Sweetly

by Jackson Pearce

  The chocolatier is darkened, though bits of moonlight stream through the front windows and through the glass cases, as though the sky is intentionally illuminating truffles and candies. There’s a dull glow from behind the saloon doors, a single light struggling to fill all the blackness. I edge around the display cases and peer into the kitchen.

  Sophia paces. Her hair is down and frazzled, her nightgown wet with sweat. In front of her are a few truffle trays, mostly empty, and a bowl of candied orange peel that’s been tipped over. There’s also a bottle of dark rum, and I can tell even in the dim light that it’s half empty. I remember it was intended for some sort of truffle, but judging from the glass beside the bottle and Sophia’s face, I’d say it’s largely been drunk.

  Sophia winds her fingers through her hair and turns so I can see her face. It’s hard to tell what’s sweat and what are tears, but her eyes are watery and red. She slams her hand against the corkboard with the festival RSVPs and mumbles to herself, then stumbles back to the bottle of rum and pours herself another shot. There’s a seashell beside the bottle—I think a new one. She glares at it, then releases another sob.

  “Sophia?” I say gently, stepping through the saloon doors. Sophia clangs the glass back onto the counter and stares at me, confused, as if she’s forgotten who I am. Her eyes suddenly flood with recognition and she crumples down to the counter, head in her arms.

  “There aren’t enough,” she weeps as I hurry around the counter and put a hand on her back. “There aren’t enough people coming.”

  “I’m sure some more people will RSVP. You have two weeks,” I comfort her, quietly screwing the cap back onto the rum. She heaves and raises her head as I step away to put the rum back into a cabinet and toss what’s remaining in her glass down the sink. She watches me mutely, as though I’m in a movie, then finds my eyes again.

  “What if there aren’t more?” she whispers, new tears spilling down her cheeks. She jumps off the bar stool and goes to the corkboard, where she begins rearranging the RSVPs frantically, dropping tacks onto the floor. I step around them and wrap an arm around Sophia’s shoulders. I ignore the pounding in my chest, the knowledge that the party will result in some girls’ deaths. That’s Sophia’s power: as much as I suspect her at times, I still care for her. I still want to comfort her.

  “Then it’ll still be a great party,” I answer her soothingly, brushing away the strands of hair sticking to her face.

  She looks at me and shakes her head, eyes wide with something like dread. “No, it won’t,” she says hoarsely. “I’m sorry, Gretchen. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know…” She reaches for the seashell on the counter, cradling it against her.

  “Come on. Let’s go upstairs and go to bed.”

  Sophia mumbles incoherently as I guide her around the fallen thumbtacks. Ansel is a heavy sleeper, but I’m still astounded that I manage to make it upstairs without his waking. I leave Sophia in her bed, then hurry to the bathroom to get a cold washcloth to wipe her face. By the time I’ve made it back to her room, she’s asleep, the shell resting on her bedside table beside the Nietzsche book. I run the washcloth over her red cheeks, cleaning the tearstains away, then rise to leave.

  “Gretchen,” she whispers, eyes closed.

  “Yeah?” I ask, kneeling beside her bed. Sophia opens her eyes a little, lashes fluttering.

  “I’m a good person, Gretchen,” she mumbles drunkenly, pleadingly. “You have to believe me.”

  I want to believe her. I mostly believe her. But there are two versions of Sophia Kelly, two versions I’ve been trying to figure out since the day I got here. Now I understand that they were explained to me in the diner before I’d even met her. One is the patron saint of candy, and the other is the first sign of Live Oak’s end days. And I’m not sure which version is stronger.

  Sophia looks at me a long time, eyes desperate, helpless, then falls back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I was thinking—wait, your hair…” Samuel says, squinting at me in the sunlight a few days later.

  “I had the Skittle colors cut out of it,” I say.

  “Oh. Well… it looks… really…” It seems as if he’s about to say something but can’t find the word. He shakes his head and starts a new sentence. “I was thinking about what you said.”

  “What I said?”

  “About hunting. About how you wanted to go hunting with me, I mean.”

