Gleaming in the moonlight, a silver SUV awaits with a temporary registration sticker pasted on the rear window. I hit the key remote and the locks click open. Access granted. I suck in the new car smell, groaning in satisfied delight, running my hands over the leather, wanting to touch everything at once.
I plug the key into the ignition, and the engine hums to life, like the finest piece of machinery on earth. Not that I would know. I’m just happy when my foot lands on the gas pedal and the truck slides into gear.
I coast to the end of the block and turn toward town, detouring down empty side streets to prolong my trip. Music blasts from the radio. I set the FM stations to the ones I like, feeling the thrill of controlling my own musical destiny.
At the Towne Centre shopping center, I circle the lot and park in the back, leaving six empty spots in every direction. No dents on my new baby. After checking the locks twice, I resist the urge to plant a good-bye kiss on the hood.
I dash into Market Fresh and make my way into the snack aisle. A new ride calls for a celebration, and I know who I want to celebrate with. I pick up a supersized bag of pretzels. I also throw a box of dinosaur fruit snacks in my basket, all thoughts of ditching Connor long gone. My anger has evaporated, replaced by new-car euphoria. I need to be ready when Connor reappears. Because right now I’m resolved. I’m going to find out the truth about the mystery boy in the woods.
***
The next morning, I pull my shiny new SUV into the parking spot next to Will’s car. Becca glances up from her phone. Her mouth drops open. She pounds on the window until Will hits a button to slide the glass down.
“No. Freaking. Way. I don’t even have my own ride,” she says.
“Sweet. Brian hooked you up, didn’t he?” Will asks.
“Only because my mom insisted. She wants me to be independent. And she also wants me to visit her after I move away for college.”
“Awesome. My parents would buy me a car because they want me to leave them alone. Stop asking them to drive me places,” Becca says.
“Bitter,” Will says.
“It’s the truth, though.”
Will returns to admiring my truck. “What’d Ty say about your wheels?”
Ohmigod. Ty. I haven’t called or texted him since I saw Connor’s messed-up poison ivy face.
“Uh, I haven’t told him yet. It’s a surprise.” I whip my gaze over to Becca, asking for help keeping my secret. She nods and smiles, knowing I screwed up.
With a wave, I’m off, running to make it to Ty’s locker before homeroom, but he’s nowhere to be found. I slip a quick note into his locker, filling him in on my new truck and apologizing for not returning his calls.
While I’m in the vicinity of the first-aid center, I decide to check in with Nurse Applebaum and ask a casual question.
She rises from her creaking chair, eyeing me suspiciously. “May I help you?”
“Just one question. For a friend. Is poison ivy contagious?”
She studies me closely, checking for obvious symptoms. “The rash can be passed between persons in close contact only when the poison is present on the skin. Have you been around someone affected?”
“Yesterday,” I say, trying not to cry.
“Hmmm. Any redness or itching?”
“Not yet.”
“You’re probably safe.”
“He was in my bedroom,” I whisper.
Nurse Applebaum shoots me a stern look. “In that case, if you develop any strange rashes, call your doctor or stop back here for an exam.”
I am going to kill Connor of the Woods.
***
By the end of the day, the right side of my face hurts from gritting my teeth to keep from losing my mind. Yes, I’m a major hypochondriac, but still. Connor looked horrific. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow as the female version of him.
I check my skin thoroughly before changing into a long-sleeved sweatshirt, thick socks, sweatpants, and a pair of yellow work gloves left in the garden shed. I also strap on my riding boots.
On my way out, I grab a baseball cap in the event that poison ivy penetrates human hair. I pack the bag of pretzels in my backpack and head into the woods, my gloved hands clenched into fists, determined to avoid touching anything.
After circling the clearing near the stream twice, I remove my gloves and stuff them in my pockets. I call Connor’s name as loudly as possible, forcing my sore jaw to unclench.
Seconds later, he appears. His cheek is still red but less swollen. “You bellowed?”
