Our Crooked Hearts
Melissa Albert
To my wonderful, fiercely loving mother,
who is not the mother in these pages.
If I ever wrote you into a book,
you’d be a heroine.
A nightmare is witchwork.
—ELIZABETH WILLIS, “THE WITCH”
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
The suburbs
Right now
We were going too fast. Too close to the trees, weeds feathering over our headlights, whisking away.
“Nate.” I gripped the passenger seat. “Nate.”
Fifteen minutes ago we were at an end-of-year party, jumping up and down with our hands on each other’s shoulders, and all the time I was thinking, I should break up with him. I should do it now. I have to break up with him now. Then he cupped my face in his hands and told me he loved me, and I was too startled to tell even half a lie.
I followed him out of the house, over the lawn, into his car, still saying all the useless things you say when you’ve bruised someone’s ego and they think it’s their heart. He slammed too hard into reverse, then sloshed over the curb peeling away, and still it took me a block to realize he was drunk.
At a stoplight he fumbled with his phone. For a few taut seconds I considered jumping out. Then he was off again, an old Bright Eyes song blasting and the wind tearing it into pieces. The music stuttered as he swerved onto the single-lane road that wound through the forest preserve. Trees closed in and my hair whipped to fluff. I closed my eyes.
Then Nate shouted, not a word but a sharp, surprised syllable, cutting the wheel hard to the right.
The moment between swerving and stopping was weightless as a roller coaster drop. I rocked forward and my mouth clashed hard with the dash.
When I licked my teeth I could taste blood. “What the hell!”
Nate turned off the car, breathing hard, craning to look past me. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
He opened his door. “I’m getting out.”
The car was sprawled across the narrow strip between the road and the trees. “Here? Are you serious?”
“Stay if you want to,” he said, and slammed the door.
There was a Taco Bell cup in the center console with an inch of meltwater in it. I swished it over my teeth and swung my legs out of the car, spitting blood onto the grass. My lip felt tender in the loamy air.
“Hey!” I called. “Where are you going?”
Nate was slipping into the trees. “I think she went this way.”
“She? Who?”
“How did you not see her? She was standing in the middle of the road.” He paused. “Completely naked.”
My breath caught as I considered the paths you could take to end up in the woods at three in the morning, female, naked, and alone. Toothy grasses trailed over my shins as I waded in behind him. “Did you recognize her? Was she hurt?”
“Shh,” he said. “Look.”
We stood on a rise above the creek that ran through the trees, which could be shallow as a pan or deep enough to kayak in, depending on the rains. Just now it was somewhere in the middle, waist high and churning along beneath a gibbous moon. I knew it was about that high because the girl we were following was kneeling in it, submerged to her shoulder blades.
She was, in fact, nude. Hair center-parted and long enough that the moving water tugged her head back. I couldn’t see her face, but the rest of her was an almost electric shade of pale. There was nothing nearby to signify she hadn’t dropped to Earth from a star, or risen from a crack in a hill. No shoes on the shore, no cell phone on a balled-up shirt. The sight of her was out of a dream, almost.
Her hands were moving over her skin in this profoundly unsexual way, squeezing it, slapping it, like she was beating the feeling back in. She was making these guttural sounds I had no words for. Crying, I guessed.
I’d almost forgotten about Nate when he dug an elbow into my ribs and grinned, mean and quick. He thumbed his phone’s flashlight on and held it out like a torch.
Her head twisted and I saw that she was around our age, maybe a little older, eyes dilated and mouth still curling around the end of a smile. She hadn’t been crying. She’d been laughing.
Nate meant to make her feel exposed, but I knew he was really doing it to me, because it was shitty and he wanted to be shitty to someone right now. I could’ve left him, but if I were her I’d be more scared of a dude by himself. And she might need help. I was ready to offer it when she spoke first.
“Come out.” Her voice was low, smudged and hardened by some unplaceable accent. It rose into a singsong. “Come out, come out, whoever you are.”
She rose like a backwoods Venus, dirty creek water running out of her hair, down her body, beading through her serious seventies bush. She whistled, piercing and clear. “I said show yourselves, motherfuckers.”
She was naked, she was alone, she couldn’t even really see us, but just like that we were the ones who were afraid. I felt the tremor in Nate as he saw how this was gonna go. “Fuck this,” he muttered.
The girl stepped onto the bank. She was large-framed and underfed, her hair a sticking mermaid curtain, but the thing I couldn’t look away from was how she held herself, without the barest awareness of her body. Like she was a baby, or a bird.