  “And your thoughts are?” I ask eagerly.

  “Well… if you’re still interested… maybe that’s not such a bad idea.” Samuel shuffles his feet. I grin and walk forward, joining him in the shade of an oak.

  “I’m still interested,” I say, nodding.

  “Okay, but… there are some rules. I don’t want… I don’t want anything to happen,” Samuel says, and I get the impression he prepared this speech. He continues. “You have to be able to hit a moving target. And you have to promise not to run.”

  “Not to run?”

  “Like you did the night we met. You run into things. It’s dark. Fenris chase things that run. It’s harder to hit something chasing something I don’t want to hit… if that makes sense. It’s just a bad idea overall.”

  “So… when would we be doing this?” I ask.

  “As soon as you can hit a moving target,” he says with a shrug. “If you can hit this”—he holds up a tennis ball—“then you’ve got good enough aim to try hunting. With help from yours truly, anyhow.”

  “Okay,” I say with a breath out. “Okay. I can do that.”

  Samuel shakes his head. “We’ll see. Here,” he says, handing me a rifle. “Your aim is best with this one.”

  The gray man is nowhere to be seen, and instead, Samuel throws the tennis ball hard. It ricochets off the ground as I try to aim for it. Try being the operative word—after several attempts, bullets have hit the dirt and a tree and skimmed through grass, all without ever making contact with the neon yellow ball. The afternoon fades into a mango-colored sunset, and Samuel checks his watch between throws. Still, he’s yet to tell me we should call it a day.

  “You don’t have to hit it today,” he reminds me as he brings the ball back for the millionth time. “I didn’t plan for you to do it today. I just meant… that’s the goal.” He stoops to take a long drink of water from a bottle, which he then hands to me.

  “But if I hit it once today, we get to go hunting, right?” I say before drinking. It’s not that cold, but compared to the heat it’s icy. I toss the bottle back to him.

  “Do you really want to go hunting if you aren’t truly ready?” Samuel says as he catches it.

  I shake my head. “Yes. It sounds stupid, but yes. I feel like it’ll change everything. It’ll help me be… me. The me I want to become.”

  Samuel nods and looks at the ball in his hand, then rears back to throw it again. It flies from his hand and spins through the grass. I line up the sights on the rifle with it, then squeeze the trigger. Another miss. Samuel tries again.

  The mosquitoes are coming out, nipping at my skin and distracting me even more than the fear of not hunting does. Samuel is right—it doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter. I have ages to hit the damn tennis ball.

  Samuel picks up the ball and looks at it. He walks back to me slowly, with a look that reads “we’re done for today.” I sigh and empty the few remaining rounds from the gun, flip the safety on, and fall into the grass cross-legged. Samuel heaves himself onto the ground beside me. Lightning bugs emerge in the woods, where it’s already dark.

  “There’s something I didn’t answer, a while ago,” he says, running the tennis ball between his palms. I raise my eyes to his.

  “You asked me once,” he begins, “if I still love Layla.” He gives me a long, intense look, and the remaining light from the sun reflects in his eyes.

  “I…” I shake my head. “I was just wondering. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “That’s the thing, actually—I do have to tell you,�
� he says. Even in the dim light, his eyes stand out in the piercing way that used to frighten me. Used to—it isn’t until this moment that I realize they don’t any longer. I still wouldn’t say they comfort—they challenge, they dare, they shine.

  “You told me your sister’s name,” he starts, “and if we’re going to go into the woods together with, you know, loaded guns, I don’t think I should have any secrets.”

  I inhale the scent of the trees and night. I’m not sure what to say, so I nod.

  Samuel exhales. “I will always love Layla. That’s what love is. It becomes a part of you. It holds you down sometimes; it becomes something you can’t escape.”

  My stomach twists—I feel as though someone has hit me. I force a weak smile, nod, as if this is what I expected to hear. Of course he still loves Layla. I repeat it over and over in my head. That’s the way it works. They always want the one who vanished. The one they can’t have.

