Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lunch hour always felt vaguely lawless at Woodland High.
The teachers stationed around the cafeteria had long since given up trying to control anything beyond actual fistfights, so the room swelled with the kind of noise that made your skull ache if you tried to focus on anything other than the conversation right in front of you.
I sat straight backed on the tiny round chair beside Emily, peeling the skin from grapes one by one while Lindsey complained dramatically about her chemistry grade across the table.
Andy sat on my other side with one thick arm slung over the back of my shoulders, his knee nudging mine every so often beneath the table as he argued with Morgan about whether raccoons or opossums would survive longer during an apocalypse.
“Raccoons are very intelligent,” Morgan insisted, pointing the same fry she’d been holding for ten minutes at him accusingly.
“That alone puts them above most men.” I noticed she did this any time food was involved—work up the people around her so no one would look directly at her untouched plate.
I’d been eating her lunches in sneaking bites for the past week, and not a single person at our table seemed to notice.
Andy snorted. “Opossums literally play dead. That’s survival instinct.”
“I’m going to actually be dead if this conversation goes on any longer,” Emily muttered beside me.
I smiled faintly, but my attention drifted toward the windows lining the cafeteria wall.
Outside, Autumn had painted everything in shades of browns and oranges.
The trees beyond the parking lot looked like fire against the cloudy sky, their thinning branches black and twisting like veins beneath thin skin. Woodland always looked ugliest in fall.
Summer at least softened things. Kudzu swallowed broken fences whole, and heat shimmered over the roads enough to blur what was rotting underneath.
And in the winter, everything was covered in a sheen of frost that made it sparkle.
But these few months where the weather couldn’t make up its mind and everything was beginning to die was always the worst.
I was halfway through peeling another grape when the cafeteria doors swung open with a metallic groan loud enough to pull my attention up. Cold air swept briefly through the room carrying the smell of wet dirt and pine straw. A girl stepped hesitantly inside, pausing near the entrance.
Morgan noticed her the same time I did. “Hey, Lucky,” she chirped brightly.
The girl looked over at the sound of her name. I recognized her then—I’d seen her beside Shannon O’Kinzy enough times to associate the two of them together automatically. The redhead always looked vaguely out of place, even by Woodland standards. Like she belonged to some other era entirely.
Today she wore red gingham pants cuffed too short at the ankle and a faded yellow T-shirt with a screen printed ladybug stretched tightly across the chest. Her copper hair hung in two uneven braids, frizzing carelessly around her face.
But it was her expression that unsettled me.
Her bloodshot eyes sat behind swollen lids, the rest of her face equally puffy and blotchy. She looked frightened.
Not a dramatic teenage frightened. Not crying-over-a-boy frightened. Something quieter and uglier sat beneath her skin. Her wide eyes darted nervously around the cafeteria before landing on me.
“Hey, Lola,” she said, voice thin. “Um… I was just wondering if you saw Shannon last night?”
The question hollowed my stomach instantly. It was strange how fast the body could recognize danger before the brain caught up. One sentence and suddenly my mouth tasted metallic. The cafeteria noise dulled around the edges, voices blurring together until everything sounded underwater.
“Yeah,” I answered slowly. “He was at youth group.” I glanced automatically toward Andy beside me, seeking confirmation I didn’t really need. He nodded immediately.
“Yeah,” he said. “He was there.”
Lucky twisted her hands together. “He didn’t come home last night.”
Morgan straightened, and Andy’s arm tightened around my shoulders.
I frowned. “You live together?”
Lucky shook her head quickly. “No. He just…” She swallowed hard enough I saw her throat bob.
“He usually comes over after church stuff. I live on the other side of the tree line that divides the crops, so he cuts through the woods.” Her voice started speeding up now, panic slipping through the cracks.
“But he never came over last night. And his mom said he never came home either, so I just thought maybe somebody here saw him after youth group or something.”
There was a tremor in her voice now that made my chest tighten painfully. Morgan reached across the table immediately and took Lucky’s hand. Morgan was always open-hearted in a way that felt almost dangerous in a town like ours.
“Did Miss O’Kinzy call the police?” she asked gently.
