“Or we could do Never Have I Ever?” Portia offered, when no one said anything. “We don’t have any”—she lowered her voice, eyes darting around the room for Raven’s mom, who’d been popping in and out all morning—“booze, but we could play with cookie cake? That could be cool.”
Hendricks couldn’t imagine anything sadder than playing Never Have I Ever with cookie cake while Raven lay unconscious a few feet away, her mom listening outside the door. She cleared her throat and said in a small voice, “I feel like maybe . . . we don’t need games?”
She was careful to use the “I feel” language that the counselors at Catskills Therapeutic Expeditions had taught her. It was supposed to keep the other person from feeling attacked. Or something.
Portia’s eyes flicked to her, and Hendricks knew she was thinking of camp, too. The two of them and Connor had gone together, at the suggestion of their school counselor, who’d been worried that the three of them hadn’t “dealt with their trauma” appropriately. Apparently “wilderness therapy” was a thing. The counselor had sent them all home with brochures for CTE to give to their parents.
The brochures had convinced Hendricks’s parents that a little time outdoors was all she needed to get over the death of her ex-boyfriend, whom they thought died in a freak fire at their old house. So, while everyone else went somewhere warm for spring break, Portia, Hendricks, and Connor spent a week hiking through the mountains with forty pounds of gear strapped to their backs, and chopping wood, and talking about their feelings around a fire. They weren’t allowed to use their phones or the internet or electricity, and they slept on sleeping bags on the ground, not even a tent separating them from the stars.
Hendricks had been surprised to discover that she’d sort of loved it. And it had helped. She and Portia and Connor were all friends again, maybe even closer than they’d been before the accident. Hendricks wasn’t over what had happened, obviously. But she felt stronger.
Now Portia clapped her hands, grinning like Hendricks had just offered up an amazing idea. “Oh my God! You’re so right. We should do music instead. Raven would have wanted music. She loves to dance.”
Portia whirled around and started digging through her backpack, quickly producing a Bluetooth speaker and her phone.
Hendricks worked a little harder to keep her smile firmly in place. At CTE, she’d learned that Portia tended to get bossier when she was feeling overwhelmed or freaked out. So, when ABBA filled the room a minute later, Hendricks tried very hard to look like she was having fun.
All around the room, people glanced at one another, wondering if they were supposed to dance. Hendricks had been staring off into space, and it was a moment before she realized she hadn’t exactly been “staring off into space” so much as “staring directly at Connor’s face.” Awkward, considering their . . . history.
He was standing right across from her, one eyebrow cocked, waiting for her to notice him. Somehow, he managed to look even taller and blonder and more all-American surrounded by all this sadness.
Camp had been good for them, too. They’d agreed to be friends—just friends. So far, it had been working. They’d come a long way since the party. The party, the one where they’d broken things off once and for all, the one where Raven had gotten hurt, and the sky had rained blood, and the skeletons of three teenage boys had dug their way out of her backyard. And Eddie . . .
Hendricks closed her eyes, tears gathering along her lashes. It still hurt every time she thought about it. This was the one thing camp hadn’t helped her work through. It had been three months since Eddie died and still she couldn’t make herself believe he was really gone. She kept expecting to see him standing at some sidewalk corner, leather jacket thrown over his shoulder, eyes dark and hooded, watching her. She’d found herself flinching at the smallest noise, whipping her head around whenever she saw something in her periphery, sure that Eddie would be there.
But he wasn’t there. Eddie had been buried in the Drearford Cemetery on a miserable, rainy Monday morning. Hendricks had stood on the frozen ground in her one black dress, watching Eddie’s mother cry while his casket was lowered into the earth, his dad’s arms wrapped loosely around her as he tried not to break down himself. Hendricks had looked from Eddie’s gravestone to the two just beside them.
Eduardo Ruiz
Maribeth Ruiz
Kyle Ruiz
Three children. All of them dead.
Thinking about it now, Hendricks felt a lump forming in her throat. She pressed her knuckles to her lips and swallowed, her breath hitching. The boy next to her—Blake, she thought his name was—glanced over, frowning.
Time to go, she thought. Portia would just have to understand.
“Excuse me,” she murmured, ducking past Blake, toward the door. The room didn’t seem cold anymore. It was hot now, the air heavy and thick. She couldn’t breathe.
She stepped into the hallway and was halfway to the door when she heard her name.
“Hendricks! Wait.” Connor.
Hendricks swallowed, her eyes trained on Raven’s front door. She wanted to be alone right now, so she could cry in peace, but Connor had been a real friend to her at camp. She couldn’t just blow him off.
Slowly, she turned around. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Connor said. “I, uh, just wanted to see how your hands were feeling.”
Hendricks smiled, despite herself, and rolled her eyes. Back at camp, Connor had taught her how to chop wood, but he’d forgotten to make her wear gloves, and she’d gotten these massive, gross blisters all over her palms and fingers. Of course, the blisters had healed weeks ago.
“They’re good,” she said. “No thanks to you.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault your city-girl hands aren’t used to hard work,” Connor shot back. His lips twitched from a smile to a frown and then back to a smile again, and Hendricks wondered if he was doing the same calculation that she’d done earlier: Was it okay to smile at a time like this?
