Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  “She knew, Dad. Ella knew about what happened to Sarah, what you did to her. She thought—she thought you might do it to her, too. She was afraid of you.” I took a breath. “I found her diaries. She wanted the wolves to come get her, to take her somewhere. She didn’t want to be in Amble anymore.”

  Dad groaned, his eyes shiny. He paced the perimeter of the clearing, thinking. Finally he said, “I’m stuck here. I’m one wrong move away from Seth leaking everything to the papers or to the Dunnards’ lawyer. I’ve got to lie low for a while.”

  “I can do it,” I said.

  Dad stopped pacing and stood in front of me. Gently, he touched my cheek. “Claire, I need you to find her. I need you to tell her the truth—tell her that I’d never hurt her. Steal her from the wolves and bring her home to us.”

  I nodded, and leaned my cheek into his hand. “Grant will help me. We’ll find her.”

  Dad smiled, a tentative little thing, and kissed my forehead. “I know you will.”

  thirty-two

  Dad and I came up with a plan.

  I’d go to Grant’s, tell him everything about Dad, and ask him to help me find Ella. Dad would tell Mom that I’d gone back to New York in the middle of the night, and that Grant had decided to go with me. He’d say that I realized I’d never be able to stay in Amble again, not with my history. Then he’d spread this message like a stain all over town.

  The walk to Grant’s house was quick and painless. The sky was stained with pink, the snowfall had slowed, and I took it all as a good sign. But when I stepped onto the Buchanans’ sagging front porch, all of that hope drained out of me.

  Angry black words crawled across the porch, the windows, the front door. Words that had been written in the hours nestled between dark and dawn. The hours when wolves came out to hunt, according to Rae, and when their howls broke apart high school bonfires.

  I touched the word “psycho” on the front door. Black smudged my fingertips. Still wet.

  I followed the trail of paint that had run down the door and pooled at the welcome mat.

  A box of matches lay scattered across the porch like forgotten strings of seedlings, plucked from the ground and left to die. I picked up a match and examined its tip: blackened, but not charred. An almost-spark that never caught fire.

  My hand shook as I reached for the doorbell. Grant’s living room was thick with shadows, so much so that it was like they’d put up a curtain of fog in front of the bay window.

  The door creaked open and a puffy eye peeked out at me from the other side of the doorframe.

  “Oh. Claire.” Grant’s mom opened the door and stared back at me, the skin under her eyes purple and blotchy.

  “Hi, Mrs. Buchanan. Um, is Grant here?” I asked softly, because it felt like if I spoke too loudly she would shatter in half.

  That must have been the wrong question, because her head drooped as she pressed her fingers over her eyes. “He’s not here.” She pulled in a breath between her teeth. “I can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Didn’t he come home last night? When did you see him last?” I asked. But the words sounded stale and foreign, like they weren’t coming from my mouth. Like they were disconnected from me, like they came from the wind and the trees and the cornfield that was swallowing everything and everyone up around me.

  Laura Buchanan looked out past me and into the rolling gray underbellies of the clouds. “Yesterday. Before he went to your house.” She bent down and picked up a single matchstick, rolling it between her fingertips. “And then I woke up to this. At least I shooed them away before they lit the matches.”

  I couldn’t find words, not a single one. They were clotted together in the back of my throat. I blinked for an extra second to temporarily erase the site of Grant’s mom surrounded by words I wish Amble had never found. They were the same words they’d used to torture my family, and now they were punishing Grant for being with me.

  Remember, Grant, Amble doesn’t like crazy.

  Laura sighed and flicked the match to the porch. “I guess I better call the police.”

  “No.” It was the first word that snapped into my mind. “I mean, I think I know where Grant is. He said he’d meet me for breakfast this morning, at that diner downtown.”

  Dad couldn’t come here. He couldn’t see the graffiti that bit at the sides of the house, at the almost-fire littered across the porch. I didn’t want him to see the disaster I’d created. The same disaster he’d tried to keep hidden under a layer of paint and handful of lies.

  I could find Grant.

  Laura’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure, Claire?”

  I smiled my best no-teeth smile. “Positive. I know where he is.” I turned and stepped over the rotting part of the staircase and headed back toward my house, and I felt Laura’s eyes burning through the back of my head. It was almost like I could hear snippets of her thoughts. They whispered, “What did you do with my son?”

  I stepped off the porch and clutched my chest. I couldn’t freak out, not now. I couldn’t give Laura a reason to think I wouldn’t find him.

  I called his cell phone. The ringer hummed in my ear, and after six, seven times, Grant’s voice clicked on: “Hey, this is Grant. Leave a message after the beep.”

  Beep.

  I hung up the phone.

  “Okay, Claire, think.” I paced the patch of dirt road in front of Grant’s house. Images from Lacey’s party flicked through my head. Grant and Cole wrestling in the snow. Knocking over the card table. Spilling the cherry vodka.

  All over themselves.

  And then the wolves came.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. They couldn’t have taken him. They wouldn’t have.

  They might have.

  I stopped pacing and tried to breathe, to clear my head. Okay, what had Grant said about investigation before, when I saw him at the diner my first day back in Amble? Something about always starting at the beginning.

