“Hey, there’s Tommy and his girlfriend!”
“Shut up, dude, remember he killed his parents. Want to be next?”
They broke into wheezing laughter.
Thomas speed-walked in the opposite direction. The paper bag smacked against his leg with an unappealingsquish.
“Someday I’m running away to a dessert island,” Thomas said. “I will never speak to another person again.”
Andrew sighed as he followed. “It’sdesertisland.”
“I said what I said, Perrault.”
They sat on a low stone wall at the very edge of the gardens. Ahead, the sports fields stretched and ended against the sharp line of the fence. The forest watched them. They stared back, unblinking. The air felt even grayer here, and they could taste the soaked leaves and mud and moss of the forest on their tongues.
A lonesome shadow crossed Thomas’s face as he stared at the woods. He must miss it, those days where he sneaked out there for the pure enjoyment of it, returning with mud stains and pockets crammed with interesting rocks and leaves. Dove would go off on him about risking expulsion, and he’d look her dead in the eye and lie.What? I haven’t been in the forest.
He used to kiss trees. Now they made him flinch.
Andrew picked at his sandwich. The peanut butter felt like glue in his mouth.
“I’ll fight Bryce Kane if it’ll help,” Thomas offered.
Andrew shot him a flat look. “Help you get kicked out? Ignore him.”
Thomas rummaged in the paper bag. “So, my aunt finally contacted me. Apparently she’s been sorting out affairs and stuff even though the case isn’t closed yet. But she… she knows about our well.” He bit savagely into another sandwich. “It’s overgrown with ivy, so the cops would’ve missed it. But she might look in there.”
“If she does,” Andrew said, picking his words like shards of glass, “the cops will have answers and they’ll close the case. Nothing ties it to you.”
“But I don’t want—” He stopped. “They might have escaped, you know?”
Andrew didn’t point out it had been weeks since his parents “vanished,” because he could hear the tentative wish in Thomas’s voice.
“They probably escaped,” Andrew said.
“But my aunt might pull me out of Wickwood. It’s the kind of vindictive thing she’d do.”
That couldn’t happen, not to Andrew. If he lost Thomas, and Dove kept this strange new distance from him, how impossible would it be to hold on to himself?
Thomas sighed and then cast a careful glance at Andrew. “Are you okay?”
Andrew gripped the sandwich. He’d taken two bites and healready felt stuffed all the way up to his throat, but he didn’t want Thomas to baby him, so he took another huge mouthful and tried to chew.
It tasted of mud. He had to be imagining it, what with the air smelling so thickly of forest and him already being on edge. But mud was all through his mouth, cloying and suffocating, bits of gravel grinding into his molars. He choked and bent double, spitting out the sandwich.
Thomas leaped up and grabbed Andrew’s shoulders as he gagged. “Hey, what? What’s wrong?”
When Andrew peeled apart the bread, the peanut butter was mixed with black, wormy soil, grubs wriggling with their guts pulsing out their severed edges where Andrew had bitten in.
Andrew dropped it and dry-heaved.
“What the hell—” Thomas stared. “I didn’t—that peanut butter was fresh out of the jar! Shit, I’m so sorry—”
Andrew’s mouth tasted of leaves and muck and worms. He was breathing too fast. He’deatenthat. He’d put filth in his mouth and—
Thomas crushed himself down on the wall next to Andrew, close and tight, his hand sliding over Andrew’s stomach and up his chest. Feeling him hyperventilate. Holding his ribs together so they didn’t burst apart. It was so intimate and he leaned into it,needingthe way Thomas bent his head until his mouth nearly brushed Andrew’s neck.
“See, this is what I mean.” Thomas’s voice came low and urgent. “They’re watching us. They’rehere. The dark doesn’t hold them back, and it’s like they’re all over us, all the time.”
