I'd kill for you

The bus hit a pothole and Preston Hale's laugh cut through the noise like a blade. I kept my forehead against the cold window and watched the trees blur into one long wall of green, then black. Windmere Academy sent its top forty students to the mountains every October. A reward, the flyer called it. Four days at a private lodge so deep in the pines that cell service died somewhere around the second switchback. I got my spot through a scholarship essay about resilience. Everyone else got theirs through last names stitched into hospital wings and law firms. Preston sat three rows up, holding court, already planning who he'd bunk with and who he'd ignore. Class president. Golden retriever smile. A father who owned half the ski resorts in the state. Two seats ahead of him, alone, Marcus Chase had his forehead bent over a paperback he wasn't reading. I knew because his eyes hadn't moved down the page in eleven minutes. I'd counted. That was the kind of thing I noticed. Small, useless things. The way a person's shoulders dropped a centimeter right before they lied. The way Preston's voice pitched higher when he wanted something from a teacher. The way Marcus, sweet faced and quiet, always seemed to already know where the exits were before he walked into a room. He caught me watching once, over the top of the book. Didn't smile. Just looked, steady, like he'd been waiting for me to notice him back. I looked away first. I always did. Bree Callahan dropped into the seat beside me somewhere around hour four, cheeks pink from the cold air leaking through a window that wouldn't seal. "You've been quiet," she said. "I'm always quiet." "You're always quiet like this." She waved a hand at my whole body, like that explained anything. "Quiet like you're doing math in your head." "I'm doing math in my head." She laughed, and it was easy, and for a second the tight feeling under my ribs loosened enough that I could laugh too. "You clocked Marcus Chase yet?" she asked, lowering her voice like it was gossip worth protecting. "Two rows up. Hasn't said a word to anyone since we left the parking lot." "I noticed." "Course you did." She grinned. "You notice everything. It's unsettling, honestly." By the time we reached the lodge, the sky had gone the color of a bruise. The building sat in a clearing ringed by pines so tall they swallowed the last of the daylight whole. Behind it, the mountain rose into fog. In front of it, a dirt lot where our bus idled, engine ticking as it cooled, exhaust hanging low in the wet air. Ms. Ward, our advisor, clapped her hands and read cabin assignments off a clipboard in a voice too bright for the weather rolling in over the ridge. I got cabin four. Bree got cabin four too, and squeezed my arm like we'd won something. "Storm's supposed to hit tonight," she said, thumb scrolling a weather app that had already lost its bars. "Bad one." "Define bad." "The kind where they cancel school." She grinned. "Which doesn't matter, because we're already off the grid." I didn't grin back. Something had been sitting wrong in my chest since the second switchback, a low hum under my ribs I couldn't place and couldn't shake loose. At dinner, the dining hall smelled like woodsmoke and pine sap and the cheap lasagna the kitchen staff had trucked in that morning. Long tables. Candlelight, because the generator was temperamental, according to the caretaker, an old man who left before dessert and didn't come back. Preston held court at the head table, recounting a story about his father's boat that nobody had asked to hear twice. Naomi Cole sat beside him, laughing on cue, her fork untouched on the plate in front of her. I sat at the far end with Bree, close enough to watch, far enough to not be seen. Marcus sat two seats down from me. He didn't talk to anyone. He ate methodically, small bites, his eyes moving around the room the way mine did. Counting exits. Counting people. Counting something I couldn't name yet. Once, his gaze landed on me and stayed half a second too long. I felt it in my spine before I understood why. "You're staring," Bree whispered. "I'm not." "You've been staring at Marcus Chase since the bus." "He's staring back." She glanced over, then back at me, eyebrows climbing. "Creepy pretty boy energy. I respect it." I didn't answer. My stomach had that hollow feeling it got before a test I hadn't studied enough for, a feeling I'd learned a long time ago not to ignore, no matter how many times my brain tried to talk me out of it. After dinner, Preston announced a bonfire, because of course he did. Somebody handed out flashlights. Somebody else found a speaker. Half the class trooped down to the clearing by the lake while wind picked up in the trees overhead, a sound like the whole forest breathing out at once. I didn't go. I told Bree I had a headache, which wasn't entirely a lie, and sat on the cabin steps instead, watching orange light flicker through the trunks a hundred yards off. Laughter carried on the wind in broken pieces. Somebody shrieked, then laughed harder. Marcus wasn't down there. I noticed that the way I noticed everything, filing it away without meaning to. The first drops of rain came a little after ten. Fat, cold, spaced out like a warning before the sky committed to anything worse. By ten thirty it was a wall of water, and the bonfire crowd came sprinting back up the trail soaked and shrieking, boots slapping mud, somebody's speaker abandoned and still playing tinny music into the storm behind them. Ms. Ward herded everyone toward their cabins, voice sharp now, all the brightness burned out of it by the wind. Lightning lit the clearing white for half a second. In that half second, I saw Preston peel off from the group alone, jogging toward the equipment shed near the tree line, head down against the rain. Nobody else seemed to notice. I told myself it wasn't my business. I went to bed anyway, listening to Bree's breathing even out across the room, listening to rain hammer the roof like something trying to get in. I woke at midnight to silence. Not the rain stopping. The rain was still going, softer now, a steady drum instead of an assault. It was the quiet underneath it that woke me, the specific wrongness of a night with no voices in it at all, not even the wind moving through the pines the way it had been for hours straight. I don't know why I got up. I told myself later it was thirst, or nerves, or the itch under my skin that never fully went away at Windmere, the constant low static of not belonging anywhere I'd been placed. I pulled on my jacket and slipped out past Bree's cot, boots in hand, lacing them on the porch in the dark so the buckles wouldn't rattle against the wood. The path to the lake was black mud and slick roots. My flashlight beam bounced off rain, off bark, off nothing. Somewhere behind me a screen door banged in the wind and I flinched so hard I nearly dropped the light into the mud at my feet. I reached the clearing where the bonfire had been. Dead now, hissing faintly, a wet black scar cut into the grass where laughter had been an hour earlier. Past it, near the equipment shed, something pale caught the edge of my flashlight beam. A hand. I told my feet to stop. They didn't listen. I crossed the clearing in a kind of numb, floating panic, rain running down the back of my collar, my own breath loud and ragged in my ears, louder than the storm itself. Preston Hale lay on his back in the mud, eyes open to the rain, his throat opened in a way that didn't look real, that looked staged, that looked like something out of a movie I would have turned off before the second act. I didn't scream. I wanted to. My throat just wouldn't do it, like something had reached in and shut the sound off at the source. I made myself look away from his face, and that was when I saw it. Sitting in the pool of blood beside his outstretched hand, rain sliding off its surface in beads, was a lighter. Silver. Engraved with a small, crooked star on the casing. I had seen it a hundred times. Marcus turned it over and over in his fingers during class, a nervous habit, click open, click shut, never lighting anything at all. I knew that lighter the way I knew the sound of my own name. Thunder rolled over the mountain, long and low, and somewhere behind me, footsteps started through the mud.