Oops! I Have Four Mates

The Drive

SORREN

The car smells like the same air freshener my mother has used for years. Pine. Clean. Ordinary. It does not match the fact that we are driving me out of my own life.

As I settle into the back seat, my backpack is at my feet, and I'm sitting on my crossed arms so hard that my shoulders are starting to hurt. Darius is driving. Elena is next to me in the passenger seat with a paper cup of coffee that she hasn't touched since we left the house. Neither of us has said anything. The radio is turned off. All I can hear is the engine's droning sound and the sound of the turn signal clicking.

“You could at least pretend this is temporary,” I say.

Darius glances at me in the rearview mirror. “It is not temporary.”

“Thanks for the honesty. Really fills me with hope.”

Elena turns halfway in her seat. “Sorren.”

“What? I am supposed to sit here and act grateful that you packed my bags while I was still asleep?”

“We told you last night.”

“You told me the decision was final. That is not the same as talking about it.”

She faces forward again. The coffee cup stays untouched between her hands. Outside the window the suburbs thin into longer stretches of road. Strip malls give way to empty lots and then to open land. The sky is the flat gray of early morning. Nothing about it looks special. Nothing about it looks like the start of something permanent.

I try again. “What kind of school needs this much secrecy? You will not even show me a website.”

“They do not operate the way regular schools do,” Darius says.

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one you are getting right now.”

I laugh once under my breath. It comes out sharper than I mean it to. “Right. Because explaining things to your own daughter is apparently optional.”

Elena’s shoulders tighten. She does not turn around. “We are not doing this to hurt you.”

“It still hurts.”

The silence that immediately ensues is heavier than the first one. I stare at the side of her face in the car window's mirror. She looks exhausted, quite different from sleep-exhausted. Darius is focused on the road, steady hands on the wheel, jaw muscle going up and down like he is biting words he refuses to speak.

We leave the last of the familiar exits behind. The highway narrows. The barriers on either side change from metal to older concrete, then to nothing at all. Trees begin to close in. At first they are ordinary stands of pine and oak. Then the gaps between them shrink. The undergrowth thickens. The light that reaches the road becomes patchy and green-tinted.

I notice the lack of other cars around the same time the road surface changes. The asphalt looks older. The painted lines are faded almost to nothing. We have not passed another vehicle in twenty minutes.

“This is a long way from anywhere,” I say.

“That is the point,” Darius answers.

“Of what? Isolation? Making sure I cannot run back?”

Elena finally drinks from the coffee. She grimaces like it has gone cold. “The academy is private for a reason. They keep a low profile.”

“Low profile is one thing. This feels like we are driving off the edge of the map.”

Neither of them disagrees.

The forest presses closer. The trees are taller now, their trunks thicker, the canopy dense enough that the sky only appears in narrow strips. I roll my window down an inch. The air that comes in is cooler and carries a scent I cannot place. Damp earth. Something sharper underneath it, like crushed leaves after rain, but stronger.

A sound moves through the trees on the right side of the road. Not wind. Not birds. Something heavier. A low, distant crack of branches, then silence again.

I sit up straighter. “Did you hear that?”

Darius’s eyes flick to the mirror, then back to the road. “Animals.”

“That did not sound like an animal.”

“It was.”

The way he says it is too flat. Too final. I watch the side of his face. He is still looking forward, but his grip on the wheel has shifted. His knuckles are pale.

Elena reaches over and turns the air conditioning up a notch even though the morning is not warm. The gesture is small and pointless. I file it away with the rest of the things they are not saying.

The road curves deeper into the trees. The asphalt gives way to packed gravel in places. The car slows. Darius takes the turns carefully, like he has driven this route before and knows exactly where the edges drop off. I have never seen him this careful on any other road.

I lean forward between the seats. “How far is this place?”

“Another hour,” he says.

“And then what? You drop me off and leave?”

“We will stay long enough to get you settled.”

“Settled. Great. Looking forward to that.”

Elena turns enough to meet my eyes. “You can be angry. You have every right. But you need to understand that this is the best option we have.”

“Best for who?”

She does not answer.

I lean back. The backpack at my feet jostles as the car rides over a bump. Inside the pack are the clothes they stuffed into it for me, a couple of books, the charger for my phone. No laptop. No indication of when I might see home again. Maybe that was intentional.

A new sound filters through the trees. Closer. A ponderous thudding that makes the underbrush along the left side of the road shudder, sending loose leaves tumbling across the asphalt.

I turn toward the window.

Something is moving among the trees.

A shape, large and sinuous, emerges briefly between the trunks. Too long, by half, to be anything worn by a single human, and the color is wrong, something between the bark and the shadows inside the woods. It pauses, just far enough back that the tops of the trees sway where its tail ends.

My mouth goes dry.

“What was that?”

Darius does not look. His eyes stay locked on the road. “Nothing.”

“That was not nothing.”

Elena’s hand finds the door handle and stays there. She does not open it. She just holds it like she needs the contact.

I keep staring into the trees. The shape is gone. The branches are still. The only movement left is the ordinary sway of leaves in a breeze that does not feel strong enough to explain what I just saw.

“Dad.”

“I said it was nothing.”

His voice is tight. Controlled. The same tone he uses when he is trying not to show that something has gotten under his skin. I have heard it before, usually when the phone rings late and the conversation that follows happens in the other room with the door closed.

I watch him. The set of his shoulders. The way his throat works once before he swallows. He knows what I saw. Or he knows what it could have been. The recognition is there whether he admits it or not.

Elena speaks without looking at either of us. “We are almost there. Try not to focus on every sound in the woods.”

“I am focusing on the fact that something the size of a small truck just moved through those trees and neither of you is reacting like normal people.”

“Because it was not what you think,” Darius says.

“You do not know what I think.”

“I know enough.”

The car continues forward. The gravel road narrows further. The trees lean in until the canopy almost meets overhead. Light filters down in thin green shafts. The air coming through my window is colder now. It carries that same sharp, damp scent, stronger than before.

I keep my eyes on the forest.

Nothing moves for a long time. The silence feels deliberate, like the woods are waiting for us to pass. I tell myself I imagined the shape. That the light and the density of the trees played tricks. That stress and anger and the dream from the other night have left me jumpy.

I almost believe it.

Then the branches shift again, farther back this time, and the same impossible bulk passes between the trunks for less than a second. It does not look at us. It does not need to. The size of it is enough.

I do not speak this time.

I only watch Darius’s hands on the wheel. The way his fingers flex once and then go still. The way Elena’s coffee cup has started to tremble almost too slightly to notice.

They know.

Whatever I saw is real, and they have known about it long enough that the sight of it does not shock them the way it should.

I sit back against the seat and keep my face turned toward the trees. The road keeps winding deeper. The academy is still ahead of us, somewhere past all this green and shadow. I do not know what kind of place needs to be hidden this far from ordinary roads.

I only know that my parents are not telling me the truth.

And the forest is watching us leave the world I used to understand behind.