippily. “They died in a fire.”

“Either way,” Brody said, his voice suddenly low. “There’s something weird going on out in those woods. The Bermuda Triangle is a good way to describe it, actually.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“This area has a sort of reputation.”

“Oh, not this again.” Alex rolled his eyes.

“It’s true. It’s not like I’m into any of that crap, but my sister did a report on it when she was here. Trust me, there’s been some freaky stuff over the years.”

“Define
freaky
,” Chelsea said, leaning in.

Brody shrugged. “According to my sister, there are places
that have something kind of strange about them. It’s something about the electromagnetic fields or vortices or something. And these places, these vortices, maybe they attract weird things, or maybe they generate them. Dude, I don’t know, but these places—like the Bermuda Triangle—there’s something wrong with them.”

“The Bermuda Triangle is a fairy tale,” Chelsea said dismissively. “Name me one other place.”