Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  I’d nearly made it to the trees when a hand closed on my arm. I bit back a scream and tried to jerk away, but the hand was too tight.

  “You can’t go through there,” a voice whispered. It took me a minute to realize the sound wasn’t coming from inside my head this time. It was Karen. “You can’t get any closer to her.”

  “No, no, I’ve got to see Mary,” I whispered back, before I realized what I was saying, and that it was weird Karen was talking about this.

  And that she was calling Mary her instead of it.

  “Wait.” I stopped struggling. “What do you mean?”

  She sighed and motioned toward the car. “Get in. We’re going home.”

  I looked longingly toward the path, but Karen pulled me back to the car. She looked ready to shove me into the front seat. As she reached for the door handle, I saw my chance and ripped out of her grip.

  “Wendy!” Karen whispered, but I’d already left her behind, running as fast as I could.

  I reached the trees and darted down the path, my tangled hair flying out behind me. The woods were crowded with people, smoking and drinking and talking and laughing, none of them in any sort of hurry. As I ran past, I heard them say my name.

  “Was that Wendy Keegan?”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “God, you know, she seems okay sometimes, but she really is so weird.”

  I ignored them all.

  I’d almost reached Mary—I could see her silhouette through the smoke-filled air, huge and dark and looming against the trees—when Karen’s hands clamped down again, grabbing me by both arms this time.

  “Wendy, you can’t!” she muttered urgently into my ear. “Mary’s too angry!”

  “She isn’t, that’s just it!” I hissed back, not even sure where the words were coming from. “Let me go!”

  “I can’t!”

  “I don’t care if you think I’m weird!” I wasn’t even bothering to keep my voice down. I fought, trying to wrench away from Karen, but she held on tight. “Or if any of them do! Mary needs me!”

  “If you go anywhere near Mary Keegan’s grave we’re all dead!”

  I stopped fighting. My heart thundered in my throat. “What did you say?”

  “Come here.” Karen dragged me off the path and into a grove of trees, out of sight of the others.

  “What are you talking about?” I whispered. My chest heaved. That newspaper photo of Joey Leary’s face flashed through my mind, pulsing in time to my heartbeat.

  “It isn’t safe for you to be out here.” Karen finally let go of my arms and shoved her hair out of her face. She looked around us in every direction, trying to make sure there was no one close enough to hear. Her eyes were wild and frantic. “Your mom must’ve told you that, right?”

  “What do you know about my mom? Or Mary Keegan?” I fought to keep my voice low. I could still feel Mary pulling me to her, but if what Karen said was true... Joey Leary. Remember Joey Leary.

  Another crack of thunder sounded, louder than before.

  “We have to get out of here.” Karen’s eyes kept darting around. She looked ready to jump out of her skin. “You can’t be anywhere near her at midnight.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell this is about.”

  “Look, I...” Karen sighed. “I haven’t been honest with you.”

  “Yeah, I figured that much out.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans.

  “I tried to tell you the truth before. That night, when we—at the railroad tracks. But I didn’t—I couldn’t...”

  She trailed off, and I stared down at my boots. Now, instead of worrying about Mary and Joey Leary, I was worrying about that kiss.

  Maybe it hadn’t meant what I thought it had at all. Maybe this whole thing had been some sort of mean prank, like the kind kids used to play on me at school. Like when Mike Delaney kept stealing all the erasers out of my pencil case every time I got up to go to the bathroom until one day I started crying in the middle of Arithmetic.

  “Wendy.” Karen put her hand on my arm again, but it was light this time. “I’m—my whole family—we’re witch hunters.”

  That was definitely not what I’d thought she was going to say. Grandma had told me stories about witch hunters, of course, but they were the same stories other grandmothers told about boogeymen in the closet, or monsters that hid under your bed if you didn’t eat your vegetables. Witch hunters weren’t real. “You can’t be.”

