“I haven’t been up there in forever,” Mia said. She looked over at Galen, frowning. “How do you even know about that?”
“I saw a photo at your house, and I asked your parents about it.”
“I doubt my parents’ll let me go,” Liam said. “Not that far. Not for two nights.”
This was going to be a problem. Galen’s mom was almost completely absent and his dad had left town years ago, but Liam’s parents were really overprotective. Frankly, I wondered how he was going to explain the tattoo.
“So lie and tell them you’re staying at my house,” Mia said to Liam. “You’ve spent the night there before, lots of times. And if they do find out we left, we can say it was, like, a last-minute thing.”
Liam thought about it. Mia’s parents were strict too, which is part of the reason why Liam’s parents let him spend the night at her house. Plus, everyone knew he was gay.
As for my parents, I knew they might object at first, but they’d let me go in the end. My parents could be annoyingly reasonable. All my life, they’d seemed to know exactly when to give me the right amount of freedom. I was eighteen now, graduating from high school in a few weeks, and I knew they’d see this as the perfect chance for me to test my independence before going off to college in the fall. Unlike everyone else in that car, if I ever screwed up my life, I wouldn’t be able to blame absent or overprotective parents. I wouldn’t be able to blame anyone except myself.
“I’m in,” Galen said.
“Okay,” Liam said. “Let’s do it.”
I smiled.
It’s hard for me to talk about that conversation in the taxi. If I’d never suggested going away, I wouldn’t have reminded Galen about Mia’s parents’ cabin. We never would’ve gone away. None of what happened that weekend would’ve happened.
That’s what I mean about this being all my fault.
It’s hard for me to talk about that conversation in the taxi. But that’s easy compared to talking about everything that came next.
2
There was something off about Marot, Washington.
Marot is this nothing little town in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula that we had to pass through on the way to Mia’s parents’ cabin. It was a big timber hub for a long time, but by the 1980s, they had cut down most of the peninsula’s old growth forests, which is where the real money is, and started using new machines that eliminated most of the jobs. So times had been a lot tougher since then.
But you already know this, don’t you? Of course you do. Anyway, maybe that’s why the town felt the way it did—like a ghost who doesn’t realize he’s already dead.
We’d left for the cabin from school Friday afternoon, right after lunch. Mia and Galen had wanted to skip completely, but even if it was only two weeks until graduation, Liam and I were worried about how it would look. I was seventy percent sure it wasn’t true what they say, that once you’ve been accepted into a college, they don’t care what your last transcript looks like, so we compromised and just skipped the last two classes.
By the time we reached Marot, we’d been driving for over three hours straight, and we were all ready for a break. Mia parked the car along the street—the entire downtown was only about a block and a half long—and we all climbed out. The air smelled like pine and rotting garbage, and the sky was overcast, a dirty air filter needing to be replaced.
It felt a little like we’d gone back in time. Except for a couple of gas stations on the outskirts of town, there probably hadn’t been any new buildings built in Marot since the 1950s. The signs on the stores all used old-fashioned fonts. The word DRUGS! was painted on the side of the pharmacy in big happy letters, like drugs were something to be really excited about, not something kids should be terrified of.
But it didn’t really seem like the 1950s either. For one thing, everything was faded and dirty and run-down. At least half the stores were boarded up, and there were too many power lines overhead, a couple that were drooping badly. Despite what the sign said, somehow I doubted that the pie in the diner really was world-famous.
The people didn’t look particularly cheerful and friendly either, at least not the ones we saw shuffling along the sidewalks and milling in the grocery store parking lot. The men all seemed to have wild beards and pot bellies, and the women had greasy hair and bad skin. Everyone was wearing thick boots and flannel and denim.
And everyone was old. The only people we saw under the age of forty were a couple of skinny guys our age leaning against their cars, slouching like a pair of parentheses. They weren’t on smartphones or anything.
Their eyes flicked our way, and I nodded awkwardly, but they didn’t respond.
