He watched me calmly, like it wasn’t revolutionary that someone had thought of me—not as background filler, not as the mute daughter of Pastor Cornier, but as a person, with thoughts and feelings as complex as anger and a desire for revenge.
All I could manage was a weak “How?”
“Come on.” He turned to face the deep woods, the one place we hadn’t yet ventured. “I’ll show you.” He glanced back. “Unless you need to go home?”
All of my life, my mother warned that the Louisiana deep woods were no place for children, especially girls. There were wolves and bears. Venomous snakes and frogs spotted like leopards and spiders as big as your fist. No well-worn paths to guide you out of the maze of trees. In the deep woods, I was prey.
But right now, nowhere was as dangerous as home.
“Show me the way,” I said.
8
JUNE, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD
After we’d hiked for an hour, Everett stopped. “This is the place.”
I looked around, my breathing labored from keeping pace with him. As far as I could tell, there was nothing special here. The ground was nice and flat, clear of tree roots, but… “Is that trash?”
Everett bent and grabbed the plastic bag, shaking it so I could see inside. There were bright wrappers, the kind on processed food from the gas station. There was rarely trash in the woods or the swamp. Too few people ventured in.
“I don’t know why,” he said, “but this spot is popular with drifters. It’s not even close to the highway.” He looked around and shrugged. “Maybe it feels sheltered. Either way, I’ve seen people camp here.”
I studied him. “You really are always outside, aren’t you?” That was another one of the rumors at school: Everett Duncan was a Satanist freak with ripped-up clothes and an antisocial personality, practically a feral animal, always lurking in the swamp or woods.
His laugh was harsh. Usually, Everett was stoic. Every day when I met him on my lawn, he asked benign questions in an even tone:How are you doing? How’s your homework going?I knew he did it to calm me, make me feel like even after what happened with Renard, normal life waspossible. I’d gotten used to him being unflappable. This pained laughter was a crack in his armor. It made him seem human, and I wanted more.
“What’s that laugh for?” I asked, trying to goad him.
His expression turned disdainful. “Where else should I be? In church, with your father? At home, with mine? Should I join the football team or the yearbook so I can make memories I’ll treasure forever?” He was breathing hard. “I’d rather take the gators.”
I looked at him. And grinned.
“Why are you making that face?”
“I can’t believe you would dare critique Sacred Surrender. All those innocent, learned scholars, just trying to drink life to the lees.” I felt a tug of embarrassment quoting Tennyson, who we’d just read in English class. You weren’t supposed to care so much about your homework that you memorized it. But the chink in Everett’s armor was too inviting. He was being himself, so maybe I could, too.
Everett’s mouth curved into a smile. The sharpness of his canines was still new to me, so I couldn’t help but stare. “‘How dull it is to pause.’” The words rolled off his tongue. “‘To make an end. To rust unburnished, not to shine in use. As though to breathe were life.’”
“So he does do his homework.”
“And she talks. Surprise, surprise.”
We grinned at each other. When Everett finally pulled his gaze away, his smile still hung in the air, like the afterimage of sunlight that stays glowing long after you close your eyes.
“Let’s start the fire,” he said, and dropped to the dirt.
I joined him, brushing back pine needles until I saw what he was looking for: burn marks scoured deep into the earth. “You’re not supposed to light fires out here because it’s a burn hazard,” he said. “But people do it anyway.”
He nudged the bag of trash. “If the sheriff or anyone ever stumbleson this place and they see someone’s been setting fires, ours will be unrecognizable from the campers’.”
“You’re burying our fire in theirs, like a needle in a haystack.”
He dropped Renard’s necklace into my palm. I straightened the chain gingerly, like it was a relic. Then Everett gathered the pine needles back in a pile and pulled a lighter from his pocket, thumbing up a flame, and set the needles smoking. We sat back and watched as they caught frond by frond. The fire was small but hungry; soon the whole pile was ablaze. The heat flushed my face. I pressed a finger to my cheek and felt the spot of cool like an island in a sea of lava.
“Do you want to put it in now?” he asked. “I think it’s ready.”
I hooked the necklace and let it dangle over the fire until it got too hot. Then I released it. It fell, shimmering, into the center of the pit.
