Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  Another footfall, and I listen for talons tapping on the linoleum.

  Another footfall, and was that the rustle of feathers?

  Another footfall, and this is the end. This is where I think my last thought, where I draw my last breath. No one even knows where I am.

  Then, I hear the creak of the handle on the lantern, and suddenly the light lifts.

  Right over my head.

  The light swings high overhead. Each time it rocks back and forth, it casts a grotesque shadow on the wall, and I won’t scream. I refuse to scream.

  Instead, I whimper.

  “Well, I see you’ve got your father’s knack for mischief.”

  I try to place the voice. Can bird people talk?

  “Though I don’t remember him having a talent for lockpicking. Truth be told, that was more up my alley.”

  When the light finally steadies on the wall, I brace myself and look up from my crouch to find Mr. Gershowitz, his lanky body casting one long shadow. Seeing him here, grinning in the lantern light, the room no longer looks quite so ominous.

  Except that I still can’t stop my body from shaking.

  “C’mon,” he says, extending his hand down to me. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.”

  I take his hand without hesitating. I have zero idea of where I am or why Mr. Gershowitz is here, but if there’s a single certainty I have, it’s that Mr. Gershowitz is a good person. Dad wouldn’t be friends with him otherwise.

  “I’ll go first,” Mr. Gershowitz says, making sure I’m steady on my feet before swapping out the lantern for his own flashlight. Only then do I see that he’s wearing a uniform, a badge stitched to the front of his shirt.

  He points to the badge. “Private security,” he says. “Raven Brooks City Council likes a little extra vigilance.”

  He leaves his explanation there. It seems to be enough. Dad did say his friend works nights.

  “Okay, my turn,” he says, keeping the beam of his flashlight pointed away from my eyes. “What in the name of bacon are you doing out here on a night like this all alone?”

  “Bacon?” I say.

  “Do your folks know you’re here?”

  “Where is ‘here’ exactly?”

  “Are you one of those kids who answers questions with questions? I don’t do well with those kinds of kids.”

  “Sorry,” I say, and I really am. “It’s just that I thought you were …”

  He eyes me closely.

  Tell him. Tell him you thought he was one of the bird people here to peck your eyes out and make a nest from your hair.

  “I was trying to get out of the rain,” I say, choosing about ten percent of the truth. “My friends and I got split up.”

  Mr. Gershowitz eyes me for another second, then seems to accept my story, or at least gets tired of questioning it.

  “Rain’s mostly stopped now. Let me walk you home.”

  I want to play it cool, but it’s impossible to act like I’m anything but thrilled that I won’t have to cut through the woods alone.

  Mr. Gershowitz leaves the office first, giving me one last chance to look around at whatever’s left of my grandparents’ workplace.

  When I turn back around, Mr. Gershowitz is already gone, and I must turn the wrong way because I make it two steps before he stops me with his light.

  “Not that way!” he yells, even though I’ve barely gone anywhere. I jump at his tone, trying to see his expression, but I can’t get a good look, thanks to the glare from the flashlight.

  “Sorry, I—”

  “Stay close. Don’t go wandering,” he scolds, and I’m starting to feel a little less grateful.

  He takes me out of the building, and even though the thunder is still rumbling in the distance and some of the wind is still kicking up the leaves, the storm has mostly passed.

  Once we’ve moved a little farther away from the building, I sneak another look at the tower over my shoulder.

  “It’s a weather station,” he says, picking his way through a mostly obscured path. This trail is definitely not the same way I came. Of course, to retrace that path, I’d have to roll back up the embankment.

  A weather station. Okay, so that makes sense, I guess. Mr. Donaldson had said my grandparents were famous for their work in geology and meteorology. What doesn’t make sense is why everyone is acting like that’s some sort of crime.

  “Sounds kinda boring,” I say to Mr. Gershowitz, prodding for more information.

  He seems to understand because he says, “In any other town, maybe.”

