Burden Falls

by Kat Ellis

  But the figure beside him is the real kicker: It’s Ford.

  What the hell is my best friend doing in there with the people who’ve stolen my life?

  I want to march right in and ask him. I’m going to—screw the Millers.

  But I can’t do that. If I’m caught here, the Millers will raise hell—they’ll probably think I’ve come to smash their windows or something petty like that. They might even call the cops.

  At the same moment that I resolve not to act like a righteous ass, Madoc leaves the room. Dominic leans out through the open window, and points something out to Ford.

  No, not something. Someone.

  Me.

  Shit.

  I pull up the hood of my coat—a pretty pointless gesture seeing as my hair is really dark anyway—and turn away from the manor. Then I run.

  Cold air burns my lungs with each hard breath. I don’t slow down. I’m at the bridge before I look back, but somehow Dominic is already at the front door of the manor, just stepping out and peering at the shadowy treeline where I was standing a moment ago. He hasn’t tracked me to the bridge yet, but it’s only a matter of glancing in my direction.

  Just then Ford bounds through the door behind him, yelling something I can’t make out, and Dominic turns to answer him.

  This is my shot.

  There isn’t enough time to make it back to the wall surrounding the property. Not without being clearly visible, anyway. And Dominic’s probably a much faster runner than I am. It’d be just like him to carry a pocket Taser.

  I don’t feel like getting zapped tonight.

  I reach the end of the bridge and duck down underneath it, letting the roar of the water swallow the sound of my ragged breathing. The scars on my hands sting with cold.

  Maybe ten seconds later, I hear voices overhead—Dominic and Ford, I guess, unless Madoc has decided to join the search party.

  They must be yelling for me to be able to hear them at all, but I can’t make out the words. Their voices fade as they cross the bridge and head in the direction of the boundary wall—the same way I need to go to get out of here. Typical. But then they cross over the river again and go back toward the house.

  I wait another few minutes in the dark beneath the bridge like a literal troll, icy vapor misting my skin, just to be sure Dominic doesn’t come back with reinforcements. But then it occurs to me that he might be checking the manor’s security footage, or worse—calling the cops to report an intruder.

  I don’t think the cameras would get a clear image of me at night and from so far away, but it’s definitely not a good idea to still be here if the cops do show up. I slide out from my hiding place and sprint back to the boundary wall. In one swift move, I climb up and over, jump down the other side, and head back to my new home.

  It’s only as I’m walking back along the river past Copper Bell Dam that I remember: I still haven’t covered up the goddamn mural.

  FIVE

  Uncle Ty has already left for an early faculty meeting when I set out for school in the morning. I turn the key in the ignition, half expecting Bessie to roll her eyes at me, but for once the car seems oblivious to the cold and starts up like a kitten.

  Daphne and Carla aren’t waiting at the bank of lockers, though that’s hardly a surprise. Corinne—their usual ride to school—doesn’t believe in living her life by some asshole’s schedule, so Daphne and Carla tend to storm in right before the tardy bell.

  This means I have to hang around at the lockers, waiting for them. That’s not usually a problem because I’m locker-neighbors with Ford. But today I’m rightfully pissed at him.

  His back is to me as I approach, and his shoulders tense the second he hears my footsteps. He turns, beaming his ridiculous full-toothed smile.

  “What the hell was that yesterday?” I demand. “Ditching me for the Miller twins?”

  Ford winces. He’s a good-looking guy, though not my type. The way toothpaste tastes fine, but you wouldn’t want to eat it. With his curly brown hair, pale skin that freckles the moment it sees the sun, and the tiny mole above his lip, there’s something a little too angelic about Ford. His nose ring goes some way to downplaying the effect, but not far enough.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, voice pitched low like he’s trying to soothe his way past an angry tiger. “I completely lost track of time—did you know Nic Miller has the most amazing collection of—”

  “Nic? You call him Nic now?” I actually gag.

  Ford changes tack and looks sheepishly at me. “I know, I’m the worst friend ever. But I did get you a little something to make up for it.”