  I thought about going back to Lacey’s house. That would make the most logical sense, I mean, that was where the wolves first struck tonight. But the wolves weren’t logical creatures.

  For me, there was only ever one beginning with Grant. It was the beginning I’d longed for, for years. The one I thought of when Grant scratched the back of his head with his pencil in Algebra. When he showed up at my house after Thanksgiving dinner, cheeks rosy and eyes glowing, stealing Mom’s pecan pie right out of the tin. It was the beginning that almost began in the cornfield two years ago, when he slipped me that note and told me to come to my birthday party alone. It’s where Ella’s beginning happened, the turning point where the whole course of who she thought she was going to be changed. It was Dad’s beginning, too—that’s where he found the wolves hunting Sarah Dunnard and his life tipped on its axis. That clearing nestled between Lark Lake and Route 24 was a constellation of beginnings and endings, of life and almost death.

  It was exactly the kind of place to go looking for wolves.

  thirty-three

  I didn’t know if the wolves would be there waiting for me. I didn’t know if they’d be hovering over Grant, snarling and snapping at his face, threatening to turn him into a stitched-up version of himself like they did to Ella. Or maybe he wouldn’t be there at all.

  I stopped just outside the clearing. I was still lugging around Ella’s diary, and I knew I couldn’t keep it with me.

  I had to let it go.

  I kicked over a lump of snow near the base of a cornstalk and tucked the diary into the cold. I didn’t want Ella’s past anymore. I wanted her future.

  I shoved my chapped hands into my pockets and started to trudge forward. In one pocket, my fingers brushed against the blade of Dad’s knife. In the other was something soft and knitted. I pulled out one of the two things I’d brought back to Amble with me: Ella’s periwinkle bird.

  I’d never t
aken it out of my pocket since I’d come back into town.

  I shoved the bird back into my jeans and glanced into the cornfield, its stalks groaning under the weight of the weather that was surely on its way.

  As soon as I stepped into the field, I thought that panic would consume me, swallow me up and make me shiver with regret. But it never came. I looked at the swaying field around me, the one that kept better secrets than even I did. I wasn’t scared anymore.

  I was determined.

  I grabbed the knife out of my pocket and crept forward.

  I knew they were watching me with their yellow eyes. I could feel them.

  But I kept going.

  The wind blew and something brushed against the back of my neck, something sharp and bitter sliding against my spine. I yelped, whipping around to stab whatever was there. I jammed my knife through a bent stalk, which groaned in defeat before it fell.

  I let the air out of my lungs. No wolf. Not yet.

  I was almost to the clearing, just to the right of it. Almost to the spot where I’d found Ella like a broken bird. I wondered if I’d know the exact spot when I got there, if it would still smell like a hint of Cherry Blast body spray or there’d be speckles of old blood tattooing the base of the cornstalks. I pushed my body through the snow. One foot in front of the other, the edge of the knife’s blade gnawing through my palm.

  Then I saw it, nestled in the snow like a precious jewel.

  One drop of crimson.

  I bent over it, shadowing it like a sinewy tree bending under the weight of the weather. The wind blew my hair into a tangle around my eyes, but as hard as the world tried to keep it from me, I saw right through the web of gold across my eyelashes.

  Blood.

  I leaned closer.

  It smelled like metal and earth; a tiny, glistening star blowing up the universe right in front of my face.

  It was fresh.

  My veins froze, my heart stopped beating, the clouds lumbered across the sky, the world still tipped so heavily that I was about to roll off in a jumble of oceans and continents. The wind blew snow into the neck of my jacket.

  One more drop, and then another.

  A trail of bread crumbs to the big, bad wolf.

  My boots crunched quietly through the drifts, the soles of them pressing next to the droplets, which were now becoming quarter-sized pools and beginning to run into each other.

  Bloody little hearts, beating in the snow.

  My bloody, broken little heart beating in my ribs.

  And then I heard something in the stalks rustle.

  And I looked up.

  And it was there—he was there, just like I somehow knew he would be. Because everything I’d ever let myself love withered here, in this cornfield, under the weight of the stars and the sky and the wolf’s snapping, yellowed teeth.

  There are moments in life when everything in the whole world really does stop: the water in the ocean stills, the wind drops off, your lungs stop begging you to breathe. Even your brain quits, and everything you ever thought about history finals and fashion school and sloppy first kisses with someone you already knew wasn’t the right person disappears like melting snow. And all that’s left is this:

  Why?

  And then this: How?

  Until that melts away, too, and there’s only this: I need you to be okay. I need you to be okay. I need you to be okay.

  This was that moment. Finding Ella was that moment, too—only this was worse. Way worse. Because when I’d found Ella, everyone still thought I was just another Amble girl that snuck sips of fruit-flavored liquor and dreamed of running away.

  But Grant, he was light and warmth and a breath of I love you and I need you too. He’d reeled me back in on my string, invited me to join him and the rest of the world in actually living. Breathing. Smiling real smiles, with teeth and everything.

  I need you to be okay.

