by Lisa Unger
Her mom sighed. “What’s wrong?”
Willow told her about the incident with Mr. Vance. “I was just kidding.”
“Well, what do we do when we hurt or embarrass someone we care about?”
“We try to make amends,” Willow said. Why had she even called? She could have predicted the entire conversation verbatim.
“Sounds like you know what to do.”
“Okay,” Willow said. “Yeah.”
She tucked herself against her locker. She wanted to ask her mom to come get her. The first couple of weeks, Willow had called and begged to be picked up, and her mother had complied. But then her mom said no more; Willow would have to ride out the school day no matter how miserable she was. And when her mom said no more, she meant it.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too. And, Willow? I know things aren’t easy for us right now. But they’re going to get better. I promise. Just try to find small ways to be happy.”
“I’ll try.”
“Art class next, right?”
“Yup.”
“That should be fun.”
Willow hated that forced brightness in her mother’s voice. It reminded her that her mother was suffering, too.
“Woo-hoo!” she said.
“Okay, smarty.” Her mom laughed a little. “Hold it together over there.”
After ending the call, Willow traded her textbooks for the art supplies in her locker and slammed the door.
“Nice backpack.” The nasty voice carried down the hall, bounced off the walls. Willow turned to see Becka Crim surrounded by her plastic, pretty clones. Their designer bags-Juicy Couture, Coach, Kate Spade-seemed to gleam with malice. She’d bought hers at the army-navy store. It was cool. Too cool for school. Willow flipped them off and kept walking, listening to them all laughing.
“Her love for him was a red, red rose.”
She didn’t know which one of them said it. But it hardly mattered. None of those morons were in her AP English class, but they’d already heard about what had happened in class. Perfect.
The door to Mr. Vance’s office was closed. Through the frosted glass, she could see his shadow behind the desk. She felt a flutter of nerves but lifted her hand and knocked on the door, anyway.
“Come in.”
She pushed the door open, and he lifted his eyes from the file on his desk, then dropped them again. She hovered in the doorway, unsure if she wanted to go in.
“What can I do for you, Willow?” he said when she didn’t enter. He looked at her, brow creased into a frown.
“I came to apologize,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. That was stupid.”
He motioned toward the chair opposite his desk. As she sat, the bell rang and she heard someone break into a run, a door close. She was late for art class.
“Let me explain something to you,” said Mr. Vance. “We’re friends, right? We have a relationship of sorts-we talk about books, we spend extra time discussing topics from class.”
“Right,” she said. On his desk she saw the picture of Mr. Vance, cheek to cheek with a smiling woman she assumed was his wife. Willow had thought his wife would be prettier for some reason, imagined her tall and blond. But she was kind of on the plain side, with mousy hair and glasses. She seemed happy, though. And nice.
“But it’s delicate,” said Mr. Vance. “Any hint that there’s something inappropriate going on and that’s my career. Do you understand that? I have a wife, a baby on the way. I need my job, my reputation.”
She felt heat flood her cheeks, the threat of tears. “I didn’t mean-” she started to say. Then, “I’m sorry.”
“You embarrassed me,” he said.
She started to apologize again, but her throat closed up. She wouldn’t be able to talk without crying. The room was hot, and she suddenly felt too close to Mr. Vance. She stood, just wanting to be away from him, his disapproving stare, so different from his usual smile and mischievous gaze. His face was pale, his mouth pulled taut. They wouldn’t be friends after this; she could tell. She bumped the chair as she backed up, and it made a loud scraping sound on the floor. His face softened then.
“Okay,” he said. He lifted his palms. “I get it. I put you on the spot. You were trying to save face.”
Somehow his knowing that just made her feel worse.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, barely keeping her voice from breaking. She wouldn’t cry in front him. He was punishing her, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that it hurt. She walked out the door of his office and started jogging, her backpack knocking clumsily against her.
“Look, Willow…” His voice carried down the hall. “Do you need a late pass for your next class?”
