by Kieran Scott
Alessandra handed the bat to Katie, who held it over her head with both hands and started to stretch out, bending backward so far her shirt rode up to expose her belly button ring. Jacob smacked Colin’s chest with the back of his hand and Colin smirked appreciatively. Hannah wanted to vomit. Why couldn’t guys ever stop acting like guys for five seconds in a row?
Oblivious to their ogling—or perhaps not—Katie continued her limbering routine, reaching to one side, then the other, and stretching her legs.
Maybe Hannah didn’t feel so sorry for her after all.
While Katie stretched, Colin strolled over to Hannah and bumped her lightly with his shoulder. Which, of course, made her blush.
“What do you think, Webster?” he asked under his breath. His using her last name as a nickname sent a pleasant little thrill right through her. She glanced past him at Jacob to see if he was watching them. He was. “Can she do it?”
“If I told you what I know, wouldn’t that be cheating?” Hannah whispered back. Her ears felt warm. She was flirting. With a hot guy. In front of Jacob. She thought back to how close she and Colin had been sitting, up in the projection room.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” he replied, and her blush deepened. Because what the heck did he mean by that?
“Oh, she can do it,” Hannah answered truthfully. She didn’t want to be petty by downplaying Katie’s skill, and she was actually kind of proud of her stepsister’s athletic prowess. If there was anything Hannah could appreciate in another person, it was commitment to a sport. And it had been pretty sweet when Katie’s three-run homer in the seventh had wiped the grins off the Lakewood High fans’ faces during the semifinal game back in May. “I’ve seen her hit a softball at least three hundred and fifty yards.”
Colin grinned, which made Hannah’s heart do a backflip.
“Ten bucks says she can hit it past the third buoy,” he called out, turning toward Jacob and whipping a bill from his back pocket.
Jacob stared out at the lake toward Mystery Island, squinting against the bright sun. The third buoy had to be at least two hundred fifty yards offshore.
“I’ll take that action,” Jacob said. “She’s good, but she’s not that good.”
Hannah tried not to smile. She was both gratified Jacob was betting against Katie and giddy over the fact that he was so going to lose. His school had played Oak View twice this season. Hadn’t he heard what Katie could do? Hadn’t Katie told him herself in the midst of all their secretive little text conversations?
“How many chances do we give her?” Colin asked.
“I say five,” Jacob relied. “If she does it in five, you win. If not, I win.”
“You’re gonna regret that, Faber,” Katie said, and winked at Jacob over her shoulder.
“Why’d you get baseballs instead of softballs?” Hannah asked Katie, leaning toward her so the boys couldn’t hear.
Katie grinned at her. “Because baseballs are lighter.”
Hannah grinned right back. Katie moved a couple of steps away so she could execute a few practice swings. The whoosh the bat made as it cut through the air made even the boys take notice.
Alessandra clapped her hands once. “So you need somebody to pitch to you, or … ?”
“No. That’s fine. I got this,” Katie replied. “Hannah, if you could just hand me a ball?”
Hannah bent and grabbed one of the dirtier baseballs. She gave it to Katie, then stepped back.
“Prepare to lose,” Jacob teased Colin.
“Nah. I have a good feeling about this,” Colin replied, crossing his arms over his broad chest and shooting Hannah another smile.
Katie tossed the ball so far into the air, Hannah lost it in the sun. Katie got into her batter’s stance, swung, and crack! The ball went sailing out over the lake, but plopped into the water a good few yards before the third buoy.
“Ha! Told ya!” Jacob crowed.
“I’m just warming up,” Katie chided, swinging her ponytail jauntily.
“Warm up fast,” Colin said under his breath. “I got a tenner on this thing.”
“Don’t worry,” Katie said with a wink. She was literally the only person Hannah knew who could pull off a wink without looking like a dork. “I got this.” Then she turned to look over her shoulder. “Hannah?”
Hannah handed her another ball. Katie tossed it straight up again and swung. This time the ball was a line drive. It skidded across the surface of the water for a foot or two before being swallowed up just before the third buoy.
