Brave in the Woods

by Tracy Holczer

  Gabby practically pressed herself against the car door to get as far away from Luca as she could. Juni remembered being that annoyed with Connor when he’d leave the bathroom mirror covered in toothpaste spit, and stubbly shaving cream blobs on the counter. Every. Single. Day. She would love to scream, “HANG UP YOUR DISGUSTING TOWEL!” one more time.

  “What’s green and has wheels?” Mason said. When no one said anything, he repeated, “What’s green and has wheels?”

  “What?” Gabby snapped.

  “Grass. I lied about the wheels.” He snorted. No one else made a sound. “Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Why don’t you read more of Anya’s story,” Luca said. “Take our minds off . . . stuff.”

  Juni met his eyes in the rearview mirror and wondered again about her army suspicions. If joining the army might be Luca’s way of proving he was as brave as Connor. Something Juni often felt the need to do herself.

  She didn’t want to think about any of that, though. What she did want to think about was how Anya’s story ended. Juni hoped there might be answers she could use for herself. So, she traced her finger along the lines of the flowers etched into the leather of the book, took a deep breath and began.

  “‘Before I get to the end, I need to make my confession . . .’”

  WHERE THE STORY ENDS

  Summer 1960

  Before I get to the end, I need to make my confession. I have to write down my thieving of the antler bone in detail or this story won’t be complete.

  All I can say in my defense is that a person does a lot of growing up between the ages of eleven and twelve years old. When I was eleven, I believed I saw something nobody else could see. Not Will, not nice Mr. Halloran or his daughter Alice, not even the doctors or nurses or even Mama herself.

  I knew she was dying.

  And even though it seemed she needed the luck more than anyone, I figured I knew better. It was so crystal clear at the time. If only I’d talked it through with Will first, or Mr. Halloran.

  I didn’t think twice, though. I just took that antler bone right off Mama’s neck and never told a soul. Not even Will when he was looking everywhere for it, frantic that losing years of our family’s luck meant the curse would work its magic and she would die. Even then, I didn’t tell him I had it right there in my pocket.

  I felt my logic was sound. If Will and I had the luck instead of Mama, maybe she would live. Because we needed her more than she needed herself.

  It sounds crazy now, of course.

  I put the antler bone in my pocket for safekeeping and took good care of it right up until the stitching ripped through and it fell out. Maybe it ended up in some car we’d hitchhiked in to see Mama. Or in the woods around the house. Or the lake, or the hospital. Or. Or. Or.

  Although I may be responsible for starting this curse again after it had been mostly quiet, I will take all the fairy-tale bad luck this world has to give me before I’d let anything bad happen to anyone else.

  Once I saw Abigail was all right, just shaken, and Mason and I had fetched Anita, his mother, to come sit with her until Teddy could get there to figure out the damage to the roof, I hurried back to the shed with Mason as my shadow. It had started to rain.

  “Please, Mason. You have to let me go. I’ll find a way to pay you back once I get where I’m going.”

  I told him a quick version of my antler bone story, my only evidence of how I’d brought on the curse, as I repacked everything into the rucksack. I also told him if he tried to stop me, I’d just do it again. And again. As many times as I needed to. Mason didn’t say anything as I slung the bag over my shoulder and rushed into the rain.

  So there we were, me running into the rain and Mason following, probably not sure, exactly, what he should do. And because everyone else was rushing toward the Scotts’ house—because a lightning bolt and a falling tree branch is what passes for drama around here—it was the perfect time to escape.

  “Can I walk with you?” Mason said.

  I told him he could do what he pleased. He didn’t say a single word to me as we walked the one and a half miles into town. I figured I needed to get out on Highway 89 a ways before sticking out my thumb. Didn’t want someone I’d met in the last month to pull over and drive me directly back to the Scotts’. And I’d met a fair number of people, the Scotts being as friendly as they were.

  Eventually, Mason did insist I tell him exactly where I was going. He even got Hickory’s Miracle Café out of me, because that was going to be my one stop along the way. I would have told Mason anything, said anything to convince him that what I was saying was true and that he needed to keep it to himself.

  But I think about this part a lot. The part where I didn’t hesitate about blabbing the whole thing to Mason. The curse, where I was going and everything in between. I mean, it was like I wanted to get caught.

  As we stood on the shoulder, waiting for a car going in the right direction, Mason said, “You know, I came close to dying last month. Got my foot caught in a branch when I was swimming in the river.”

  Water had soaked my hair and was running down my face. I should have thought to grab a rain hat. Or an umbrella. Instead, all I had was a dumb sweatshirt without a hood. It wasn’t that I was uninterested in Mason’s story, but I was a little busy at the moment.

  “Thought I was a goner. I’d been under for a bit and started to get loopy, thought I saw a water angel and everything. Then my dog jumped in right on top of me, which alerted my friends to where I was.

  “Once Izzy jumped in, they all dived down and worked those branches until my foot came free. Taking that first breath was the truest feeling of relief I have ever known. But then Izzy got pulled downstream in the rapids and was lost.”

  “I really am sorry about your dog,” I said.