Amazing. Where does he hide? I never see him unless he wants to be found. “Uh—yeah. How are you?”
He scowls. “Look at my face.”
“It’s like a thousand times better than yesterday.” I exhale a sigh of relief. “I was worried about you.”
He lowers himself on a fallen log. “I spent the day numbing myself with ice and aloe. Do you think I should take off the bandage?” He holds up his arm to show me the white gauze on the verge of unraveling.
I shrug noncommittally and step away from him. “I can’t touch you until I know for sure you’re not contagious.”
He nods. “Maybe another time. After the blood flow returns to my face.”
I reach into my bag and toss him the bag of pretzels. “So, I saw these and thought of you.”
He tears it open and shovels a handful in his mouth. “Thank you.”
“Also, I got your note. Do you have a cell phone?”
“No.”
“Email?”
“Nope.”
“Twitter? Instagram? Snapchat?”
“None of those.”
“But I thought you liked computers.”
“I’m between phone plans. I cut everything off when I left Chicago and haven’t gotten around to finding a new one. And I turned in my laptop at my old school. Jack doesn’t pay me enough to buy expensive electronics.”
“I thought everyone had email. Don’t you need it to catch up with friends?”
“Uh-uh. Clean break.” He stands and brushes some dirt off his jeans. It doesn’t improve his general state of cleanliness. “If that’s it, then, thanks for the pretzels. See you around.” He takes off, back into the woods, disappearing before it hits me that he’s really leaving.
“Good-bye to you, too,” I say, shaking my head in disgust.
On the way home, I veer to my left, out of the woods, toward the edge of the Westerly Estate. Up close, the two-story faded brick wall looms higher, an impassible dividing line between the past and the present. I run my hand over the chipped bricks and holes in the mortar.
“What’s your story? Your real story, that is.” I speak to the silent wall.
Curious, I follow the brick barrier until it cuts sharply at a ninety-degree angle. In front of me, hidden by winding ivy and overgrown trees, I spy an iron gate. Wind whistles through heavy chains wound around the rusted handles.
Could Becca’s story about the Westerly Estate really be true? I’ve heard different versions over the years, but they all start and stop with the same basic legend. A lovesick daughter. A controlling father. A tragic event.
Is there a ghost trapped on the other side? Or something else?
Passing the gate, I continue around the next corner. At the back of the Westerly Estate, the wall borders a desolate field known around school as the best location for bonfires. Black, burned-out circles mark the ground, visible evidence adults never bother to seek out. The sloped roof of the Westerly manor house juts over the top of the wall, casting a pointed shadow on the dried out grass. Two bare windows on the top floor stare at me like unblinking eyes trapped between black shutters.
In the left window, a glowing light sputters. I freeze in my tracks, afraid to move a muscle. A fuzzy profile appears. I inch my hand into my pocket and pull out my cell phone. Aiming for better focus, I step closer, zooming in while keeping my eyes trained on the spot, and press my finger to capture a burst of photos. The phone camera struggles to slide
into focus. Before I capture a clear shot, the figure vanishes and the house resumes its vacant staring.
Hurriedly, I swipe through the grainy images. Thanks to the dim light and far-away distance, what I see on my screen doesn’t remotely resemble a person or a ghost. Just a blob of gray against black.
I shove my phone into my pocket and hike home along the roadway. A potential news story begins to take shape in my mind. It’s time someone discovered the truth about what lies on the other side of the Westerly wall.
Chapter Thirteen
Determined to forget about Connor, I switch my focus to the Westerly wall.
After school, when I’m supposed to be studying, I’m actually staring into space, imagining what I’d find on the other side of the bricks. I connect my phone to my laptop. A spark of anxiety flickers in my chest. The picture of the shadow in the manor house window might be a clue. Or not.
I scroll through the photo burst and enlarge each shot, one by one. Everything is blurry. Nothing resembling a human. I squint hard, tilting my head side to side. The shadow in the window could be an optical illusion. An errant sunray bouncing off a glass pane. Yet here I am, once again wasting time on something that means nothing. Probably means nothing.
