“That’s mine,” she announced before running downstairs and out the front door. I stepped inside her new room, surveying the yellow-and-white striped wallpaper and queen-size bed. A huge bay window faced the street, and I could see Darcy as she yanked open the trunk of the car and pulled out her bag.
Her choice was fine by me. After everything that had happened, the last thing I wanted was to face the street.
Across the hall was a master suite done up in blues and grays, which my father would claim, and the next door opened onto a white tiled bathroom. At the end of the hallway, a third door stood ajar, revealing a winding staircase. I peeked inside and tilted my head, but all I could see was a wood-paneled ceiling.
The stairway was so narrow that I was able to trail my fingers along the opposite walls as I made my way up, the stairs creaking beneath my every step. At the top, I paused. The room was wide, almost as wide as the house, with a sloped ceiling and white-washed walls. A double bed stood in the center under the highest part of the ceiling, with a six-paneled floor-to-ceiling window behind it facing the water. The only other window overlooked the beach to the north. The furniture was sparse—a wardrobe, a desk, a bookshelf filled with haphazardly shelved cloth-covered volumes.
In any other circumstance, I would have loved it. But right then, I wanted nothing more than to go home. I missed my room. I missed my desk and all my things. And being away from home, away from my mom’s wallpaper, her kitchen utensils, the artwork she’d arranged so carefully in the living room, was making me miss her even more.
It’s only temporary, I reminded myself with a deep, fortifying breath. But I knew the first thing I’d be unpacking was the framed picture of the two of us.
Turning around, I headed downstairs to get my stuff. As I passed by the open door to Darcy’s room, she tugged her hood from her hair. In the back of her head was a huge blotch of blood, all dried into her tangled hair.
“Darcy! Your head! It’s still bleeding!” I gasped.
She whirled on me, her green eyes flashing as she attempted to cover it up again. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” I said, a chill running through me.
Out of nowhere, a flash overtook my vision. A pale hand in the silvery moonlight. A distant hoot of an owl. A tumble of bloody black hair over a smashed-in skull. But when I blinked, the vision was gone. It was just a nightmare, I reminded myself. I pressed my hand onto the nearest wall and tried to breathe.
“Rory? What is it? What’s wrong?” Darcy asked, alarmed.
“Nothing,” I said, looking away, avoiding her eyes.
“That didn’t look like nothing. It looked like…you got the exact same look on your face as when you had—”
“The flashes,” we both said at the same time.
I swallowed hard and sat down next to her. My heart pounded with panic, and I tried to do what my psychiatrist had told me to do all those years ago—focus on what was real, focus on what was here. There was a gray smudge on my sneaker. A big black knot in the wood plank under my foot. A cuticle torn on my right ring finger. These things were real. This room, this seat, and Darcy. They were here.
“I knew it!” Darcy exclaimed, her face lined with concern. “It’s happening again? Since when?”
“I don’t know. Just…that was the first time,” I said. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
But even as I said it, my stomach was tied in knots. After my mother had died, I went through months where I’d get flashes every day. Vivid visions of her coughing up blood or moaning in pain or crying out for my dad. But they weren’t just memories. It was as if I was transported back to the moment I’d seen these things happen and I was there all over again, reliving them in pure 3-D. My father had taken me to a psychiatrist, who had diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder, and after a few months of therapy, the flashes had slowed, then finally stopped. But now, apparently, they were back. And I was flashing on the worst nightmare I’d ever had.
“You sure?” Darcy asked me.
“Yeah. I’m all right,” I said, standing up again. The room spun for one split second, but I forced myself to focus and breathe. “I’ll be right back. We have to clean you up.”
“No. I can handle it. You should sit,” Darcy said.
But I ignored her and headed for the bathroom. I was too glad to have something to do—something to distract myself from that flash. I found a washcloth in a linen closet behind the bathroom door and ran the water in the ceramic sink until it turned warm. Then I splashed some water on my face and gave myself a bolstering look in the mirror for good measure. When I returned to Darcy’s room, she was sitting on the window seat, waiting for me.
