Chapter Six
SIX
I STAND THERE, FROZEN IN the yard. Pain slicing through my chest like a sickled blade until my mother pokes her head out the back door and tells me the final guest has gone.
Numbly I amble up the porch steps and through the kitchen.
I’m stiff. Weary. My head feels full of storm clouds, and the pressure radiates down the back of my neck and across my shoulders.
My mother is no better. She grunts something unintelligible and leaves, presumably to smother today’s pain with Real Housewives.
When I’m finally, blessedly alone, I stand in the kitchen and turn in a slow circle, surveying the mess.
Discarded flutes of half-drunk champagne, little ceramic plates littered with crumbs, balled-up napkins and trays of unfinished food.
The cloying smell of nearly-rotting flowers shoved into cheap glass vases, cards filled with platitudes tucked between their wilting petals.
I prop my elbows on the island and pile my curls atop my head.
Looking out into the night-darkened panes of the French doors, I sigh.
My makeup is all smudged, and my right dress strap has slipped over my shoulder.
My feet hurt from standing all day, and there’s a dull ache throbbing under each of my eyes.
And that throbbing is made all the worse when I remember tomorrow’s looming deadline to accept or reject the offer to attend BMA.
I pull a spoon out of the drawer and slide the half-finished dish of banana pudding toward me. I’ve barely eaten a thing all day, and several sneaky glasses of sparkling wine are making me feel a bit faint.
Shoving a heaping spoonful of the sweet dish into my mouth, I let the handle dangle from my lips as I slide onto the cracked vinyl seat of the barstool and pull out my phone.
The thing about Earnest and Black Mountain Academy is that, despite the rumors woven by the locals and the begrudging way they cross the threshold of its gates to attend church and town meetings in Lee Chapel, it’s always been for the people who really belong here—who spend their days in the village at the foot of the school, in and out of shops, their whole world cast in its shadow.
Never mind the legends that plague the woods: The whispers about bodies piled under the foundation of the church, or the vicious, hungry wildcats with strangely human eyes, or wolves of smoke and ash.
Never mind the Indigenous lore we don’t even talk about for fear of bringing life to nightmares beyond our comprehension.
But that’s just Appalachia. That’s just what happens when you live on one of the most ancient mountain ranges in the world. That’s just a part of what it means to come from Earnest.
And despite all this—because of all this—I love it. And all I’ve ever wanted was for it to love me back. All I’ve ever wanted is to feel like I finally, really belong here too.
I scroll through BMA’s surprisingly robust social media profiles.
I take my time, inspecting every photo and video and caption, staring into the vacant eyes of every prep-school teen deemed marketable enough to grace their feed.
My heart squeezes when I come across pictures of the football team.
I swipe quickly past Malachi’s photo, reddened face smudged with eye black, but I can’t seem to flick Lucas’s away quite so easily.
I try to convince myself that they have nothing to do with why I want to attend the school, but I can’t ignore the pang in my chest as I take in Lucas’s sun-darkened skin, deepened from its usual golden brown. The raven-black shade of his lashes, a striking contrast to his icy-blue eyes.
Before, Lucas was like a brother to me, ’cause we’re more alike than not. Opposites so opposite, we’re nearly the same. A Leo to my Cancer, he’s always made me feel safe in the way he’s just as passionate, just as loud, and just as crazy as me.
And Malachi—he was our constant. He was our Scorpio, our voice of reason. He was the sun, yanking us into his gravitational pull. Until last summer, there was no room for Lucas and me to see each other any other way.
Frustrated, I punch the X over Lucas’s photo with my finger and open a new window before tapping the school’s name into the search bar.
To be honest, I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.
Maybe I’m just desperate for a sign. Some flashing neon monstrosity that takes away the pressure in my chest. That lightens the load of this responsibility.
Dread fills me as I scan the search results.
Missing Student Reported at Local Boarding School
Teen Last Seen on Private School Campus, Nowhere to Be Found
Faculty Pleads with Local Community as Search for Missing Student Continues
I bite the inside of my cheek. The missing posters plastered all over downtown. My eyes unfocus as I read article after article about the girl who disappeared from campus last school year. Fiona. It’s been nine months, and there are still no leads. No witnesses.
No one knows a thing.
Apparently Fiona is from out of state and was awarded a merit-based scholarship and, according to faculty, appeared to be thriving prior to her disappearance.