“I need to pee,” Mia said. She started for a nearby store—sporting goods, not so surprising in a town surrounded by wilderness.
We started down the sidewalk. This woman was coming toward us, approaching like a bulldozer. She was older, in her sixties maybe, with short white hair and a face like turkey jerky, sort of a leathery pinkish brown.
And she had a crossbow strapped to her back. No, seriously, with a quiver and everything. But even a crossbow didn’t seem all that strange in a place like Marot. That was the other thing I noticed about this town: people definitely liked their weapons. There were rifles in the window of the sporting goods store, and a full gun rack in the back of the pickup truck parked next to us. One of the skinny guys leaning against those cars had even started whittling with a switchblade.
“Mrs. Brummit?” Mia said.
Mia knew the woman with the turkey jerky face? Then again, we were going to her family’s cabin, not too far away, so it made sense that she might know some of the people in Marot.
The woman’s pale blue eyes focused, the wheels in her head starting to turn.
“You probably don’t remember me,” Mia went on. “I’m Mia Kinnaman. From my parents’ cabin up at the lake? My friends and I were just heading up there now. It’s sure a coincidence, running into you like this.”
“I know who you are,” Mrs. Brummit said, in a voice that could have frozen warts off fingers.
She remembered Mia all right, and she sure wasn’t happy about it.
There was an awkward silence. Maybe all the people in Marot were this rude. It did suddenly seem like the whole town was staring at us—not just the skinny guys leaning against their cars and the woman with the turkey jerky face. I finally noticed an actual kid, a pale girl on her bicycle, but she was scowling at us too.
It took more than this to intimidate Mia. She looked at Mrs. Brummit and said, “Well, okay then.” And then she stepped to one side and headed down the sidewalk. Galen, Liam, and I scampered after her like little ducklings after their mother.
Once we were out of earshot, Liam said, “What was that about?”
“Oh, who the fuck knows?” she said, shrugging off the whole interaction. “She and her family own the cabin near ours, but I guess she’s mad about something. Maybe I borrowed their raft without asking back when I was nine years old.”
I glanced back at Mrs. Brummit, half expecting her to have disappeared, like she’d never been there at all. But no, she was still there, glaring back at me like my own reflection in a mirror.
• • •
The sporting goods store was much larger inside than it had looked from the outside. It was definitely bigger than the pharmacy, and maybe even bigger than the grocery story.
It was full of weapons, mostly guns and knives. It was kind of crazy, this giant open space crammed full of things that shoot and cut, all stuff that’s designed to kill. There were also fishing poles and nets and, yeah, bows and arrows, and there must have been nonlethal stuff too—I remember a brand of camouflage clothing, RobGear, because it was my first name. But what struck me most were the guns and knives. Barrels and blades. The store smelled like leather and glue and something stinky, like someone had recently opened the refrigerator with the fish bait in it.
On the way to the restroom, Mia stopped
at a rack of T-shirts. I sidled up next to her.
“Do you really think it was just that you borrowed their raft without asking?” I asked.
“What?” she said. This was classic Mia. She’d already put what had happened out on the sidewalk behind her. But I wasn’t like that. Our encounter with Mrs. Brummit had shaken me.
“The woman,” I said.
“Hey, what do you think?” She held a shirt up to her chest that read, SPOTTED OWL TASTES LIKE CHICKEN.
The spotted owl is an endangered species that keeps loggers from cutting down certain trees and forests.
“Nice,” I said, but it felt a little like she was blowing me off. And it still felt weird being surrounded by all those weapons. Right in front of me was a case full of giant knives and cleavers, probably for butchering deer.
An aisle away, Galen stood facing a shelf full of a dozen different kinds of bug spray. I drifted over to him and said, “There’s something not right about this town.”
Galen looked over at me, his face almost completely blank. “Huh?”
I remembered it was the middle of the afternoon and he was never very sharp this time of day.