Hannah tensed up, suddenly struck by the eerie thought that something could have pulled the ball down.
Stop it, Hannah told herself firmly.
“How far out did it go?” she asked Jacob, shaking off her fear.
“Two hundred and fifty yards. About halfway between us and the island,” Jacob said smugly.
Katie sighed, scowled, then held out her hand to Hannah. Hannah slapped a baseball into it silently. Her own adrenaline was up, which meant Katie’s had to be sky-high. She wondered whether it would make Katie hit the ball farther, or throw her off her game.
Katie tossed the ball. It came down. Katie swung—and missed. The bat made an awful whipping sound as it caught nothing but air.
“Oh!” Jacob shouted, and both the boys laughed. Even Alessandra snickered.
“Whose side are you on?” Hannah said through her teeth.
“Sorry. Sorry.” Alessandra waved it off and straightened her face. “You got this, Katie.”
Hannah bent and picked up a fresh ball. This one looked fairly new. No visible marks anywhere. Katie took it, tossed it a couple of times, then threw it high.
Please hit it this time. Please hit it this time, Hannah prayed.
Crack!
The ball rocketed over the water in a high arc. It looked like something Big Papi would have hit at the Home Run Derby on All-Star Weekend. Everyone scurried to the edge of the lake. Hannah watched the ball cut through the sky and waited for the splash. It was definitely coming down beyond the buoy—the question was how far. She watched the water. And watched. And watched.
Out of nowhere, a shiver skittered down her spine, and she glanced around quickly, but there was nothing. Nothing near the house, nothing in the woods, nothing in the water.
Nothing. Not even a ball coming down from the sky to make a splash.
“Where’d it go?” Jacob asked. And then half a dozen birds took flight from the charred end of the island, squawking as their black bodies darted across the bright blue sky.
“Guys.” Colin turned to them, his brown eyes bright. “I think it hit the island.”
Jacob’s face screwed up. “No. Freaking. Way.”
* * *
Five minutes later, Jacob, Hannah, and Katie were back on the skiff, put-putting toward Mystery Island. Colin and Alessandra had stayed behind, claiming laziness. But Katie had finally overcome her terror of the water so that she could see for herself if she’d broken her own distance record. Hannah had felt a zing of pride for her stepsister as she’d watched her strap on her life jacket and decide to come along. If that ball was on the island, she wanted to help Katie gloat over it. Apparently, girl power trumped all else.
The closer they got to the island, the more Hannah found that she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the blackened tree trunks and cracked branches. Some of the rocks were discolored, too, burnt until they looked like charcoal, or streaked with gray-and-white ash. She noticed the yellow-white insides of some shattered trees near the periphery of the destroyed section, jagged and pointing toward the sky like an accusation. It might have been her imagination, but Hannah could swear she smelled the scent of smoking wood. How could anyone do this to such a beautiful place?
“There’s no way it’s out here. We just missed the splash,” Jacob said as he circled the shoreline, sticking to the healthy, verdant side of the island, looking for a safe spot to run the boat ashore.
“Please. All five of us? No way,” K
atie replied, fingernails digging into the straps of her life jacket.
“She’s right,” Hannah said. “You’re gonna owe Colin ten bucks, guaranteed.”
“And have to kiss my feet the rest of the time we’re here,” Katie added.
Jacob ignored them and maneuvered the boat into a little inlet, near where the living vegetation gave way to the dead. He dropped the small anchor and hopped out. The water came up to his knees. Hannah followed, the hems of her cargo shorts trailing through the water, and helped Jacob tug the boat a little bit closer to shore.
She couldn’t believe she was really here—on the creepy island that had been haunting her since she arrived on Dreardon Lake.
Hannah and Jacob both helped Katie out of the skiff as she held her sandals aloft with one hand. She quickly ran up to dry land, then pushed her feet back into the shoes with a relieved breath.
“Mystery Island,” Jacob said quietly.