  “We are.” Karen nodded, her face solemn. “That’s why we moved here. We were up in Salem until my parents heard there was a curse down here in Boyle’s Run that was still active. They decided I was old enough to get an assignment of my own this time, so they asked me to get to know you at school, to see if I could find out anything about your family. Only I didn’t count on how I’d—Wendy, I’m so sorry.”

  I nodded, dully. I should’ve known better than to think Karen was really my friend, much less anything more. And now I’d betrayed Mama and Grandma without even knowing it.

  I tried to think if I’d ever told Karen anything her parents could use against us. Probably. All I ever talked about was my family and how much they frustrated me.

  A witch hunter. How could I have been so stupid?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I turned away, saying what Grandma had taught me to say if somebody point-blank asked me. “There’s no such thing as witches.”

  “I’m so sorry.” It was obvious Karen didn’t believe me, not even a little. “If I’d known what you were really like, I never would’ve—Anyway, I told my parents you’re not dangerous, but they said we have to investigate anyway. There’ve been reports of weird deaths here. Something about a suspicious bicycle accident, and cars that go off the road south of your greenhouse every few years. But I know you would never want to hurt anyone—which means you can’t go anywhere near that statue of Mary Keegan tonight.”

  I turned to look through the trees toward where Mary stood.

  I couldn’t just leave her there. She was too lonely.

  “My mom said the curse has been mostly dormant for the past couple of decades,” Karen went on, breathless now, “but people are starting to forget why they put that statue out there in the first place, so it’s starting to activate again. If any one of the Keegans goes where that statue can see you, the curse will come back in full force. Mary’s still too angry at this town to let it go.”

  “She’s not angry.” I stretched up on my toes. I could just barely see the tip of Mary’s outstretched hand. “She’s sad.”

  “What?” Karen blinked at me. “How do you know that?”

  I shook my head. There was no way I could explain, but I knew it as well as I knew the queer shape of a ghost orchid, or the bike route from our greenhouse to the front door of Boyle’s Run High. I could feel the deep, powerful sorrow running from the ground where Mary Keegan had knelt on that cold night, flowing up into the statue that marked her grave.

  “She didn’t ask for all this to happen,” I mumbled. “The family curse was too powerful. She thought she could stop it, but it was out of her control.”

  “Okay, look.” Karen kept twisting her mood ring around on her finger, her voice quavering. “My parents have been studying the Keegans for months. They said if any of Mary’s descendants gets near her grave, a voice will tell her to stop. It’s the last warning.”

  “I know. I heard it.” That thrumming feeling coursed through me, like a wave powerful enough to split my skull in two. It was nearly midnight, and it didn’t matter what Karen said. I had to get to Mary. “But she’s not telling me to stop. She’s trying to make the curse stop. She didn’t want to hurt this town any more than I wanted to kill Joey on the playground.”

  “Any more than you wanted to—” Karen’s dark eyes widened. “Wendy, wha
t—”

  The rain started all at once.

  The skies opened up, the water landing on the hard-packed earth like a never-ending drumroll. Behind us, Becky and Carl squealed and ran toward the shelter of the trees.

  “I have to go.” I pushed past Karen. “I have to see Mary.”

  “You can’t! Wendy, wait!”

  I jerked away from her and ran faster than I’d ever run in my life.

  Someone else called my name, Becky maybe, but I ignored her and charged down the trampled path. There were people everywhere, shouting and holding their jackets over their heads.

  The rain pounded down on me, too, but I barely felt it. All I could feel was Mary Keegan’s grief.

  “Mary?” I shouted. I was getting closer, my feet thrashing through the mud. There were voices behind me, people from school calling out as I ran past, but it didn’t matter. “I’m coming! Wait for me!”

  Something slammed into my shoulder. A moment later, it was thumping down, as fierce as the rain. Hail, big icy rocks of it. To my left, someone screamed, but I never stopped running.

  Then—there she was.

  Mary.

  I spotted her first out of the corner of my eye, when she was no more than a shape between the trees. Then I came to the clearing and all at once she was in front of me, opaque stone gleaming in the rain.