But the walls, the shame, the smell of cafeteria pizza were closing in on her. She couldn’t stand it, being there under the fluorescent lights, in a place where she was a freak, where she couldn’t make herself seen or understood. When she turned the corner, she slowed and walked toward her class. But just as she was about to go inside, she saw the exit door at the end of the hall. Light streamed in from the narrow rectangular windows. Without really thinking, she kept walking and pushed out into the cool air of late autumn. For a moment she stood looking behind her at the squat brick building, the olive green doors. Then she moved quickly down the back drive to the side road and kept on going.
She expected someone to come running after her, wanting to know where she was going. No one did. And she just kept heading up the quiet, two-lane road lined with whispering elm trees. She had the giddy, anxious sense of stolen freedom as she made her way along the shoulder. It was only a matter of time in a town this small before someone drove by, saw her, and made a call, a teenager walking away from the school alone in the middle of a school day. Then there’d be trouble. Her mother was going to be upset. But she didn’t care. She just wanted to be… away. It was a familiar feeling.
She didn’t have a plan, wished she’d kept her jacket with her. A stiff wind blew through the trees and brought down a spray of golden leaves that lofted and danced and finally fell to the ground, crushed beneath her thick, black shoes.
She was a year and a day and a hundred thousand miles from life before. There were people she could call, her old friends. Some of them had forgiven her; some of them still called and sent e-mails, still commented on Willow’s Facebook page. But why bother? Every time she talked to them or saw their updates in her news feed, read their stupid tweets, she felt her exile. She knew that there was no road home again even though everyone, including Willow, pretended otherwise.
There was a book her mom used to read to her, about a boy who got angry with his parents and ran away from home to join the circus. He put his head in a lion’s mouth and walked the tightrope. He sailed above the crowds on the flying trapeze, and he danced with the clowns. But at the end of the day when the lights went down and the crowd went home, he found himself alone in a small, dark tent. He closed his eyes and cried for his mother, who, it turned out, wasn’t that bad after all-she’d just wanted him to eat his broccoli. When he opened his eyes, it was all a dream and he was safe in his bed, his mom leaning in to give him a kiss on his forehead.
“I ran away and joined the circus,” he told her. He told her about the lions and the clown and the flying trapeze. “Even after all that, I just wanted to come home.”
“You’re always home, because I’m always with you,” the storybook mom said. “You can go out in the world and be or do anything you want, but you can always come back to me.”
Willow remembered loving that book, always nuzzling in close to her mom at the end. Even now, when it seemed maudlin and contrived, she still liked the idea that you could find yourself at home in your bed, safe and loved and everything okay after all. She used to believe that things were like that, that the world was safe and that there was nothing her mom couldn’t fix.
She heard a car coming, so she stepped off the road and into the trees. Fingers of
light shone down through the thinning tree cover, glancing off the damp ground. The earth beneath her feet was a soft cushion of fallen leaves and sticks. The air was thick with the aroma of decaying vegetation. She started making her way through the woods. Better to be off the street; she knew she could walk through the trees for a mile or so and come out onto the dirt road by her house. She’d done it before, even though she’d promised not to. Once she came back here and smoked a joint with Jolie Marsh, the only halfway-cool girl she’d met in The Hollows. But Jolie got suspended for cutting last week; now Willow’s mom didn’t want her to hang out with Jolie anymore.
There was one thing about The Hollows that Willow didn’t mind-the silence of the place. She never realized how loud the city was, how noise invaded every element of her consciousness. I can think here, her mother said of The Hollows. She’d get this annoyingly dreamy expression. I can breathe. Willow knew what she meant, though she wouldn’t admit it. She tended to sulk when her mother started going on and on about The Hollows, how pretty, how quaint, how close to nature she felt, how clean the air.
God, Mom. Give me a break. This place is a pit.
Try, Willow. Just try.