  “Mom told me I had a trauma and that I wouldn’t be the same. She said an experience like that changes a person. I told Mom I didn’t feel changed, but I did feel like I was taking a break from myself. She said that was normal, but at some point, I had to come back. We decided we’d shoot for September.”

  My ears perked up. That was exactly how I’d been feeling. Like I’d left my true self behind somewhere, and maybe, while I was running from the curse, I might find myself again.

  “I am truly sad I will not get to know you better, Mason. I think we would have been good friends,” I said.

  He stayed with me until a station wagon filled with kids picked me up on their way to Quincy. I gave them a sob story about a mama in the hospital and a daddy whose car had broken down. It was a good story, one that would get me as far as Hickory’s Miracle Café.

  And only that far. Because of course that Mason Junior went right home and told everyone exactly where I was going.

  I sat there in Hickory’s Miracle Café, thinking I was halfway home, and then watched as Teddy walked in the door, frantic. So I just put my head down on the table and gave up.

  Giving up should be harder than it is. It was so easy to lay my head down and feel my whole body unspool itself. I’d never felt so defeated in my entire life. Knowing no matter how I planned, no matter how hard I tried to go my own way, destiny would pull me back into its cursed grip. I felt like a rag doll. One that had been squeezed into a floppy mess.

  But I couldn’t give up, now could I? I would just have to come up with a better plan. One that I needed to keep entirely to myself this time.

  “Oh, Anya” was what Teddy said when he reached me. Which brought back to mind Abigail and how she had made me feel special a few hours earlier by saying the very same thing.

  “Is Abigail okay?”

  “It was the darnedest thing. That tree limb falling like that. We were so lucky it didn’t burst through the roof. Abigail was sitting just underneath.”

  Lucky? Well, that was a fantastical
ly Teddy-like way to look at the situation.

  “Let’s get a move on,” Teddy said. “We have a long drive ahead of us.”

  Before we left, I excused myself to the bathroom and looked for Hickory. He was dusting off a china cabinet near a sliding glass door that led out onto a patio.

  “Here,” I said, and gave him back his cedar carving.

  He looked at the carving and then at me. “No one’s ever given back a miracle before,” he said with a smile, and I realized I never did hear Hickory’s story.

  “I don’t believe in miracles” was what I said again, and walked to the parking lot where Teddy was waiting.

  I have since heard Hickory’s story, and from time to time I consider changing my mind. But that is a whole other story, I figure. Maybe I’ll write that one next.

  Teddy drove to the end of the parking lot, but instead of turning left onto Highway 89, he turned right.

  Toward South Lake Tahoe.

  Which was a shock, let me tell you. My only thought was that he must be throwing in the towel and driving me to Mrs. Deakins’. Mason must have told him I was cursed, and that it was my fault that falling branch could have killed Abigail. And even though I was the one who wanted to go to Tahoe in the first place, I was real hurt. Because I’d figured him wrong. Teddy wasn’t a kind and understanding person at all. He was unforgiving and punishing and thought it was okay to take a child back, like I was a jacket that didn’t fit. And if I’d figured Teddy wrong, how could I ever trust myself to figure anyone right?

  Teddy turned on the radio to a country-and-western station where they played Marty Robbins and the Carter Family.

  “Did you know,” Teddy said after a while, “that the Carter Family used to travel the Appalachian hollers collecting lyrics for their songs?”

  Which sounded an awful lot like what the Grimms used to do, but I wasn’t talking to Teddy at the moment. Eventually, Elvis came on and sang, “Are you lonesome tonight?” and I wanted to say, “Yes!” Gosh darn it, I was lonesome. Even though it wasn’t night.

  I didn’t say a single word until Teddy pulled into the Happy Homestead Cemetery—where Daddy, Mama and Will were buried—not the El Dorado County Social Services office.

  For the second time in one day, I was out of words.

  “Mason said this was where you were headed. He said you wanted to visit your family and that, frankly, he didn’t understand why we hadn’t brought you here ourselves before now.”

  When he explained himself after it was all over, Mason told me he figured that story would get me in less trouble. But sometimes I have wondered if he didn’t just see right to the heart of things from the very beginning.

  “How did you know where to find my family?”

  “It was in the information we got from Mrs. Deakins. Abigail and I wanted to talk to you about your family, but we thought it best to follow your lead. We were wrong. We should have talked long before now.”

  We got out of the car and stood at the grave site. It was hot and clear, three hours away from the thunderstorm, and the air was thick with cicada buzzing in the oak trees. I didn’t have flowers, so I gathered three stones and set them on top of the family grave marker. A cheap, unmarked headstone I swore I’d replace one day.

  “There isn’t anywhere you can go where I won’t follow, Anya. I don’t come by giving up naturally.”

  And what could I say to that? I believed him. I believed that he’d follow me wherever I went, and I was terrified. Terrified I’d lose them like I’d already lost everyone else.

  All I had left was to tell him the truth. About Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and how they messed it up for generations to come by going back on a deal with a witch. How the curse was following me now and we were all doomed.

  “Don’t you see, Mr. Scott? I’m cursed.”

  “Of course you believe you’re cursed after what you’ve been through,” he said. And no matter how many times I tried to explain that they were better off without me, that they should go and find some easier girl, he shook his head. “You are the girl for us.”