“Freaky,” Hannah replied, glancing around. She could see a skinny path cutting inward through the lush area.
“Have you ever been out here before, Jacob?” Katie asked, wrinkling her nose as she studied the charred trees.
“A couple times.” Jacob shrugged. “There’s really not much to see.”
“Except a lone baseball, waiting somewhere to mock you with its very existence,” Katie joked.
And all those burnt trees, Hannah thought, giving a little shiver.
Jacob rolled his eyes to the sky. “Let’s go. If it’s here, it’s back this way.”
He walked up into the underbrush and hooked a right. Hannah and Katie followed, shoving aside branches and trampling grasses and weeds. Every now and then, a stiff breeze would blow through, and Hannah could hear the decaying trees on the south side of the island groan and crack as if in pain.
They were moving uphill slightly, and the farther they walked, the less recognizable the path was. Then suddenly, they came to a bit of a clearing. Jacob tromped right across it, but Hannah paused. Right at her feet, there were strange trenches in the muddy earth, like something had been dragged across it recently. Here and there, the trenches disappeared—probably thanks to the recent rain filling them in, but there were definitely two long, thin tracks.
“What do you guys think this is?” Hannah asked.
Katie turned back and her brow furrowed. “Huh. I don’t know.”
“What?” Jacob was so far ahead he had to jog over to see. He stood next to Hannah, hands on hips. “That’s weird.”
“It looks like they end over there.” Hannah began to follow the tracks.
“Hannah. Come on. You’re going the wrong way,” Katie chided. “The ball definitely fell closer to the burnt trees.”
But Hannah’s curiosity was piqued. Maybe it was all the mysteries she’d been reading lately. Maybe she was determined to get past her childish fear of the island, of the lake. But something was telling her to investigate. “You guys go ahead. I’ll catch up in a second.”
“Whatever, dude!” Jacob replied, and he and Katie headed off toward the south side of the island. It wasn’t until they were out of sight that Hannah realized she’d just sent the guy she liked off alone with the girl who liked him. But she decided not to stress this time. It wasn’t as if she could keep the two of them apart forever.
She looked back down at the trails and her fingertips prickled. Her neck went slick with sweat and once again, she felt like she was being watched, and not by her friends—by someone else. Something else? When she got to the edge of the clearing, she saw that the grasses on the other side were flattened in two long trails, but after a few feet, the trails ended. She swallowed hard, her eyes scanning ahead. Had someone created the trails? Who had been out there recently and what had they been doing?
And then, a shape caught her eye. There was something there—a dark lump on the ground.
“You guys.”
No one answered her. They were too far away at this point to hear. Hannah stepped forward—one foot, then another. Her throat was dry. She reached out a hand and pushed aside a curtain of leaves. There, at her feet, was a small mountain of rocks. It was about a foot high and clearly man-made, carefully assembled with a wide base tapering to a point at the top. Beneath the rocks the earth looked dark, and there were more of those skinny trail marks.
“What in the world—”
“Hannah! Come on!” Jacob’s voice sounded far off.
“I’m coming!” she shouted back.
Slowly, Hannah started to turn, and then noticed a flash of color in the brush. A flash of blue.
She took a couple of steps forward. It was the corner of a blue metal box, sticking out from under a sort of shelf made out of rock. Someone had clearly shoved the box in there to hide it, but hadn’t covered it up very well.
The wind tickled the back of her head and the moaning of the trees intensified. Holding her breath, and feeling distinctly as if she was doing something she was not supposed to be doing, Hannah gripped the cold box between her hands and pulled it out. It was a bit wider and taller than a shoe box, and had a latch, but no lock. Turning her face away slightly, as if the thing might explode, Hannah undid the latch and flipped the box open. The hinge squealed, but the top swung harmlessly to the side.
“What the?” Hannah whispered.
Inside the box was a collection of random items—a blue hooded sweatshirt with a streak of mud on the sleeve, a University of Michigan iPhone case, a couple of hair ties, a set of keys with a glittery heart key chain, and—Hannah saw when she pushed the sweatshirt aside—a leather-bound journal. It was a small book—a little bit larger than Hannah’s hand—and had clearly been used often.
