Nancy Drew

by Micol Ostow

  Melanie, another self-proclaimed theater geek who Daisy was friendly with after so many years of costarring in school productions, chimed in, rolling her eyes. “We get it, Theo, you’re above the whole Naming Day thing, and you’d rather spend that weekend brooding around Hot Topic and listening to sad eighties whine-rock. That just means one less person to compete with over pieces, so go with God, if you ask me.” A few others echoed their agreement with this sentiment.

  Theo straightened in his seat, bristling. “I am above it,” he said. “And you should be too.” He literally pointed an accusing finger, like a villager in the third act of an outdated Disney movie. “It’s such a sad, sycophantic display of misplaced ethnocentrism, thinly disguised as town pride.” It was impressive, the way he spat it out, multisyllabic phrasing and all.

  “Points for the twenty-dollar word, brother,” a voice broke into the din. “But you have to know you’re not winning any popularity points with this tactic.”

  I swiveled as everyone else in the room also turned, nearly in unison, to see who’d made that comment.

  Well, hello.

  Parker Winslow was a transfer student, new this year, and though we didn’t have any classes together, I knew all about him—originally from Chicago, had gone national in fencing, which was unusual but inarguably cool, had a much older sister who worked for a nonprofit in Miami. Horseshoe Bay is a small town, and newcomers are rare. And newcomers who bear a striking resemblance to a lesser-known Hemsworth brother?

  Yeah, you’re going to hear about them. Especially if you’re me, and digging is your thing.

  Seeing, though? Up close and personal? That was different from hearing. Way different.

  Rumors had definitely not been exaggerated. Now that he was standing in the Masthead doorway, I realized I’d never been this close to him before. His eyes were a color I’d never seen before on a human face, some green/blue/gray mix that seemed to change with every micromovement he made. His hair was a sandy blondish brown, perfectly tousled. I found myself idly wondering what it would feel like to run my fingers through it… .

  Get it together, Drew.

  This was weird. I mean, I’d had boyfriends before, though nothing all that serious. And it wasn’t like I’d never been in the same room with a cute guy before. But this felt … next level, somehow. Like the air pressure had dropped since he’d walked in. There went all that composure I was so happily pretending to have recaptured.

  Not good. I had a Masthead issue to put out and a Naming Day to help plan, and exactly no time for hair tousling, fantasized or otherwise.

  Lena, however, seemed to be immune to his whole pressure-y aura. She looked at him, scanning dispassionately. “While I know we all appreciate the vote of solidarity,” she said, “I don’t know that we need a peanut gallery swinging by just to weigh in.”

  Parker smiled. The backs of my knees tingled, a spot on my body I previously hadn’t known could tingle.

  This is the opposite of getting it together.

  “I can see how it might seem that way to you,” he said, still giving that light, easy grin, “but I’m here to join the team.”

  “And we love … joiners,” I said, wincing. “But the thing is, Naming Day coverage has all been assigned.” Cute or no, I was defensive of my bylines.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “I heard some of that, as I was—well, lurking,” he finished, sheepish.

  Oh, he gave such good “sheepish.”

  “But then I heard your boy Theo, here, insisting that he didn’t want the beat, so I’m going to assume you have a hole in your schedule.” He looked at me. “Didn’t want you to be left high and dry.”

  “Real talk: It wouldn’t be hard to fill,” Lena said, dangling it like a threat—one that we all knew was empty.

  “He wants the beat,” I put in, still in some kind of weird, unnecessary denial.

  “ ‘He’ doesn’t,” Theo replied, insistent. He stood now, bouncing on his heels, warming to his little riff. “ ‘He’ keeps saying it too. I genuinely am not interested in covering Naming Day or anything to do with it.”

  “I … don’t understand,” Daisy said blankly.

  Theo gave a short laugh, his shoulders shaking. “I’m sure you don’t.” He looked at her. “Do you have to take some kind of, like, blood oath of Horseshoe Bay fealty, as a Dewitt? Because I’m picturing it a lot like a baptism but with sixty percent more creepy religious overtones.”