  She was bigger than I’d expected, a lot taller than me. She would’ve looked frightening if the sadness pouring off her wasn’t so strong. Her face was solid and dark, with no more than a tiny glimmer of red light. She bent, kneeling, one arm stretched up to the sky as though summoning the storm.

  Which, of course, she was.

  “Mary!” I had to scream to hear myself over the howling wind. “It’s me, Wendy Keegan! Your great-great-great-great-granddaughter!”

  Nothing happened. Mary stood, silent, the rain pouring all around us.

  “You meant to forgive them, didn’t you?” I shouted up into that silent stone face. “You wanted to stop the curse? Well, how about I forgive them for you?”

  Mary didn’t answer. But the tiny glimmer of red light grew.

  It was her eyes. They were opening.

  There was some truth to the stories after all.

  I closed my eyes and tried, with all the strength I had, to forgive.

  I started with Joey Leary, and the friends who’d laughed with him—Steve and Carl and Mike and all the others.

  I forgave them.

  I forgave the girls who’d smirked at me at the lockers, too. I forgave my grandfather for running around on Grandma, and the customers at the greenhouse who’d tried to cheat us the winter I was seven and sailed over the Route 22 guardrail on their way home.

  I forgave Karen, for not telling me why she’d sat next to me in English that first day, and for everything she hadn’t told me since. And for anything she might do in the future, too, if I let her get close.

  Nothing she could ever do would deserve the kind of punishment the Keegan curse doled out. Mary had known that, too.

  Last of all, I forgave Cormac Boyle and the rest of the men who’d chased Mary out into the cold. And I forgave Mary, too, for not being able to stop the curse herself.

  I fell down on my knees. And in that moment, I was Mary, kneeling on that very spot.

  I raised my hand into the air. I could feel the wind blowing and the hail raining down, and I tuned out every voice in the trees behind me as I repeated in my mind the same word Mary had said that night.

  Stop, I told the wind and the rain and the curse and all the powers greater than me. Stop. Stop. Stop!

  “Wendy.”

  I forgive them, every one! I never meant to hurt them!

  “Wendy, it’s over.”

  It was Karen’s voice, but I didn’t dare move.

  “Listen to the sky, Wendy. It’s done.”

  I listened.

  The hail had stopped. The wind, too.

  The rain went on, but it wasn’t pounding anymore. It was drizzling. A regular autumn rain. The hurricane wasn’t coming tonight.

  Karen’s hand gripped mine, and gently, she lowered my arm.

  She was right. It was over.

  I climbed to my feet, slowly, carefully. Karen was standing across from me, her dark hair soaking wet and plastered to her head, her eyes wide. Rain ran down her face in rivers.

  Beyond her, I could see the others. Faces staring. Fingers pointing.

  And I didn’t care. I wasn’t angry at them, not anymore, but I was done acting like some version of myself they wanted me to be.

  I met Karen’s eyes. She touched my hand.

  She knew more about me than anyone else in the world, and she was still here.

  “I don’t know what you just did, Wendy Keegan.” Karen smiled. “But I think it was something good.”

  * * * * *

  THE ONE WHO STAYED

  by Nova Ren Suma

  WE SHOULD HAVE guessed another girl would find our fire. If we’d had our eyes on the night, casting through the thick tangle of trees to that particular stretch of woods, we might have known she was coming long before she made her way to us. We could have stopped what sent her running.

  Instead, we were consumed with what brought us to the woods in the first place. The moon was full, white and pulsing. The time was approaching midnight. Summer warmed our skin already, before the fire even reached full roar. Our eyes were contained to our circle, our ears filled with the noise made by our own bodies. We weren’t thinking of another.

  All the while, the girl was gaining ground. She didn’t know it herself, but she was in our path. She would come upon our circle within moments. She’d come crashing through the break in the gray birch trees, where the maple bent to let in stars and sky, and there she’d freeze at our ring of faces rippling in the glow. She’d be shaking with fury, slick with fright, and we would be hungry to be so raw again, so new, to taste that rage, ignite it to flame and wear its ashes. She held so much power. She didn’t even know.

