The Little Woods Read online

  “She’s cute.”

  “She’s a nightmare,” she said.

  I was given a lacrosse stick, and we hopefuls were broken into three lines, the center girl given the ball. Then we were supposed to do something involving running down the field and putting the ball into the goal. I managed to avoid the line of girls who were supposed to do something with the ball, and spent the afternoon sort of lurching down the field, hoping not to fall into ditches. When I watched Noel descend upon the unmanned goal and miss it by a good three feet, I knew that neither of us would make JV. Rather than humiliate ourselves by being the only upperclassmen on third team, we decided to pursue independent walking as our sport—something I was pretty sure Noel had made up on the spot. She said someone named Ms. Sjursen would sign off on it for us.

  “Will that count?”

  She thought a moment. “I think so. She’s a little bit senile, but she’s good with lists. She runs the equipment center and just sits there marking stuff in and out all day. She can just mark us in and out as well. Plus she likes me. I bring her cookies sometimes.”

  We were walking by the varsity field on the way back to the dorm when I first met the disaster I would come to know as Pigeon. She was sitting on the bench, picking at her nails and biting her lower lip, when she saw us and waved. She jumped up and ran over, faster than I’ve ever run.

  “Oh my God, are you Calista?” she yelped when she reached us.

  She was lithe and bronze with huge brown eyes and dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. There was something a little off about her. She wore her lacrosse kilt buttoned high and tight at her waist when the other girls wore theirs slung down around their hips. And she was unattractively thin, all her edges firmly demarcated as if she were perpetually posing as an awkward nude.

  “She goes by Cally,” Noel sighed.

  “Did you guys make JV?” Pigeon asked with a soft lisp, looking me up and down in a way that I could describe only as impolite.

  “We decided to do independent walking instead,” Noel said, smiling at her like she was a benighted child.

  “Oh my God, what, like just walking around?” She laughed too loudly and made a face at my shorts. “Where did you get those shorts? They’re enormous. Are you being, like, ironic or something, because I don’t get it. So walking around? Just walking around? That’s not even a sport. Did you get it okayed with someone?”

  I backed away from the sheer force of her, though she was so small I feared a light wind might topple her.

  “Pigeon, you’re in,” an exasperated girl called from the field.

  Pigeon jerked her head around to the girl, shrugged, gave my shorts one more pained look, and loped back to the field.

  “Wow,” I said, finally exhaling. “So that was Pigeon, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Noel said as we continued on. “That was Pigeon.”

  “She’s kind of like an eight-year-old on crack.”

  “Oh, just you wait.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Spain. Her parents are descended from Spanish royalty or something. It’s not that she’s a bad person or anything, but ten minutes alone with her and you will want to kill yourself.”

  “And she’s a sophomore?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why do you guys hang out with her?”

  “Helen loves her. She thinks she’s hilarious. She just showed up to lunch one day dragging Pigeon along and insisted we integrate her. We all thought it was some kind of elaborate joke. I mean, you never know with Helen. My sister eats Sno Balls for dinner and I still don’t know if she’s just being eccentric. But she was adamant about Pigeon and, well, here we are.”

  “They still make Sno Balls?”

  “Yeah. She’s so weird.”

  Noel headed off to her dorm, and I took the long way back to mine, skirting the edge of the woods, listening to the whistle of the wind in the pines.

  Walking around St. Bede’s, I couldn’t help thinking of Clare. With every step I took, I wondered if the ground beneath me had been touched by her feet, so big back then in her pink Keds and her purple socks, turned tiny with time. I imagined that now I would be able to hold one of them in my hand. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Big sisters were supposed to stay big.

  Had she played hide-and-seek in the empty hallways of what was now my dorm? Had she drawn her looping flowers on the chalkboard of my math classroom? Early that night—the night they’d disappeared—a fire had started in the woods. The campus went to bed thinking it was under control, but it wasn’t, not really. At some point the wind blew the wrong way, and the whole forest lit up like a Christmas tree. When they evacuated the school, when they came knocking at the door, the girls weren’t in their beds. They found no sign of forced entry, and Ms. Snow had heard nothing while she slept.