  I stepped closer, and the wolf with the watery eyes I saw in my dreams stared back at me. Its lip pulled back around its teeth in a warning.

  Grant lay in the snow, his hair matted against his forehead with clumps of sweat and blood. His eyelids were purple, his lips white, his breath shallow.

  His heart still beating.

  A low rumble escaped from behind the wolf’s teeth, and I snapped up to look it in the eye.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I told it.

  It blinked slowly, opening its mouth to reveal a line of congealed blood looping around its teeth. And I swore it said back, Why not?

  I squeezed the handle of the knife still in my palm. Because there’s nothing left to lose anymore.

  And then I howled, louder than the wolves, louder than the rush of blood in my ears, louder than the street traffic in Manhattan. I stabbed, stabbed, stabbed until the air was sliced into ribbons around me, and the sun was poked full of holes, and the whole world turned bloody.

  thirty-four

  “Claire? Did you say something?”

  A gigantic light swayed above me, making the face in front of me flicker in and out of darkness. I rubbed the skin around my eyes; it felt lumpy and puffed up like it was full of tears that hadn’t been let out yet. Had I been crying?

  I clutched the table in front of me, grasping for something solid. The face shifted into focus again as the light drenched us both. He squinted at the ceiling that held the cord until it shuddered to a stop. “There,” he said with finality, like now that the puzzle of the swinging light was solved, he could figure out the mystery of me.

  I stared at the ridges slithering across his forehead, the way his nose was a little too bulky for his face. I knew this guy; I’d met him before.

  The last time I was in here for questioning.

  He touched his nose and looked at me, like he could read my mind or something. What was his name? Rob, Rich? Why couldn’t I remember? It didn’t matter; it was disturbing.

  But at the same time, kind of comforting.

  Because maybe Rob/Rich really could tell me what had happened to me and why my eyes were almost swollen shut and why there were stitches gnawing at the center of my palm.

  “Do you remember how you got here?” He watched me as I rubbed my fingers over the stitches. I looked up at him.

  “Not really.”

  “Do you remember how you got those stitches?”

  I shook my head.

  He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. “Do you remember who I am?”

  I bit my lip and stared at the purplish skin under his eyes. Somehow I couldn’t get over the itchy feeling that this was a trick question, or that he was trying to make it one. But it didn’t matter anyway; I really didn’t know any of the answers. I puffed out my lip and whispered, “Yes.”

  Something in his eyes flickered and his shoulders sagged, like he was melting from the top down like an ice cream cone under the sun. He scribbled something on his notepad and asked, “How do you remember me, Claire?”

  “The last time,” I said. “The last time I was here.” But I knew it was a lie as soon as I said it. Because all I could think of was Grant, Grant, Grant and the way he’d looked at me in this very office while were searching for my criminal history: like the earth had cracked open and sucked in all the light. That was what had happened the last time I was here.

  “The last time you were here,” he started, swiveling his chair to grab a fat file on the corner of the desk, “was because you were a suspect in your sister’s death.”

  “My sister didn’t die.” I dug my fingernails into my jeans until I could feel them through the denim. “She didn’t die.”

  Rob/Rich flipped through the file before pausing to squint at a piece of paper. He cleared his throat and said, “Sorry about that. When I first saw the pictures of the scene, I thought she was gone. Guess I never could get it i
nto my head that she made it somehow.”

  Then he did something I never thought was possible. He did something almost like magic—almost as magical as Ella and Grant—but a lot less pleasant. He pulled out a glossy photo from the file and set it in front of me.

  This ripped open my brain, and he plucked out sharp little memories that I thought I’d forgotten. He pulled them out like fragments of broken glass caught in between folds of soft skin: deadly intruders that were never meant to find a home there.

  Ella’s eyes stared at me, half-lidded and drained of all their color. Blood pooled in the creases of her nose, screamed across her sallow skin, braided its way through her hair.

  Blood pounded in my wrists.

  My throat.

  Beating, beating, beating in my shattered little heart.

  I was somehow still alive right now. Barely.

  He was watching me; his eyes smothered my skin, pressed the breath back into my lungs. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at her. I chewed on my lip until it tasted like metal.

  Rob/Rich slid another photo across the table. The skin between his fingers was shiny with sweat. Why was he sweating?

  I shouldn’t have—every spark in my brain told me not to. But I saw the paleness of his eyes and the muscles in my neck made me lean over so that I could see him again.

  Grant’s picture, next to Ella in the snow. Dead eyes, blood-speckled nose that used to be lined with stars. Two bloody angels lying side by side. It was a horrifying thing to see both of their bodies mangled between the cornstalks.

  My head snapped up. “Where’s Grant?”

  He cocked his head to the side as he ran a finger over Grant’s picture. “Hospital.”

  I let out a puff of breath. “He’s alive?”

  Rob/Rich’s eyes snapped to mine before he reached for the file again. I was a feral animal, a wolf with yellow eyes and yellow teeth, and I couldn’t be trusted.

  Two more photos slid across the desk. One next to Ella, one next to Grant.

  One of an imprint. One of a knife.

  Both in the snow.