Chapter 28
At home, I grab my family’s laptop from the kitchen table and lead Xander to my room. He follows close behind, quiet but observant, taking in everything.
My face warms as I watch him. “Sorry, my house is small,” I say.
“It’s the same size as mine was,” he replies, staring at photos in the hall.
A few steps later, I plop onto my bed, the plaid sheets still wrinkled from the night before, and rest the laptop on my thighs. Xander mirrors me exactly, until our knees touch.
“Let’s see what we got,” he says, rubbing his hands together.
“Hold on,” I say, fishing out a USB cord from under my pillow. “I need to hook up my phone.”
Xander groans. “This can’t just sync to the cloud?”
I shoot him a sidelong glance. “Not all of us can steal MacBooks whenever we want.”
“I’ll get one for you. What color do you like?” I tap my chin. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”
Without another word, Xander suddenly springs up from the mattress and wanders toward my bulletin board on the floor where the pile of pictures is scattered like fallen leaves, left untouched since my meltdown a couple weeks ago. He crouches and lifts up a photo from the mess.
“Is this your ex-boyfriend?” he asks.
My fingertips go slick with sweat against the laptop keys. No one else has ever referred to Murray like that before, out loud. Xander’s words hit me like a slow-building breeze.
I swallow. “It is,” I say, scratching my throat.
He studies the picture of Murray and me petting a goat at the Penango County Fall Festival. His lips press into a thin line.
“Why do you still have these?” He sifts through more of my Murraycentric photo collection. “I thought he was mean to you. Are you two back together?”
“No.” I sigh. “I’ve just had other things to worry about.”
“Sure,” he says, thick with sarcasm. He tosses the photo back on the floor.
I cross my arms. “We’re not together.”
“But you still like him?”
“I want nothing to do with him.”
“Then what’s that?” He gestures toward my closet doorknob, where a Christmas ornament dangles. It’s two ceramic snowmen, labeled as Stetson and Murray, cuddling between tiny Christmas trees.
I exhale. “I forgot that was there.”
“You forgot about the bright white, red, and green thing hanging from a door you open every day?”
I grunt. “It’s been there for years. It’s just . . . I don’t know, a routine thing. I don’t think about it.” My eyes flick toward the stuffed animals Murray won for me at the fall festival, piled in the corner of my room like relics of another life.
“Why don’t you?” Xander’s voice is quiet.
“Like I said, it’s just the way my room has always been.”
He returns to my bed. But this time he sits on its edge. His back is stiff while he twirls his thumbs in his lap.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
He clears his throat. “I care because . . . because if you let things stay the way they’ve always been, life stretches into one, long period of grief.
You mourn the person you should’ve been in the past, and you feel sorry for yourself because you’ll never be the person you want to be in the future.
What’s the point of living if you never let yourself change? ”
My stomach tightens. “Well, when you put it like that . . .” I force a shrug. “I just figured there was no rush. I have all summer.”
“I wish I didn’t.” His voice drops. “I wish I didn’t have forever. Forever is meaningless when nothing changes. I’d rather only have a week left on earth if it meant I got to experience something new.”
“Aren’t I new for you?”
He turns his head slightly, just enough for me to catch the flicker of something intense burning in his amber eyes. “Yeah. And that’s why I—” He stops, bites his lip, and whips his gaze toward the wall.
“That’s why you what?”
“Nothing.”
“Why you what? Tell me.” I scooch closer to him, my heart pounding.
He stands. “Forget I said anything.”
But I won’t forget. And I don’t think I can pretend I wasn’t imagining certain words leaving his lips either.
With the Fourth of July around the corner, summer suddenly feels like it’s slipping away. And here I am, still surrounded by pictures of my ex-boyfriend who I broke up with weeks ago. I only have one and a half teenage summers left. Why waste the best season surrounded by the worst person?
I push the laptop aside and stand. I scoop the photos from the floor, their glossy edges crumpling beneath my grip, and dump them into the trash can beside my desk.
Flares of color—Murray’s tuxedo vests, our matching ties, the bright lights from school dances—flash before me like a shattered kaleidoscope.
“There,” I say. “Change can be quick.”
Xander watches me, his lips curving into the faintest smile.
“You want more?”
I crisscross my room, searching for anything else with Murray’s fingerprints on it. My corsage from senior prom sits on my nightstand, its once-white petals now dry and shriveled. I bring it to my nose before launching it into the can like a basketball.
Next, I slide open the top drawer of my dresser and remove a thick stack of birthday, Valentine’s, and Christmas cards. Murray’s sloppy handwriting is scrawled across each one. They land in the trash pile.
Then I make for the stuffed animals.
“Goodbye, Pink Teddy,” I say, grabbing the bear’s squishy bicep and tossing it into the closet. The impact rattles the hangers against the metal rod.