  He gazes over my shoulder, into the dense trees, and when he meets my eyes again, there’s an expression in them I’ve never seen—lurking behind the hardness, the bitterness, is an uncertainty that I can’t believe I missed.

  He opens his mouth and pauses before speaking. “But I want to make sure you know that that doesn’t mean I’m still… hers. She’s gone. I know that. And just because I want to make things right in Live Oak doesn’t mean I haven’t moved on.”

  We watch each other, and then Samuel smiles and shakes his head.

  “I just thought you should know,” he says, then tosses the tennis ball to me; I catch it as it bounces off my thigh. He rises from the ground and makes his way to his motorcycle.

  “Tomorrow night. We’ll give it a shot. No promises—I don’t find wolves more often than I do find them. But still.”

  “Wait, what?” I ask, scrambling to my feet. He doesn’t answer, but I see a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. I turn the tennis ball over in my hand and only then realize that there are fourteen holes in it, nearly hidden by the fuzz and swelling rubber.

  I hit it.

  Seven times.

  I shout loudly, and before I can stop myself, I sprint toward Samuel. I drop the tennis ball and fling my arms around him, still yelling, sounds that were meant to be words if only I could translate my happiness into language. Samuel chuckles lightly and puts one arm around my head, then kisses me on the forehead, little more than a gentle brush of his lips. I step back, face wet with sweat and grinning.

  Wait. He just kissed me.

  Samuel seems to realize it at the same instant I do, and his face goes dark red. “Sorry,” he says quickly. “I… um… forgot.” Forgot what? That he doesn’t kiss me?

  “No, it’s fine,” I say, still breathless. The spot where his lips touched me tingles, memories of the way it felt replaying over and over on my skin.

  “Come on,” he says, voice still happy but now tinged with nervousness. He passes me the motorcycle helmet. “I’ll take you home.” I nod, spin in a circle to try to shake some of the enthusiasm from my veins, and climb onto the back of the motorcycle; for a moment, I try to keep space between Samuel and me, worried it’ll make the strange kiss more awkward, but I can’t help but draw closer to him as the bike rolls along.

  Darkness seems to come quickly—from sunset to pitch-black is minutes, not hours. By the time we’re a hundred or so yards from the chocolatier, the sides of the road are thick with lightning bugs and mosquitoes. Samuel gives me a hand to steady myself as I climb off.

  “So really? Tomorrow?” I ask quietly, glancing toward the shining chocolatier in the distance.

  “Might as well. Are you scared?”

  “Yes,” I answer without hesitation. “Terrified.”

  “I’ll be with you,” he reminds me. “I’ve shot them before.”

  “That’s not really it,” I say cautiously. “It’s… I’m going after them. I’ve always been scared of the witch, afraid he’d find me, but… I’m going to look for him. It’s scary in a different way. Scary because if this doesn’t change me, if it isn’t the last step away from being the scared little girl, I don’t know what will be.”

  Samuel nods. “I’ll meet you outside the Kelly place at… midnight? Sound good?”

  “Yes,” I say breathlessly. “That sounds great.”

  I turn and retreat toward the chocolatier; when I’m bathed in the porch light’s glare, I hear the faint sound of Samuel’s bike revving up and disappearing into the night. I turn back and try to see him in the darkness with no luck. My fingertips rise to the spot on my forehead. He kissed me, kissed me as if it was nothing, as though it was normal and right and I felt the same way for a moment.

  He’s Samuel, I tell myself, suddenly realizing that hunting wolves isn’t the only thing suddenly scaring me. I turn to go into the house, but a voice interrupts the quiet.

  “Who was that?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I whirl around, hand to my chest. Before the scream of surprise can leave my throat, I exhale. Ansel.

  “Who was who?” Deny, deny, deny.

  “I’m not stupid, Gretchen,” Ansel says. He walks around the side of the chocolatier and up the porch stairs, then collapses into one of the rocking chairs.

  “Just a guy from town,” I answer slowly as I take the rocking chair next to him.

  We rock silently for a moment, the sound of Sophia sweeping the kitchen and the quiet radio interrupted occasionally by the noise of crickets. Some new emotion is threading between us, something rough and raw and new, but neither of us wants to point it out.