  “You knew them, right?”

  Mr. Gershowitz slows his pace so we can walk side by side, and I catch him eyeing me before he turns his gaze ahead to the trail, the light from his flashlight bobbing.

  “Your grandparents? A little. Only enough to thank them when they had me over for dinner, which was more often than it should have been. My parents worked long hours … couldn’t always put food on the table at a normal hour.”

  He’s trying to say a nice thing about my grandparents, but I can tell he’s starting to get uncomfortable. I guess that’s why I push a little harder. I’m getting tired of secrets.

  “I think people were afraid of them.”

  Mr. Gershowitz loses his footing, and I catch his elbow before he goes down on the slick path.

  He mutters a thank-you before righting himself. He’s quiet for another minute before he starts walking.

  Then he says, “You ever seen a meteor shower?”

  It’s possibly the most random question anyone has ever asked me.

  “Um, no?”

  “It’s magnificent,” he says. “And it’s terrifying. The light is so bright, you think it’s going to scatter across the whole sky. Then the dark just … swallows it up. Just like that, it’s gone.”

  I get the sense he’s trying to tell me something meaningful, but unless my grandparents were astronomers and meteorologists, I’m clueless.

  Mr. Gershowitz must sense this on some level because he goes on to say, “Sometimes the things that burn the brightest are the scariest right before they flame out. Your grandparents … they were the type of people who burned bright.”

  Clarity drops on me like a house.

  They burned bright, just like my dad. And when they were at their brightest—their most genius—they scared him.

  They scared everyone.

  Mr. Gershowitz has known my dad for a long time. It’s impossible to believe he hasn’t seen that same spark in him.

  “Your grandparents wanted to put Raven Brooks on the map. In a lot of ways, they did. And in a lot of ways, it was good for the town,” he says, tiptoeing around the topic the same way he sidesteps the uneven ground.

  “But?” I say. Because there’s obviously a “but.”

  “Some people weren’t looking for that sort of attention.”

  “Like who?”

  I’ve crossed into forbidden territory. I can tell by the way he pinches his mouth shut now. Mr. Gershowitz is done talking. It makes me wonder if he was one of the ones who didn’t want that sort of attention. It makes me wonder if maybe taking him up on his offer to walk me home was more dangerous than I’d realized.

  Then, as fast as the thought comes to mind, it leaves, because he says, “Your dad isn’t like them.”

  He stops walking, so I’m forced to stop, too. He looks at me, making sure I look back. “In case you were wondering.”

  I don’t know how he knew, but he did, and I’m not sure I could ever tell him how much it means, saying that one little thing. I’m not sure I could ever thank Mr. Gershowitz enough for that.

  When we start walking again, I try to turn the conversation in a safer direction. “I thought they only worked at home. How come no one ever talks about this place?”

  Mr. Gershowitz shakes his head. “Not really sure. They just stopped working out of this place at some point, started moving everything to the house.”

  He could have st
opped there, but he added, almost too quietly for me to hear, “Paranoia’s a funny thing.”

  Honestly, I didn’t need that last part.

  “You said you and your friends got split up. Shouldn’t’ve been out here in the first place,” he says.

  I know I should apologize or explain or do something to tell him he’s right, but Mr. Gershowitz and I seem to be in this weird place where we can say anything and none of it is out of bounds, so I try my luck.

  “You work out here a lot,” I say instead of ask. When he’s quiet, I keep going. “Have you ever seen anything … weird in the woods?”

  He’s still quiet. I’m dying to keep asking questions, but something inside me tells me to shut up and wait.

  “No,” he says, and nothing more.

  By the time I start to recognize the path we’re walking, I realize we’ve made it back to the place we were standing right around the time I lost Enzo and Trinity. I wish I’d been paying closer attention to the way we came.

  Not that I’m in any hurry to get back to these woods anytime soon.

