Sometime after two, feeling only slightly guilty, Trudi had given up, crawled into bed, tucked her phone into its permanent depression at the top of the mattress, and fallen asleep. She’d dreamed of other woods. Of the circle of trailers near Halfmoon Lake, and what she and Rebecca had found there.
Sometimes, Trudi really believed it was only her phone, always charged and perpetually alert under her pillow, that kept her from waking up screaming every single morning of her life.
Today Eliana’s first text read, Jesus, Tru, U liv w wood sprites!!
Before Trudi could clear her brain and sit up and settle back among her puppets to answer, Raj chimed in.
& witches, bitches!
Snorting, Trudi glanced toward the window and considered creeping over to the main house to see if everything was okay. She wouldn’t actually have to go in, probably. Only after a few seconds did she realize she was praying again, in her way. At least, she thought she was praying. No one she’d lived with—either in Jess’s Stockade or Amanda’s house at Halfmoon Lake—had ever taught her how. If there was a how.
She prayed that Eddie had come back. She prayed that hard, even though she rarely talked to the kid. Probably, she realized, and not without regret, she spoke less to him than to her mainland friends, whom she only spoke to when she was at school and had never once invited to the Stockade because she couldn’t imagine them here.
Because it wasn’t safe here?
She read Raj’s text again, could practically hear him crowing the words in his defiant, fag-boy singsong.
Only guy I know who can txt gay, Trudi typed. Floating behind the words, she could see the ghost of her own reflection in the viewscreen. There she was, superimposed on an actual conversation. Practically a real person. Almost present out there in the world most people lived in.
Had ur rampion? Raj responded.
Trudi scowled. That joke had soured the first time Trudi herself had made it, way back in fifth grade, in the aftermath of her very first 5 A.M. foray across the Strait to Bellingham Harbor School. The teacher, Mrs. Kobenberg, had decided to read them “real” Grimm stories, for an opening-day treat, because they were “older now, and should start to understand the world as it actually is.” When she’d gotten to the end of “Aschenputtel,” and the little cooing crow in the story started going after eyes, Trudi had shot to her feet, hurled her backpack into Mrs. Kobenberg’s face, and fled the room, screaming.
After that—after a few days, when the school had decided she could try, once more, to return, under strict probationary conditions—Trudi knew she had to turn what had happened into a joke. It was only a matter of which fairy tale her classmates would select her nickname from, so she’d done it for them. Picked the character least like her that she could possibly imagine, so that maybe the name wouldn’t stick for too many years. And since she lived on an island, up in a minitower, imprisoned and cared for by a woman who wasn’t her mother …
I’m letting down my hair, Trudi texted, silenced the phone, and dropped it facedown on her nightstand before it could alert her to Raj’s or Eliana’s answer. Then she lifted her hands to her head, fingering the tight cornrows along her scalp. If she shaved off all six of them and stitched them together, she’d still have more of a friendship bracelet than an escape rope.
Her fingers slipped for the millionth time to the fraying band of black and red thread around her wrist. Here was the only friendship bracelet anyone had ever given her, and it hadn’t come from a friend, but from Danni, the bitch-tormentor who’d traumatized her life at Halfmoon House, then suddenly—on her last day on Earth—knocked at Trudi’s door, handed her this bracelet, and herded her out to the woods. So Trudi could watch her die.
On the nightstand, the phone buzzed, vibrated closer to Trudi like a little winged beetle. Ignoring it, she flung the covers back, slipped out the other side of the bed, and went to the window.
What had she expected to see? A big banner, maybe? “Welcome Back, Pain in the Ass Kid?” A cake with candles where the mushroom-eggs had been?
There was none of that, of course. In the creeping morning gray, the only things moving in the yard were the light and the mist. The house itself stood dark. Rebecca and Kaylene appeared to have come back from their latest shrieky-music-for-shrieky-girls show, because the curtains in both their rooms were drawn, now.
But Eddie’s curtains …
Slipping fast into jeans and one of her two blue BELL HARBOR KELPIES hoodies—the only sweatshirts she owned, “gently used” school uniforms having replaced Amanda’s bargain-catalog orphan-wear in Trudi’s half-empty dresser drawers—she grabbed her phone, then checked Jess’s bedroom across the hall. The door was closed. Maybe Jess was in there sleeping instead of still out hunting. Maybe everything was okay now.
But if she opened the door and Jess wasn’t there …
Instinctively, or maybe superstitiously, Trudi decided not to do that. Instead, she tiptoed down the staircase. Whether Jess was in her room or not, it seemed better neither to wake her nor to know, at least for a few more minutes. As she stepped out into the wet grass and pooling mist, Trudi realized she was praying again. When had this started? she wondered. And how did you stop, once you start?
Then she wondered why was she so sure she shouldn’t pray? Which of her caretakers had taught her that?
Halfway across the yard, shivering in the chill, Trudi slowed, then stopped. At first, she thought the morning bird sounds had halted her. Not the shrieking gulls—she loved shrieking gulls, almost considered them her spirit animals—but that breathy, humming moan. Click-and-moan. Somewhere back in the firs that ringed the yard, or in one of the little rock mounds in the woods, was a pelagic cormorant’s nest. This according to Rebecca, who for some reason researched such things. Whatever it was, it made noise mostly in the early morning, and mostly, it moaned. Occasionally, like now, it squeaked low, like a baby rolling over in its crib during a nightmare.
