That’s when I pushed back my chair and ran down the hallway after her. I knew what I’d done. I had taken sides. I was in a different kind of trouble now, but I didn’t care.
It wasn’t just Lena. She wasn’t the first. I’d watched them do it, my whole life. They’d done it to Allison Birch when her eczema got so bad nobody would sit near her at the lunch table, and poor Scooter Richman because he played the worst trombone in the history of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra.
While I’d never picked up a marker and written LOSER across a locker myself, I had stood by and watched, plenty of times. Either way, it had always bothered me. Just never enough to walk out of the room.
But somebody had to do something. A whole school couldn’t just take down one person like that. A whole town couldn’t just take down one family. Except, of course, they could, because they had been doing it forever. Maybe that’s why Macon Ravenwood hadn’t left his house since before I was born.
I knew what I was doing.
You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.
She was there in my head again, as if she’d always been there.
I knew what I’d be facing the next day, but none of that mattered to me. All I cared about was finding her. And I couldn’t have told you just then if it was for her, or for me. Either way, I didn’t have a choice.
I stopped at the bio lab, out of breath. Link took one look at me and tossed me his keys, shaking his head without even asking. I caught them and kept running. I was pretty sure I knew where to find her.
If I was right, she had gone where anyone would go. It’s where I would have gone.
She had gone home. Even if home was Ravenwood, and she had gone home to Gatlin’s own Boo Radley.
Ravenwood Manor loomed in front of me. It rose up on the hill like a dare. I’m not saying I was scared, because that’s not exactly the word for it. I was scared when the police came to the door the night my mom died. I was scared when my dad disappeared into his study and I realized he would never really come back out. I was scared when I was a kid and Amma went dark, when I figured out the little dolls she made weren’t toys.
I wasn’t scared of Ravenwood, even if it turned out to be as creepy as it looked. The unexplained was sort of a given in the South; every town has a haunted house, and if you asked most folks, at least a third of them would swear they’d seen a ghost or two in their lifetime. Besides, I lived with Amma, whose beliefs included painting our shutters haint blue to keep the spirits out, and whose charms were made from pouches of horsehair and dirt. So I was used to unusual. But Old Man Ravenwood, that was something else.
I walked up to the gate and hesitantly laid my hand on the mangled iron. The gate creaked open. And then, nothing happened. No lightning, no combustion, no storms. I don’t know what I was expecting, but if I had learned anything about Lena by now, it was to expect the unexpected, and to proceed with caution.
If anyone had told me a month ago that I would ever walk past those gates, up that hill, and set foot anywhere on the grounds of Ravenwood, I would’ve said they were crazy. In a town like Gatlin, where you can see everything coming, I wouldn’t have seen this. Last time, I had only made it as far as the gates. The closer I got, the easier it was to see that everything was falling apart. The great house, Ravenwood Manor, looked just like the stereotypical Southern plantation that people from up North would expect to see after all those years of watching movies like Gone with the Wind.
Ravenwood Manor was still that impressive, at least in scale. Flanked by palmetto and cypress trees, it looked like it could have been the kind of place where people sat on the porch drinking mint juleps and playing cards all day, if it wasn’t falling apart. If it wasn’t Ravenwood.