“Do you want me to do it?” I asked.
She didn’t say yes, but she also didn’t throw me out of her room, which I took as a positive sign. Instead, she brought her feet up on the plaid bench cushion and turned to look out at the street. Tentatively, I touched the wet cloth to the wound. She winced.
“Does it hurt a lot?” I asked.
“Just get it over with,” she answered tersely.
I cleaned up the blood and was relieved to find that underneath it all it was simply a superficial scrape. When I was done, I brought her leather hobo bag over to the bench, knowing she would want to work on her hair. She rummaged through it until she found her brush and started to detangle the ends.
“We should walk into town and find those guys,” Darcy mused, pulling the ends of her hair around to study a stubborn knot. “If we’re going to be here for a while, we might as well make friends.”
I turned my profile to Darcy and stared at the hardwood floor. Three dark knots in the wood grain formed a wobbly smiley face.
“How long do you think we’ll be here?” I asked quietly.
Darcy shrugged, working on her tangles. “I’d say it’s a bad sign that they’ve been chasing him for ten years.”
“Yeah,” I said, my heart folding in on itself. “I guess he’s pretty smart.”
Darcy was silent for a moment. She was staring out the window, as though lost in thought, the brush limp in her hand.
“Do you want to hear something really sick?” she finally said in a disgusted voice. “I actually liked Mr. Nell. He always explained math in ways that I might actually use it in real life, which made it way more interesting. And I liked how he did speed-math contests for the last five minutes of every class because he knew that otherwise everyone would be watching the clock tick.” She shuddered.
“I know. I liked him, too,” I admitted. And I had. I liked how he carried his coffee in a Beatles travel mug, how he always had a dog-eared copy of Auto Repair for Dummies tucked under his arm, and how he never had bad breath when he leaned in to check my work, unlike every other teacher at Princeton Hills High. I used to smile when I saw him strolling the halls, holding the strap of his gray messenger bag with both hands, whistling like he hadn’t a care.
“I guess you can never really know what’s going on in someone’s head,” Darcy mused, beginning to brush her hair again.
I glanced over at her bright green eyes, which were so much like our mother’s. We hadn’t been the best of friends in a long time, not since before our mom died. But after Christopher dumped Darcy, she’d completely changed. Every other sentence out of her mouth was a snap or an insult. The only thing that had stayed the same was her standing up to Dad. She was always the one to talk back to him while I cowered in the corner. I was grateful to her for that—for getting in his face a little so I didn’t have to. But I didn’t know how to tell her.
My mother would have told me to just say it. That it was important to let people know how I felt. My heart pounded nervous energy through my veins at the very thought, but I decided to try anyway. I could have been dead right now, after all. Then she never would have known. Apparently, “Life is short” was going to be my new mantra.
“Darcy, I—”
She stood up abruptly. “I’m gonna
go check out the rest of the house,” she said, turning away, avoiding looking me in the eye. It was as if she’d heard the emotion in my voice and it had scared her.
“Um, okay.”
I tucked my hands under my butt, embarrassed, but she was already out the door. Sighing, I turned toward the window and glanced out at my new neighborhood. It was quaint, with brightly colored houses in lemon yellow and mint green. Each garden contained a riot of flowers and neatly trimmed trees. Only the house across the street seemed out of place. It was light gray with painted black shutters. It had no trees, no garden, no shrubs. The only interesting thing about it was the square grate in the center of the front door—one of those old-fashioned peepholes that opened like a mini door from the inside.
As I watched, a curtain fell over the window directly opposite Darcy’s and I saw a hand disappear from view. My heart hit my throat. Was someone watching us? I leaned forward, squinting as the curtain fluttered.
Something crashed downstairs, and my hand flew to my heart. My father cursed at the top of his lungs. I got up and made my way to my new bedroom. Shaking off the quick scare I’d had in Darcy’s room, I closed the door quietly behind me. We were safe here. No one was watching me anymore. People were allowed to look out their windows.
