Chapter 30
Identifying the various flora and fauna of western coastal Michigan was exactly as fun as it sounded. Which is to say, not at all.
It took three hours to drive up the coast to the state park where they were spending the night.
When they finally got off the bus, they’d taken another hour for lunch, then broke into groups of thirty, each led by a different chaperone.
Charlie, Lou, and Abigail had been placed into a group together, but Abigail had marched immediately up to the head chaperone and asked to switch into the group run by the AP biology teacher.
“Is she on drugs?” Lou had whispered to Charlie.
“Quite possibly,” Charlie had said. “But I’m sure she also wants the chance to impress Mr. Gallego with her extensive knowledge of pollination and photosynthesis.”
“Ugh.” Lou crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why are we friends with her again?”
“Because we adore her.”
Lou sighed. “That we do.”
Their group was led by Mrs. Waterstone, the chemistry teacher who had broken up Mason and Elias’s fight earlier that week.
But while Mrs. Waterstone was a passionate—if forgetful, much to the delight of her students when test time came—teacher of chemistry, it quickly became clear that she knew next to nothing about biology.
“This one here…” she said, pointing to a patch of standard beach grass that grew all along the coast of Lake Michigan, “might be Dryopteris affinis, the golden male fern.” She flipped a page, squinting at the text.
“But this says those grow mostly in southern Europe and southwest Asia, so I don’t know… ”
Thankfully, Mrs. Waterstone was so clueless about plant life that she spent most of the day with her head in the book, leaving her group to do as they pleased.
For some, that meant scrolling on their phones or taking selfies under trees.
For others, it meant gossiping in low tones about the party that night.
Charlie, on the other hand, spent the afternoon flinching every time a squirrel ran past. Catching her breath as the Reddit post flashed through her mind.
Hunched back. Yellow eyes. Not being able to tell the difference between an innocent little creature and a beast who wanted her dead was terrifying.
Most squirrels moved too fast for Charlie to get a good look at them, so she couldn’t verify if they had the telltale red swirl on their forehead. It was unnerving.
Of everyone in their group, it was almost certainly Henry who had the most fun. He scampered about the forest floor, sampling every type of leaf and fungus he could find.
“Don’t eat that one,” Charlie whispered to him when he picked up a wide yellow mushroom cap. “It looks poisonous.”
Henry stuck out his tiny pink tongue.
NOT POISON
ME KNOW FOREST
“Fine,” Charlie replied. “But don’t come complaining to me when you get magical Asgardian diarrhea.”
After two hours of confused wandering, Mrs. Waterstone finally gave up trying to identify plants and sent them off in groups of two with their handbooks and a worksheet of fifty different flora and fauna to label.
They were supposed to write the common name, the Latin name, and describe the area where they found it.
“What a ridiculous list,” said Lou, plopping herself on an enormous stump and flipping through the pages of the worksheet. Henry climbed the stump and nuzzled into Lou’s leg. She absently scratched under his beard. “Totally inaccurate. They don’t even have vittra on here. Or draugar.”
Charlie snorted. “I don’t think the writers of the textbook could see those things.”
“Amateurs.” Lou sniffed, pulling out a pen and writing in the box depicting a deer: white-tailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, under a white pine tree.
“We haven’t seen any deer yet,” Charlie pointed out.
“Who cares?” Lou asked, moving on to the next box. “There are, like, six billion white pines out here. I’m sure that there is a white-tailed deer under at least one of them.”
“Fair enough.”
Lou’s pen moved over to the third box. “So,” she said, keeping her eyes on the paper. “You’re awfully chipper today.”
Charlie shrugged, watching Henry leap off the stump to chase a chipmunk around a bush. “It’s OET weekend. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Charlie a month ago wouldn’t have cared about the annual camping trip.
” Lou started to fill in the box for chipmunk.
“Charlie a week ago wouldn’t have cared about the annual camping trip.
Then, all of a sudden, a certain someone cruises back into town…
” She looked up from the worksheet, quirking one eyebrow.
“My mood has nothing to do with Elias,” Charlie said, tasting the lie as it rolled off her tongue.
Lou didn’t respond. She just kept staring, lips twisted into a knowing little smirk.