  I bite off whatever I was about to snap at him. “You got me a gift? But it’s not my birthday for a couple weeks yet.”

  I can tell he knows he’s got my interest by the smug way he points to my locker.

  “It’s in there?” Suspicious now, I input the combination and open my locker a crack. Nothing leaps—or dribbles—out, and there’s no obvious bad smell. So far so good.

  I don’t see anything unusual at first, but then my eyes land on a scrap of paper. When I pick it up, four photos of Ford stare back at me.

  The photos are on one of those hokey picture-booth strips. In them, Ford gazes at the camera as he unbuttons his shirt—one button lower in each frame—until the fourth shot, where he’s trying unsuccessfully to lick his own nipple.

  I look up at him, biting the inside of my cheek so I won’t laugh. Ford winks at me.

  “A little something for your wank bank, milady.”

  The combination of the Mary Poppins–ish accent and his absurd cockiness is too much for me. I try to maintain my glare, but it’s useless. A snort slips out, and I’m done for.

  “Those’ll be worth a fortune when I’m a famous Hollywood actor,” he adds as my laughter dies down.

  “I still don’t forgive you for yesterday,” I grumble, but even I can admit it’s a lie. Ford and I have danced this dance too many times to count over the course of our friendship. There was the time he told me he was too sick to go skating for my tenth birthday, and I later found out he just couldn’t tear himself away from his new gaming console. Or the time he borrowed my bike in middle school and it somehow ended up in the river. Or last month, when he asked me to pick him up after an audition in the city, then forgot to tell me it’d been canceled.

  “You’re right as always, my queen,” he says. “That was unforgivable.”

  “And I’ll need a full report on all the gross decor choices the Millers have made.”

  “Naturally.”

  I sigh. “Then I accept your weird and creepy peace offering.”

  Every time, he goofs his way around me. And like a sucker, I let him. But that’s just what you do with friends, right? Put up with their crap?

  Ford put up with plenty from me after my parents died. He kept inviting me to do stuff—go to parties or to watch a movie, even when I kept saying no. He’d skip whatever it was to come hang with me instead, the two of us sitting side by side in my room, playing Rocket League in silence. And he always picked up the phone when I needed to talk, even if it was three a.m. on a school night.

  He’ll never change, for better or worse. I just have to deal with that, and accept his weird apology gifts.

  I go to put it in my bag, but Ford snatches it from me and sticks it to the inside of my locker with the gum from his mouth.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  He nods. “Like your face.”

  I punch him in the arm, nowhere near hard enough to hurt. Still, I expect Ford to make a big show of rubbing it like he normally would. Instead he reaches up and runs his thumb down my cheek. I lean away.

  “Uh . . .”

  “Mascara goop,” he explains. “Anyway, what were you doing in the orchard last night?”

  Damn. “You knew it was me?”
/>
  “Of course I knew it was you. Who else would be sneaking around out there without a flashlight?”

  “Does Dominic know too?”

  “No,” Ford says with a look of extreme pride. “I ran interference for you, told him it must’ve been the manor’s resident spook he saw. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  “Thanks.” I offer Ford a sincerely grateful smile. Having the Millers on my back for “trespassing” is the very last thing I need.

  “You haven’t answered my question, little snake. Why were you there?”

  “Spying,” I tell him. “I was insanely jealous about you hanging out with the Miller twins.”

  There’s a grain of truth to this, but I still load it with enough sarcasm to send Ford’s eyes rolling. I don’t want to tell Ford why I was really there, though. He doesn’t know about the mural I painted in the pavilion—first, because I was embarrassed about it essentially being homework from my therapist, Dr. Ehrenfeld. Second, because the whole thing was just too personal. I know I can talk to Ford if something’s bugging me, but at the same time . . . I don’t always want to. I don’t want to be the friend who always leans on other people. The one who always brings their problems to the table, and nothing else.

  “I just . . .” I scrabble around for a plausible excuse for being there last night. But Ford can tell when I’m bullshitting.

  “Move it, serfs!”