  At first she was only a flashlight bobbing in the darkness. Erratic, frantic blooms that made the tree arms monstrous, that confused the moon and made it seem so far away. At some point, she lost the flashlight, and then only her fumbling noise could be made out. Thrashing through the branches, stumbling over tree roots, skidding down the slope, and picking herself up again, the wounded-animal sound of her cries.

  By this point we had heard her. We couldn’t ignore the clamor of her approach as she reached the fringe of trees. Besides, there was something she carried that each one of us, from darkest to bright, from hardest to most uncertain, could recognize. The storm inside her could fill this whole wooded grove and take us over. She was coming. Were we ready?

  “Do you hear that?” the quietest of us said.

  No one had to answer. We all heard, and we were all thinking the same thing.

  “Not another one,” the tallest of us said.

  The coldest of us kept still and made no comment, her bare feet close enough to stoke the flames. The warmest of us smiled. Her teeth glinted in the night.

  The one of us with the worn scratches all up and down her arms felt a song surging inside her as the girl got closer, and the one of us who had the most tender heart felt it also and let the tears rain down her cheeks.

  “This time, it’ll be different,” one of us said. “This time we won’t let her run.”

  * * *

  Mirah Rubin sensed she’d be different by morning. She expected a big night, but she couldn’t have guessed how it would change her, or in what irrevocable ways. All she knew was that when Jayson Turner said to meet him by the bend in Old Fork Road, there where the path into the woods beckoned with a black and bristling gap, she said yes. She said yes faster than her finger could tap it out. She said yes and wore new underwear for t
he occasion, chewing off the tag with her teeth.

  Her flashlight had a fresh set of batteries, and a hammer hit hard inside her chest. Jayson Turner was a senior and had never been seen with her in person, eye to eye, except when he’d pushed past her in the hallway the last day of school, when his arm brushed her arm and left a blooming swirl of intention and heat. Mirah was about to be a sophomore in a short stretch of weeks, but he sought her out. He waited all summer, for school to be long over and about to begin again, before he said he wanted to meet, now, at last, tonight. An invitation like this might never come again.

  To her parents—overworked, short on the water bill and short-tempered because of it—she said she was suddenly invited to sleep over at Natalie’s. To Natalie and the rest of her friends, she said nothing, not yet. She felt the cool flush of night as she stepped out into it. When she looked up at the moon it was full—a pale circle against black—and she wondered if that meant anything. Maybe good luck. Then she didn’t think of anything besides crossing the backyard as fast as she could. She didn’t want to keep him waiting. She scaled the fence and leaped the drainage ditch. She headed for the shortcut field that would get her to Old Fork Road. Jayson Turner had asked her to meet him at the bend. He said he’d swing by in his car and pick her up there instead of in front of her house. Jayson Turner said that, which meant not only did he remember their shared moment in the hallway (that electric touch, her arm on fire for almost an hour afterward), he knew where she lived.

  If Mirah could have stopped to take a picture of this moment, to remember this feeling and keep it forever, she would be a blur of color, a litter of flowers, a pile of smiling faces with dancing, drunken hearts instead of eyes.

  * * *

  Our hearts were in our throats. We remembered nights like she was about to experience. Our blood pounding, our bodies slick with sweat under our summer dresses before we even had to run. For some of us, it was decades ago, the memory gauzy with distance and gone gray, but for others of us it was recent, still in our rearview. For the youngest of us, it felt like yesterday. We remembered, but we had no way to rewind the night and warn the girl. If only we could have been watching, perched in the highest tree at the edge of that field she used as a shortcut. We would have waved our many arms to her. We would have bird-called from every set of lips and pitched acorns, pocket debris, and stones. If we had to, we would have jumped to ground and risked broken limbs.