Fingers trembling, Hannah opened the book to the first page. It was crinkled around the edges from water that had dried, but the wetness hadn’t disturbed the words.
Dear Future Me, it read across the top of the page.
“Hannah!” Katie’s voice shouted.
Startled, Hannah shoved the journal into the pocket of her cargo shorts and snapped it shut. Then she shoved everything else into the box and pushed it back into its hiding place, making sure it was entirely concealed this time. As she clambered to her feet, she wondered why she’d done any of it—taken the book, re-hidden the other things, or tried to hide them even better. But she had. And then Jacob and Katie were emerging from the woods and there was nothing she could do to fix it.
“You are never going to live this down!” Katie crowed, sitting on the front bench and holding up the baseball with her free hand. The other hand was, as always, clutching the boat’s side.
“I know.” Jacob rolled his eyes, but smiled. “You are a home-run goddess.”
“I think he should just call me that from now on, don’t you?” Katie grinned at Hannah, who forced a smile back. She was happy Katie had found the ball and Colin had won his bet and girl power had ruled the day, but she was still a little bit freaked out by what she’d found on the island. Why would someone leave a dirty hoodie and some random hair ties and all that other stuff out there? And why protect it all from the elements in a metal lockbox? The journal she could see wanting to keep intact, but what was so important about the rest of it?
The journal. It felt as if it was burning a hole through the fabric of her cargo shorts and leaving a mark on her thigh. Why had she taken it? Those were someone’s private thoughts. She had no right to read them. Hannah had never kept a diary of her own, but if she did, she was sure she wouldn’t want anyone else getting ahold of it. What if the book’s owner came back to the island and found the diary missing? She—Hannah was sure that the small, loopy handwriting pegged the writer as a girl—was going to be so upset.
Hannah glanced over her shoulder at the eerie two-faced island, wishing she could think of a reason to get Jacob to turn back. From this angle, she could only really see the green, northern end, and she realized suddenly that Jacob wasn’t heading for home.
“Where’re we going?” she asked.
/> “I thought I’d take you guys around the north side so you could see Prandya and Raj’s house,” Jacob told her.
“And also so you could avoid Colin and Alessandra for longer?” Katie teased.
Jacob half frowned, half smirked. “That, too.”
“I must have hit that ball at least seven hundred yards,” Katie said.
“Try five hundred,” Hannah replied automatically.
“What?” Katie snapped.
“Five hundred. If the buoy is at two-fifty and that’s halfway between the shore and the island, that’s five hundred. The southern part of the island is actually wider, so it was probably even shorter than that.”
Katie rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Okay, four-point-oh. We all get it. You’re smarter than me.”
“Um, what are you talking about?” Hannah asked.
“It’s not like I got the equation wrong, okay?” Katie said. “I was just exaggerating. Or am I not allowed to do that around you?”
“Ladies, ladies, please tell me we’re not getting involved in a math-based fight right now,” Jacob said. “It’s summer, for the love of Pete!”
“Whatever.” Katie tossed the ball to Jacob, who caught it one-handed. Then she reached up, undid the clasps on her life jacket, and shook it off her shoulders. She leaned back on her hands, letting her hair cascade between her shoulder blades. It was a decidedly casual pose, but Hannah could see that Katie’s elbows were trembling, probably from a combination of nervousness and anger.
“Katie? What’re you doing?” Jacob asked, placing the ball at his feet and keeping his other hand on the rudder.
“That thing was suffocating me,” Katie replied, tossing her head so her hair rearranged itself into even more perfect waves. The boat turned slightly and Katie flailed to grip the side, then blushed and let go again when she realized she wasn’t going over. “And besides, the sun is finally out for real and I’m not going back to school next week with weird tan lines.”
“Katie,” Hannah said in a warning tone.
“Hannah,” Katie shot back. “You’re not my mother. Don’t tell me what to do.”