I freeze behind a low hedge, popping down in case she looks my way.
Haven spins around, scouring the walkway. My pulse skips when she looks straight at me, but her eyes move on a second later.
She’s too drunk, or I’m too well hidden, for her to spot me.
But she knows.
She can feel me.
Even when she was a kid, she had a sixth sense about these things. About me. At first I thought I was scaring her, the way she’d constantly check behind her, hands tightening on her scuffed yellow backpack, shoulders hunching. But weeks after I started following her, she began wearing a faint smile, chin lifted, almost strutting to and from school.
I like to think my invisible presence gave her that confidence.
Or maybe our games did.
Would she feel the same if she knew I’d been follower her on-and-off since she came back to Agony Hollow? Taking photos. Videos.
Stalkingher?
“You want a piece of me?” Haven yells, waving the bottle at no one. “Then come get me, motherfucker!”
Her manic laugh sends a shudder through me, and I have to force myself not to sprint after her when she plunges into the darkness between the trees.
Instead, I give her a thirty-second head start, counting under my breath to ground myself.
I make it to twenty-three.
The scent of wet soil and pine needles hits me as I slip quietly between the trees.
These aren’t our woods.
They’re just a small copse of trees separating the campus grounds from the farmland beyond. Nothing like the vast forest that stretched behind our trailer park.
But in the dark, rain misting around me as I follow her deeper inside, it’s familiar enough to conjure fucking ghosts.
Suddenly I’m fifteen again, leading Haven through the trees for another round of ‘Hide and Hunt.’
Hide and seek was for babies. ‘Hide and Hunt’ was our game, where I’d give her a head start, then track her through the woods like prey. She’d try every trick—doubling back on her tracks, crossing the creek, climbing trees—but I always found her. The hunt always ended in a sprint. Always ended with me tackling her to the forest floor. Usually one—or both—of us with a skinned knee.
“Hunters always catch their prey,” I’d tell her, triumphant and breathless, as I pinned her beneath me.
In the beginning, catching her just meant tickling her until she screamed for mercy. As we became older, the game changed. Tickling became pinching. Then slapping. The older I got, the more my hands would linger, especially on those forbidden places.
The older she got, the less she struggled.
I shake away the memories, focusing on Haven’s uneven footsteps ahead of me. She’s making no effort to be quiet,snapping twigs and splashing through puddles, letting out little hiccuping laughs that sound almost like sobs. She staggers forward, bouncing between the trees like a pinball, her blue poncho snapping around her legs.
I move the way I taught myself to move when sneaking out of the single-wide past Dad when he was asleep on the recliner. Each step careful, deliberate, and most importantly,silent.
Piss easy in the middle of the day. Near impossible at night.
A twig snaps under my boot.
Haven stops.
I freeze, pressing my back against the damp bark of a nearby tree, holding my breath.
Silence, but for theplip-plopof rain.
