Occasionally, there are the more personal artifacts, proof that Roger and Adelle Peterson were real people with real, everyday lives, no matter the genius reputation that seemed to haunt them. There was the Raven Brooks University mug with the school’s seal—the large, shadowy wing of a raven encircled by filigree. There are the random newspaper articles folded over to expose the feature written about one of their accomplishments, always picturing one or both of them looking reluctant to stand for a picture. There’s even a pearl button from what I imagine came off of one of our grandmother’s cardigans.
“Aaron, look at this.”
Mya’s holding a dusty framed picture I didn’t notice the last time I was here, maybe because it was facedown in a corner by the emptied filing cabinet. When I shine the lantern over her shoulder, I see that it’s a crude drawing of a clown.
“I could have gone an entire lifetime without seeing that,” I say, but Mya shoves me.
“No, dummy, look!”
She points to the more adult-looking script at the bottom reading “Teddy, Age 5.”
“Oh.”
“Right,” she says. “Dad drew this.”
We stare at it for a moment in silence, as though we could somehow divine from it the countless memories Dad will never share with us. What could be so bad about this, a boring old weather station with a bunch of moldy papers and abandoned furniture?
“Have you explored the rest of this place yet?” Mya asks.
I shake my head. “Nah, I sort of got, er, sidetracked last time. Why?”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that it was just … abandoned? I mean, why would they leave some of this stuff behind?”
She looks back down at the drawing in her hand, the one that was special enough to frame at one time.
“Maybe they condemned the building or something,” I say, but I know that’s reaching.
“Then why is it still here?” Mya says, shaking her head. “It seems like they left in a hurry, like they didn’t have time to take much.”
“Well, whatever the reason,” I say, because I can tell she’s starting to get scared, “I’m sure it was a good one. Probably not a very exciting one, either.”
“Aaron?” she says, and I know she’s about to ask me something big. Mya always makes perfect eye contact when she’s about to ask something big. It makes it impossible for me to lie, which I’m sure she knows.
“Do you think Grandma and Grandpa were like Dad?”
I should have seen the question coming. I don’t know if I’m off my game because we moved from Germany so fast or because everything about living in Raven Brooks has been like navigating an obstacle course. Either way, her question takes me off guard, and I don’t have time to set my face. She sees my first, unfiltered response before I even say a word.
“The park in Germany,” Mya says, and her voice has dropped so low, I can hardly hear her. “It wasn’t his fault, was it?”
I have no idea how hard it was for Mya to get that question out, but what I do know for sure is that she was the only one brave enough to ask it.
I open my mouth to answer her, still not sure what I’ll say, but instead of words, a high, thin howl is the only thing that comes out.
Mya tilts her head, confused at my response, but the sound didn’t come from me.
“You heard that, too?” I say. Because I’ve heard that noise before.
“It wasn’t from in here,” she says. “But it was close.”
Still holding the framed drawing of a clown, Mya pokes her head out the door, but I pull her back.
“Hang on there, Nancy Drew. Unless you’ve got some secret ninja skills I don’t know about, maybe we shouldn’t go hunting for trouble.”
“So, what exactly are we doing here tonight?” she challenges.
“Okay, it’s possible I didn’t think it through all the way,” I say, “but I think this is enough excitement for one night.”
“What is that sound, though? It almost sounds like a howl, or—”
“All I know is it isn’t the first time I’ve heard it.”
“Huh?”
“In the basement at home. And maybe in Dad’s study, too. And my room.”
“… huh?”
“Look, I don’t know, okay?” I say, getting antsy. “But whether it’s the wind or a coyote or Forest Protectors, we’re not hanging around to find out.”
“Hold on, Forest what?”
“Mya, let’s go!”
“Okay, okay,” she says, shoving me ahead of her. “Just let me gather a few things first. We might never make it back out here again … the construction site for the park isn’t far. This place could actually get condemned tomorrow.”
Reluctantly, I scramble to help her collect a few of our grandparents’ notebooks, the maps, and the newspaper articles scattered about the room. We shove them inside a paper bag we find in the desk drawer, then move.
I take a shallow breath and ease myself along the wall toward the door leading back out to the forest. While I’m not excited to return to the rustle of the trees, at least the sound of that weird howling is growing more distant.
“Almost there,” I tell Mya before emerging from the door, still ajar, and quickly rounding the corner back to the path that will lead us toward the clearing.
Except when I turn around, Mya’s gone.
“Mya, that’s not funny,” I say, loud enough to let her know I mean it, but the second she doesn’t answer, a bottomless hole opens up inside of me, and I feel like I’m falling so fast I’ll never get a foothold. My vision goes black for a moment before I get a grip.
“Mya!”
I sprint back toward the open door and jog to the abandoned office, the lantern still glowing in the middle of the floor where we left it. But Mya is nowhere to be found.
“Where did you … Mya?”
My voice reverberates off of the walls and comes crashing back to me, slicing through the thick air of the weather station and bouncing across the crevices I can’t see.
I bolt back out the door, my feet pounding on the forest floor as I sprint one length of the wall, then round a corner to the next side.
“MYA!”
