The Creeping

“I just mean he trusts me to make my own decisions. It’s nice to be treated like that, most of the time.” I twirl my fork in the pasta. “Will your mom care that you’re out late?”


He covers his mouth with a napkin. “No, once she heard that I was coming here she didn’t even give me a curfew. I’ll have to use you as cover every time I go out.”

I stab a meatball with my fork. “I missed your mom.”

“I think she missed you,” he says with a full mouth, smiling with bits and pieces of food in his teeth.

“Oh, sooo hot.” I throw my napkin at his face, laughing. “What about Daniel? Did you call him?”

“I texted him what we found at the library and cemetery and finally got a text back saying he was crashing with his dad. He was vague, but I guess the police questioned him and then sent him home. He said he’d call tomorrow.”

I nod. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Jeanie,” I admit absently. “I can’t remember what she was like, and all I really know is what Zoey says.”

“You want to know what I remember?” he offers. I swallow and nod. He leans back in his chair. “She was funny. She kind of wobbled everywhere, like she was dancing rather than walking. That really got me at six.” He laughs under his breath. “She had a lisp, and she loved rattling off in gibberish. I’m not sure if she made up her own language or what, but she’d dissolve into giggles after a few sentences of nonsense.” I stare into the middle distance of my kitchen, like I might be able to look back in time and see what Sam does. “She always wanted to play outside . . . always in the front yard or the woods.” We don’t speak for a long time.

“Do you think I’d be friends with her now?”

He blinks at me carefully; he can probably see how thinly veiled my guilt over the imagined answer has become. “Who knows? Everything could be different if she were here.”

I know exactly what he means. Who would I be without the disappearance sending ripples through me? If Jeanie were a person with laughter and habits rather than a diamond or dull penny to me, who would I be? In an alternate universe, where Zoey made me choose between herself and Jeanie, might I have chosen Jeanie? Would we be in orchestra? Would we date best friends who took us to the Cineplex every Friday night? I like the idea of three alternate realities for me to exist in: one where I’ve chosen Zoey, one with Sam, and one with Jeanie. Perhaps that’s because Sam is right: I shouldn’t have chosen. Jeanie shouldn’t be dead. We’re all disembodied from the way it should be.

Sam rises to clear the plates. I dump them in the dishwasher once he’s rinsed. “Thanks for making dinner. Do you want to watch a movie or something?”

Sam heads to the front room. “You don’t have to do that. It’s okay if you want me to leave,” he says, stooping for his keys on the coffee table.

I watch helplessly as he walks toward the front door and pulls it open. He’ll leave, travel into the darkness between our two houses, accept that I won’t say the magic words to make him mine, convince himself that I don’t want him, and this moment will be gone forever, snatched away from me like the gust of wind from the open door is scattering the pages of my time line to the floor.

Before he gets any farther, before I lose him, I blurt out, “For the last hundred years a secret group has been sacrificing animals every time something horrible happens in Savage.”





Chapter Nineteen


You remember those heaps of dirt at Mrs. Griever’s? Well”—I wave for him to follow me into the living room—“I think they’re buried animals. I don’t know if that means that she’s one of the people sacrificing them, or the only one, or that she’s cleaning up after them and hiding the evidence. But I found a pattern—well, most of a pattern, since the online library archives are incomplete.”