The Little Woods

by McCormick Templeman

  “So you guys worked out your little, um, problem, then?” he asked.

  Sophie raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Yeah. No, everything’s fine now, Jack. Thanks for asking.”

  “I’m here for all your needs, Wood.”

  “Jack, don’t be disgusting. You okay?” Sophie asked, turning to me, concerned.

  “Yeah. I am totally fine, thanks.”

  I tried not to look at Jack during class, but his lure was overwhelming, and I found myself constantly distracted. Eventually I had to give in and take a peek across Sophie. He was staring at me, just staring. When he saw me look over, he gave me a smile with something like admiration in his eyes and then laughed as he shook his head.

  I was both dreading and looking forward to chemistry. We had a lab, which meant my time would be largely unsupervised with Jack. He was leaning against the table, already hard at work, when I came in.

  “Eager much?”

  “I had third period free. I thought I’d get us out of here a little early.”

  “Jack, that thing with Alex …”

  “Pumpkin,” he said, looking wounded. “You can do whatever you want with your boyfriend. I really don’t care.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I have my own situation to attend to, remember?”

  “You mean your secret girlfriend?” I teased, but he tensed up and looked upset, so I dropped it. “Okay, so we’ll just be friends, then?”

  He smiled at me, slow and vulpine, and I felt a little dizzy, a little like I might attack him right there in chemistry lab. “BFF, Wood. BFF.”

  We did finish half an hour early, and Reilly let us go. We walked in a strange sort of silence, the air between us thick and charged.

  “Wood, um, I think we need to talk,” he said.

  “Sounds good,” I said, tripping over my tongue, trying not to choke.

  And just as we were passing the boys’ bathroom, Jack slammed the door open and pulled me inside. He kissed me, heavily, eagerly. I melted at first but then pulled away.

  “Jack, I’m with Alex now.”

  “So?” he said, leaning against one of the stalls.

  “So? So? I’m going out with him again.”

  “So what do I care?”

  “So I’m not going to cheat on him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s wrong.”

  “He cheated on you,” he said, moving closer.

  “So? Two wrongs and all that.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t enjoy our little activities, because it seemed to me that you did … like, a lot.”

  “Obviously,” I said, unable to keep the grin from my face.

  “So?” he said, moving closer, taking my wrist gently in his hand. “Why not keep on doing it, then? It’s not like we’re having sex or anything. We’re just fooling around.”

  “I can’t go out with Alex and fool around with you.”

  “Sure you can. You haven’t taken any vows.”

  “No. It’s dishonest. Besides, what we did the other night was kind of intense. I can’t keep doing those things with you if I don’t do stuff like that with Alex.”

  “And you don’t want to do those things with him?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s great news.” He beamed. “I don’t want you to either. See, we have totally the same priorities.”

  “But do you want to keep hooking up with someone else’s girlfriend?”

  He nodded and smiled. “Yes. Yes I do. I absolutely do. Alex cheated on you.” He moved closer to me, and I could feel his breath hot on my neck. I backed up against the wall, and slowly, softly he pressed into me. “You have carte blanche right now.” He leaned in and kissed me. “I think you should use it.”

  It happened again, strange and electric, and in the boys’ bathroom, of all places. We clung to each other like frightened children, our hands seeming to move of their own volition. This was not my personality, not my typical behavior. When we’d exhausted ourselves, he held me close against his chest like he didn’t want to let me go. I knew that what Jack had said to convince me didn’t make a ton of sense. I wasn’t a moron. But my time with Jack was in some ways the only honest time in my life. With him I simply was. There was no narrating every detail: Now Alex’s hand slides up my waist. Now he is kissing me. Kiss him back. With Jack it was more of a deranged psychosis, and I loved it. But there was something I needed to know.

  “Jack,” I said, trying to get my clothes back in order. I could see him in the mirror, leaning against a stall watching me, his eyes soft and gentle.

  “Mmm?”

  “I need to know one thing if we’re going to keep doing this.”

  “Anything.”

  “I need to know who you’re seeing in secret—I mean, besides me. I need to know who the other person is.”

  He shook his head.

  “I really can’t tell you. I’m sorry. I don’t want to keep things from you, but this is beyond my control.”

  He started to approach me, but I stopped him.

  “I need to know that it’s not Sophie.”

  He frowned incredulously. “Sophie? Like our Sophie? You think I’m seeing Sophie?”

  “Obviously, or I wouldn’t have asked.”

  He shook his head, a strange set to his eye. “Of course not. She’s my best friend. No. Not Sophie. God, I can’t even think about Sophie messing around with anyone, let alone someone like me. I’d kill anyone who touched her.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling kind of jealous about his protectiveness. “Enough. So it’s not Sophie, then? You promise?”

  “I absolutely promise you. I swear on my life.”

  That was all I needed. And finally, at last, the true charm of boarding school became overtly, achingly obvious to me.