I climbed the stairs, sank down on the bed, and stared up at the wood-beamed ceiling with a sigh. So this was it. This was my new life. With my family but entirely alone. At least something about this place was familiar.
“Rory…”
I sat up straight in bed. My eyes darted around the unfamiliar room, the dark corners, the distorted shadows. Someone had just whispered my name.
“Rory Miller!” the voice sang again. “Can Rory Miller come out and play?”
I flung the covers aside, my bare feet hitting the cool wood floor. A quick turn of the room convinced me that no one was there, but the voice came again.
“Come on, Rory. Come out and play with me.”
Goose bumps popped up all over my bare arms as I shakily stepped toward the stairs and peeked over the guardrail. No one was there. Just the bare steps winding down into the dark.
“Rory?” It was Darcy this time. “Rory!” she screamed. “Rory, help!”
Heart in my throat, I stumbled down the stairs. When I opened the door, it stopped with a thud. I looked down, and there was Darcy, curled up in a fetal position on the floor. Her eyes were open and staring, dead. Her head was so crushed it seemed impossible it was ever whole.
“No!” I screamed, covering my eyes. “No! No! No!”
I whirled around on the stairs, right into Steven Nell’s waiting arms.
“No!”
I startled awake on Sunday morning, my hands over my stomach, the bright sun assaulting my eyes. Sweat covered every inch of my body and my skin felt like it was on fire. My belly ached like I’d eaten too many bags of cotton candy and chased them with an entire bottle of Coke. I covered my face and told myself it was just a dream. It was just a dream. It was just a dream.
Breathe, Rory. Breathe.
As my breath started to calm, I heard the sound of my father slamming pots and pans around in the kitchen. I shoved my feet into my slippers and yanked on my E=mc2 sweatshirt before padding down the two flights of stairs. I tiptoed through the foyer and paused by the table near the door. My father had placed the family photo there—the one that used to hang on our upstairs wall. I hadn’t even seen him take it from the house. When another crash sounded, I slid over to the kitchen door and peeked inside. My dad was bent over in jeans and a T-shirt, rummaging through a low cabinet, every so often tossing a Teflon pan or a copper pot behind him onto the floor.
“Tell us we have to leave our house and then send us to some backward island with no phone service and no Wi-Fi,” he muttered into the hollow of the cupboard. I’d noticed the Wi-Fi problem last night when I’d tried to log on to the Internet from my iPad, but I’d hoped it was a temporary glitch. “What the hell kind of way is this to run a government agency?” He started to pull himself up and slammed his head on the edge of the opening. “Motherf—”
I jumped back to hide before he could spot me and start yelling at me, too. Outside I heard a bicycle bell trill, and I made my way to the front door. I slipped onto the porch, closing the door quietly behind me. The warm summer air enveloped me from head to toe. I tiptoed over to the porch swing and sat, wrapping my arms around myself. Even from the front of the house, I could hear the waves rushing against the beach out back, and the air was filled with the tangy salty scent of the sea, plus that sweet floral infusion I couldn’t quite place.
Someone nearby was humming. The tune sounded vaguely familiar as it floated on the breeze. Familiar enough that I started to hum along. Until I realized exactly why I knew the melody. I jumped up from the swing, whirling around.
It was “The Long and Winding Road.”
I was flashing again. I had to be flashing again. But then a little yellow bird flew over and perched on the porch railing. I heard the distant sound of a bell. The magnolia tree across the street rustled in the breeze. I was here. In Juniper Landing. In the now. And the humming was real.
Trembling, I walked to the end of the porch and peeked over the railing toward the back of the house. Sandy, patchy crabgrass stretched out to a boardwalk that separated our house from the beach. But other than a blackbird perched in a flowering tree and a few bees buzzing around a coneflower, there was nothing there. I walked to the other side and looked back at the garage. Our new car sat in the driveway, its black hood glinting in the morning sun. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and listened. Nothing other than the crashing of the surf and the cawing of the blackbird.
