Chunks of glass lie scattered on the floor, but the door to the porch is closed and Emily and Nolan are still fighting anyway; no one notices the sound of breaking glass.
I breathe in. Out. In. Out.
I look out the window where I just barely make out the lake through the trees. There’s practically a whole forest between us and the lake. A path cuts through it, some worn, dusty trail that’s been beaten down by people’s feet. Our cottage is probably the furthest one from the lake, but because of the hill, we see over the trees. Even I can admit it’s pretty, though I’d never tell Emily or Nolan that. Never.
I’m feeling sorry for myself—wishing myself dead, imagining myself dead, imagining how sorry everyone would be if I was dead—when all of a sudden I hear movement through the screens.
I look closer. I hold my breath and listen, trying to find the source of the noise. Outside, the trees are still. There is no breeze.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. I stand up, stepping over the broken glass, drifting closer to the screen. I set my hand on it, feeling the screen give and become looser against the weight of my hand. I wonder if Emily was right, though I’drather die before admitting it. I wonder if someone could easily break into the porch. There is no door straight to outside, but it wouldn’t take much for them to get in anyway, just a little pressure and the screen would give.
I hold my breath as a boy, about my age, steps out from behind the trees, walking alone in the woods with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. The world goes quiet. I forget all about Skylar and Gracie on Instagram, and Emily and Nolan in the next room. Instead, I find myself falling hard, suddenly infatuated with his long, thick brown hair, which isnotone of those overdone messy cuts that literally every guy in the world has these days (Wyatt included) with the fringe bangs that fall forward into the eyes like a llama’s. Instead, his is pushed back so that I can see his face: the thin nose, the sharp edges of his cheekbones and the jawline that looks like it’s been carved by a sculptor.
All of a sudden, the door to the porch gets thrown open behind me, ricocheting off the opposite wall.
I spin around. “You ever hear of knocking?”
Emily stands there, delivering my bags, disappointment on her face.
“Sorry to scare you, but I asked you not to leave your bags by the door,” she says, setting them down on the floor and then, because she can’t limit herself to nagging about just one thing, she says, “You’re not going to hide out here for all of vacation. This is afamilyvacation. You’re supposed to be with family, not isolating yourself out here.”
“Did I not just spend the whole day in the car with all of you?” I ask.
She can’t argue with that. And besides, I don’t see a single person in the living room besides her anymore. Everyone else has now shut themselves away too, including Nolan, which tells me that Emily is sad and lonely and she’s projecting.
“You can at least leave the door open so we know that you’re alive.”
“Fine. Leave it open when you go.”
She starts to. But then she sees the broken glass on the floor and my phone lying just beside it and asks, “What happened? Did youbreakthat, Reese?”
A second later, her eyes rise up to the screens. She doesn’t wait for me to answer either of her first two questions before she asks, “Is someone out there?” while searching, something outside having caught her attention.
“No,” I unhesitatingly say. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone.”
But he is still there. Emily just doesn’t see him.
Because, when I look for myself, I catch sight of him hidden further in the trees, listening to our conversation, his dark eyes watching me.
Courtney
It wasn’t real. The face in the window. I imagined it, I tell myself as I slam the cottage door closed behind us. I lock it, flicking the dead bolt into place, jiggling the handle to be certain it’s locked and that no one can get in. I lean into it, resting my forehead against the door, trying to catch my breath, which feels impossible.
When I turn around, Cass and Mae stand behind me in the room, Cass four or five inches taller than Mae, because Mae, like Emily, is petite, and because she hasn’t hit puberty yet. She’s still waiting for a growth spurt, which happened for Cass a year ago. It gives the impression that Mae is much younger than she is, though she’s ten, like Cass, just one year away from middle school. Emily and I were pregnant at the same time. We gave birth just five weeks apart. It comes rushing back to me in that moment: the baby shower we shared, Emily and me posing for pictures with our baby bumps, her going into labor first and then downplaying it, so I wouldn’t be scared.It really didn’t hurt, not as bad as they say.
And now Emily is dead.
I shudder at the thought, some sort of feral, guttural sound coming out of me. My hand rises to my mouth as I squeeze my eyes shut tight, trying not to, but still picturing her lying on the floor of the screened-in porch, her mangled body bloodied, practically magenta from the way the blood pooled inside of her. I see the expression on her face, fixed forever in place in a wide-eyed, openmouthed scream. I throw up in my mouth thinking about it and swallow it back down, the reflux making my throat burn.
Someone killed her.
Someone killed Nolan.
They’re both dead. Murdered. My best friend and my brother. Gone.
I open my eyes. In front of me, Cass is wide-eyed, wild, her chest heaving, crying. But Mae is in shock, quiet, her skin sallow, though I see her heartbeat through her thin cotton shirt. She breathes through an open mouth, her nostrils flaring. The knee of Mae’s pajama pants is torn from when she fell. There is still blood on her hands. It’s on her knee too, staining the edges of the tear red. Her hair, like Cass’s, is in her eyes. It’s practically the same color hair, a light caramel brown—like Nolan’s, like mine—so that when you see them lying side by side sometimes you don’t know where Cass ends and Mae begins.
I drop to the arm of a chair. I pull them into me, wrapping my arms around their small waists, holding them as they press into me. I look back over my shoulder to double-check that the front door is closed and locked, which it is, though that doesn’t mean someone couldn’t just kick it in or break a window to get in. I picture Emily and Nolan’s cottage. Did someone let the killer inside, or did the killer break down the door? I try to remember if the door was open, or if the weak wooden frame was splintered by force, but I can’t recall. Still, I think about pulling a chair in front of our door, but I don’t know that it would stop anyone, and someone could just as easily come in through the open windows.