She felt suddenly exhausted.
Connor shook his head, the grin falling from his face. He looked just as tired as she felt. “This is weird, isn’t it? Being back.”
Hendricks nodded. “Tell me about it.”
“I keep waiting for it all to feel real,” Connor added. “It’s like every morning, I wake up and I have to remind myself that Raven’s in a coma, and Eddie . . .” He trailed off, his cheeks blazing. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I know it’s not like that for you.”
Hendricks bit her lip, saying nothing. They’d talked about this at CTE. This had all seemed “real” to Hendricks the moment it’d happened. Much, much too real.
She had a sudden flash of memory: standing in a long line of people wearing black, dropping a handful of dirt over Eddie’s casket, rain drizzling around her. Once again, tears pricked the corners of her eyes, only she wasn’t so sure she’d be able to stop them this time. She blinked. Time to go.
“I really should—” she started, at the same time that Connor said, “Listen, I just wanted to—”
They both stopped talking. Hendricks nodded at Connor. “You go,” she said.
“This might sound kind of weird,” Connor said, “but I, uh, I just wanted to say that I’m still here.”
Hendricks stared at a freckle on Connor’s forehead because she knew that if she looked him in the eye, she would break down. “Thanks.”
“I know we aren’t at camp anymore,” he continued, “but . . . we can still talk. Or chop wood, if you want. My parents have an old shed out back that they’re always trying to get me and my brothers to bust up into firewood.”
Hendricks felt her lip twitch. “Trying to get me to do your chores for you?”
Connor scoffed. “Like a city girl could even handle my chores,” he teased, and Hendricks socked him on the shoulder.
Connor flinched, feigning pain as he rubb
ed the spot where she’d hit him. “Anyway,” he added. “I’m still here. That’s all I wanted to tell you. See you later, friend.”
Hendricks stiffened. Friend, Connor had said. She suspected that he still had feelings for her, that being her friend was the last thing he wanted. And yet, he was willing anyway, without her even having to ask. For the first time all morning, something like warmth spread through her chest. It reminded her of how she’d felt when she’d looked outside and saw the sun shining. Maybe things will be okay.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching for the door. “That means a lot.”
* * *
• • •
Her mom’s old Subaru was parked at the corner. Hendricks ducked her head against the early spring wind, huddling down in her jacket as she speed-walked toward it. Tears streamed down her face—for Eddie, for Raven, for everything—but at least the wind did a good job of blowing them away. By the time she reached the car, she was dry-eyed, and she felt almost normal. Almost.
Through the trees, she could just make out the roof of the hospital where, a few months ago, her brother had been fitted with a cast. Another accident courtesy of the Steele House ghosts, she thought with a shudder. She was still so grateful that it hadn’t been a casualty.
Her hands felt frozen as she dug around in her purse for her car keys and awkwardly shoved them into her door’s lock. From the corner of her eye she saw a twitch of movement, a figure all in white.
She jerked her head up. Her keys slipped from her grip, hitting pavement, but she didn’t bother dropping to her knees to grope around for them. She felt as though she were falling, even though the ground was steady beneath her. She wanted to grasp hold of something, to regain her balance.
Eddie?
Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. It took a moment for the world to right itself. She scanned the trees. A cloud had passed overhead, sending a beam of sunshine blazing into the woods, like a sign from heaven.
Staring into the sun, Hendricks’s heartbeat began to still. There was nothing there. She shielded her eyes and stared for a moment longer noticing as she did that there was something off about the trees themselves.
It was May, and most of the trees in Drearford had started awakening for spring. They had fresh leaves shivering from their branches, and there were birds poking around their roots, looking for worms.
But these trees were still bare. And more than that . . . their bark looked strangely ashen, almost diseased. The dirt surrounding their roots was dry and hard and black.
Hendricks shivered and looked away. She couldn’t say exactly why, but it seemed wrong to look at those trees directly, like staring at someone who was badly ill.
Those trees . . . It was almost like they were dead.
CHAPTER
2
Ten minutes later, Hendricks sat in her mom’s car, fiddling with the buttons on the console.
Something was wrong with the Subaru. She hadn’t been able to get the headlights to work on her way home, and for some reason the clock on the dash was stuck on 9:22. She’d tried to hook up her phone to the speakers, like she always did, but it wouldn’t work this time. The radio would only play old stuff from the eighties that she didn’t recognize.
“This thing is freaking ancient,” she muttered.
Sighing, Hendricks locked her mom’s car and hurried outside and up the steps to the front door of her new house. It had started to rain on her drive home. Not torrential rain, but the kind of rain that was more like mist, like the air around her was heavy and wet. Dampness crept up her sleeves and under the cuffs of her jeans.
She, her parents, and Brady had moved into the new place more than a month ago. When they were waiting for the bus to leave for camp, Portia’s mom got talking to her dad and she told him about a recently available rental next door to their place. Hendricks’s family had moved in by the time she was back.