But that wasn’t what had stopped her. Nor had the white mist swirling around her ankles like a river of ghosts. The mist here never stopped or scared her. All mist could do was make her cold.
Even after she realized what she’d seen, she stayed put a few moments longer, staring at the main house’s patio doors. Or, more precisely, at the single square of crumpled green paper pinned halfway up the door. As Trudi watched, it lifted slightly, straining against the strip of tape that held it in place. It could have been a grocery store receipt, or—yes—a check from Benny’s diner.
That’s what it had originally been. Now it was a note written in black marker. Just a few words Trudi couldn’t quite read from where she stood.
Like, Bye, Trudi. Or, We’ve had enough of you.
In the woods, the cormorant clicked, then squawked, triggering a riot of louder hoots and screeches all over the woods.
“Now you’ve done it,” Trudi murmured, lifting her hands. Letting her hands talk to each other. “Woken the whole family. Stupid bird.”
At least the racket spurred her off the grass onto the patio. She edged up to within a few feet of the darkened house, until she could read the note:
HE’S FINE. KNOCK OFF THE RACKET.
For a few seconds, as the world seemed to slide from under her feet and leave her suspended in mist, Trudi stared. Then she whirled, throwing up her arms to swat away whatever she was suddenly certain was lunging for the back of her neck. In that instant, she was sure she really did see something—someone—melting back into the shadows of the firs.
Unless what she’d seen was the shadows of the firs shrinking as the rising sun erased them.
Whirling again, she confronted the note, stared it down as though she could make it blink or melt it like a shadow in sunlight. But the note stayed where it had been taped sometime last night, right under Trudi’s watchful eyes, which were apparently less watchful than she’d always convinced herself they’d become.
How was that possible? When had this happened?
A
bruptly, she had another thought which was actually more of a vision: of herself stomping into the woods right now, scattering shadows and cormorants like a ferry churning wake, rousting everything in her path until she found Eddie and stole him back from whoever had written this note.
Then she had an even crazier thought.
Could this be from one of her friends? Raj or Eliana? As a joke and a hello? For one moment, in early morning sun, that seemed right on the edge of plausible. The exact sort of prank Eliana and Raj might concoct, having had enough of Trudi never inviting them to see where she lived.
Had she even told them which island, though? She didn’t think she had.
Probably not them, then. But being the first one to see this note, take action, locate Eddie, and bring him safely back … wouldn’t that make her, at last, an undeniable and indispensible member of … whatever it was they had here?
“Stupid bird,” said one of her hands to the other, or maybe to her.
Before either hand could say anything else, Trudi turned and walked straight back across the grass, past her tower and into the woods. Her gaze flashed everywhere, boring into the shadows. She didn’t waste much time in the trees; if Eddie were here—wood rat though he might indeed be—someone would have found him by now. Anyway, that note suggested he wasn’t hiding. Someone had him. He was where that person was.
Bursting onto the cliff-side path, she stopped momentarily, startled by the colors. Mist had unrolled like a giant futon on the surface of the ocean, which shaded gray and blue as the watery sun lifted like a tousled head off its surface. All around her, blue rye grass shimmered gold, dusty purple, and green as it shifted, settling and resettling. In that instant, suspended above the Strait as though at the prow of a ship, Trudi felt the island behind and beneath her, so much more teeming with life than it seemed from her tower. Too vast and shadowed for anyone ever to search or know, just like every other square mile of miraculous land on the planet.
In actuality, the island wasn’t vast all. And she wasn’t so very small anymore, either. Jess and Joel and Benny would have looked in all the places Eddie usually went—his orca cove, his wood-rat tree stumps—but not in places the leaver of that note might have taken him.
Assuming, then, that that person was neither okra nor wood rat, and also unlikely to be hanging out for pancakes and coffee in Benny’s diner, there were only a few places left where he or she might be. All of those places were clustered off to Trudi’s left, between where she currently stood and the abandoned barracks.
Goddamnit, Eddie, she thought, then thought of Danni again. Danni escaping with her into the Halfmoon Lake woods, shrieking and laughing, on the day Danni died. Which had also been the only day she’d been Trudi’s friend.
“I’m coming,” she murmured. “Little fucker.”
She started left along the cliffs toward the low, crumbling, stone and wooden buildings of Hornby Camp. She was pounding the ground with her feet, hands up, palms and fingers chattering to each other inside her head as she plowed forward. Birdsong dropped away behind her. The Strait went quiet, barely even brushing the rocks below. A single gull broke from its yammering companions overhead to wheel behind and sometimes ahead of her, in case Trudi was headed for food. It shrieked sometimes, and Trudi found herself glad of its company, of any noise that wasn’t her own feet in the softly switching grass.
