Reese
Inside the cottage smells funky. The walls and floors are all wood. It’s dark and depressing as fuck, because of a lack of
windows and a lack of actual lights. The furniture doesn’t match. A red plaid chair sits beside a mangy blue velvet recliner
that’s seen better days. The sofa is a glorified futon. There are dead flies in the windowsills, an ant trap on the kitchen
floor. The curtains are long and pleated, and I’d bet my life there are spiders living in the curtain folds, making spider
eggs that will hatch one night while we’re asleep, filling the cottage with millions of spider babies.
Emily tries finding a light, which, when she does, turns out to be pointless, because the light the lamp gives off is practically
nonexistent. It’s sunny outside, but that doesn’t matter because the sunlight is not getting past the big trees to reach the
inside of the cottage.
Wyatt tries dropping his stuff just inside the front door, but Emily tells him to take it upstairs. “We’re not going to make
a mess of the cottage the minute we arrive. And someone close the door, please. We don’t need those mosquitoes getting inside,”
she says before going and doing it herself, because none of us is fast enough, because I, for one, am too caught up in grieving
last year’s ocean views and private lanais to even think about closing the door.
Beside me, Wyatt groans. Nolan says, “Would you relax, Emily? We’re on vacation.”
“Am I supposed to carry everyone’s luggage upstairs for them?” she asks. “Am I not on vacation too?”
I don’t know much about parenting, but I do know one thing. You should have a united front. You should at least give the appearance
of being in agreement when it comes to things like where the luggage goes. Otherwise the kids will walk all over you.
“No,” he says, “of course I don’t expect you to carry everyone’s things upstairs. Just give people a minute to get settled.
It was a long drive.”
Wyatt walks away from his backpack. I set my own bags on the floor because if he can, then I can too.
“What’s that smell?” Wyatt asks and I’m glad I’m not the only one who notices.
“It’s just a little musty,” Nolan says, trying to stay upbeat. “We’ll open the windows and air things out.”
Together, we walk up the wooden stairs, where we find three bedrooms and one bathroom on the second floor. “Wyatt, you can
sleep here. And Reese and Mae will sleep in this room,” Emily says, and I poke my head into Mae’s and mine, seeing just one
small bed, which is not happening.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Absolutely not. I am not sleeping with Mae. She hogs the blankets. She kicks.”
“I do not!” Mae argues, crossing her arms against her chest, sulking.
“Yes, you do,” I tell her before looking at Emily and saying, “I am not sharing a bed with her. No. I refuse. She can sleep with Wyatt. Why should he get his own room? I’m the oldest.”
“Because he’s a boy,” Emily says, as if that’s not completely sexist.
“So what?”
“I don’t want to sleep with Wyatt,” Mae cries, turning on the waterworks because Emily falls for it every single time.
“It’s only for a few days, Reese,” Emily says, trying to reason with me, but I’ve already tuned her out because, from the
top of the stairs, I make out a porch just off the main room of the cottage, with a bed that I see through the glass panes
of the door that connects the porch to the rest of the house.
“Never mind,” I say. “Mae can have the room all to herself. I’ll sleep down there.” I turn and make my way down the stairs,
because the idea of being an entire floor away from the rest of them is actually amazing.
Emily sees what I see and decides. “No. You can’t sleep on the porch, Reese. It’s not safe. What if someone breaks in?”
“Good. They’d put me out of my misery then,” I say, bounding down the stairs, not looking back.
“Don’t say things like that, Reese. You are not sleeping down there. You’re sleeping up here with—”
“Just leave her alone,” Nolan says, cutting her off. “Just let her sleep on the porch if she wants to. Who really cares where
she sleeps? It’s not like anything’s going to happen to her.”
Emily’s attention shifts to him. “You know how much I hate it when you do that,” she says, raging as I open the door and slip
out onto the porch, into a world of my own, which is basic—just a small bed pushed up against one side of the room with a
white quilt and one flat pillow, a tiny nightstand, wooden floorboards with a braided wool rug and slack, flimsy screens that
overlook the woods. “You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“You always contradict me in front of the kids. You let them do anything they want. They will never respect me because of
you. She will never respect me because of you. It’s your fault she doesn’t listen to me. I already told her she can’t sleep down there.”
“You can’t control everything she does. Let her sleep on the porch if she wants to. What do you possibly think is going to
happen? She’ll be fine,” he says, and I hate that they do this. I hate when they talk about me like I’m not here, like I can’t
hear them. Like I’m deaf. I tug on the porch door so hard that it slams, and then I drop down on the bed, pulling my legs
into me, wrapping my arms around them, wishing I was anywhere but here.
I go on my phone to distract myself, to see if Skylar ever texted back. There is no Wi-Fi in the cottages, though there’s
free Wi-Fi in the lodge. You’ve got to be kidding me, I said when the lady at the lodge told us. Emily said I should be glad, that this was my chance to disconnect from technology
and enjoy nature, as if that’s something I’d actually like.