It was a one-story ranch-style home with white siding and no porch. There were four square windows and a two-car garage and a front door that someone had painted robin’s-egg blue. A single tree stood in the yard outside, surrounded by a small circle of packed dirt. It was possible that a few flowers might pop up once it got a little warmer.
If you asked a kid to draw a picture of a house, they’d draw this house. Hendricks half expected to look up and see that the sun was a yellow circle with a smiley face drawn on it.
When she’d first seen the place, Hendricks had been relieved. Her parents had always been the types of people who liked things to be interesting or unique. Like Steele House. It had been legit haunted, but her parents wouldn’t shut up about the parquet floors and crown molding.
This house was too basic to be haunted.
“Anyone home?” Hendricks called, stepping through the front door. Inside, the house was just as generic as the outside was. Four white walls for the living room. Hall on one side, door to the kitchen on the other. She kicked off her wet boots and hung her jean jacket on a hook by the door.
“We’re in the dining room,” her dad shouted back.
Dining room was a rather optimistic way of referring to the tiny nook off the equally tiny kitchen. Hendricks crossed the living room and walked through the kitchen, finding her mom; dad; and baby brother, Brady, crammed around the circular Ikea table they’d bought to fit into the small space.
Her parents didn’t look up as she walked in. They had coffee and blueprints spread out across the table, and they were bent over, studying them intently. Brady sat in his highchair across from her dad, carefully picking up individual Cheerios from the attached tray and dropping them onto the floor with delight.
“But if what if this wall wasn’t here?” Hendricks’s mom was saying, a deep V creasing the skin between her eyebrows. “Then we could merge the living room and dining room into more of an open greeting area?”
“Isn’t that wall load-bearing?” asked Hendricks’s dad.
Her mom scratched the top of her head with a pencil and said, “Huh.”
Hendricks opened the fridge and closed it again without getting anything out. Her parents still didn’t look up, but Brady started bouncing up and down in his high chair, squealing, “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!”
Hendricks beamed at him. Ha-ha was what he called her because he couldn’t say Hendricks yet.
“Hey, bear,” she said, and planted a kiss on top of his soft, sweaty baby head. “At least somebody here still loves me.”
“Sorry, kiddo, we’re just trying to figure this mess out.” Hendricks’s dad groaned and rubbed his eyes with two fingers, leaning back in his chair. The wood gave an ominous creak beneath his weight. “How was your party?”
“Depressing.” Hendricks opened the fridge again, and this time, she took out an apricot La Croix. She messed with the metal tab on top instead of opening it. “Especially since Raven can’t even blow out her own candles.”
“God, that’s heartbreaking,” said her mom. “Her poor parents. Did you get a chance to talk to her mother at all?”
“No, she kind of stayed in the other room the whole time.”
Her dad shook his head. “I can’t imagine what this is like for their family. Didn’t you say she had to take some time off work?”
Hendricks nodded. The only reason Raven wasn’t required to stay at the hospital until she regained consciousness was because her mother was a nurse practitioner and knew how to take care of her at home. Portia told her that Raven’s mom had taken a leave of absence from the hospital so she could care for her daughter around the clock.
Her mother stood and began moving coffee cups off the table so she could roll the blueprints up. “We should really do something for that family,” she said. “Bring them a casserole maybe.”
Hendricks nodded absently, but she was looking at the blueprints now. “What are those?”
“Do you want coffee, honey?” Her mom s
lid the blueprints onto the top of the fridge, her movements a touch more hurried than they’d been a moment ago. “We have that disgusting creamer you like. Hazelnut—”
“You’re trying to change the subject and you’re being super obvious about it.” Another technique she’d picked up from CTE: being direct was better than being passive aggressive. Still, from the look on her mom’s face, she thought she might’ve struck a nerve. Hendricks rolled her lip between her teeth, gnawing on it anxiously. “So, what’s the deal? Are you, like, rebuilding it or something?”
It. Steele House.
Last Hendricks saw, Steele House was little more than a pile of blackened wood on a packed dirt clearing. She’d been hoping it would stay that way.
But those blueprints . . .
“Let’s not get into this again,” her dad said.
Hendricks crossed her arms over her chest. She could feel her muscles pulling tight, adrenaline pumping through her veins, her whole body gearing up for a fight.
It was a fight they’d already had a couple of times. First, they’d fought about whether to stay in Drearford at all. “Manhattan could be a really exciting way to spend your senior year!” her parents had argued. Like starting her life all over again could be some sort of adventure.
Hendricks didn’t want to start over again. She’d made friends here. She had a life here, even after everything that’d happened. But she didn’t want to go back to Steele House, either.
That was the part her parents were having a difficult time understanding, that she wanted to stay here, in Drearford, but that she didn’t want them—or anyone else, for that matter—to live on the cursed bit of dirt where Steele House had once stood. Even though no part of their old house remained, that patch of land felt . . . tainted somehow. Like the earth itself was haunted.
In the end, they’d compromised. They’d decided to rent this house for the year while Hendricks finished school and they figured out what to do next.
“That place is messed up.” Hendricks had to work to keep her voice from shaking. “People died there. You can’t just let another unsuspecting family move in.”
The Unleashed Page 2