  Ouch. Don’t hold back, Theo.

  I glanced at Daisy. Her lower lip was trembling, though she was trying to play it off. If we as a town took homegrown pride seriously, then Daisy’s family lived the extended-play dance remix of that base-level pride. And the “creepy religious overtones”? That was a little too close to home.

  “Are the rest of us supposed to apologize for not coming from tragic broken homes?” Lena put in, coming to Daisy’s defense before I had the chance to. “Just because you need to be all rebel-without-a-cause twenty-four seven doesn’t mean Naming Day isn’t a big deal to a lot of us.”

  “Oh, but see—that’s where you’re wrong,” Theo countered. “I’m downright lousy with causes.”

  “ ‘Lousy’ being the key word, there,” I said. Whether or not our town had a unique tendency to overhype the Naming Day phenomenon, Daisy was right—the last thing we needed was a Grinch in our midst. That sort of negativity was infectious.

  “Maybe it’s a little silly how into town history everyone here is,” I said, “but who cares? It’s tradition. And it’s fun. You know … fun? Like: a good time? You should try it.”

  Parker stepped forward, giving me a smooth smile that made my cheeks feel flushed. “Don’t overexert yourself, Nancy. You can lead a buzzkill to the celebration, but you can’t take the stick out of his—”

  I stifled a laugh, clinging to a last grasp at professionalism.

  What is happening to you?

  “Look, dude,” Theo said, “I don’t know who you even are, but you’re not even on the Masthead staff. So maybe back off with your witty critiques of me or the way I approach my beat.”

  “Actually,” Parker said, shooting me a tentative look, “as of today, I officially am on the Masthead ’s … er, masthead.”

  “It’s a double entendre,” I said. “Nautical term.”

  “Believe it or not, while we may not all be savants on par with the local girl sleuth, that much I knew,” Parker replied. Though he was definitely teasing, flames crawled up my cheeks. Yes, I had a reputation around Horseshoe Bay. But no, I didn’t love when cute new boys got wind of that rep before they’d had a chance to get to know me. Perfect.

  Theo looked nonplussed. “I’m sorry, so you’re on the ed board?” He looked at me, throwing up his hands. “When did that happen?”

  “Not the ed board, the writing staff,” Parker said. “It happened when I asked Mr. Pitilli to sponsor my application.”

  Theo looked at me. “Nancy!”

  I shrugged. “What do you want me to do? If Pitilli signed his application form, he’s in. You know as well as I do, it’s policy.”

  It was. The buck started and stopped with me, as EIC, when it came to assigning articles. But anyone who wanted to could apply to our writing pool, as long as they had a teacher’s sponsorship. Pitilli taught AP Lit and, frankly, was notoriously a little bit of a hard-ass. If he was Parker’s sponsor, I felt good about Parker joining the team.

  “Great,” Theo said sarcastically. “Another lemming, then?”

  Parker just shrugged. “If by ‘lemming,’ you mean: ‘Keene High student who’s stoked about Naming Day and happy to cover it’? Then yeah.”

  “Thank you,” Daisy said, relieved. “At least someone here has a sense of occasion.”

  “Someone?” Theo scoffed. “More like the whole damn town. And it’s a total waste of energy—not to mention ink—if you ask me—”

  “Literally no one asked you,” Lena pointed out.

  Melanie stood up, hol
ding an extended arm out like she was directing traffic. “Okay, listen, he’s entitled to his opinion,” she said. “There’s no reason to get hostile.” She and Theo were tight—their families were old friends—even if they didn’t see eye to eye on this particular issue.

  Daisy shook her head. “He’s the hostile one. I mean, hate on tradition all you want, but this is still an important issue for us. If you’re gonna be such a downer, why even come to the meeting?”

  Theo raised his eyebrows. “So these things are optional? I hadn’t realized.”

  “They’re not,” I confirmed quickly. “But there’s, you know, lively debate and dissent, and then there’s pot-stirring just for the sake of causing drama.”