“Fine.” Charlie toyed with a pine branch hanging close to her face. “Maybe it has something to do with him. But only because he’s helping me figure out these powers that I didn’t know I had.”
Lou’s eyebrow hitched higher.
“Bah.” Charlie plopped down onto the stump beside Lou, head falling into her hands. “You’re annoying. You know that, right?”
“Talk,” said Lou.
“I don’t know.” Charlie rubbed at her temples with the bottoms of her palms. “Honestly. I have no idea what to say. I thought I hated Elias, but I’m starting to think…”
“… that you might be in love with him?” Lou prompted.
“What?” Charlie looked up from her hands, startled.
“Gods. No. I could never fall in love with someone who tried to kill my best friends. I just…” She sighed, tilting her head back to look up at the cloudless sky.
“He’s … good company, I guess. He understands me.
” She paused, considering. “Sometimes, it feels like he understands me better than I understand myself.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized that they were a near mirror of what Elias had said just a few hours earlier. She swallowed, looking back down at Lou.
Her friend nodded. “I know.”
“You do?”
“Duh.” She rolled her eyes. “You light up like a Christmas tree when he’s around, Charlie.
Before he showed up in Silver Shores last month, it was like …
like you were living with only one foot in the outside world.
You spent more time in your head than with the rest of us.
But now—” She turned on the stump, her knees bumping into Charlie’s.
“You’re alive again. It’s so obvious it’s almost painful. ”
“Maybe so. But I can’t go down that road with him again. The … romantic road, I mean.” Charlie watched Henry sniff some wildflowers. “He almost took everything from me, Lou. I would never be able to trust him enough to be in a relationship with him.”
“I’m not telling you to get into a relationship with him,” said Lou.
“I’m just saying … he’s clearly making an effort to patch things up with you.
Despite whatever history might tell us, I think he genuinely cares about you.
And he’s strong, and he knows how to fight.
Maybe having him as a friend wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. ”
“I don’t know.” Charlie chewed on her bottom lip. “Mason hates Elias. Despises him, really. He’ll never be able to forgive him for what he did to you.”
“We aren’t talking about Mason.”
“No. But he just barely started talking to me again, and I’m not super keen on blowing up our relationship by announcing Elias as my new best friend.”
Lou scoffed. “Please. That title will never belong to anyone but me. If you give it to Elias instead, I might have to kill you.”
“Don’t worry.” Charlie grinned, reaching down to squeeze her hand. “I would never.”
“I know,” Lou said. “I’m irreplaceable. One might even go so far as to call me price—”
Just then, a squirrel leapt from the branches of a nearby tree, soaring through the air and landing less than a foot away. The girls screamed, jumping up onto the stump and grabbing each other’s shoulders. Henry squawked and launched himself off the ground, grabbing hold of the nearest tree.
“Lou, Henry, run!” Charlie yelled, letting go of her friend’s shoulders and stepping in front of her. “I’ll fend him off. I’ll—”
The squirrel turned to them …
… revealing a furry brown forehead, no red swirl in sight.
Charlie exhaled, slumping over. “Oh, thank the gods.”
Henry hopped off the tree trunk, sending colors of relief into her head.
“Odin’s wrinkly butthole,” Lou said breathlessly. “I thought we were goners.”
“Me, too,” said Charlie, heart thudding in her ears. She watched the squirrel scamper away, off to find an acorn or climb a tree or perform whatever other non-nefarious activities it had planned. “But we’re safe. For now, at least.”
“Oh gods.” Lou let out a breathy laugh. “Maggie Matine and Kate Leibowitz are staring. They think we’ve lost our minds.”
Charlie craned her head, spotting the girls huddled beside a patch of juniper. They were indeed staring. And pointing. And whispering.
Lou elbowed Charlie in the side. “Just like old times, right?”
Charlie snorted. It was true; in middle school, they’d always been the extroverted oddballs. The ones who ran the fastest and yelled the loudest and wore the most ridiculous costumes on Halloween. It was funny to think that they were right back where they started.
It was funny. Them screaming and jumping up onto a stump was funny.
But it also wasn’t funny. Not at all.
Because the truth was, that squirrel easily could have been Rattatosk. Any of the squirrels could be.
Anywhere, at any point, death could be waiting.