  We finally break through a clearing in the trees, and we’re out of the forest, but not in the same place I entered. Apparently, there’s another way, one that doesn’t involve cutting through alleyways and dodging poison ivy.

  After about five blocks of walking mostly in silence, we pass by the natural grocer, and I finally have my bearings.

  Only now it occurs to me that I have no idea what Mr. Gershowitz is going to say to my parents about where I’ve been or why I’m soaked and scraped and probably still have twigs in my hair.

  Or why the streetlights are on and I’m only just now coming home.

  No matter how hard I try, though, I can’t work up the nerve to ask Mr. Gershowitz just how much of the truth he’s going to tell.

  Mom’s on top of me the second I open the front door. Dad isn’t far behind.

  “Practically eight o’clock!” Mom says, skipping to the important part while she holds my face and examines every inch of me for damage.

  “And with the storm,” my dad adds, grabbing a towel from the bathroom to drape over my shoulders.

  “And your friends saying they couldn’t find you—” Mom says, squeezing my arms, I guess to see if I have broken any bones.

  “I’ll call their parents,” says my dad.

  Mya is peeking around the corner of the kitchen looking betrayed, like she thought I’d left her and wasn’t coming back.

  I get it, everyone. The woods was a bad idea.

  Only after my dad returns from the kitchen, having hung up with both sets of parents, does anyone seem to notice that Mr. Gershowitz is standing right next to me, not saying a word.

  Dad is the one to finally say something.

  “You found him?” he asks, his big hand resting on his friend’s shoulder. The look of relief in Dad’s eyes makes me feel a new level of horrible. He’s about to find out I had them worried because I just had to be the cool new kid who wasn’t afraid of some stupid forest.

  But Mr. Gershowitz surprises me.

  “He made it out of the woods all by himself. I found him near the natural grocer. Poor kid’s probably starving.” Then he laughed. “You’d have to be to eat the food from that place.”

  He doesn’t even flinch at the lie. He just casually omits that I was breaking and entering, creeping around the forbidden tomb of my grandparents’ research.

  Mom shudders. “That woman.”

  Mr. Gershowitz laughs again.

  Dad searches his friend’s face. If anyone can sniff out an untruth, it’s Dad. But his face relaxes into an easy smile soon enough, and just like that, I’m off the hook.

  Well, with everyone but Mya.

  Upstairs, she gets ready for bed and doesn’t even say good night. I have to be the one to knock on her door, and even then, she only lets me in grudgingly.

  “You went without me,” she says, holding her rag doll to her chest and playing with its hair so she doesn’t have to look at me.

  “It was just a stupid forest,” I say.

  But that’s not what she means. She means that I did something that was dangerous. She means that she thought I might not come back.

  That I’d left her alone.

  I want to tell her what I found, about the office and Grandma and Grandpa, and the urban legend of the Forest Protectors. I want to tell her all of it.

  But everything still feels blurry. I can’t make sense of any of it. How could I possibly expect Mya to?

  Instead, I tell her I’m sorry and wait for her to accept my apology.

  And because it’s Mya, she does. In her own way, that is.

  “You smell. Get out of my room.”

  Long after I should have taken the shower I obviously need and gone to bed for the sleep I need just as badly, I find myself instead in the basement, staring at my painted sunshine and a blank pad of paper. I had plans to draw the office in the weather station before I forgot all of the details, but now that I’m here, once again, my hand doesn’t seem to be able to capture what my brain is telling it.

  I was just remembering that I never thanked Mr. Gershowitz for … well, for everything, when suddenly I hear his voice. Not in the basement but echoing from another part of the house. I probably wouldn’t have heard him at all, but his voice sounds agitated, and it’s followed by my dad’s muffled voice over top of it. It doesn’t take me long to understand that they’re arguing.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” I can hear Mr. Gershowitz say, but my dad’s voice is deeper, and it rolls right over him.

  “I know how to protect my family.”

