ONE
It hadn’t hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart.
Andrew had written about it later in spidery lines from a sharp pen—a story about a boy who took a knife to his chest and carved himself open, showing ribs like mossy tree roots, his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he’d still cut it out and given it away.
Being left aching and hollow was a familiar feeling. A comfortable pain.
Andrew had always been an empty boy.
It was easier to tell a story than say how he felt, so he’d ripped the page from his notebook and slipped it into Thomas’s back pocket the day school let out for the summer. Then Andrew had dissolved into his father’s car and Thomas had been swallowed by the bus, and that had been it. They would be severed until Wickwood Academy opened again.
It didn’t matter if Thomas read the truth in the story or not, how he alone owned Andrew’s heart. The thrill of the confession had been terrible and beautiful—and retractable. Just in case.
There were words for people like Andrew Perrault.Desperate, maybe.Awkwardfit, too.Cowardstung, but it wasn’t a lie.
Andrew was probably the only person who didn’t crave summer or holidays, but he felt better at school, solid and morereal. He’d boarded at Wickwood since he was twelve, and the ivy-smothered walls, the old stone manors, even the rose gardens and forests cloaking the campus, all felt like home. He left everything here—his books, his memories, his school things. He left Thomas Rye here, too.
Andrew was hungry for it. Take him away and he starved.
But summer had ended, and that feeling of wholeness hadn’t yet filled his chest as his father drove him back to Wickwood. All he could think about was how this was their final year. Dread already threatened to suffocate him.
Andrew pressed his cheek to the cool window glass as the BMW snaked along winding roads. The forest grew so thick on each side it felt like gliding through a tunnel of dark and wolfish green. It should take an hour to get there from the city, but his father had been driving at a glacial pace. Usually he moved with confident speed, taking calls and dictating emails to his phone, his grip easy on the wheel as his gold watch clinked against matching cuff links.
Today Andrew’s father sat rigid, a muscle in his jaw flexing. He kept glancing at Andrew through the rearview mirror, and Andrew kept pretending not to notice. He stuffed in one earbud against the silence. His notebook lay open on his lap, two lines of a new story begun.
This was what Andrew did—told stories. Ones with dark, bitter corners and magic curled into thorns. Ones about monsters with elegant, razor-like teeth. He wrote fairy tales, but cruel.
Thomas loved them.
Once upon a time there lived a prince who wore a crown of rowan to protect him from woe, but a sweet willow maiden askedhim to take it off in return for a kiss. After the kiss, she cut out his eyes.
They’re the best, Thomas said.They make me want to draw. Do they mean anything?
Andrew had given a small shrug, but a fever lit beneath his skin at the praise.They’re just meant to hurt.
Like a paper cut—a tiny sting that meant nothing more thanI’m alive I’m alive I’m alive.
Thomas was the only one who understood the stories. Andrew’s father didn’t. Even Dove didn’t, which felt like a betrayal since they were twins.
She sat in the front passenger seat of the BMW, her arms folded and her posture stiff. She was locked in a frosty war of silence with their father. Over what, Andrew had no idea, but they wouldn’t even acknowledge each other.
They looked like twins, Andrew and Dove. Pale skin, honey-gold hair, brown eyes, and not much height difference between them. But Dove was a statue of glittering ice, beautiful and dangerous and impossible to reshape, while Andrew was more like a collection of skeleton leaves, fragile and crumbling. Dove was the one everyone saw, and Andrew was the one they forgot.
She wore the Wickwood uniform of white collared shirt and tie, deep green blazer and plaid skirt, not a single button or wisp of hair out of place. Dove had the graceful poise of someone expecting to stand before an auditorium and give a valedictorian speech while cameras flashed, immortalizing her as an example of perfection. She’d be fine this senior year; she’d own it. Andrew suspected this year would beat him up in a back alley and leave him for dead.
Already his stomach felt knotted, but he told himself he’d calm down when they arrived. Thomas would be waiting with his freckled cheekbones and troublesome scowl, forever angry at everyone except the Perrault twins.
He was theirs, and they his. The three of them had been this way since they met.
The car’s tires rolled from smooth road to crunching gravel, and Andrew pressed even closer to the window. His heartbeat sped up. Here was Wickwood, grown from the forests and thorns of middle-of-nowhere Virginia. Cars and buses filled the circular driveway, and students flooded the marble front stairs alongside baggage and fretting parents.
As their car crawled forward, looking for a place to park, Andrew searched for Thomas. Nothing.
He glanced at his phone. His heart still gave a small jolt at the sight of the scars crisscrossing his skin, thin as cobwebs, from fingers to wrist. It didn’t hurt anymore. He barely remembered how they had happened.
He checked for texts, knowing there’d be none since Thomas had broken his phone a week into summer vacation.
Andrew pulled up their last exchange and chewed his lip.
