Click. A group of jocks laughing too loud at their own jokes. Click. A girl eating alone, her face carefully blank while tears tracked down her cheeks. Click. Two guys in the corner having what looked like a serious argument, their body language screaming tension.
And there, in the back corner where the light barely reached, sat the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen.
Broad shoulders, dark hair that looked like he'd run his fingers through it, and eyes that seemed to catch and hold shadows. He sat alone, picking at a sandwich he wasn't eating.
Without thinking, I lifted my camera and framed the shot. Perfect light, perfect composition, perfect?—
He looked up.
Our eyes met through the viewfinder, and I felt something shift in my chest. Not attraction, but something deeper. Recognition, maybe, though we'd never met.
Slowly, I lowered the camera and raised my hand in a mock salute. A small gesture, harmless. Friendly.
He stared at me for another heartbeat, expression unreadable, then looked away.
Heat flooded my face. Rejection, swift and complete. The kind that made you want to crawl under a rock and die of embarrassment.
But also—and this was the weird part—it made me want to know why. What was his story? Why did he sit alone? Why did his eyes look like they carried too much weight for someone who couldn't be older than seventeen?
Why did looking at him feel like coming home to a place I'd never been?
After school,Dad texted asking me to come straight back home. Something about “settling in” and “family time.” I looked at the message, looked at the forest path that curved away from the main road, and made my choice.
Family time could wait. Hollow Pines couldn't.
I'd spent the afternoon thinking about the boy in the cafeteria, about Mr. Daniels' careful non-answers, about the way this whole town felt like it was holding its breath. If I was going to survive here—actually survive, not just exist—I needed to understand what I was dealing with.
And that meant exploring.
The path led deeper into the pine forest, away from the main road and the sounds of civilization. Ancient trees towered overhead, their branches so thick they blocked most of the light. My footsteps sounded too loud on the carpet of needles, but I kept walking, following the distant sound of running water.
After ten minutes, the path opened into a clearing dominated by the most ominous building I'd ever seen.
Three stories of weathered wood and broken windows, it squatted beside a fast-running stream like something out of a horror movie. Rust stained the waterwheel that no longer turned. Ivy crawled up the walls in patterns that looked almost deliberate, and the whole structure leaned slightly to one side as if the earth beneath it was slowly giving way.
Perfect.
I raised my camera and started shooting. The way light slanted through the broken windows. How the ivy seemed to pulse in the wind like it was breathing. The dark water rushing beneath the useless wheel, carrying secrets downstream.
Each shot felt like solving a puzzle piece. This place mattered to Hollow Pines. Maybe not officially—I'd bet money the town council would prefer tourists never found it—but in the way that mattered to teenagers and locals.
I was lining up another shot when footsteps crunched behind me.
I spun around, nearly dropping my camera. The boy from the cafeteria stood at the edge of the clearing, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, watching me with those dark eyes.
Up close, he was even more striking. Tall enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his gaze, with the bone structure that belonged in magazines. But there was something wild about him too, something that made the hair on my arms stand up in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
“Sorry,” I said, though I wasn't sure what I was apologizing for. “I was just?—”
He held up a hand to stop me, then pulled a small notebook from his pocket. His pen moved quickly across the page before he turned it toward me.
Careful with that thing.
“The camera?” I asked, confused. He nodded toward it, then wrote again.
Taking pictures of the mill.
“Yeah.” I held up my camera like evidence. “It's incredible. How old is it?”