However, the articles contend, this disappearance follows a long history of gruesome accidents and mysterious missing persons cases that plague the small private academy hidden in the dense forests of the Blue Ridge.
I wrap my arms around my chest in a futile effort to alleviate the chill coursing through me.
When the articles lead me nowhere, I switch over to the only online forum I can find about the case. The comments are not encouraging.
QueenofDarkness69: i heard that the school is haunted
hellogoodbye: yeah i’ve heard the same. something abt the woods?
carbonfiberfighter: no. Witches
QueenofDarkness69: witches?\
hellogoodbye: seems sus
QueenofDarkness69: like the woods are haunted by witches or the girl is a witch?
carbonfiberfighter: yes
hellogoodbye: AKSASKHAKSJAKS WAIT EXPLAIN
QueenofDarkness69: carbon?? Hello?
QueenofDarkness69: u can’t leave us hanging like this!!!
QueenofDarkness69: hello?!
hellogoodbye: all I know is that BMA is sketchy af…
Witches. The word reverberates in my head long after I leave the kitchen and go upstairs, slipping into the white porcelain claw-foot tub filled with lavender bubble bath.
In Appalachia you grow up knowing to come inside once the porch light clicks on.
You know not to answer if you hear your name called from the depths of the woods, to ignore the whistles that sometimes ring out at night.
But the Lee Valley Witches are a local fairytale.
A myth. Even Gigi scoffed whenever they were mentioned.
Offended that something as ridiculous as a devil-worshipping coven of witches is what people latched on to, when according to Gigi, there was real magic in the world. In the stars.
Though the stories of my childhood have all faded into still images of Gigi’s face as she whispered me to sleep, her love of astrology is ever present.
She swore up and down that the stars can tell us the future.
They can guide us. That it was ancient blood magic, the way people like us can connect to them.
My head is full of signs, of traits, compatibility, charts, and constellations, but she was wrong.
The stars don’t whisper to me like they did to her.
They don’t call to me. Not the way she wanted them to.
Not the way Earnest does. But I couldn’t look her in the face and tell her that.
I couldn’t bear the thought of letting her down, of severing the very thread she believed connected us.
So like I’ve found myself doing more and more recently to bury every bad feeling filling me up inside, I lied.
And now that she’s gone, there can be no forgiveness for that sin.
My grandmother always told me that Earnest was mine for the taking.
That the land was ours. That our ancestors built this town whether anyone wants to acknowledge that fact or not.
She knew how much I love it here, dreamt with me of the day I got to hold the keys to Willow Estate in my hands, when I’d get to add my own lifetime of memories to our family’s legacy.
But BMA was off the table. A nonstarter.
And maybe that’s it. Maybe that was the thing that really did it.
Really sealed my fate. For as much as my grandmother was my whole world and I was hers, the truth about Black Mountain Academy would always be a wedge between us, and I just want to know why.
What is so rotten about it? Why, if it’s so bad, did we trek up there every third Wednesday and sit in the chapel for town meetings?
Why did crossing those gates steal my breath?
When the water is well past cool and my skin is all shriveled and stinging, I let the tub drain and climb out, wrapping a striped towel around my torso.
Or rather, as much as I can anyway, with the bottom corners splayed apart where my hips widen.
I slap on my skin care and tuck my curls beneath a satin bonnet before pulling on a nightgown and padding to the window.
The military-grade binoculars still rest on the edge of the curved bench, and I grab them, peering into the glowing square across the way.
In the distance through the opening in the trees, Malachi sits against his headboard, nose tucked between the pages of a book. Aslan’s fat, orange belly rises and falls lazily beneath his hand.
Like he can sense me, he slams the book closed and stands, Aslan’s mouth widening in protest. I shrink back but straighten as he saunters to the window and flattens his palm against it.
Tension blooms a sharp sting between my shoulder blades as he flips his hand over, his middle finger springing up as he uses his other hand to yank the curtain closed, blocking me out.
Whatever, I think as I turn from the window and slip under the covers.
The last time I saw Malachi Matsoukas, he broke my heart. Now my grandmother is dead, and there’s nobody to blame but god and time. Thankfully, I have enough anger inside me for all the above.
I stare unblinking into the night sky, allowing my mind to empty. Polaris, the North Star, twinkles like a taunt, and I turn my back to it, rolling onto my stomach and tucking my arms beneath my pillow.
When I asked the stars to save Gigi, nothing happened.
So why do I still yearn to hear their call?