  I look up and see Carla baring her teeth at some unfortunate sophomores as she and Daphne march toward me. Carla has her hair twisted into a dozen little cones today, and her shadow stretches out ahead of her, hard and spiky as a weaselbat.

  “That’s my cue to . . .” Ford turns to face his open locker, totally missing my Very Not Pleased face. I hate the way he avoids Carla and Daphne.

  “Did you study for the test?” Carla asks, not bothering with hello.

  “Of course,” I say, but we both know I haven’t studied nearly enough. Math just doesn’t make sense to me. Also it’s boring. Except to Carla, apparently, who likes it enough to join the mathletes.

  “We’re only a few months away from graduation,” she reminds me.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “And are you actually planning on graduating?”

  “Are you actually planning on kissing my ass?” I counter. But she does kind of have a point. The school guidance counselor, Mr. Hamish, has been making distressing comments about the prospect of summer school or repeating the year. Apparently, there’s a one-year time limit on grieving for your dead parents, and losing your lifelong home and family business doesn’t even count as far as cutting me some academic slack. But I just can’t seem to focus on my studies beyond art class.

  “Ava.” Ford tugs on my arm. “Have you heard this?”

  It’s only when I turn fully that I notice several other students in the hallway are gathered around Mateo Medel, one of the Miller twins’ little shit-crew.

  Mateo is captain of the football team. He’s Latino, with naturally deep copper skin, a smile you can see around corners, and zero coordination when he’s off the football field. (His truck has more dings in it than Bessie, and she’s lived a long and eventful life.)

  I used to think he was okay—for a jock, at least—but he morphed into a Miller-twins-wannabe the moment he started hanging out with them last year. Now he seems to be announcing something to his gathered fans, making big arm gestures to go with it.

  Casper, final member of the Miller twins’ ensemble, stands quietly next to Mateo as always. They’re a couple, I think, but I don’t know if that’s fact or just hallway speculation. I’ve never really spoken to Casper, so I only know him as a set piece in their ghost-hunter videos who supposedly “senses things” in whatever location they’re filming. He’s thin and grungily pretty, with messy blond hair and hazel eyes—picture a bleached-blond Timothée Chalamet—and I’d always thought he was shy before he became one of the Haunted Heartland crew.

  “. . . she was, like, facedown at first, just floating there in the shallow water, but then he flipped her over and he knew right away she was dead . . .”

  “What’s he talking about?” I whisper to Ford. He answers without tearing his eyes away from Mateo.

  “His dad found a girl’s body at the bottom of the waterfall when he was walking his dog this morning.”

  “A body? Who?”

  At the front of the crowd, Mateo continues spinning the story for his captive audience. “Her hair was all tangled around her face, so he had to kinda peel it away, and that’s when he really freaked out because the girl had no eyes! Like, they were completely gone. Just two empty eye sockets staring up at him.”

  I shudder, imagining a cold breath brushing my nape. There’s no way that’s true about the girl’s eyes. Mateo must be making it up. Nevertheless, a whisper of Dead-Eyed Sadie runs through the crowd.

  Dead-Eyed Sadie is the name people in Burden Falls have given to the ghost that supposedly haunts Thorn Manor—especially the waterfall. She’s a teenage girl who wanders the grounds, looking for her missing eyes. Rumor says she was murdered near the waterfall, her eyes gouged out in some grotesque ritual that left her spirit tied to the manor. I feel a kind of proprietary protectiveness toward her, same as I do toward the manor itself. But she isn’t real, no matter what people around here believe.

  No matter what Mom believed.

  “Mateo sent me a pic his dad took at the scene,” Ford says. “Some white girl with long blond hair. I don’t recognize her. Wanna see?”

  “Ew! Hard no, Ford. Why is Mateo sending you pics anyway?” They aren’t friends as far as I know. Ford shrugs, like it’s totally normal.

  “I bet it was the impact of being washed over the waterfall that made the corpse’s eyes pop out—if that’s even true,” Carla cuts in next to me, logical as ever. “Mateo’s probably just making it up to win Sadie points.”