“So long, Rainbow Dolphin. Later, Pointless Pikachu. Bye, Simba. See ya, Mr. Caterpillar. I always thought you were creepy anyway.”
Xander giggles.
I clap my hands and slam the closet door closed. “Consider him gone.”
Xander exhales. “I didn’t mean to make you upset.”
“I’m not upset at all.” I roll my shoulders back. “I feel great, actually. You were right.”
Xander kneels beside my bulletin board and runs his fingers along the empty cork. “You should bring this with you to Tennessee. Cover it with pictures of us.”
I raise an eyebrow. “We need pictures of us first.”
He grins. “We can change that too.”
The laptop dings as the photos from the archives finish uploading. We both turn toward the sound. The glow from the screen becomes the only light source in the room as a late afternoon storm darkens the sky outside.
“Should we look at these first?” I ask, nodding at the laptop. “And have our photo shoot another time?”
“Deal,” Xander says, twisting a curl between his fingers before pointing toward the window. “The electricity in the atmosphere is making my hair static anyway.”
I want to run my hand through his curls, to feel their charge, but instead, I climb onto my bed and keep my hands busy at the keyboard.
Xander follows, just like last time. But he’s closer.
This time, it’s not just our knees bumping, but our arms, hips, thighs, and calves.
Even our toes nearly touch. He catches me glancing down at the small gap and, without a word, tilts his foot sideways until his baby toe brushes mine.
He doesn’t speak, just exhales softly, the warmth of his breath landing on the side of my neck.
Outside, the wind picks up, cracking my plastic blinds against the wooden sill.
I try to focus on the laptop screen, but my hands are shaky as I open the downloaded folder. Dozens of files appear. Xander’s long, tan finger moves across the screen as he counts them. He sighs. “We have enough documents to write an entire history book on Thaddy Daddy.”
“Hopefully chapter one has all the answers.”
I double-click the first image. It’s the same illustration of Thaddeus Gregor and his four adult children. They look like any other colonial family from a high school textbook. I press the arrow key to flip through the files at rapid speed.
“Wait,” Xander says, nudging me. “You’re going too fast. Go back. I read a lot, but I can’t read that fast.”
“I’m looking for a drawing without the other girl so we can see when she disappeared,” I explain, licking my lips as I continue clicking. “We need to figure out the order of events. Once we have the date we can—”
“But you already skipped something important.” Xander pushes my hand aside and smacks the left arrow key so hard my thighs vibrate from the force. “It’s not always about numbers, Stetson. Look past the obvious.”
I blink at the screen. It’s a rough black-and-white sketch of an old woman hunched under the weight of a pile of sticks, or hay, or firewood. Her shadow stretches across an open field.
“I don’t recognize her from the family pictures,” I say. I read the caption:
Abigail Mattson upon the Gregor Preserve after fleeing her home in Ridley Township, now Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
Xander’s fingers tighten around my arm just as rain starts to patter against the window.
“What?” I glance down at his grip. My phone is an inch from his face. His breathing suddenly goes uneven.
He scratches his neck before flipping the screen toward me. “I think I know why Louise disappeared.”
I scan a list of internet search results he pulled up for Abigail Mattson.
Abigail Mattson, a Puritan minister’s daughter, was one of two Pennsylvania women tried for witchcraft in 1683, nine years before the Salem Witch Trials.
The other, Louise Gregor, was the daughter of a well-known Quaker leader.
Accusations included bewitching, cursing, and killing livestock and plants, and appearing to townspeople in spectral form.
Both were exiled from local communities.
My body stiffens. A bolt of lightning escapes from the clouds and illuminates Xander’s horrified face. Rain hits the window in heavy, tapping bursts like fingers drumming to be let inside.
A five-pointed star enclosed within a circle is all over the internet image results. “What’s this picture?” I ask, pointing to the screen with a shaky finger.
“It’s a pentacle,” Xander answers. “It says it’s a popular symbol among witches used in magical evocation.”
“So we were right. We’re not dead but . . . cursed.”
He drops my phone, then swallows. “Do you think we could get those stuffed animals from the closet?” His lips tremble. “I need to squeeze something.”
I nod, unable to blink.
He tosses me Pikachu. I hand him Simba. Without asking, he slides under my comforter. I set the laptop aside, ending our investigation for the night, and slip under the covers beside him. The screen locks, plunging the room into blackness.
In any other moment like this, I’d be reaching for my earbuds to leave my house and escape into someone else’s story.
But I’ve lost track of them like a loose balloon at the park.
And right now, I don’t care to find them.
Not when Xander is inches away. His soft breaths are like comforting baby coos.
More lightning flashes, just enough for me to see his wide eyes staring back at me.
Neither of us says anything.
Neither of us looks away.