“Whose?” Oliver asks, and Jasper points a finger at the gravestone. The place where Willa Walker has been laid in the ground—the Walker who wept into the lake and made it bottomless. The same grave that Oliver told me the boys made him stand over and whisper her name three times—the first part of his initiation.
“If you say her name three times, you’ll summon her up from the grave,” I hear Rhett say, a serious measure to his voice. A grimness that reminds me of when he broke into my house and pulled me from bed.
“Legend says that Willa Walker wept into Jackjaw Lake and made it bottomless,” Jasper adds, smirking.
Oliver makes a sound, and Max moves closer to him, his shoulders pulled back. “You don’t believe us?” Max asks. And my head starts to vibrate again, hearing their words, watching as Oliver peers down at the grave and reluctantly speaks Willa’s name three times—I know where I am.
I know: This is the night of the storm.
This is the night Oliver breaks through the ice and sinks into the dark. This is the night he drowns.
When the electricity will spark and then die. When the road will be snowed in.
Time has spun and tottered and turned itself inside out. OrIhave unraveled it. I have done this. Brought myself back to this night.Back, back, back.
I am at the place where it all began.
Little pops of light break across my vision—the now familiar prick of déjà vu. The air wavers against my eardrums, as if I’m falling, tumbling, losing all sense of gravity.This has all happened before.
On that awful, awful night.
And I feel like I might be sick.
“Dude, you should see your face,” Jasper says now—just like Oliver described. And he claps a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, laughing, the sound carrying up into the treetops, startling a blackbird that caws from a nearby spruce tree and takes to the sky.
This has all happened before.
The boys begin to move through the cemetery, passing the bottle of booze among them. Rhett and Lin hop over the low wood fence, laughing to themselves. Jasper staggers behind while Max moves slowly, fidgeting with something in his hand. The watch.The silver pocket watch.The same one I found in Oliver’s coat pocket—the one that broke just before Oliver slipped beneath the water while Max looked on. Air bubbles rising to the surface.
Anger scrapes up inside me, imagining Max standing over the hole in the ice. Refusing to save Oliver’s life. To reach down into the water and pull him up.
He watched Oliver die. Helethim die.
I feel the sudden urge to stride across the snow, out of thecemetery, and wrap my hands around Max’s throat. Stare into his eyes and know that he deserves it. Maybe even push him out onto the ice and wait for it to break—make him suffer just like Oliver. Atone for what he did.
But he hasn’t done it yet.
Not yet.
I watch as the rest of the boys scale the fence and tromp through the snow to the lakeshore.
But Oliver is last to the fence, his hands in his pockets, gaze turned away from the blowing snow. He doesn’t realize he’s following them to his death. That when he reaches the lake, they will force him out onto the ice. Max will shove him in the chest, hands coiled into fists, adrenaline in his veins. And in the end, Oliver will break through the surface and sink downdown down downinto the lake.
That soon, before this night is over, he will drown.
My footsteps are quick through the snow, my breathing heavy, and I reach Oliver before he climbs over the fence after the others. He doesn’t see me, not at first, his eyes squinting away from the wind, but when I’m close enough, he must sense me because he whips around, startled, and his eyes go wide—a verdant, wild shade of green.
“Oliver,” I say softly, my voice terribly small. Terribly, impossibly weak.
He is slow to react, his gaze sweeping over me, stalling at the curve of my lips, the wet strands of my hair, but there is no recognition in his eyes. No flicker of memory. He doesn’t take my hand and pull me against his chest and ask if I’m okay.
He only stares.
The trees surrounding the cemetery begin to shake just a little, and I can’t tell if it’s the wind or my eyes. If things are still trying to snap back into focus—the lake separating itself from the sky.
“Oliver,” I say again, lifting my fingers and hovering them only a few inches from his chest, afraid to touch him. Afraid to know if he’s real or not.Alive or not.
His skin is not pale or sallow, his eyes do not look tormented by his memory of the forest. He looks strong. Different. Not how I remember.