I resize the photos, magnifying the pixels. Swirls of digitized gray and black morph into different proportions, creating larger blobby shapes.
A rhythmic pounding breaks my concentration. I slam down the lid of my laptop and glance out the window at the scene below. In the center of the yard, Jack hefts a hammer high above his head, raining it down on a wooden stake jutting out of the grass.
After bundling up in a fleece jacket and work gloves, I head outside.
“Heard about Connor’s run-in with the poison ivy,” Jack says, and I swear he’s holding back evil laughter. He notices my outfit and his lips pare back into a hint of a smile. “That the reason for the snowsuit?”
A blush creeps into my cheeks. “Possibly.”
Jack pummels the stake again, sinking the wood six inches deeper into the soil. “The city boy learned a valuable life lesson. You’ll be more careful, too.”
I tug my left glove higher, covering my wrist. “Why does a city boy like him spend so much time in the woods? It’s like he’s asking for trouble.”
Jack’s eyes dart toward the dense tree line beyond the tall weeping willow. “He seems to be the type to ask for trouble, doesn’t he? A contrarian. Argumentative. Disagreeable.”
I nod in agreement. “Good description. By the way, have you seen him today?”
“Ran into him earlier. He’s just about back to normal. You might want to consider a career in medicine.”
“He told you I helped him?”
“Saved his life is the way he described it.” Jack picks up another stake from his pile.
“You don’t happen to know where he lives, do you? I want to stop by and check on him myself.”
Jack picks up another stake and twists it between his hands, screwing it into the soil. Once it’s set, he slams it with the hammer, driving it down. “I never asked for an address,” he finally says. “Connor seems to appear when I need an assistant. Like he can smell the money in my pocket.”
I swing my backpack over my arm. “If you see him, can you let him know I have something for him?”
“Will do.” Jack watches me stride toward the woods. “There you go, walking right into the thick of it.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll stay far away from shiny plants with three leaf clusters,” I call back to him.
I follow the trail to the clearing and yell for Connor. The muddy stream rushes ahead of me, its loud gurgles drowning the sound of my voice. I’m so focused on spotting poisonous plant life that I almost traipse right by him, lying, half-asleep, on a fallen tree trunk.
I nudge the toe of my boot against the side of his leg. “Wake up, Connor. Too much Benadryl?”
His eyes drift open. “The bottle’s empty now. What does that tell you?”
“I’ve been calling you. Not on a phone, of course, but here … ” I sweep my arm around the clearing.
“Oh, hey, Mel.” He’s working on some sort of time delay. When he finally snaps to attention, I notice purple circles under his eyes.
I rest my hands on my knees and bend forward to get a better look at him. The rash has mostly faded but his dark eyebrows seem more pronounced against his sallow skin. “What’s going on? You look tired … sick or something.”
He smiles a little. “More like the something.”
“Are you contagious? Coughing? Fever?”
He holds his arm in front of his face, waving a hand in front of his eyes. “Not that I know of.”
“Hungry?” I unzip my backpack, remove the bag of pretzels, and set it on the log. “I brought you a snack.” I’m still not ready to touch him. Despite what Jack said, I’ll never be a doctor.
I wait for him to open the pretzels before reaching in my bag and retrieving a water bottle, which I lob his way. He snatches it from the air one-handed. While he’s occupied with eating and drinking, I study him carefully, noting a blue vein popping out from the pale skin of his forehead.
“What’s wrong with you?” I whisper.
Our eyes meet, and my suspicions must click in his mind. Abruptly, he stands and walks to the stream. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m tired. Jack needs help every day this time of year.”
“That’s not all of it.”
He turns his head toward the ebb and flow of the churning stream. “No. It’s not.”
“Can you just … tell me where you live? So I don’t have to risk being taken down by stray darts or succumbing to a plant-related illness when I want to see you?”