But when I opened my eyes again, the very same curtain in the very same window of the house across the street fluttered closed. This time, I caught a glimpse of blond hair as someone turned away from the window.
“What the hell?” Before I could lose my nerve, I jogged down the steps of the porch, opened the latch, and stepped out onto the sidewalk for a better look.
“Whoa!”
I nearly jumped out of my skin as two girls about my age skidded to a stop on their bikes just outside our gate—and inches from me. One was pretty, dark-skinned, and round-cheeked, with curls sticking out in all directions and an eyebrow ring that glinted in the sun. She wore an army jacket, even though it was warm out, along with a black dress, a striped scarf, and tall black boots. The other was the petite girl I’d seen with Darcy’s new conquest yesterday at the general store. She had straight black hair that fell to her chin, dark eyes, and sported a JUNIPER LANDING T-shirt over denim shorts. A weathered, woven leather bracelet clung to her right wrist.
“Close call,” the girl with the eyebrow ring said, backing up her bike.
“Um, yeah,” I said, my eyes darting back to the window. The curtain was still.
“You’re new,” the petite girl said coolly. She looked at me with pointed curiosity, like she was studying my face.
“That obvious?” I asked.
“To a native, yeah,” she said with a short laugh that felt almost mocking. Like there was some private joke I was missing.
“Less obvious to me, but I’m just visiting.” The other girl kicked down the stand on her bike and offered me her hand. “I’m Olive Walden. This is Lauren Caldwell.”
I shook her hand, still staring across the street at the gray house.
“And you are…?” Olive prompted, clearly amused.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, blinking myself back into the moment. “Rory. Rory…Thayer.” The new name felt odd on my tongue.
Lauren looked up at my home away from home. “Nice digs.”
“Thanks. Do you have any idea who lives across the street?” I asked, lifting my chin at the gray house.
Lauren and Olive exchanged a look, then glanced back at the house.
“Already trying to get the dirt on your neighbors, huh?” Lauren said, a mischievous glint in her eyes.
I blushed. “No. I just thought I saw…I mean…” I trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence. I couldn’t exactly explain that a serial killer was stalking me, so mysteriously moving curtains were sending me over the edge.
“Don’t sweat it. She’s just giving you a hard time.” Olive laughed, elbowing Lauren in the side in a be nice kind of way. “Want to go for a ride with us? We can take you for a tour of the town.”
I glanced back at the house. I didn’t relish the idea of hanging out inside with sulking Darcy and pissed-off Dad, but the eerie humming was still echoing in my head.
“Thanks, but I don’t have a bike,” I said, happy for the excuse. “Besides, I’m more of a runner.”
“Running? Really?” Olive shaded her eyes against the sun. “I never got the appeal.”
“No? It’s great. I love it,” I told her.
“Yeah?”
I lifted my shoulders and took a breath. “It’s…I just like being alone and not having to think about anything but the rhythm of my steps and the rate of my pulse,” I said. “It’s very…”
“Zen,” she supplied.
“Okay, Zen,” I said with a laugh. I looked her in the eye. She looked back with an intrigued expression.
Lauren, on the other hand, was starting to look bored. “Let’s get going, Olive,” she said impatiently, rolling forward on her bike. “I’m starved.”
Olive hopped back on her seat, lifted her kickstand with her heel, then turned to me once more. “Oh!” she said, her eyes lighting up. “You should come to the party tonight.”
“Party?” I asked warily. I detested parties. Avoided them as much as possible. I’d always been okay with friends one-on-one, but crowds were not my thing. In fact, one of the ways I comforted myself over never having gotten together with Christopher was by telling myself that he would have dragged me to at least one party a weekend.
Of course, now that seemed like a silly rationalization. My heart squeezed just thinking about it. I should have said yes to him. I would have gladly gone to ten million parties if it meant being with him.