“Forget it,” I said. Finally, I walked over to Liam, who was staring up at an elk head mounted on the wall. That was the other thing this store had lots of—stuffed elk and deer and moose heads. There was even a whole big stuffed black bear in the middle of the store, standing upright with its teeth bared and its arms and claws stretched out.
Liam turned to me, his eyes wide, and said, “Rob, didn’t you think that was weird, that woman out on the sidewalk?” He shook his head. “There’s something off about this town.”
I wanted to give him a big hug, but I figured that might not go over well in a place like this, so I smiled and said, “Totally off.”
At least Liam knew how I felt.
• • •
Ten minutes later, Mia found Liam and me in the back of the store.
“Have you seen Galen?” she said.
“What?” I said. “No. Why?”
“He’s gone. And he isn’t answering my texts.”
Clutching her phone, she glanced around, almost twitching. She looked different than I’d ever seen her before—face drawn, eyebrows furrowed.
Mia was scared.
She hadn’t looked like this out on the sidewalk when she’d been confronted by Mrs. Brummit, and I’m not even sure she’d looked like this that night at the tattoo parlor. Seeing Mia worried, that rattled me more than anything that had happened so far.
We glanced around the store for Galen. There were lots of different racks and display cases, plus the refrigerator and the stuffed bear. He could have been behind any of them.
“He has to be here somewhere,” I said.
“Maybe the bathroom?” Liam said.
Mia shook her head. “I was just there.”
Up at the front of the store, a bell rang—that familiar double ring of the door to a store opening or closing. We couldn’t see it, but someone was entering or leaving.
“Maybe he left,” I said.
“Why would he leave?” Mia said, worried again.
Mia sent him another text, and I started poking around the store looking for him. There weren’t that many places he could be.
As I searched, I suddenly had the feeling I was being watched. It absolutely felt like there were eyes on me, following me.
Then I realized it was just the mounted animal heads on the walls, and I immediately felt stupid.
Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly how off this town was. How mad was Mrs. Brummit at Mia for stealing that raft? Could someone have done something to Galen? Could we all be in some sort of danger? It was hard to ignore the guns and knives all around me, the barrels and blades. There was a rack of gunsights pointed right at me, one that even said it had night vision.
I sensed someone staring at me again, peering in through the front window from the sidewalk. Did they have short white hair and a pink turkey jerky face? But when I looked, there wasn’t anyone there.
I really needed to get a grip.
“Mia?” I said.
“What?” she said, not far away.
At that exact moment, Galen stepped out from behind the bear in the middle of the store. He saw us looking at him and lifted his arms like the bear and let out a big roar.
Then he laughed.
He breezed closer to us, a stupid grin on his face.
“So a bear walks into a bar,” Galen said, “and he says to the bartender, ‘I want a beer and’ ”—he stopped for a long moment—“ ‘an order of nachos.’ And the bartender says, ‘Hey, what’s with the big paws?’”
Needless to say, Galen’s bout of afternoon moodiness was over. And the concern was already gone from Mia’s face.
• • •
When we got back to our car, I half expected Mrs. Brummit to have poked holes in our tires with the arrows from her crossbow, or maybe to have scraped the word “Beware!” in the paint on the door. But it was all fine. People weren’t staring at us anymore either. Everything was normal. Yes, Mrs. Brummit had given Mia a dirty look. So what? Everything else that had happened in town—the staring, the would-be face in the window, even the feeling that something was off—
I was ninety percent sure it had all been in my mind.
3
We missed the cutoff to Mia’s parents’ cabin.
Even Mia, who had been up there lots of times, didn’t see it. Maybe she’d been more shaken up by what had happened in town than she let on. But it didn’t take her long to realize we’d gone too far and we had to backtrack.
The cutoff was right off the main highway, and it was pretty easy to miss. It was nothing more than a dirt logging road that immediately disappeared into a dense evergreen forest.
A rain forest.
