SIENNA POV
The school secretary gave me my schedule, a locker combination on a Post-it note, and a look that lasted half a second too long before she smiled.
The look said, I know who you are. The smile said, I'm not going to tell you that I know.
I took the schedule and the Post-it and thanked her and went to find my locker, and on the way I counted three more looks of the same quality, from a teacher coming out of the copy room, from a custodian pushing a mop bucket, from a girl at the water fountain who turned away just slightly too fast when I glanced over. Not hostile. Not curious, exactly. Something more specific than curiosity. Calibrated.
Black Hollow Regional High School had two hundred and forty students and the specific atmosphere of a place where everyone had grown up together and had long since sorted themselves into formations that didn't shift. I was a formation of one, which was fine. I'd been a formation of one in four schools across three states over the past year and a half. I knew how to navigate it.
What I didn't know how to navigate was a school where the formations had all, independently, decided to notice me in the same particular way.
✦
The bakery was called Hollow Grounds, which I appreciated for the wordplay, and it sat at the corner of Main and Vane Street, Vane Street, the same street on Claire's key, the emergency address I hadn't yet gone to find.
I went in after school because I needed coffee and because the light inside was warm and the alternative was going directly back to a house full of things Aunt Claire wasn't saying yet. A bell above the door announced me. The smell was cardamom and browned butter and something underneath that I couldn't identify, something almost green, like rain before it falls.
The girl behind the counter had her hair pulled back with a pen still threaded through it and flour on her left forearm in a long pale streak she hadn't noticed. She looked up when I came in and her face did the thing I was getting used to, the fractional pause, the recalibration, the decision to perform ordinary.
'Hey.' She smiled. Genuine, mostly. 'You're the new one. Claire Hayes's niece.'
'Sienna.' I put my bag on a stool at the counter.
'Yara.' She was already reaching for a cup. 'What do you want?'
'Whatever's good.'
She made me something with cardamom and oat milk without further consultation, which I respected. While the machine ran she leaned on the counter with her elbows and looked at me with the frank openness of someone who had decided that direct was easier than careful. I looked back.
'You're going to get a lot of people watching you,' she said. 'Don't take it personally. New people are an event here.'
'How long before I stop being an event?'
'Depends.' She slid the cup across. 'On what you do with the watching.'
I wrapped both hands around the cup then registered what I was doing and set it down on the counter instead, one hand only. 'What do most people do?'
'Keep their heads down. Learn the curfew. Don't ask about the woods.' She said it lightly, like she was giving me directions to the post office. 'Stay on the main roads at night, especially near the full moon. You'll be fine.'
'What's in the woods?'
The espresso machine finished its cycle. Yara straightened up and turned to wipe down the steam wand, and for a moment her back was to me and I watched the set of her shoulders, the slight lift, the decision being made somewhere in her spine.
She turned back around. The pen in her hair had slipped, she pushed it back without looking. 'Animals,' she said. The same word Aunt Claire had used. The same flat delivery. 'Big ones. Old forest, you know. Things that haven't learned to be scared of people yet.'
The door opened behind me. Cold air and the bell. Yara's eyes went to whoever it was, and something in her face shifted, the expression of someone who had been saying something and had just decided to stop saying it.
'Let me know if you want anything else,' she said, and moved down the counter.
I didn't look behind me. I picked up my cup and took a slow sip and watched Yara instead, the way her posture changed in relation to whoever had come in, shoulders slightly inward, movements smaller, a woman taking up less space than she had a moment ago.
I stayed until I finished the coffee. Nobody bothered me. The person who had come in ordered drip coffee and left. When Yara came back to clear my cup her shoulders had returned to their normal position and she gave me a real smile, no calculation in it.
'Same time tomorrow?' she said.
'Sure,' I said.
I left a five-dollar tip on a three-dollar coffee and didn't mention it.
✦
The hardware store was called Prewitt & Sons, and I went in because I needed a second rubber band for the folder and because hardware stores in small towns tend to have long-tenured employees who notice everything and sometimes, if you pick the right moment, will talk to you about it.
The man behind the counter was somewhere in his seventies, with a face like weathered clapboard and reading glasses pushed up on his head that he never looked through. He watched me come in and browse the fasteners aisle without moving from his stool.
I brought the rubber bands to the counter. He rang them up.
'New in town,' he said. Not a question.
'Claire Hayes's niece,' I said, because that was clearly the currency here.
He nodded, slow. Made change from the register. Then, without looking up, 'You know about the curfew?'
'I saw the sign.'
'Follow it.' He held out the coins. When I took them his eyes finally came up to meet mine, and there was something in them, the look of a man who had seen what happened when people didn't listen and had run out of the energy to explain it. 'I mean that as a friend, not as a warning. There's a difference.'
'What's the difference?'
He considered this with the seriousness it deserved. 'A warning,' he said finally, 'is what you give when you think a person can still be reasoned with. A friendly piece of advice is what you give when you just want them to stay alive and you don't have time for the whole conversation.'
He went back to his stool. I pocketed the coins.
'Has anyone ever asked you for the whole conversation?' I said.
He picked up his newspaper. 'One or two,' he said, from behind it. 'They're not here anymore.'
I stood there for a moment. The store smelled like machine oil, sawdust and old paper. A ceiling fan moved the air in slow circles overhead. Through the window I could see a stretch of Main Street, two women talking outside the pharmacy, a man loading bags into a truck, all of it unremarkable, all of it somehow arranged to look unremarkable, like a stage set where someone had art-directed normal.
'Thank you,' I said.
He turned a page.
✦
The east trail was marked with a wooden post at the edge of the school's back athletic field, a hiking marker, orange blaze, the kind that appears on any number of unremarkable forest paths across New England.
A boy was leaning against the post when I came by at four-thirty, and he straightened up when he saw me in a way that was just slightly too deliberate to be accidental. He was sixteen, maybe seventeen, with the kind of face that was still figuring out what it wanted to be and a jacket two sizes too large.
'Hey,' he said. 'You're new.'
'I keep hearing that.'
He fell into step beside me without being invited, which I allowed because he was nervous and nervous people sometimes said true things by accident. 'You're not thinking about going up there, are you?' He nodded at the trail marker without looking directly at it.
'I was walking past it.'
'Right.' He pushed his hands into his jacket pockets. 'Just… the east trail's not great. The terrain's bad. People get turned around.'
'People get turned around on a marked trail?'
'The markers don't go all the way.' A pause. 'And it's close to the full moon, so.' He said it the way you say something that's supposed to be self-explanatory, the way you say 'wet paint' or 'bridge ices before road.'
'Who told you to tell me that?'
He stopped walking. I kept going two steps before I turned to look at him. His face had done something young and caught-out, and he opened his mouth and then closed it again.
'It's okay,' I said. 'I'm not going up the trail. I just wanted to see where it started.'
That was partially true. I had wanted to see where it started. I had also wanted to see what was at the start of it, and now I knew, a post, an orange blaze, and the particular quality of dark between the first trees that felt less like shadow and more like the edge of something that had not agreed to be entered.
I walked back toward Aldermoor Street. Behind me, I heard the boy's footsteps going the other way, quick, relieved. I didn't look back.
The fog was coming down early again. I watched it move between the houses on the far end of the street, not drifting, not the way fog usually drifted, but settling, dropping into the low places with a kind of purpose, thickening fastest at the edges where the town met the trees.
As if it knew where the boundary was.
As if it had been doing this long enough to know the shape of it by heart.