The sun drifted behind the clouds, and the golden fingers withdrew. She was left in a milky slate light. The leaves suddenly just looked brown. She felt the unfurling of regret… her stupid mouth in class, her lame apology, and her reckless flight from school. Now there were miles to walk through silence and only trouble waiting for her at the other end.
Then the wash of fear. If the school called her mother, she’d be worried, really worried. Her mom got so upset, her wild writer’s imagination spinning every awful scenario in vivid Technicolor flashes. And that’s the last thing her mom needed right now.
Willow dug her cell phone out of her backpack. But as she was about to dial, she saw that she had no signal. The Hollows was full of random dead zones, places where cell phones mysteriously didn’t work. Jolie had told her it was because there were miles of abandoned iron-mine tunnels beneath the ground. Willow didn’t see why that would be a reason. But what did she know? She strongly suspected that the town itself was trying to keep her isolated and alone, just to torture her, to ratchet up her misery. There wasn’t even a Starbucks.
She shoved the phone into her pocket, knowing that the signal might return at any time, and she picked up her pace. She looked up at the sky and saw three large birds circling overhead. She stopped to stare at them, watching them aloft in the air, wings barely moving. There were things she’d never seen before that she saw here all the time: deer on their expansive property, wild rabbits, blue jays, cardinals, crows. She liked that about The Hollows, too. Of course, these things-the peaceful silence, the wildlife-hardly made up for the rest of it.
While she was staring up, she started to notice something she’d been hearing in the distance for a while. A kind of rhythmic thumping, something so soft and steady it had taken a while to leak into her consciousness. Willow glanced around to determine the origin of the sound, but it seemed to come from the earth, the sky above. She knew there were some properties that backed up against the edge of the Hollows Wood, and sounds carried.
Jolie said that the old-timers called the acres and acres of trees the Black Forest, even though that wasn’t the real name. But the Germans who had settled the town had stories; it was the forest of every fairy tale ever told-filled with witches’ cottages and gingerbread houses and big bad wolves. Apparently the Hollows Wood reminded them of that place. And it was a nickname that stuck.
There were a few huge, newer houses sitting on acres of privately owned land that backed up against the edge of the wood-the house that Willow’s mother had bought among them. “So city people can feel like they live in the country now,” Jolie had said, as if it were something she’d heard and was repeating because it sounded cool. Willow wasn’t sure if Jolie knew that she, Willow, lived in one of those houses and whether Jolie was making a dig or was just ignorant. And furthermore, Jolie had never been to the city and she didn’t know anything about city people. But Willow didn’t say so because Jolie was her only friend.
Some of the land belonged to old Hollows families, just shacks in the middle of nowhere. The roads were impassable after the first snow. Many of those folks, kids included, disappeared for the winter. All this according to her pot-smoking, suspended friend, whose family had lived in The Hollows for four generations, her German ancestors actually members of the original settlement.
Ka-thunk . Ka-thunk. Silence. Ka-thunk.
Through the trees ahead, she could see the clearing. Once she crossed that, it was just another mile or so and then she’d come out down the road from her house. But instead of walking in that direction, she found herself moving toward the sound she heard, deeper into the woods. She felt that jolt of curiosity, that itch to know something. She loved that feeling, how it took her out of herself, away from her own issues and problems. She felt a hammering of excitement, started moving a little faster. She checked again for a signal on her phone. Still nothing.
The sound grew louder, and she slowed her pace, walked more quietly through the trees. Something snagged her arm. As she drew it back to her body, she felt the smack and sting of an old black branch. Looking down, she saw that she’d ripped the flowered cotton of her Lucky Brand blouse. She put her free hand to her arm, and it came back with a smudge of blood. Her favorite shirt; she got it at the SoHo store on her last visit home. It was like having a little piece of the city with her, something none of the Barbies at school would have. Again that wash of anger with herself. Willow, if you didn’t put yourself in these positions, things like this wouldn’t happen. That’s what her mother would say. And she’d be right.
Ka-thunk . Ka-thunk.