He picks up a smooth stone and tosses it into the water. It skips three times before disappearing with a loud plop. “Sorry. No.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?” I heave a sigh. “Tell me the best way to get in touch with you.”
He shrugs. “Come find me.”
“Don’t you have a home address, so I can at least knock on your door?”
“I can’t have visitors where I live.”
My eyes narrow. “Why? Are you in a halfway house or something? Did you get caught with drugs?”
Connor pivots around to face me, his jaw working at a record pace as he finishes off the lump of pretzel tucked into his cheek. “I was never arrested. That’s all I have to say about it.”
Crap. I’m aiding and abetting something here, I just don’t know what. “Okay, the woods it is,” I say, backing down. “You do understand what you’re saying is completely abnormal, right?”
He shrugs. “I never claimed to be normal, Mel.”
“That’s true. But you did claim to be honest.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“Fine. Do you want to come back to my house for a while, maybe hang out in a place where we won’t be poisoned to death?”
“Stop worrying. You’re covered—totally.” He glances down at my jeans tucked into my riding boots before checking out my wool coat and gloves. A slow grin spreads over his face. “And you say I’m abnormal.”
“Just humor me, okay?” Ignoring my hypochondria, I remove one of my gloves, and take his hand in mine. His skin feels cool. Too cool. “Come back to my house. I like the company. No one’s home right now.”
He exhales loudly. “Okay. You win. Only because I’m desperate.”
I pointedly ignore the alarms going off in my head as Connor limps along next to me, moving like half of the life has been sucked out of him. At the weeping willow, he ducks behind a curtain of droopy vines, scoping out the scene in front of us. The clanging of Jack’s hammer splits the air. Since I left an hour ago, the number of stakes impaling the backyard has grown from three to thirty.
“I just remembered—I need to go,” Connor says.
“Go where? It’s only Jack.” Before I finish my sentence, he zooms back into the woods, like he just self-injected a needleful of ad
renaline.
“Fine, Connor!” I call after him. “But don’t come crawling back to me the next time you touch poison ivy.”
I stomp back into the yard. “What’s with the stakes?” I ask Jack, trying to act as if it’s normal for me to jump in and out of the forest with no warning.
“Brian wants some new trees in the yard. What did you see over at the Martins’?”
“Junipers, I think. A blue spruce. Two burning bushes, birch trees with exfoliating bark, and a load of Japanese maples.”
“Good work. You’ve been paying attention to me.”
“I looked up the names on the Internet when I got home,” I confess.
Jack tests one of the stakes by shaking the living daylights out of it. “Can you ask Brian to check my markers? This is the optimal placement, where the roots won’t grow into the gas or water lines.”
“Sure. I’ll let him know when he gets in tonight.”
“Tell him I can stop by this weekend with prices on the hollies he wants to use as a privacy screen. They’re expensive, but they’re slow growers. Maybe a dwarf pear or a dogwood if he doesn’t mind a deciduous species.”
I reach in my backpack for a pen and paper. “Let me write this down. I won’t remember all those names.”
“Tell him deciduous,” Jack enunciates slowly. “Not evergreen. You can look up the difference on one of your fancy computers.” Jack ambles to his truck, fires up the engine, and drives away before I figure out how to spell deciduous.
Chapter Fourteen
When Ty appears at my locker the next morning, I act as if nothing has changed. Technically, nothing has changed. But I need time to think about what’s going on between us, though now isn’t the best time. So, I put off a discussion about our couple status and limit myself to casual conversation.
Why? Miserable excuse number one: Connor. He insisted our one kiss was a mistake. In the past, I’ve tried to learn from my mistakes and move on. But, deep down in his twisted heart, I suspect he’s hiding something. I hate that. He refuses to tell me anything about himself, but small glimpses of the truth seep out. Enough to suck me in and get me to trust him. And then he freely admits he’s not normal. Like just saying it is an excuse for bad behavior.
My Junior Year of Loathing (School Dayz #2) Page 10