I round the third corner, crashing through overgrowth and scraping my knuckles against the thorn bushes, but I can hardly feel a thing.
How could she be gone so fast? It’s like she just disappeared.
I round the final corner, and it’s the thickest overgrowth yet, vines and gnarled roots weaving a sloppy tapestry across my path.
All at once, I slam straight into something on the other side of the brush, and now my vision does go black, but not from panic. I lie there until the night sky stops spinning and finally crawl to my feet. But not before I see a familiar shoe sticking out from the tangle of shrubs in front of me.
I part the brush and find Mya leaning back on her elbows, trying to regain her own vision.
“Where the heck were you?” I accuse.
“Me? Where were you? Cute joke abandoning me in there, Jerk!”
“I didn’t abandon you! How hard is it to go out the door?”
“I did go out the door!”
“Well, clearly you didn’t because when I turned around you were gone!”
“So what, you think I found a worm hole?”
Mya’s bleeding. It’s just a little cut right above her eyebrow, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve failed as a big brother. She’s still clutching the paper bag to her chest like it’s treasure.
“Come on,” I say, making an effort to soften my voice. I lift the bottom of my shirt to her head, and she flinches back.
“Ew, you stink.”
“Just hold still.”
I dab at her head until the cut is clear, then I help her to her feet and ease her behind me.
“This was a bad idea,” I say.
“A little late for that,” she grumbles, but she holds tighter to my hand as I guide us through the brush and back to the clearing.
We don’t say another word for the rest of the way home, not even when a squirrel skitters up a nearby tree and practically gives us both heart attacks. One of us might have screamed.
When we arrive back at the rambling blue house, Mya and I slowly open the door and sneak back upstairs like thieves. Mya finally releases my hand to slip into the bathroom, dabbing water on the cut above her eye.
I’m in the top bunk when I hear the floor at my doorway creak.
Mya doesn’t even ask. She simply hides the paper bag under my bed, lies down on the bottom bunk under me, and pulls the comforter over her head. I’m not sure which of us falls asleep first. All I know is that once we were down, neither of us moved an inch.
Enzo is pacing back and forth behind me so much, I don’t even need to watch him to get dizzy.
“Dude, I’m getting motion sickness just listening to you.”
“It has to be epic. I mean, like nothing she’s ever seen.”
“It’s Halloween, not a meeting with the queen.”
How can I be expected to sketch under these conditions?
“And you’re sure you have everything you need for yours?” he asks, full of urgency.
“It’s not exactly complicated,” I say. “Bloody clothes. Butcher knife. Giant Styrofoam tooth.”
We’ve decided to go as the two most notorious, bloodthirsty, infamous slasher movie monsters in the history of ever: me as Smiley, from the always classic Tooth series, Enzo as the three-headed alien from SpaceKills. We’re solid on the idea front; it’s the execution that needs a little work.
“Okay, so that leaves me. I need something that can support three heads.” He stops pacing for a blissful second. “Hey, have you got a set of shoulder pads? Like from football?”
I look down at my favorite shirt—the one that I’ve worn for three years and still never managed to adequately fill out.
“Is that a joke?”
Enzo resumes pacing.
“Okay, so no shoulder pads. Maybe I can make something happen with a couple of wire coat hangers. How are those sketches coming?”
“Man, seriously, you have to calm down. I can smell your desperation from over here.”
Enzo sighs and slumps on the bottom bunk of my bed. “What if she thinks I’m lame?”
I put my hand on his shoulder and lean in. “Enzo, she already knows you’re lame—”
“Thanks,” he says, throwing my hand off.
“But,” I say, “she likes you anyway. Maybe she even thinks you’re cool because of it.”
“She thinks I’m cool?”
I shrug. How the heck would I know? “Absolutely.”
Enzo lightens up enough to actually look at my drawings of the costumes which, if I do say so myself, are amazing.
“These look great,” he says.
“I know.”
“So, my dad’s on this new health kick lately, and the only thing he eats are things that sprouted from other things, so I’m basically starving all the time now,” says Enzo. “Please tell me you have an actual potato chip in your kitchen.”
“I think there’s some leftover pot roast,” I say.
“Good enough,” he says, getting a head start down the stairs toward the kitchen.
When we reach the bottom of the steps, though, Enzo stops dead in his tracks. My dad looms over him like a gargoyle, and I wish I could read his expression, but the late afternoon sun is casting a glare on everything above his mustache.
I haven’t seen him all day.
“Um,” says Enzo.
Nice. Good first impression.
“We were just … pot roast …” he says after my dad says exactly nothing.
Okay, so maybe there are worse impressions to make.
“Dad, this is my friend Enzo,” I say.
I watch his mustache. It doesn’t even flinch.
“Pleased to meet you,” Enzo says.
My dad is silent. He’s like a ghost. I can feel Enzo’s nerve melting out of his pores.
“Pleased to meet you … sir?”
“Enzo,” Dad finally says, but he says it so slowly, I’m not sure it’s any better than him staying mute. “Enzo Esposito.”
“Th-that’s right,” says Enzo, and I swear he’s visibly trembling now.
