“It is for me,” Beck says. She leans on the baked goods counter. “So, I hear this town’s pretty witchy.”
I hold my breath.
The girl in the black dress smiles, but her attention falls over to her friends. They all meet eyes, laugh together, and the girl in the black dress retreats.
“I gotta go,” she says.
And with that, all three of them move away from the baked goods section without another word. Natalie’s warning rings in my head, but I take a deep breath, stuff my sweating palms in my pockets, and approach Beck.
“Maybe they didn’t know anything,” I offer.
Beck scrapes her hand along her face. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was blushing. “They absolutely did, the shitheads.”
While Beck scans the store looking for another probably-Republican to go risk her skin to talk to, I go for another angle.
The little girl here with her mom is wearing aFortniteshirt. My heart racing, I stroll into the aisle she’s in—sodas, classic—and grab a Sprite.
“I like your shirt,” I say to her.
I understand kids deeply. Kids are allowed to—expected to, even—have special interests. All you need to do to get a kid on your side is speak their language.
She grins, thank god. “Do you play?”
I force myself to breathe again. “Yeah. I play with my brothers.”
There was a time when I did, anyway. When Owen and I were eleven, right before we graduated elementary school. He and I were actually pretty good as a duo, but then Mom made us play with seven-year-old Liam and our win ratio got slashed to almost nothing.
“Have you seen the new update? It’s awesome.”
I haven’t played in years, but the lingo has stuck with me, thank god.
“Yeah. I feel like they made the weapons too OP—”
The mom walks up to us, grabbing the girl’s hand. “Sorry about her. She doesn’t stop talking about that game.”
“It’s okay.” I can’t quite make eye contact with the mom. “Are you on vacation? My friend,” I motion to Beck, who’s grabbing something from the dairy aisle, “and I are.”
“She had a doctor’s appointment. We’re local,” the mom says. She studies us. “You two better be careful. What with what happened with those girls.”
I grab Beck, as if this information is totally new. “What happened?”
The mom sighs. “These out-of-town girls were killed in the woods. No one knows if it was animals or some sicko, but I always tell my daughter to be careful around that national park. They’re just not as safe as they used to be. With all the fires those camp kids were doing that night, I was surprised they didn’t burn the whole place down.”
I itch to pull out my phone and take notes. Paisley, Harlow, and Opal were talking about a witch. Someone was lighting extra fires and that could’ve been any of the three campsites. People generally avoid the woods.
“Is it just because of the fires?” Beck asks, yogurt in hand. “Or is it bad news for other reasons?”
The mom looks at Beck, at the tattoos on her arms, and her lip curls. Heat rushes to my face, somewhere between embarrassment for Beck and anger on her behalf. “People don’t go there to camp. Drug deals happen all the time. It’s only inevitable that ODs, suicide, and murder would follow. Sketchy activity has been going down for years, long before those girls.”
The new information buzzes in my chest. I don’t really buy the whole drugs-to-murder pipeline, but I do buy that my friends partook while here. We have to watch the video Paisley sent again. Could they have possibly been on drugs they bought from some shady character around here? I’ve never seen any of them buy drugs, but they don’t resist when we go to parties together. It gives me the strangest hope that maybe they excluded me simply because I wouldn’t have wanted to do drugs in the woods with them. (A hit of weed at a party is fine, but the woods, no. I watch too many horror movies to think that would go well.) Maybe it wasn’t that they hated me as a person.
Drugs are also the kind of thing that would get them fixated onthat witch legend.
“Does any of the sketchy activity involve a witch?” I ask.
The woman grabs her daughter’s arm and yanks her away from us. “We have to go.”
Beck sighs as we watch her leave. “Someone will talk to us.”