  “Ted, listen to me. You haven’t been out there—I have. I’m telling you, things are happening. Strange things, like before—”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Your boy’s even starting to ask questions, about his grandparents, the forest, the—”

  “What did you tell him?”

  For just a second, the blood in my body stops flowing. I’ve never heard Dad’s voice sound like that. Even through the vent, I can hear something’s changed. All of a sudden, he isn’t Dad. He’s menacing, cold, like he’s momentarily slipped out of his own body. I can’t see him, but I can imagine his eyes clearly. Like icy green holes with tiny black pinpoint pupils.

  “Nothing, Ted. I didn’t tell him a thing,” Mr. Gershowitz says so quietly, I almost don’t hear him at all.

  Everything goes quiet for what feels like an eternity. I start to think maybe they’ve left the room, but then I hear my dad talk again.

  “I think it’s time for you to go, Ike.”

  More silence.

  I didn’t think footsteps could sound like anything other than footsteps. But if I had to assign Mr. Gershowitz’s footsteps a feeling just then, it would be reluctance. He doesn’t want to go. At least not like this.

  But hearing Dad’s voice turn so cold, there isn’t a person alive who would feel like they could stay.

  I wish I could run up the stairs and pull Mr. Gershowitz back—to tell him that I’ll listen. Whatever my dad won’t let him say, I will. I’ll hear it all. I won’t say a word. Just as long as he can take some of these secrets away from me.

  Instead, I stand at the foot of the stairs in the basement and listen as the front door above opens with a tiny creak, then closes after a delay, like he was giving my dad one more chance to change his mind and invite him back in.

  I stay in the basement for a long time, long enough to hear my dad leave his office and trudge up the stairs, closing himself behind his bedroom door with my mom and leaving me to find my own way back.

  Mya and I are running. It’s the worst day to be late.

  “It was your turn to set the alarm,” Mya says between gulps of breath. Her backpack is bouncing against her, shoving her forward with every stride.

  “Reason number five thousand to GET YOUR OWN ALARM CLOCK,” I pant back, looking quickly right and left before pulling her across the str
eet and rounding the corner.

  “I told you, mine got broken in the move,” she says, but she’s a horrible liar.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We’re going to miss the bus,” says Mya, and about this, she might be right. And about this, I might not be too brokenhearted.

  It’s field-trip day, and we’ve all been warned that the bus will leave promptly at eight forty-five. Miss the bus and you’ll miss the Golden Apple factory tour.

  It would also mean missing a glimpse at the forest I have zero interest in seeing again after the last time.

  “We’ll make it,” I say, picking up a tiny bit of speed so she thinks I’m at least trying.

  It’s eight fifty when we do finally make it to school. I think for sure I’ve dodged the field trip, but there’s Trinity, waving to us from the bottom step of the bus, hanging out of it like a train conductor.

  “C’mon, you guys!”

  Mya yanks my arm, and we board the bus to find a bazillion other kids squirming and shouting, along with a handful of annoyed-looking teachers, chaperones, and a bus driver who looks even sleepier than I do.

  “I convinced them to wait,” Trinity says, pulling me by the arm and seating me next to Enzo all the way in the back. Mya shoves in beside Maritza and Lucy toward the front.

  “It’s the least we could do,” Trinity says in explanation of why she pleaded with the teachers to hold the bus.

  “We feel bad,” says Enzo.

  “Really bad,” says Trinity.

  “Like, the worst bad,” says Enzo.

  “Guys, it’s fi—”

  “What happened to you?”

  “We thought we heard you yelling, but—”

  “Your parents probably hate us. Do they hate us?”

  “GUYS!” I yell, making at least a few heads turn.

  I try to smile until everyone goes about their business, then look at Enzo and Trinity again. “I’m fine.”

  “We’re just … don’t hate us, okay?” says Trinity, and Enzo nods enthusiastically.

  “What, just because you left me to die in a forest full of blood-thirsty bird people?” I say, and Trinity’s eyes widen in horror.