  I sat with Noel at dinner, but she didn’t say much, and she ate even less. I wanted to help her, but I felt powerless.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” I asked, watching her push food around on her plate.

  She gave me a weak smile. “I’m fine. Would you stop worrying about me?”

  I gritted my teeth, not knowing what to say. “Remember over spring break when you were talking about suicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was all theoretical, right?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be naïve.”

  “What do you mean? Why am I naïve?”

  “It’s not like I’m obsessed with suicide or anything. It’s just that we talk about it sometimes, so I’ve been, like, relating stuff back to it lately. You know when that happens? When you’re studying, like, owls or something, and then you start seeing owl symbolism everywhere?”

  “Not really,” I said, laughing.

  Noel shrugged. “Well, that happens to me.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Who’s we? You and Asta?”

  “No,” she said, her cheeks flushing.

  “Who, then? You and Helen?”

  “No one,” she said, her voice weak. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She stood abruptly, leaving her plate on the table. “I gotta go. I’ll see you later, Wood.”

  That night when Alex came to get me after study hours, I didn’t know what to say to him. It’s no big deal, but I’ve accidentally hooked up with Jack Deeker twice in the last two days? I didn’t think that would go over too well, so I decided to omit it.

  Walking with Alex, I could almost forget what had happened with Jack. Alex had an easy kind of charm about him. There wasn’t the strange, muddled electricity that I felt whenever Jack was near, but that just meant I could relax around him. He slipped his hand into mine and stared down at me with almond eyes, a faint smile playing on his lips.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Kind of intense, actually,” he said. “We had an unscheduled prefect meeting tonight, and it’s just been a really tough time. You have to keep this on the DL, but Harrison told us the po
lice found a bag in Iris’s pocket that had trace amounts of psilocybin.”

  “What?”

  “Psychedelic mushrooms. That girl was tripping balls when she died. Harrison’s really upset,” he sighed. “You can see how this looks for the school. He wanted to know if we’d heard of anyone in possession of something like that, and wants us to be on the lookout from now on. Pretty intense.”

  “What? Why is it your job to inform on your classmates?”

  “We’re prefects. That’s one of our responsibilities.”

  “So you guys are like narcs?”

  “We have responsibilities, that’s all.”

  “You’ve never done it, though, right? You’ve never turned anyone in.”

  “Yeah I have.” He smiled. “This kid back in November. I caught him smoking pot in his closet under my watch. Not cool. I got his ass thrown out.”

  “But you do drugs,” I said, my gut telling me that something was off.

  Quickly he looked around, then lowered his voice. “Cally, that was different. God, I can’t believe you’d say something like that out in the open. What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “I just can’t believe you got that kid kicked out.”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he said, clearly disappointed.

  We continued on, an uncomfortable silence between us. As we walked through the grass, my thoughts fell to Iris and the mushrooms. Had they been her decision, or had someone manipulated her into taking them? Had her killer drugged her before taking her life, and if so, why use mushrooms? I shook my head and tried to put it from my mind. It seemed that every time I got closer to understanding what might have happened that night, something else crept in to complicate it.

  The next day, sitting alone on the balcony, I found I barely had the will to finish my lunch. For the billionth time, I wished I had my dad to talk to. Back home I had Danny, but he wasn’t much for emotions. He would have suggested we find whoever had sent me the puzzle box and beat the shit out of them. The main thing that got under my skin was that I felt like a victim—like I’d been chosen because of Clare’s death—and it felt like someone gouging my wounds with stinging nettles.

  I took a bite of my sandwich, something slowly settling onto me. If Clare was the reason I’d been contacted, then was it possible that Asta had been contacted as well? I noticed that at the thought of Asta, my blood pressure dropped to a nice, easy level. She had said to talk to her if I had a hard time at St. Bede’s, and I was pretty sure that was what I was having. She seemed kind, and she seemed to really like me. Maybe it was okay to reach out to her, to trust her.

  I left lunch early and headed down to the bio lab, thinking I could catch her alone between periods, but when I walked in, I found her with Noel. They sat across a lab table from each other, and Noel flinched when she saw me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll come back later.”

  “No, Cally.” Asta smiled. “Please stay. In fact, you might be exactly what this discussion needs.”

  “I’ll finish up the display cases,” Noel said, not making eye contact.

  “Perfect,” Asta said. “You keep an eye to your work and an ear to the conversation, and we can kill two birds with one stone.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, still unable to place the vibe in the room. I felt like I’d just walked into the middle of an uncomfortable situation, but Asta seemed perfectly at ease.

  “Well.” She smiled and slid one of the jars of oil and dead flies across the table toward me. “We were just discussing the morality of killing all these flies. Of course we all know that releasing them outside would be potentially harmful to the ecosystem, but Noel here was saying that by killing them, we might be doing something wrong.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. I feel kind of bad killing them too.”

  “That’s good.” Asta nodded. “Illogical on some level, but good. Tell me, why do you feel bad about it?”

  “I don’t know. They’re living things. It doesn’t seem right for me to decide whether they should live or die.”