  That was what he said.

  Whether I was cursed or not, he said, he’d take his chances.

  I cried then. I couldn’t help myself. Not just because I was failing to keep them safe, but because I finally realized how much I missed home. I’d been so fixated on weed pulling and my escape plans, I really hadn’t had too much time to think about how everything was gone. I wanted to see our house again. To go to school one more day with Marianne and Cookie. I wanted to read in the corner at the Stag’s Head Bookstore with Mr. Halloran smoking his pipe in his office. I wanted to find Mama’s antler bone and bring back our luck.

  After I pulled myself together, Teddy drove me to the Stag’s Head, where I fell into Mr. Halloran’s arms and cried all over again. His daughter Alice was there with her own baby, Petunia. Then it was Alice’s turn to pull me into a hug while little Petunia pulled my hair and giggled, which made me feel a smidge better.

  We talked for a long time, and Teddy and Mr. Halloran struck a deal. I could come and stay when I wanted, to visit my family, or the fishing shack, or Marianne and Cookie, but I had to accept that it wasn’t my place to make decisions for Teddy and Abigail. They got to decide for themselves if they wanted to adopt a cursed child. They promised they wouldn’t try to talk me out of what I believed, but I owed them the same courtesy.

  And then we went home.

  Home.

  It felt a little bit like I’d failed. Because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave them again. I really didn’t want to run away and live in a shack by myself, hiding from the world. If the curse was meant to follow me around my whole life, I figured that would become plain soon enough and I’d decide what to do when the time came.

  But it also felt like I was where I should be.

  Abigail says there are no guarantees in life, that we are only as cursed as we believe ourselves to be. She says the time has come to take charge of our own destiny.

  I hope she’s right.

  And I hope that someday, I will believe in miracles.

  286.7 MILES

  IT WAS QUIET in the car for a long time. The way it must have been that day when Teddy drove Anya to South Lake Tahoe.

  “Wow,” Mason finally said. “Did you know any of that?”

  “No. It explains her Annual Pilgrimage to the Lake, though. I didn’t realize she’d been going every year since she was twelve,” Juni said, surprised at a sudden rush of anger. Not because Anya had kept her story from Juni for so long, kept herself from Juni, really, but because Anya had given up.

  Juni had hoped Anya’s story would give her answers about what she was supposed to do with her own. Instead, it seemed Anya was trying to tell Juni to quit.

  But she wouldn’t. Not ever.

  Juni wasn’t going to stop until she got to Elsie and performed Lena’s magic spell for lost things. Not until she’d sacrificed the most important thing she could think to sacrifice even if she had no idea what that might be.

  Not if her father demanded she come back home with him.

  Not if the Wilders tried to keep Elsie for themselves.

  Not if the Caprice broke down or her friends abandoned her or she had an asthma attack and they dragged her to the hospital.

  Until that moment, Juni had felt wobbly on the inside. The way she felt when she couldn’t breathe right.

  Not anymore.

  “I have something to tell you guys,” Juni said, deciding once and for all to trust her friends with the whole story.

  * * *

  By the time Juni was finished telling Mason, Gabby and Luca about the quest she’d put herself on—the way the curse had struck her family again—they had arrived at the Stag’s Head Bookstore in South Lake Tahoe. Dad’s white Chevy was nowhere in sight.


  It was two thirty in the afternoon as Luca drove the Caprice into a parking space overlooking the crystal-blue lake. He turned off the engine, which made a ticking sound as it cooled. They watched boats zoom around in the distance.

  “You really believe it, don’t you?” Gabby said.

  “I do,” Juni said.

  “Then so do I,” Gabby said. She glared at her brother. “Because I believe in Juni.”

  Juni couldn’t read Luca. He wasn’t expressive like Connor. Never waggled his eyebrows or winked at her across the table or laughed out of control. He never danced like an idiot when he got good news, or sang off-key in the shower or the car. He wasn’t the person you’d ask to tell a good ghost story or top off the oil in the boat engine or even bait a hook on your fishing pole. He hated slimy worms and pop music and sad movies and the smell of gasoline.

  But, Juni realized, he was the person you could count on to drive you 286.7 miles on the most important adventure of your life.

  Anya had once said Luca was the string holding Connor’s kite, and Juni used to think that was a bad thing. To hold someone back, hold them down. But really, she supposed, the string was the reason the kite could fly.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Luca finally said.

  “I don’t need you to believe me,” Juni said. “I wanted you to know so you can help if I need it. Can you do that?”

  “Of course,” Luca said.

  “Just think. We wouldn’t have met Lena if Juni hadn’t gone there for one of the tasks,” Mason said. “If you plan to call her, you’d better get used to unbelievable stories. She is a witch, after all.”

  That made Luca smile. “Man, there was something about her, wasn’t there?”

  “Um, duh,” Mason said.

  “While you two contemplate the amazing Lena, I’m starving,” Gabby said. “If we still have tasks to accomplish, I need sustenance so my brain will function properly.”

  “And we need to figure out how we’re going to talk Mr. Creedy into letting us get Elsie,” Mason said.