She immediately forgot her stinging arm and started moving toward the sound again. When she saw him, she stopped in her tracks. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find when she followed the noise-some kind of animal maybe, or a swinging door at an entrance to one of those mine tunnels. But she hadn’t expected to find a man digging a hole in the ground. Ka-thunk.
He was as tall and powerful as the thick trunks around him, his long, dark hair an oil spill over the gray hooded sweatshirt he wore. He was up to the knees of his dark blue work pants in the hole and still digging. She stood frozen, suddenly breathless, but still observing. Take in the details. Everything tells a story. Zoom in.
Beside him was a large black bag that looked to be full of tools. A skein of sweat darkened his back. She heard the tinny strains of music. He was wearing headphones, listening to music, blasting loud, loud enough for her to hear at twenty yards. The sky went darker then, and the temperature dropped. Willow was suddenly cold to her core. She started to back away, aware of the sound of her own breath.
He stopped what he was doing, looked up at the sky, took the headphones from his ears, and leaned back, stretching. Willow kept moving away. Then her cell phone started to ring. A blaring Lily Allen track sliced through the natural silence. No, it exploded, ripping open the quiet. He spun, and she saw his pale white skin, his black, black eyes.
“Hey!”
Willow didn’t answer; she just turned and started to run. She fumbled for her phone, which was still ringing. It was so loud, piercing. Why did she have the ringer up so loud? But just as she got it from her pocket, it slipped from her fingers. She turned to see him standing, watching her run but not running himself, just following her with those eyes and an odd, almost mocking smile.
She didn’t stop for her phone, didn’t look back again, just ran and ran and ran, across the clearing, through more trees, until she burst out into the light and was on the road. Only then did she allow herself to stop, bent over against the horrible cramp in her side, the tight breathlessness in her chest. An athlete she was not. She couldn’t run anymore; if he was behind her, if he came bursting through the trees, she’d use the last of her strength to scream and claw at him and hope someone heard her.
But there it was again, that Hollows silence-just the singing birds and the cool wind through the leaves. She looked through the trees, and there was no one coming. She was alone-her shirt ripped, her cell phone lost, her chest painful from uncommon effort. Fear drained, leaving her feeling weak and foolish. She started toward home. She wouldn’t tell anyone what she saw. She couldn’t. No one would believe her, anyway. Because Willow Graves was a liar, and everyone knew it-even, and maybe especially, her mother.
chapter three
W here was she? God, why did this keep happening?
She’d heard the house phone ringing and ignored it, determined not to be interrupted from her work by the thousand things that conspired daily to distract her. Then her cell phone started chirping, so she pushed herself up from her desk and found where she’d left it after Willow had called earlier. HOLLOWS HIGH SCHOOL, the screen read, and she answered, heart already in her throat.
“Mrs. Graves, this is Henry Ivy from Hollows High.”
She’d met him when she enrolled Willow. The newly appointed principal, he was handsome in a sweet, geeky kind of way. A nice man.
“Is something wrong?” She already felt the swell of anxiety.
“Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Willow’s left the school. She didn’t show up for art class, and she was spotted leaving the property about twenty minutes ago.”
Fear and anger jockeyed for position in her chest.
“She was spotted and no one went after her or stopped her?” she said.
She didn’t like the sound of shrill indignation in her own voice. She wasn’t one of those parents who blamed others for her child’s mistakes and bad behavior. Still, wasn’t it somebody’s responsibility to make sure teenagers didn’t just walk out of school in the middle of the day?
“Another student spotted her and reported it to my office,” he said.
Bethany felt an irrational wave of annoyance for that particular student. Tattletale, she thought, rubbing at the back of her head. She took a deep breath against panic and picked up a picture of a tiny Willow running with a big smile and determined eyes over a chalk drawing on the pavement in Central Park. It was so easy then, hand in hand, never more than steps from each other, fretting over nursing and bumps on the head. Now Willow was her own person, out in the world and wreaking havoc.
