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“Phil,” said Coco, rounding on him. “What happened to us all, in October?”
That was obviously a question Phil hadn’t expected. He straightened, dropping the stick. “I—amnesia?”
“It’s not amnesia if you remember,” said Coco implacably. “Do you remember?”
Phil flushed bright red, then white, then muttered, “You wouldn’t believe me. When I tried to tell—Mom just took me to a counselor. Maybe I did imagine it.”
“The scarecrows?” said Coco, her eyes fierce. “When you and the rest of the sixth grade were kidnapped off the bus and turned into scarecrows? Do you remember that?”
Phil’s mouth opened. Then closed again. He whispered, “No. No way.”
“Yes way,” Brian broke in. “Or was there not a lake monster? Are you going to say we imagined that too? The world is full of weird stuff, and we—”
But Phil was obviously not listening to him. “You knew what happened?” he breathed. “In October? All this time? You knew the scarecrows were real? You knew that all of it was real? All three of you knew?”
Brian nodded.
Phil punched him. It wasn’t a very good punch, more a shove, but it took Brian by surprise and dropped him, painfully, onto the rocks and roots of the forest floor. “Hey!” yelped Coco. “Hey, cool it!”
Phil glared at them both. “I thought I was crazy,” he said. “Brian, I thought you wouldn’t talk to me because you knew I was crazy. I thought I was all by myself. Why do you think I even talked to—to your smiling man, let him give me his stupid fishing lure? Because he was nice to me. He believed me. Not just some stupid ‘I believe that you believe’ thing, like the shrink. He actually believed me. He listened to me.” And then, Phil burst into tears.
Brian got to his feet, brushing dirt from his palms. He thought of how alone and afraid they’d felt that winter. But—he and Ollie and Coco hadn’t really been alone. Not like Phil. They’d had each other. Phil hadn’t had anyone. He’d just been stuck alone with nightmares and a sketchbook, maybe waiting for a scarecrow to come and scratch the glass of his window. And all the while, people he trusted were telling him that what he remembered hadn’t happened.
“Phil,” said Coco, in a new voice. “We’re really sorry.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “Phil—I didn’t know.”
Phil scrubbed over his eyes with one hand. “You didn’t know because you didn’t ask. You didn’t care,” he said furiously. “You just cared about each other.”
“No,” said Brian. “I—we wanted to keep everyone safe. We figured that—if people didn’t remember, then they were better off not knowing.”
“I remembered,” said Phil. “And I wasn’t better off. I thought we were friends, Brian.”
“I’m sorry,” said Brian. “We should have—should have tried harder.”
Coco wasn’t even giving Brian an I-told-you-so look. She was frowning at Phil in concern. Phil glanced up and saw it. “Why are you even nice to me?” Phil demanded of Coco. “I’ve never been nice to you.”
Coco said, after a pause to think, “Well, I was mad in October. You made me cry. But then you got kidnapped and turned into a scarecrow. And also, if you hadn’t been mean, Ollie wouldn’t have tried to rescue me, I wouldn’t have left the bus with her, and I’d probably be a scarecrow myself now. Plus you apologized on the boat. So I’m not mad anymore. Are you going to be mean again?”
“Um, no,” said Phil, looking bemused. He wiped his wet eyes. “No, I’m not. I—uh—I’m sorry I made you cry.”
“Are you going to make anyone else cry?”
He shook his head. “Not on purpose.”
“Well, then,” said Coco. “We’re stuck on a creepy island, this isn’t really a good time to hold grudges anyway. Let’s grab firewood.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “We need to hurry.” The wind was picking up. Coco had vivid patches of color on her nose and cheeks. It would only get colder.
“So,” said Phil in a subdued voice, starting to collect sticks. “If the scarecrows were real, and the lake monster was real . . .”
“Then whoever was on the radio just now might not have been joking,” Brian finished for him. “Ghosts are real too.” He was breaking up a dead tree branch over his knee as he spoke, thinking of other ghosts, other places where the ordinary rules didn’t apply. He was also thinking that getting off this island was definitely not going to be as simple as signaling for rescue.
They started collecting wood in earnest. There was a decent amount of deadfall. The three of them spread out, picking up sticks as quick as they could. Brian had brought the rope from the lifeboat to tie the sticks up into bundles.
When they had gathered enough for the first
bundle, Brian hauled it back toward the lake, leaving the others gathering more, a little ways into the forest. He got back down to the water and found Ms. Zintner poking at the radio.