Nolan, however, appeased me, saying cellular might work, which it does. Sort of. It takes forever to load so that I don’t
think it’s ever going to. But then it does and I wish it hadn’t because, while there is no text from Skylar, I go to Instagram
and see that she’s posted pictures of herself and another girl, Gracie, in Chicago, at Oak Street Beach, doing things she
and I were supposed to do together, like lying out, playing beach volleyball and eating hot dogs from the concessions stand.
There are stupid little Insta stickers that say shit like Friendship Vibes and BFF Love, and I wonder if it’s for me, if it’s for my sake, if she’s trying to hurt me because she’s still mad at me.
If so, it’s working. Because I do feel hurt.
Jealous. I can’t stand to look at them together and think of all the things I’m missing out on while I’m stuck here.
I get even angrier, thinking that I’ve been replaced—that Gracie is now Skylar’s best friend instead of me, and I realize Skylar never responded to my text from before because she’s been with Gracie all day.
I wonder if she and Gracie saw my text come in together and if, when they did, they laughed, Gracie throwing her pretty blond hair back, rolling her eyes and saying something like Her again?
You should just block her because it’s the kind of thing Gracie would say.
Anger floods me until I feel like I could explode. I see them sitting on
the beach, laughing, Gracie leaning over Skylar’s shoulder to read the text, saying, Good idea, Reese. Yeah. You probably should kill yourself. Before I can take a breath or try to stop myself, I reel back, chucking my phone, watching as it arcs across the room, hitting
a glass lantern by mistake, which was probably my only source of light out here. The lantern falls. It hits the ground hard,
missing the rug by an inch and breaking.
Fuck. Just my luck.
Chunks of glass lie scattered on the floor, but the door to the porch is closed and Emily and Nolan are still fighting anyway;
no one notices the sound of breaking glass.
I breathe in. Out. In. Out.
I look out the window where I just barely make out the lake through the trees. There’s practically a whole forest between
us and the lake. A path cuts through it, some worn, dusty trail that’s been beaten down by people’s feet. Our cottage is probably
the furthest one from the lake, but because of the hill, we see over the trees. Even I can admit it’s pretty, though I’d never
tell Emily or Nolan that. Never.
I’m feeling sorry for myself—wishing myself dead, imagining myself dead, imagining how sorry everyone would be if I was dead—when
all of a sudden I hear movement through the screens.
I look closer. I hold my breath and listen, trying to find the source of the noise. Outside, the trees are still. There is
no breeze.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed.
I stand up, stepping over the broken glass, drifting closer to the screen.
I set my hand on it, feeling the screen give and become looser against the weight of my hand.
I wonder if Emily was right, though I’d rather die before admitting it.
I wonder if someone could easily break into the porch.
There is no door straight to outside, but it wouldn’t take much for them to get in anyway, just a little pressure and the screen would give.
I hold my breath as a boy, about my age, steps out from behind the trees, walking alone in the woods with his hands in the
pockets of his jeans. The world goes quiet. I forget all about Skylar and Gracie on Instagram, and Emily and Nolan in the
next room. Instead, I find myself falling hard, suddenly infatuated with his long, thick brown hair, which is not one of those overdone messy cuts that literally every guy in the world has these days (Wyatt included) with the fringe bangs
that fall forward into the eyes like a llama’s. Instead, his is pushed back so that I can see his face: the thin nose, the
sharp edges of his cheekbones and the jawline that looks like it’s been carved by a sculptor.
All of a sudden, the door to the porch gets thrown open behind me, ricocheting off the opposite wall.
I spin around. “You ever hear of knocking?”
Emily stands there, delivering my bags, disappointment on her face.
“Sorry to scare you, but I asked you not to leave your bags by the door,” she says, setting them down on the floor and then,
because she can’t limit herself to nagging about just one thing, she says, “You’re not going to hide out here for all of vacation.
This is a family vacation. You’re supposed to be with family, not isolating yourself out here.”
“Did I not just spend the whole day in the car with all of you?” I ask.
She can’t argue with that. And besides, I don’t see a single person in the living room besides her anymore. Everyone else
has now shut themselves away too, including Nolan, which tells me that Emily is sad and lonely and she’s projecting.
“You can at least leave the door open so we know that you’re alive.”
“Fine. Leave it open when you go.”
She starts to. But then she sees the broken glass on the floor and my phone lying just beside it and asks, “What happened?
Did you break that, Reese?”
A second later, her eyes rise up to the screens. She doesn’t wait for me to answer either of her first two questions before
she asks, “Is someone out there?” while searching, something outside having caught her attention.
“No,” I unhesitatingly say. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone.”
But he is still there. Emily just doesn’t see him.
Because, when I look for myself, I catch sight of him hidden further in the trees, listening to our conversation, his dark
eyes watching me.