The Ones We Buried

Three weeks ago I had a father, a bedroom I actually chose the paint color for, and a life that made sense. Now I had a duffel bag, a town called Hollow Creek that looked like it had been specifically designed to make me feel like an extra in someone else's ghost story, and an aunt who kept looking at me like I might shatter if she said the wrong thing. "You're going to love it here," Aunt Rosalind said, for the third time since we'd crossed the town line, in the tone of someone trying very hard to convince herself as much as me. "Sure," I said. "Nothing says healing like a town with exactly one traffic light and a welcome sign that says 'Population: Enough.'" She almost laughed. Almost. My dad would have laughed for real — the specific, unguarded laugh he did when I said something he pretended to disapprove of. Thinking about it made my chest do the thing it kept doing lately, that sudden airless drop, like stepping off a curb you didn't know was there. I looked out the window instead. Hollow Creek unspooled past the glass — old brick buildings, a diner with a hand-painted sign, trees so thick and old they seemed to be holding something up rather than just growing. Pretty, in the way places are pretty right before they turn out to be hiding something. "Your dad used to talk about this place," Aunt Rosalind said quietly, eyes on the road. "Did you know that?" I did not know that. My dad had never once mentioned a town called Hollow Creek in seventeen years of being my father, which felt like exactly the kind of detail someone drops when they're deciding how much truth you can handle in one car ride. "He didn't," I said carefully. "Talk about it. To me." "No," she agreed, too quickly. "I suppose he wouldn't have." I filed that away in the growing folder of Things Nobody Is Telling Me, currently overflowing since approximately the moment my father's heart decided, with zero warning and zero fairness, to simply stop. Hollow Creek High School smelled like every high school does — floor wax and adolescent desperation — but the hallway went quiet in a way that felt personal the second I walked in. New girl energy, obviously. Small towns clock outsiders the way sharks clock blood in water. "You must be Nora." A girl fell into step beside me before I'd even found my locker, dark curls, a smile that seemed constitutionally incapable of turning off. "I'm Mari. Everyone already knows who you are, by the way, so you can skip the whole 'mysterious new girl' phase and just be regular-new instead. Saves time." "Small towns," I said. "Smallest," Mari agreed cheerfully. "Also, unsolicited advice—stay away from the Ashworth brothers." "The who?" She nodded toward the far end of the hallway, where the crowd seemed to part slightly, the way water does around something it's decided to respect. Two guys, clearly brothers, equally impossible not to notice for entirely different reasons. The taller one had his head down, jaw tight, radiating the specific energy of someone who'd rather be anywhere else. The other one was already looking directly at me, unbothered, like he'd been expecting me. "Caleb and Wren," Mari said. "Everyone in this town has an opinion about that family. None of the opinions are boring." "Why?" Mari's smile flickered, just slightly, the first genuinely unguarded thing I'd seen from her. "Ask me again once you've been here longer than a day." The one called Wren was still watching me, something unreadable and a little too knowing in his expression, like he could see exactly how much I was drowning under the new-girl bravado. I looked away first, heart doing something complicated and unwelcome, and told myself it was just nerves. It was not just nerves. I found out how not-nerves it was thirty seconds later, when I turned the corner too fast and walked directly into Caleb Ashworth's shoulder, my books scattering across the floor between us. "Sorry—" I started, crouching for my things at the same moment he did, close enough that I caught the low, quiet way he exhaled, like proximity to a stranger cost him something. "You're fine." He handed me back a notebook, and for one unguarded second his eyes actually met mine—dark, careful, something old and tired behind them that didn't match a seventeen-year-old's face. "Watch where you're going, Bellweather." He knew my name too. Of course he did. He was gone before I could ask how, disappearing down the hallway without a backward glance, leaving me crouched on the floor with my heart doing that same complicated, unwelcome thing all over again—twice in five minutes, for two brothers who couldn't have been less alike. Behind me, I swore I heard someone murmur my last name — Bellweather — with a strange, weighted pause after it, like it meant something in this town that it had never meant anywhere else I'd lived. I didn't know yet that it did. I also didn't know yet that Hollow Creek was about to hand me the one thing grief hadn't left room for in months—two reasons to feel something other than numb, and no idea yet how dangerous that would turn out to be.