  “Is it Samuel Reynolds?” he finally asks in a low voice. I turn my head toward him.

  “What were you, spying on me?” I half tease, half worry. What else has he seen?

  Guilt grows in the pit of my stomach. Ansel and I don’t keep secrets from each other. We never have. We’re the survivors, the ones who made it out of the forest, the ones who had each other when even our parents couldn’t handle the world any longer. But now I’m keeping secrets—I am a secret, practically, this new version of me, this one that refuses to vanish.

  “No,” Ansel answers. “Seriously, no, I wasn’t spying on you. That waitress from the diner ratted you out. Said she saw you on the back of his motorcycle.”

  I hold in a sigh of relief, though it does little to sway my guilt. Luxe head-butts his way through the screen door and trots outside, where he settles down at my feet. I rub his head with my toes, waiting for Ansel to go on, unsure what to say.

  “So… are you? Dating him?” Ansel finally asks.

  “What? No. We’re just friends. I met him in town,” I reply, my answer not entirely a lie.

  “Okay… just wondering,” Ansel says, holding up his hands defensively. “It’s just that the waitress said… she said he was crazy. Like in a serious, clinical way.”

  I pause. “Do you believe her?”

  Ansel sighs and looks down. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  He pauses for a moment, then speaks. “It would be really easy for people to think you and I aren’t exactly stable. I mean, our sister and… everything. And half of Live Oak thinks Sophia is crazy, and I know she’s not. So I’m not going to take some waitress’s word for it. If you trust him, I trust you.”

  I don’t know how to answer—gratitude, surprise, relief, run through my head, but I can’t think of a single all-encompassing word. Nor can I think of a word to express the feeling in my stomach, the tight, twisted frustration of knowing that my brother still trusts Sophia completely.

  “Thanks,” I finally say.

  The radio in the kitchen turns off, and I hear the clicks and clatters of Sophia locking up. “I don’t think you should tell Sophia, by the way. She’d probably be upset, hearing you’re hanging out with the guy who hates her. You don’t hate her now too, do you?” Ansel says suspiciously.

  “Of course not.” Why do I feel as if I’m lying to my brother? I don’t hate her, I just…“But I agree—don’t tell
Sophia.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Ansel says. He drums his fingers on the edge of the rocking chair. I inhale and suddenly have to know something—an odd question, but one I feel as though I need to ask before I go trudging into the forest after witches.

  “Do you miss Abigail?”

  Ansel does a double take, then stares at me incredulously, as if I’ve struck him. “You said her name.”

  “Yes.” I give my brother a long look, waiting for his judgment. I’m ready to say her name again, but is he? Can he understand just how much I’ve changed since we got to Live Oak?

  “Right… wow…” He shakes off his surprise and inhales. “I… I didn’t know Abigail.” Her name is strange on his voice, as though it were a foreign word he doesn’t quite know—but at least he said it. At least we’re both ready to say it again. “I was seven. I know I’m supposed to miss her, but all I miss is the way things were before she was gone. When Mom and Dad were alive and things were normal.”

  “When we weren’t the kids with the sister who disappeared.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “When we weren’t just the kids who survived some mystery attacker.”

  I consider once again telling him about the werewolves here, but… no. It wouldn’t help. “Why do you think we survived, Ansel?”

  He shrugs. “Luck? Our feet moved one step faster than hers?”

  “But she and I were the exact same. She could have run faster. If I could, she could have.”

  “Maybe.” Ansel frowns. “I don’t know, then. Maybe it was fate. Maybe we were supposed to survive.”

  I raise my eyebrows at my brother—my practical, reasoning brother. It isn’t like him to chalk something up to fate. But I realize that fate is actually the most reasonable answer. It’s either that, or he has to think that her vanishing had no purpose whatsoever. Fate may sound unlikely, but it’s a lot less painful than thinking your sister is gone for nothing.

  “Why were we supposed to survive, then?” I muse in a whisper, as much to myself as to Ansel.