  They had wandered off into the woods, they said, two little girls stealing away from their beds just past midnight, to play some unknowable children’s game. They must have ended up in the woods, they said. They must have ended up in the heart of the fire. Those were the actions of normal children, they said, of difficult children, but Clare hadn’t been a difficult child.

  I wasn’t there, so I didn’t see the frantic search, the inevitable failure. I missed the heroism of the firefighters who put out the flames, who saved the school and the town from destruction. I missed the aftermath and the fruitless hunt for remains. My dad was there soon enough, of course. The heartbreak of it, the futility, was probably what killed him in the end. I was hundreds of miles away, and a child, so what did I know? But part of me had never believed that Clare would do something so stupid, so dangerous. Part of me would always hear a string of chords just beyond the range of sound, a leitmotif that ran through my life, whispering that the truth of what had happened that night was someone else’s secret.

  Later as I was dressing for bed Helen asked me if I wanted to “take a Saturday night” at her house.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said, pulling on my yellow moose pajama bottoms.

  “The first weekend of the semester, a lot of the parents are still around, so after Saturday classes, we can go off campus. The others are going out to dinner with their parents and then staying the night with my family at our lake house. You can come too. You can even come to dinner if you want.”

  “Um, I don’t know,” I said. As far as I was concerned, the jury was still out on Helen, and I didn’t want to end up the butt of some joke.

  “Some of the boys are going to come over later that night too. Alex Reese will be there.”

  “That guy from bio?” I could feel myself blush.

  “Should I sign you up, then?” she asked, flopping back down on her pillow. “I’ll fill out the request for you. You won’t have to lift a finger. And Noel and I will drive you. My parents got Harrison to let us keep a car on campus for emergencies. Special dispensation.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, climbing under the covers. And then my body went rigid. “Wait, we have class on Saturdays?”

  “Did you even read the viewbook before you applied?”

  I shook my head and turned out the light.

  “Oh, Cally, my Cally. Welcome to hell.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SOMETIMES I HEARD THE OTHER kids complain about what a drag it was to be at boarding school and how they wished they were back home. I felt similarly, only I didn’t want to be back home. I just didn’t want to be at St. Bede’s.

  I could tell that other kids missed their families, but I didn’t miss my mom. I missed the idea of her, but not the actuality of her. I loved her, but she was gone most of the time, even when she was there. It wasn’t her fault. She had lost a child and a husband in the same year, and she had been left with nothing, unless you counted me, which I didn’t.

  St. Bede’s kind of sucked, but it wasn’t so bad, considering. Back home, I had a few guy friends, but school had been pretty awful. I was shy, and a little weird, and when I was younger, bef
ore I figured out I needed to do my own laundry, my clothes were sometimes dirty. Kids could tell when there was something wrong with you—when there was something wrong with your family—and it was like you were an injured member of the herd. They shunned you, because when the lions came, you’d be the first to have her leg torn from her body, and no one wanted to be standing next to you when that happened.

  But Danny was in my grade, and he was a loner too, because of his weight and his love of explosive devices, so we always had each other’s backs. Only Danny was hundreds of miles away now, and when I tried to call him, his cell phone always went to voice mail. I left messages on the home phone, but no one ever called me back. Kim worked nights and slept days, so we were never on the same schedule, and she tended to switch off the ringer. Still, it wasn’t like her not to return my calls.

  To occupy myself, I focused on stalking Alex Reese, which I thought could be a pleasant semester-long pastime. I set about trying to engineer our independent walking route so that our path might cross his as much as possible.

  Saturday morning I stood in the dining hall dribbling honey over my Cheerios and humming to myself.

  “You should put some more honey on that, Wood.”

  I looked up to find Alex Reese, and down to find my Cheerios absolutely smothered in honey.

  My cheeks burned. He knew my name? I had to think of something to say.

  “Sometimes you gotta carbo-load, you know? Big game coming up.”

  “A big walking game, Wood?”

  I was pretty excited that he knew what sport I did—or rather that I’d weaseled my way out of proper sports—but I tried to play it cool.