Lucky nodded hard. Her eyes had gone glossy. “This morning.” Cold slithered slowly down my spine and I struggled to keep the sympathetic smile pinned to my face.
The woods behind Holy Trinity Baptist Church rose suddenly in my mind with awful clarity.
Tall pines packed shoulder-to-shoulder beneath moonlight.
The dark swallowed sound differently once you stepped far enough inside it.
Woodland kids grew up in those woods. We drank there.
Fucked there. Buried things there. Everybody had gotten lost in them at least once.
But Shannon knew those woods.
Andy shoved his chair back abruptly enough that it screeched across the tile floor. Several heads turned nearby. He was already pulling his phone from his pocket before he fully stood.
“I’m gonna call my dad,” he said immediately, voice firm with the kind of confidence people trusted instinctively. “We’ll get a search party together. He probably just got turned around in the woods.”
Andy rounded the table and stopped in front of Lucky, resting one broad hand carefully against her shoulder.
He looked older suddenly standing there.
More polished. More like Pastor Spires every day.
Sometimes I wondered if boys inherited their fathers mannerisms the same way people inherited eye color.
“We’ll find him,” Andy promised softly. “Okay?”
Lucky nodded fervently, lips trembling.
Then Andy was already walking toward the far corner of the cafeteria where it was quieter, phone pressed to his ear while Lucky hurried anxiously after him like he was the only stable thing in the room.
The silence left behind at the table felt thick.
Lindsey leaned forward and muttered, “Andy really loves to play hero, huh?” Normally I would’ve laughed. Instead, nausea rolled low through my stomach.
I kept thinking about Shannon leaving church the night before. Had I seen him leave? I picked through the memory of stacking chairs with Andy; of our youth leader tossing Andy the keys like he did every Wednesday night, and tried to find the image of Shannon walking out that door.
I could see his long brown hair swaying sideways as he looked back at me over his shoulder, his fingertips trailing over that faded mural on the wall, his mouth forming the words “see you later” without actually making the sounds.
He’d started saying it to me every time we left the church since that first Sunday morning when we’d locked eyes during prayer a few weeks ago. It had become somewhat of a private joke between us, that we’d always make eye contact during prayer.
The rusty shriek of the screen door had slammed shut behind him. His clover-covered notebook tucked beneath his arm. A thought flickered briefly through me then—accusing and ugly enough that I shoved it down instantly before I could fully examine it.
Beside me, Emily reached for my wrist beneath the table and squeezed once. “You okay?” she asked quietly.
I startled slightly. I hadn’t realized how still I’d gone. “I’m fine,” I lied automatically. “I have to get to the library.”
The big box heater mounted to the wall in the corner breathed out dry heat that smelled faintly scorched, like burnt dust. Mixed with it was the sweet scent of aging library books—the glue in their bindings melting soft in the warmth.
The two smells together created something falsely comforting.
I felt like I was sitting inside a set of lungs that did not belong to me, waiting to be coughed out.
I stood tucked into a narrow aisle between shelves with my forehead pressed against a row of encyclopedias, trying to steady my breathing against the cracked leather spines.
Beside me sat the cart of books I was supposed to be shelving untouched except for the copy of Wuthering Heights I’d been anxiously turning over in my hands for the last ten minutes.
I couldn’t stop replaying the sound—that awful crack from the woods the night before. The rock leaving my hand, then hitting something.
My stomach rolled hard enough that I pressed my fist against my sternum, begging myself to get it together before Mrs. Morgan came looking for me.
Andy had laughed when I’d frozen in the cornfield, his breath warm against my throat while the stalks swayed black around us in the dark. Probably a deer.
“It was a deer. It was a deer. It was deer.” I whispered to myself repeatedly, willing it to be true.
If I had known it was Shannon watching—I cut the thought off, unwilling to go down that path.
The lights overhead buzzed sharply, drilling into the base of my skull.
In the media room I could hear the printer as it spat paper in short mechanical bursts while students whispered over keyboards in the main area.
The normalcy of it all made me feel crazier somehow.
Like the world should’ve paused for this.
“Lola?”
I startled violently enough to slam my shoulder into the shelf behind me, my heart leaping straight into my throat.