That proved especially true as she crested a rise and the blue rye thinned and she found herself looking down the gently sloping edge of a caldera-shaped depression in the rocks and grass. The hollow marked the place where, a hundred and fifty years earlier, a handful of English soldiers had established their own Stockade, planted a Union Jack to express solidarity with the only slightly larger British platoon over on San Juan Island proper, and claimed these cliffs for a few more years for England.
She’d learned that history tidbit during her first year at Bellingham Harbor. The fact that the event was taught at all amazed and amused her. In New Hampshire, she’d learned about Minutemen and abolitionists. Here, teachers recounted the Pig War, a years-long “conflict” between camps of soldiers who rarely even saw each other, named for the only creature—the one pig—that had died in it.
In the thinning mist and creeping light, the four remaining structures of Hornby Camp—only two with roofs, and only one with all of its walls—barely looked like buildings at all. They were more like kicked-over cairns, their stones spilling across the dirt, not even substantial enough to haunt, let alone hide a kid in. And what would haunt them?
She’d been wrong. Had to have been.
“Spectral ghost pig…” murmured one of her hands to the other.
“Oiiink,” the other whispered back.
The circle of abandoned trailers in Halfmoon Lake woods had been scarier—much scarier—even before the whistling freak in the hat had broken Danni’s back over his knee, then shredded Amanda as though pulling apart string cheese.
Yet standing atop the slope in what constituted full sunlight in this place, at least in early November, Trudi couldn’t get her feet to move. She also couldn’t seem to get her mouth open wide enough to shout, Eddddiiiieee …
The girl below didn’t so much emerge as appear. Suddenly, she was simply standing in the grass, halfway between Trudi and the barracks.
Where had she come from? How long had she been there?
Hands still up, riveted in the air as though they’d been nailed there, Trudi stared. The girl’s flowing red-and-pink-striped hair seemed to stream from her scalp, sweeping and swishing around her as though she were made of grass. She’d seen Trudi, too, and was gazing up the rise, looking as surprised as Trudi felt.
But less alarmed. And smiling.
Too soon, Trudi thought, then wondered what that even meant.
Smiling wider, the girl in the grass floated uphill. Her gaze held Trudi’s. Trudi didn’t try to look away. Part of her wondered why she thought that would be hard. She considered stepping back but didn’t do that, either.
Couldn’t?
Get away, Trudi snarled, but only inside her head. Even her hands had gone silent, sagged to her sides. Dimly, she wondered how it was possible that she’d never seen this person before. Sure, Trudi had made it her business not to know as many of her fellow islanders as possible, but she’d ridden the ferry hundreds of times with every single other kid on this island. All twenty or thirty of them. She did it every goddamn day.
Then she wasn’t thinking at all, just floating, as though on her back in a pool, gazing into the cloudless aquamarine of the other girl’s eyes.
An arm’s length away, the grass-girl glided to a stop. She swayed, and the rye swayed around her like the hem of a skirt, as if she were a Wizard of Oz witch who’d dropped out of the mist. In the part of her brain that still felt like her own, Trudi hoped this witch was the good one.
Slowly—beautifully—the grass-girl smiled wider.
Not like light spreading, Trudi thought without thinking. More like darkness pulling back. Like tide receding.
“I was supposed to stay put,” the girl said.
Trudi seemed to be smiling back without smiling, or at least without intending to. “Me, too.”
“I didn’t feel like it.”
“Me, either.”
It was like one of those mirror exercises actors did, Trudi thought, as the smiles on both their faces stretched wider. Which of us is leading?
“Ju,” said the girl.
“Tru,” said Trudi.
“I like your hair.” Ju lifted a hand as though to touch Trudi’s cornrows, then dropped it again.
“I like yours,” Trudi heard herself say.
“She’s going to be mad.”
“Yep.”
Which “she”? And how would Ju know? Trudi was sure she should care but didn’t.
“I found a cave,” said Ju. “Want to see?”
Side by side, then single file once they reached the cliffs, they made their way down an all but o
bliterated path, past the abandoned nests of dozens of seabirds long since flown, toward the silent, surging water below.
15
Rebecca had been up since before dawn—in truth, she hadn’t slept—and when she heard the cormorant in the woods and creeping footsteps in the yard, she got up, threw on sweats and socks, and started for the bathroom. She didn’t bother looking out the window because she didn’t care which of her Stockade-mates was awake. If it was Eddie, she’d make him oatmeal with a grape jelly swirly-smile.
If Jess, she’d sit down beside the older woman at the chipped dining room table, sip scalding coffee, and admit, eventually, that she’d been afraid to sleep. Jess would glare at her and say, “Everything worth being scared of happens while you’re awake.” Rebecca would glare back and answer, “What’s your excuse, then?” And they would share another of those one-second smiles they reserved for each other.
If Trudi, Rebecca would murmur, “It’s a miracle,” loud enough to get a sock-puppet snarl, then drag the girl to the couch and demand to know who she’d been texting lately, so Trudi could have the pleasure of not answering.
If Benny, she’d order up blackberry pancakes, and he’d blink through his thicket of eyelash like a tomcat giving her the slow, we’re-old-friends wink and say, “Two dewberry wonder-wheels,” and then—over his shoulder as though as an afterthought, with the carton already out and the eggs poised in his palms—“Coupla chicks to ride ’em?”
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