  “Are you religious, Cally? Do you think that taking a life is a sin?”

  Images of Clare flashed before my eyes. Was that what she was talking about? This felt strange, inappropriate.

  “No, I’m not religious,” I said slowly, holding her eye contact. “But I know that as far as humans are concerned, no one has the right to take anyone else’s life away. If they do, they should pay for it. Whether that extends to insects, I can’t say. I hope not. I’d hate to think we’re all going to hell or whatever for taking AP bio.”

  Asta laughed, her gaze warm. “I’d hope not too. Think how many times I’ve taught AP bio. I’d probably end up down in the seventh circle with Pol Pot. But there’s more to what Noel and I were discussing. We were wondering if, hypothetically, killing fruit flies was a sin if we would be able to atone for it, either in this life or the next. Noel thinks not. I say absolutely. I feel that no matter how grave the crime, when we leave this earth, whether we go on to Elysium, or we return here for another life, our soul is cleansed, that the very act of dying cleanses us.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think that’s true. I think if you do something really bad, like if you kill a person, there’s nothing you can do to take that back.”

  Asta scratched her chin and nodded. “But what if you did something, committed an act of attrition, some kind of sacrifice to show you were truly repentant?” she asked, her voice calm and sweet, and I wondered what she could possibly be trying to tell me. It was as if the content of her speech and her tone bore no relation to each other. How on earth could she say these things to me? Anger began to well inside me.

  “So,” I said, my voice breaking. “Whoever killed Iris, they’re just going to go to heaven if they’re sorry enough?”

  “Cally,” Asta said, her eyes wide. “I’ve upset you. I’m so sorry. Clearly you’re not comfortable with this conversation. Let’s forget it, shall we? Why was it you came by before I dragged you into our silly epistemological debate?”

  “Nothing,” I said, backing away, trying to staunch the uncomprehending tears that were choking my esophagus. “I was looking for Alex.”

  I didn’t wait for her to say goodbye. I hurried out of the room and ran across the lawn, staving off the tears until I reached the safety of my bed. I sat sobbing into my hands. I felt so alone. I hated that there was never anyone there to hold me when I felt like I might shatter. Every time I put my faith in someone, they betrayed it. Asta of all people should have known how I felt. How could she say those things to me, and in front of Noel? Why would she do something like that, and do it all with a smile and a tender note to her voice? It was like she was carrying on two entirely different conversations.

  I sat there feeling next to empty, my face stretched and aching from crying. Maybe some of us were different, I thought. Maybe some of us just didn’t have guardians. Maybe some of us never would. Maybe we needed to learn to be our own guardians, to take care of ourselves.

  I found Jack outside the dining hall. He was talking to Drucy and Cara, but when he saw me, he came right over.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, reaching out for me but then stopping himself. There were too many people around.

  “Jack,” I said, the world seeming to spin around me, pressing in. “Do you have any condoms?”

  His eyes grew wide, and slowly he nodded.

  “Okay,” I said, my hand shaking as I brushed my hair behind my ear. “Meet me behind the theater in five minutes.”

  “Cally,” he said, breathless. “Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway. I took the slow route to the theater, and when I got there, Jack was already sitting on the grass, looking up at me with a little boy’s eyes. He looked frightened and beautiful.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asked again.

  “Jack, I don’t want to talk, okay?” I said, and led him into the woods, just o
ut of view.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I undressed and lay down, the forest floor rough against my back, my legs shaking.

  It was slow and strange, and not at all what I’d expected. He told me I was beautiful, but I didn’t want to hear that. I wanted everything to go away, to disappear, and for a little while it did.

  When it was over, we dressed in silence, and then Jack sat back down on the ground. He reached out for me, but I didn’t take his hand. Instead I knelt down, picked up the empty condom wrapper, and shoved it into the pocket of my jacket. I figured I could bear half the responsibility for hiding what we’d done.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I wanted to tell him the truth, that I wasn’t okay, that I hadn’t been okay for a very long time, and that nothing, not even sex with a beautiful boy, could fix that thing inside me that was broken. But I couldn’t say that. I could see from the look in his eyes that somehow what we’d done had just broken his heart a little.

  “I gotta go,” I said.

  “You don’t have class yet,” he said, forcing a smile. “Can’t we hang out for a bit?”

  He held out his hands again, reaching up for me, but I couldn’t take them. I backed away.

  “I have something to do,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, his voice quiet, his smile falling. “Okay.”

  I left him there. I didn’t look back. I don’t know how long he stayed. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day, but when I got back to my room that night, I found a single white flower on my pillow.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning to Helen peering down at me.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, clearly upset. “Your hair. I just don’t like it.”

  She’d said that the night before when I’d come back to the dorm with what she called my Sex Pistols hair. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just something I needed to do. After dinner, I’d borrowed bleach and clippers from Cara Svitt, and I’d shaved most of my head, leaving only a spiky patch up front, which I’d bleached a shocking blond.