Hunter and Bram exchange a small look. Bram tries to suppress a smile.
“Raven and Tack went midnight trapping,” he says, raising an eyebrow. This is an old joke, a code we invented at the old homestead. Raven and Tack managed to keep their romantic relationship a secret for close to a year. But one time, Bram couldn’t sleep and decided to take a walk, and he caught them sneaking around together. When he confronted them, Tack blurted out, “Trapping!” even though it was close to two a.m. and all the traps had been cleared and set earlier in the day.
“Where’s Julian?” I say. “Where’s Alex?”
There’s another fractional pause. Now Hunter is struggling not to laugh. He’s definitely drunk—I can tell by the rash-like patches of red in his cheeks.
“Outside,” Bram says, and then he can’t help himself, and lets out a loud snort of laughter. Instantly, Hunter starts laughing too.
“Outside? Together?” I stand up, confused, getting irritated. When neither responds, I persist. “What are they doing?”
Bram struggles to control himself. “Julian wanted to learn how to fight—”
Hunter finishes for him. “Alex volunteered to teach him.” They dissolve into laughter again.
My whole body goes hot, then cold. “What the hell?” I burst out, and the anger in my voice makes them, at last, go quiet. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I direct the question mostly to Hunter. I don’t expect Bram to understand. But Hunter is my friend, and he’s too sensitive not to have noticed the tension between Alex and Julian.
For a second, Hunter looks guilty. “Come on, Lena. It’s no big deal….”
I’m too furious to respond. I grab a flashlight from the shelves and head for the stairs.
“Lena, don’t be mad….”
I drown out the rest of Hunter’s words by pounding my feet extra hard. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Outside, the sky is cloudless and glittering with bright points of light. I grip the flashlight tightly in one hand, trying to funnel all my anger through my fingers. I don’t know what kind of game Alex is playing, but I’m sick of it.
The woods are still—no sign of Tack or Raven, no sign of anyone. As I stand in the dark, listening, it strikes me that the air is very warm; we must be halfway into April now. Soon summer will be here. For a moment, a flood of memories rides up, surging on the air and the smell of honeysuckle: Hana and I squeezing lemon juice on our hair to lighten it, stealing sodas from the cooler in Uncle William’s store and taking them down to Back Cove; clam-pot dinners on the old wooden porch when it was too hot to eat inside; following Gracie’s tricycle down the street, wobbling on my bike, trying not to pass her.
The memories bring, as they always do, a deep ache inside me. But I’m used to it by now, and I wait for the feeling to pass, and it does.
I turn on the flashlight and sweep it across the woods. In its pale-yellow beam, the web of trees and bushes looks bleached, surreal. I switch the flashlight off again. If Julian and Alex went off together somewhere, I have very little hope of finding them.
I’m just about to head back inside when I hear a shout. Fear shoots straight through me. Julian’s voice.
I plunge into the tangle of growth to my right, pushing toward the sound, swiping with my flashlight to help clear the interlaced path of creepers and pine branches.
After a minute, I burst into a large clearing. For a second I feel disoriented, thinking I’ve stumbled onto the edge of a large silver lake. Then I see that it’s a parking lot. A heap of rubble at one end marks what must have once been a building.
Alex and Julian are standing a few feet away from me, breathing hard, glaring at each other. Julian is holding his hand to his nose, and blood is coming through his fingers.
“Julian!” I start toward him. Julian keeps his eyes locked on Alex.
“I’m okay, Lena,” he says. His voice sounds muffled and strange. When I place a hand on his chest, he gently removes it. He smells faintly of alcohol.
I whirl around to face Alex. “What the hell did you do?”
His eyes flick to mine for just a second. “It was an accident,” he says neutrally. “I swung too high.”
“Bullshit,” I spit out. I turn back to Julian. “Come on,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s go inside. We’ll clean you up.”
He takes his hand away from his nose, then brings his shirt to his face, wiping the remaining blood off his lip. Now his shirt is coated with dark streaks, glistening almost black in the night. “No way,” he says, still without looking at me. “We were just getting started. Weren’t we, Alex?”
“Julian—” I start to plead. Alex cuts me off.
“Lena’s right,” he says, his tone deliberately light. “It’s late. We can barely see anything out here. We can pick up again tomorrow.”
Julian’s voice is also light—but beneath it I can hear a hard edge of anger, a bitterness I don’t recognize. “No time like the present.”