  “Right. I always forget how expressing a different view from the popular opinion is just ‘causing drama.’ ”

  “Oh my God, can you please just get over yourself for a minute?” Lena said, her voice rising in frustration.

  “Guys,” I cut in, “this is super not-helpful—”

  “Well, sure, if our resident Holden Caulfield is just going to hunch in the corner throwing shade … ,” Lena said, eyes flashing.

  My gazed whipped back and forth as I considered how best to break this up. With every second that passed, that seemed like more and more of an impossibility. Just as I was about to fully stand up on the teacher’s desk and give some kind of elaborate whistle, the room was rocked by a startling thud at the window. We all flinched and turned.

  “What was that?” Daisy asked, her voice small. She was still on edge from the explosion in the hallway, but it would have been startling either way.

  We all exchanged tentative glances. A crash that loud had only a few obvious causes. A bird, chances were. Flying straight into the glass. Another unpleasant metaphor. But it had been so loud. Like, improbably so.

  We stood stock-still, no one wanting to be the first to peer out the window and investigate-slash-confirm.

  Well, no one except me.

  “Okay,” Parker said, breaking the loaded silence. “If nothing else, it was the end of that argument, right?”

  Right.

  It wasn’t much of a silver lining. But we didn’t have anything else.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We’d had a cat when I was little—a fat striped tabby I named Sprinkles—who’d liked to leave me little gifts of half-eaten prey: sparrow heads and chipmunks with their rib cages stripped raw splayed out at the front door, flecks of blood still clinging to the tips of her whiskers. This couldn’t be any worse than that.

  Right?

  I took a deep breath. “It was a bird,” I said, crossing to the far side of the room to open the window and peer out. “I’m sure of—”

  I swallowed.

  For a moment, I couldn’t find the rest of that sentence. I’m sure of it. Because looking out the window had confirmed what I was sure of with horrifying, gruesome clarity.

  “Is it a bird? Nancy?” Daisy’s voice trembled, uncertain. “It is, right? It left a crack in the window.”

  I glanced up to where she was pointing and blinked, not quite believing what I was seeing. Because there was a crack in the window, a sizable chunk, spreading into an ominous web that twisted and branched from the initial point of impact.

  “Is it a bird?” Lena echoed, tiptoeing up behind me. “Because I’ve never seen a bird damage a window like that. What was it, a hawk?”

  She was joking. But she wasn’t that far off, improbable as it seemed.

  “Close,” I said grimly.

  I pushed the window as far up as it would go and swung my legs over until I was outside, feet touching down on the overgrown grass. I kneeled down to have a better look and immediately flashed back to one of Sprinkles’s most violent kills: a rabbit, gray and small, one eye gouged out, the gory socket crawling with bugs.

  This was slightly less bloody than the rabbit had been. That was something, at least.

  Sometimes it’s the little things.

  “What is it?” It was Parker, his voice way steadier than either of my friends’ had been. He was at the window, craning to have a better look.

  My gaze caught on something—minuscule, easy to overlook, but then again, I was nothing if not observant. I swiftly plucked the something in question from the bird and examined it, careful not to touch the carcass in the process. I stood to find everyone lined up at the window, expectant and nervous, a row of anxious shoulders and worried expressions.

  “I think it’s a raven,” I told them. A hawk’s shadier, goth-styled cousin. And not particularly common around here.

  “What?” Parker hopped out the window to have a look of his own. “Holy crap.”

  I know. My formal knowledge of ornithology was sorely lacking, but I could say with some real certainty that I didn’t know the last time I’d encountered a raven outside of an Edgar Allan Poe poem or the Halloween decorations section of the party store.

  We stared in silence together, for a moment. As grotesque as the scene was, it was hard to look away.

  It was a raven, sure enough: huge, ink-black feathers looking oil-slick in the afternoon sun. And it had hit the window with enough force to shatter it, and in the process, it had … well, it had nearly taken its entire head off too. In fact, its head had twisted so far around that now it clung by little more than a few bloody threads, one glassy eye gazing blankly into space.

