The Lighthouse Witches(28)

They all shake their heads, resignedly. Saffy pouts, annoyed that nobody else has taken the cue to rib their teacher. Cowards.

An older boy leans into her. Brodie. “Impressive,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for ages for someone to stand up to that mean old bitch.”

Her chest fills with a warm glow, the kind that follows approval. She smiles broadly at him, and he winks. He’s handsome. She noticed him the first day she started school, but up close his beauty is striking. He’s Rowan’s boyfriend, and so she hasn’t paid him any mind. But Rowan’s sitting with another girl on the other side of the group. Maybe they’ve broken up.

She doesn’t hear what Mrs. McGrath says next, and she doesn’t quite see the page so clearly, either—suddenly Brodie’s proximity to her has made the world swampy, underwater somehow.

“I’m writing about butterflies,” she hears Rowan announce. “About how the caterpillar changing into a butterfly is a metaphor for me becoming who I want to be.”

“Very good, Rowan,” Mrs. McGrath says. “Though please do write in silence? You use up your creative energy by explaining your project.”

My project, Saffy thinks. Creative energy. She scribbles on the page, keeping Brodie firmly in her field of vision. He looks up at her every now and then. He’s seventeen, she remembers. He has stubble on his jaw and curly brown hair.

“I’m going to divide you all into small groups,” Mrs. McGrath says. “I’ll assign you a part of the forest to explore so you don’t waste time chatting.” Saffy finds herself in a group with Brodie and the weird twins, Fia and Fen, who don’t talk to anyone but each other. They’re assigned to a vague part of the forest that looks spray-painted with neon-green moss. She remembers that sphagnum moss is an antiseptic, that the Celts used it to pack their wounds after battle. Soldiers in World War One did the same. She likes to cling on to bits of information like that, the type that links the ancient past to the near-present. It makes the strangeness of the present less strange.

Mrs. McGrath tells them to do pencil rubbings of five different kinds of leaves and name the tree from which they came, then write a poem from the perspective of each tree that identifies how it grows, its fruit or leaves, and what happens to it during each season. To the others, this appears an easy task, but Saffy has no clue. Birds, she knows about, but trees? She can just about name five—oak, birch, fir, cherry, pine—but identify them? Not a chance.

“You OK?”

She looks up to find Brodie standing over her. The twins have slunk off, leaving her and Brodie alone in a clutch of towering conifers. Immediately, blood rushes to her face, her heart catapulting in her chest. For a moment, Jack’s face sweeps across her mind, and she feels a pang of guilt.

“Yeah,” she murmurs weakly. “Just . . . trying to remember the name of this one.”

“That’s a maple,” he says.

She rises to her full height. Saffy’s tall, five foot eight, but Brodie looks down at her, making her feel tiny.

“You lived in the city, didn’t you?” Brodie says.

She nods.

“I was born in Glasgow. West End.”

“West End,” she repeats.

He grins. “I couldn’t tell an elm from a monkey puzzle when I came here.”

“Monkey puzzle?”

He raises his dark eyes to the trees around them, his face lit in pearlescent afternoon light that leaks through the canopy. It’s a scene that reminds her of one of those Dutch paintings, as though the gods in Mount Olympus have spotted one of their own.

“No monkey puzzles in this wood. That there’s an elm, though.” He bends to retrieve a leaf. “See? Looks like nettle leaves. It’s a hermaphrodite, that tree.”

She swallows. Is he mocking her or being serious? “Shut up.”

He looks at her, wounded, and she wants to collapse to the ground and beg forgiveness.

“I mean, a hermaphrodite?” she says, backpedaling. “I didn’t know trees had genitals.”

He laughs, and she laughs, too, but it’s a desperate, kill-me-now laugh. “It means that the flowers of the tree have both female and male reproductive parts. No genitals.”

“That’s a relief. Can you imagine how awkward that would be? A forest full of penises and vaginas?”

Shut up, Saffy, she tells herself, wanting to die. Shut. Up.

“Imagine,” he says, and he holds her gaze a moment too long. He is dissolving her into a kind of vapor, one cell at a time. Never in her whole life has she seen such lips.

She looks away, embarrassed. “I, uh, read that this place has some kind of history. Involving witches?”

“Yeah. That’s what they say.”

She takes a breath, willing herself to stop overthinking her every movement. “I read that they burned about four thousand witches here in Scotland. Or, you know, women.”

“I think some of them were men.”

“Yeah, like two.”

“Well, yeah. Not all of them were burned on Lòn Haven.”

“Obviously,” she says, then flushes red.

“You’re staying at the Longing, aren’t you?” Brodie says, and she nods. “Do you know what the Longing’s built on?”

She’s puzzled. “Rock?”