Either something has taken over my dad’s body and is using him as a host, or he’s messing with Enzo because he thinks it’s funny. Either way, I wish he’d stop.
“We’ve already met,” my dad says.
I can hear Enzo’s throat click as he swallows. “Yes, sir. Last m-month.”
Great. Yes, let’s bring up the night I came home soaked and trembling after Enzo and Trinity lost me in the woods.
“Dad,” I say, trying to coax him away from the memory, “It wasn’t Enzo’s fault. Or Trinity’s. I shouldn’t have …”
I mean, I shouldn’t have done a lot of things that day: convinced Enzo and Trinity to take me to the woods, made them tell me about the Forest Protectors, gotten myself so hopelessly lost I had to be chaperoned back to my house like a toddler.
But the shortcut is, “It wasn’t their fault.”
Dad says nothing.
I take a step down so I’m right behind Enzo, and now that the glare is off his face, I can see Dad’s eyes sparkling. It’s the kind of shine they get when he’s joking. It’s also the way they shine when he’s angry. At the moment, it’s a toss-up.
That is, until he bursts into a laugh so sudden, Enzo and I let out a simultaneous chirp, and he backs into me hard enough to almost knock me off the step.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Enzo,” says Dad, his broad smile spreading under his mustache. “Under better circumstances this time.”
Dad gives us both a sort of scolding look, but nothing serious. He’s just playing.
“In fact, I just heard from your father this afternoon, Enzo,” says Dad, and poor Enzo hasn’t fully recovered, so I have to ask the follow-up questions.
“Was he looking for Enzo?”
Dad shakes his head casually. “A quote, actually. Or maybe a longer conversation. Something about a story you’re working on?” says Dad.
Something in his voice has shifted again. The ease of tone is strained somehow now, like it’s an effort to keep his smile pasted on his face. Now it just looks like he’s baring his teeth.
“Oh, right,” Enzo says, his voice barely above a whisper. “My story.”
“A young reporter, are you?” Dad asks Enzo.
“N-no. I mean, no, sir. I mean, not yet. Maybe.”
Dad laughs another of his booming laughs, and the sound of it echoes off the stairway. “Well, so long as you’re decisive.”
Enzo looks to me to make sure it’s okay to laugh along with my dad before he eventually lets his shoulders fall.
“I think it could be a really interesting story,” says Enzo, and now it’s time for my shoulders to tense up.
“Well,” says my dad with practiced modesty, “I don’t want to disappoint you, young man, but we aren’t exactly the Kennedys. Don’t expect too much excitement.”
“Are you kidding? A world-famous theme park designer? Top secret scientists? Most people’s parents are, well, I don’t know what most people’s parents do. But you’re more interesting than that,” says Enzo, somehow managing to be totally inappropriate and charming all at the same time.
Dad gives Enzo a warm smile, and that should make me feel better; he’s not mad. But Enzo’s mention of the theme park twists my stomach up so tight, I think I might toss my tacos from lunch.
“Did you boys say something about getting some food?” asks Dad, suddenly Mr. Hospitality.
“Actually, I’m feeling a little sick,” I say, totally underselling it because I’m fairly certain I’m going to puke all over these stairs in a moment.
Enzo shrugs. “I’ve gotta get home anyway. Dad’s weird about homework.”
I couldn’t be more relieved that Mr. Esposito is weird about anything.
Th
e minute Enzo pulls the front door closed, I spin on the step and try to make my way to the upstairs bathroom, but Dad’s hand is around my wrist before I can get very far.
“Did you tell his father to call me?” Dad asks. I look for the same gleam in his eyes that was there a second ago when Enzo was standing beside me. The spark is gone; his eyes have turned a dull, flat green.
“No, of course not,” I say, feeling caught, even though I’ve done nothing wrong.
Dad searches me with his empty eyes, and I try so hard to divine what it is he’s looking for. A lie? A way to blame me? A way to take back the accusation I didn’t earn?
The grip on my arm loosens, and I’m allowed to slowly pull away.
If he was looking for a lie, he won’t find it. I’ve done nothing but try to keep trouble away. If he’s looking for a way to blame me, I wish he’d do it already instead of constantly searching. If he’s looking for a way to take it all back, it’s too late. I already heard the distrust in his voice. He doesn’t trust me with our secrets, but he still expects me to guard them.
I can feel his eyes on me as I make my way up the stairs and down the hall to my room. I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up anymore. Instead, I climb into bed and curl myself into a ball on my side, waiting for the sky to turn gray, then black, pretending not to hear when Mom calls me for dinner, pretending to sleep when Mya creeps in to say good night.
At some point, pretending to sleep turns into real sleep, and I only realize I’ve dozed when Mya’s screams wake me up.
I’m down the bunk and onto the floor in less than a second, hurrying into her room before she can wake Mom and Dad. It’s one of her nightmares again.
“Mya, shhhhh,” I try soothing her, and to my surprise, she responds. Or it seems like it until I realize she’s talking in her sleep.
She’s mumbling at first, but when I lean closer, I hear her clearly.
“They can’t breathe. Someone, help, they can’t breathe!”
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