  The bird also was—or it had been, before the … decapitation—wearing a collar. Something skinny and leather-looking. Brown. Which was still not the strangest thing about the whole situation.

  Parker looked at me. “What was that thing, though?”

  I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “You—you pulled something. From the bird.”

  “I …” I trailed off. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had caught me doing something that was meant to be under the radar. Parker spotting me grab the note was almost like him walking in on me changing in the gym locker room—I felt that exposed.

  “It’s …” I paused, totally unsettled. This was the strangest part, so bizarre I really wasn’t sure how to proceed—and that was before being stripped down (metaphorically speaking) by this mysterious new hottie. “Um. Well, it’s a note.” I nodded in response to everyone’s confused faces. “Yeah. There was a note in its beak.”

  “Oookay. So, what does it say?” Daisy called, straining her torso as far out the window as she could.

  Reluctantly, I unfolded the square of paper again. A few stray drops of blood stained one corner, and I gingerly did my best to avoid them.

  “ ‘Beware the Naming Day curse,’ ” I read, voice as flat as I could make it. If I could stay calm, maybe this would all seem twenty percent less creepy?

  It’s a theory, anyway.

  I didn’t want to read the rest of the note, like saying the words out loud would give them a power I wasn’t prepared for. And I knew the reaction I’d get from everyone gathered around.

  But not reading the note wouldn’t cause it to cease to exist. It was real, in my hands, and it couldn’t have come to us by accident.

  I coughed, cleared my throat. “Naming Day must be called off.”

  * * *

  “So, this is a joke, right?” Half an hour—and a ton of debate—later, Daisy was somehow still holding out hope.

  We were still inside the Masthead classroom (those of us who’d gone out the window safely back inside by now), this time with desks pulled into a circle that felt protective and necessary. I’d locked the classroom door too. The note—creepy, bloodstained, hand-scrawled in shaky lettering—sat on my desk in front of me, those words blaring at me accusingly.

  “It’s got to be a joke,” Lena repeated, though she was still up-talking like she was asking a question, and she didn’t sound very confident. “The Naming Day curse? What even is that?”

  I’d been asking myself that very same question since we’d opened the note that the raven had carried. Horseshoe Bay was
my town; I knew it better than the back of my hand. I knew its every legend, every tall tale, every ghost story.

  Or so I’d thought.

  The idea that there was a curse I’d never even heard of? That was maybe more worrying than the idea of a curse itself. A curse, I can disprove. A surprise?

  Well … a surprise was harder to get over.

  “How do you jokingly send a creepy, note-carrying raven into a classroom window?” Melanie said, her voice squeaking. “Like, who even knows how to do that? That is some Southern Gothic horror novel nonsense.” I knew she was literally a drama queen, but her response to the bird had been heightened; she was sitting up straighter, her voice just a few octaves higher than everyone else’s, since the bird had appeared.

  An excellent question. Also on my mind: Was there a reason this whole incident was piquing something in some far-flung corner of my frontal lobe? Déjà vu or something similar gnawed at me like an itch between my shoulder blades that I just couldn’t reach. But what? Ravens weren’t a bird I thought much about once I’d passed eighth-grade English.

  “It is very Game of Thrones,” Parker said. Of everyone in the room, he seemed the least taken aback by the maybe-harbinger bird’s appearance. I tried not to think about what that could mean.

  He should be shocked. My brain’s autoplay was stuck on that thought. He should be shocked, because it was legitimately shocking—even to me, and I’ve seen things—and everyone else was straight-up horrified. Putting aside the fact that a mutilated raven at the window was the stuff of a medieval dream sequence … the fact that it had, apparently, been carrying a warning, Greek-tragedy-style?

  It was concerning.

  One might even say it had the makings of the first stirrings of a mystery.

  But I didn’t want to say that, not out loud. Not just yet.

  Not everyone would see it as good news, the way I did. Not everyone enjoyed mysteries. And Daisy would be crushed at the idea of anything interfering with her Naming Day, her year.

  “It’s an … odd choice for a joke,” Seth said. “In that it’s not funny. And how did that bird get to us, anyway?”