  “Still . . .” Daphne murmurs, and our eyes lock. I shake my head.

  “Sadie’s just a story,” I say.

  “Or it could have been caused by an animal,” Carla continues as though we haven’t spoken. “Remember what happened to Mr. Hayes’s lambs?”

  I do remember, and it was gross. It was lambing season, and Mr. Hayes—the nearest sheep farmer—had already had a dozen or so new lambs. But one morning he went down to check on the flock and found that all the lambs had had their eyes pecked out. Crows had attacked every single one of them. The old farmer was so shocked to find them that way, he had a heart attack and keeled over, and died right there in the middle of his field.

  “Everyone in town started whispering Sadie’s name then too,” Carla ends pointedly.

  “I know,” I say, even though there’s a part of me that isn’t so sure this situation is the same. It’s the part that remembers Mom spinning a story about some Thorn ancestor who saw Sadie in the moments before they died, and Dad shaking his head at the newspaper he was not reading. Then Mom would look from him to me and say, “We’ll see.” Just that. And I don’t know if the we meant her and Dad, or her and me, or both.

  “Don’t you think it’s a huge coincidence that a body just washed up near Thorn Manor with no eyes? I mean, it’s right next to where Sadie’s supposed to . . . well, not live, but . . . hang out,” Daphne says.

  “Come on.” I can see Carla’s patience is at zero bars. “When you die, your eyes are always the first things to go—either eaten by pests, or they rot away. Or, in this case, get knocked out of your skull by a sixty-foot drop into a rocky pool of water.”

  “Gross,” Daphne says, and she’s not wrong. My stomach’s churning quite unpleasantly by this point.

  “And,” Carla adds, “if Dead-Eyed Sadie was really out there murdering people and stealing their eyes, why didn’t she come after you in all those years you lived at the manor? You were right there and, let’s face it, you’re not
the fastest runner.”

  “Good point, Car. I’d’ve been easy pickings for a killer ghost,” I deadpan. But I still jump when a sophomore brushes up against me as they edge past to get nearer to Mateo, who’s still taking questions at the center of the crowd.

  “Who do you think the girl is, though? Or was?” Daphne asks.

  I’m about to tell her what Ford said about not recognizing her when Carla says, “Claire Palmer, of course.”

  It takes me a second to place the name. But then I remember her photograph on the local news—a smiling girl with long blond hair and braces on her teeth.

  “The one who went missing last week in Kinnerton?”

  Claire Palmer had been all over the news for a minute there, but then a local senator got caught having an affair and suddenly nobody was talking about her anymore.

  “She didn’t just go missing.” Carla’s tone is perfectly matter-of-fact. “Claire Palmer went to walk her dog along the river and never came home. Must’ve fallen in and been swept downstream. I think there was even a witness who saw her trying to get her dog’s ball from the water.”

  “But that was over a week ago,” I say. “For sure she’d have washed up before now?”

  Carla shrugs. “Could’ve been spinning around the basin of the waterfall since then for all we know. But the time lag backs up my point about why her eyes are gone, if that’s true.”

  Daphne clears her throat, and I look up to see the Miller twins have joined the edge of the circle around Mateo and Casper. Freya stands out as she pushes her way through the crowd toward him, her long flame-red hair swishing behind her.

  Freya ignores me like she always does unless she’s decided to be shitty.

  She links arms with Mateo, leaning in to whisper something. I wonder if he’s the one she was talking to on the phone last night? I mean, I thought he was gay, but maybe he’s bi?

  Either way, not my business.

  I’m turning back to Ford when my gaze snags on Dominic Miller looming at the back of the crowd—a flash of pale, serious face and black, serious hair. The collar of Dominic’s tailored wool coat is pulled up in a way that might be because of the cold, but it also just so happens to show off his razor-blade jawline. If I ran my finger along that jaw, I bet my hand would come away bloody. A lot of kids at school would say it was worth it to touch Dominic Miller, but not me. The Miller twins might look pretty, but that’s true of many poisonous creatures.