  “I’m just doing walking because I’m so good at sports that I didn’t want you to feel, like, threatened.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah. New girl comes to St. Bede’s, schools your ass in soccer, it would be embarrassing, so I thought I’d just forgo the whole sports thing this year. And to be honest”—I lowered my voice—“I put someone in the hospital last year because they were looking at me funny on the field.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “When I get pissed, I’m like an animal, man.”

  He laughed and took the honey from me, his fingers brushing lightly against my wrist as he did.

  I tried not to watch as he spread the honey on his toast, but then I tried not to seem like I was trying not to watch, because that was for sure weirder than just watching.

  “You’re kind of odd, aren’t you, Wood?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “Kind of, yeah.”

  “Okay, well …,” he said. He made a strange face, as if trying to take in the full scope of my weirdness. Then he smiled at me, and my stomach surged. Please, God, don’t let me puke on his shoes.

  “See you around,” he said, and winking, he strode out of the room, leaving me alone with my viscous Cheerios. I shrugged and then tossed some Cocoa Puffs in for good measure.

  I was all set to go as soon as possible that afternoon, but we had to wait for Noel. She did a work-study as Ms. Snow’s lab assistant and, according to Helen, was not very skilled at her job.

  “Noel’s a mess,” she said. “I don’t know how you could ever want her to help you organize anything. The other day, Asta had her help her with something at the house, and somehow Noel nearly set the place on fire making them tea. My sister is hopeless.”

  When Noel finally arrived, she looked harried and confused, but was quick to declare herself the driver. In their parents’ much-too-nice car, we headed out to their lake house, which, they explained, was no more than a short hike through the woods behind school but could be reached by car only on a steep and narrow road that curved around the lake. The twins seemed to think this added a good thirty minutes to the journey, but we were there in less than fifteen.

  Noel drove wildly, and she smoked while she did. Every once in a while, Helen would gently snatch the little white cylinder from her sister’s mouth and take a slow, whimpering drag, then gently replace it. I tried to read my detective novel, but my stomach couldn’t manage the curves. I folded back the corner of my page and opened my window, drinking in the fresh pine scent.

  “You’re going to love Richard. Isn’t she going to love Richard, Noel?” Helen, all sparkling and perfect, turned around to smile at me.

  “Who’s Richard?”

  “Our father. He’s amazing. And Magda’s okay too,” Noel said.

  “Magda’s a bore.”

  Magda, I surmised, was the mother, and she was waiting for us in the driveway when we pulled up. Little more than an afterthought when set beside her daughters, she had wan orange hair that she wore swept up. Richard Slater was young and terribly good-looking. He wore a tailored Italian suit, and he flashed me a smile before being tackle-hugged by his daughters. I was left staring at Magda.

  “You must be Cally,” she said as if my name tasted sour. “Welcome. Welcome.”

  She took me by the arm and led me into the house, a modernist spectacle, several stories tall with steep gray steps that led down to a boathouse and then to moody gray water below. Despite its mass, the house was warm and open, with light streaming through windows and flowers bursting forth from most surfaces. Something involving birds of paradise and purple hyacinths awaited us in the loggia.

  Magda took a seat on the daisy-print sofa and motioned for me to sit beside her. She turned her rigid body toward me and appraised me like she might a new set of pearls.

  “So the girls tell me you’re from Oregon. We’re from San Francisco, of course, this is just our little vacation spot, but we do love it.”

  “It’s really beautiful here, and your house is … wow.”

  “Thank you,” she said, leaning forward, dimpled chin on ruddy knuckles. “I hope you’re adjusting to boarding school. I know it can be a bit of a shock. What do your parents do up in Portland?”

  “Um,” I said, shifting in my seat. “My mom’s between jobs.”

  “I see. And your father?”

  I tried to swallow over the lump in my throat, to push my way past the familiar longing in my chest.

  “He died when I was seven.”

  A perfunctory gasp from Magda. “My condolences, of course.”

  “Heart attack,” I said like a child who’d memorized words she didn’t understand.

  “Well,” she said, patting my knee, but then it was clear she had nothing else to say. Wrapping a blue cardigan around bird shoulders, she stood abruptly. “We should find the girls. I’m going to go check the toiletries. You head into the kitchen. I’m sure they’re in there, getting into the wine already.” And with that she disappeared around a corner and shut a door behind her.

  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.”

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nbsp; “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.