That part of the Olympic Peninsula is mostly rain forest. When most people hear “rain forest,” they think of a tropical jungle. But these are temperate rain forests, which mean they get just as much rain as a tropical rain forest—even more, in some cases—but they grow in colder climates. Places like the coast of Washington State.
But you probably already know all this too, right?
Anyway, the trees were thick and wet and droopy, and covered with hanging moss, so the cutoff into the forest was dark. It looked more like the entrance to a cave.
Mia drove inside. Twenty feet later, we came to a metal gate. I could see the thick padlock from the car.
“It’s okay,” Mia said, fumbling in a bag on the floor. “I’ve got a key.” Once she found it, she climbed out of the car to open the gate.
Water dripped down all around us, jostling the ferns, even though it hadn’t been raining. I hadn’t been in the rain forest too many times before, but I guess the water is almost always dripping down from the trees and the hanging moss. The sound is hard to describe. It doesn’t sound like rain. It’s not as even or consistent. It’s slower, lazier. You never know when or where the next drop’s going to fall.
It felt like we’d gone back in time again, but not to the 1950s. Now we’d gone back a million years, before the existence of humans.
“Lock it after us,” I said to Mia, meaning the gate, after she returned to the car. I was still mostly sure the strange things that had happened in town had all been in my mind, but there was that ten percent of me that thought maybe they weren’t.
Beyond the gate, we started making our way along the road. I stared out the window of the car, finally starting to get used to the gloom of the ancient rain forest and the water dripping on the windows.
All of a sudden, the trees disappeared.
We’d followed the road right out into a clear-cut. This made sense—it was a logging road, after all. Do any hiking in western Washington and you quickly learn the game of deception that the logging companies all play: they leave the trees intact right along the highways to make people think there’s a lot more forest than there is. Tha
t way they can fool people into thinking Washington, the Evergreen State, really is still evergreen. At least for the people who never get out of their cars. It’s only once you get a few hundred feet beyond the main roads that you realize it’s all a big lie and that the state’s “forests” are mostly a depressing patchwork of clear-cuts and tree farms.
I should have expected it, but I didn’t. The loggers had mowed the entire forest down, leaving nothing but a stretch of stumps, some piles of dead, ragged branches, and a lot of deep tire tracks. The rain forest had been dark and misty, but this was the exact opposite. The clouds had broken and the late afternoon sun was suddenly shining all around us. But it was in a place where the sun shouldn’t have been shining. Where maybe it hadn’t shone for thousands or possibly even millions of years.
In the front seat, Mia and Galen chattered away, but the clear-cut depressed me. This was all the same land, but the forested and deforested parts didn’t just look different; they felt different. One felt right, and the other felt very, very wrong.
Opposite me, Liam stared listlessly out his own window.
Before long, we entered the dark, misty rain forest again. This time it felt like burrowing under a blanket—comforting. But I knew I shouldn’t get too cozy.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, we drove into another dazzling clear-cut. It was a little bewildering, alternating between forest and clear-cuts like that, like being in a room with a kid flicking on and off the light switch.
The bottom of our car scraped the road. The logging trucks that had traveled here before us were so heavy that they’d created deep grooves with their big tires. That left a rocky bulge in the middle of the road, and we could hear the gravel clacking and scraping against the metal of the car whenever the tracks got too deep.
Each time it happened, Galen would say, “Slow down.” But it didn’t seem like Mia ever did.
The road kept alternating between forest and clear-cut, so much so that I was getting dizzy. Meanwhile, the road also started splitting into branches. The network of back-country logging roads was like a maze, and none of the roads were marked. If you didn’t know which way to go, you’d be lost in a matter of minutes. Mia’s parents had insisted she take a map, but Mia had spaced and left it behind. Still, she always seemed to know exactly which road to take. She’d been up here dozens of times with her family, even if it had been years ago. I told myself that was enough, that we were fine relying on Mia’s memory. Then again, she had missed the original turnoff.