The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(27)

The floor was spotless, the sleigh bed made up with swagged cream sheets, but the walls, teeming with bright celebrity teeth and yards of shiny hair, made the place feel hectic. I thought Ellery felt the same, because he turned on a side lamp and switched off the overhead. The hot riot of faces receded into gloom.

“Who gets the bed?” I asked. Nice guys like Finch don’t let troubled girls like me take the floor, usually. But you never know.

He gave me a weird look. “You get the bed. Ten to one there’s a trundle under there. Or a Dora the Explorer sleeping bag in the closet.”

It was Betty Boop, but I still gave him credit. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth in the adjoining white-and-rose-gold bathroom, and contemplated a shower. But the idea of getting clean just to climb back into dirty clothes was too depressing. Once I was tucked into Courtney’s pretty bed, I wriggled out of my uniform skirt and folded it on top of the pillow next to my head.

“Lights out?” Finch said. He was lying on top of the sleeping bag fully clothed, his hands propped behind his head.

I nodded, and he reached back to flick off the lamp. The vaporous light of old streetlamps filtered in around the window shades. Somewhere in the house, a heater whooshed to life. The feeling of settling into an unfamiliar house was a familiar one. I closed my eyes and let myself pretend, for one long minute, that it was my mother lying on the floor beside me. The pain around my heart expanded, sharp and hot as a supernova, and I rolled over to breathe into the sheets.

I knew the sounds of someone trying to hold back tears in the dark, and I knew I was making them. If Finch tries to comfort me, I’ll smother him with Courtney’s Eiffel Tower pillow.

He didn’t. I counted to ten, twenty, fifty. The counting worked like Novocain, like it always did. Finally, I rolled onto my back again and stared up at the ceiling.

“There’s one weird thing I haven’t told you,” I said into the quiet.

Finch’s head tilted toward me.

“There’s someone else who might be following me.”

“Besides the guy at the diner?”

“Yeah.” I stayed quiet a moment, trying to decide how to say it without sounding melodramatic. “When I was little, a guy, um. Took me. Abducted me. He didn’t hurt me or, you know, anything. But I’m pretty sure I saw him at the café where I work.”

I wasn’t pretty sure, I was certain, but felt glad I hedged my bets when Finch shot up to sitting. “Holy shit. Did he do anything to you?”

“No, no way. He didn’t talk to me, he didn’t come near me. I just saw him. Then he ran away.”

Slowly he subsided back onto his sleeping bag. “He really didn’t … I mean, when he kidnapped you…”

“He never touched me. He asked me to get in his car, and I did. I was a kid. He told me stories and fed me pancakes.”

Finch’s response was sharp. “What stories?”

“I don’t remember. I remember liking them, though. And he told me he was taking me to Althea, so.” I thought of the things he’d left behind, now tucked into the bottom of my bag. The feather, the comb, the bone.

“Shit. What if he was … what did he look like?”

“Red hair, nice face. Smart-looking. He looked like an English teacher, but without the tweedy clothes. And he looks exactly the same now, ten years later. Like, ageless.”

“Hinterland.” His voice wrapped around the word like it tasted good. It set my teeth on edge, made me want to hold my secrets closer to my chest.

I was jealous of him, I realized. Jealous of the way he could love Althea—uncomplicated, a fan’s adoration. Envy lodged in my chest like a chunk of green apple. “Why do you love it?” I asked. “Althea’s book.”

I heard him shift on the floor. It couldn’t have been that comfortable down there.

“You know how fairy tales are, like, told and retold?” he said, his voice soft. “And they all fit into these certain types, and you can find a dozen versions of ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ or ‘The Juniper Tree’ or whatever?”

I nodded, because I did know. I’d read them all.

“I always found that comforting. I liked formulas. I liked narrative arcs I could predict. I liked that my dad still kissed my mom when he got home, on the lips, like in a sitcom. I liked doing stuff the same way every day and reading stories I could take apart into pieces and never really being surprised by anything. I was anxious, I guess. I liked structure.”

The rat-a-tat talk of Adult Swim bled through the floorboards. I could pick out a word here and there.

“Then my parents got divorced, and my dad and my therapist gave me loads of books about kids with divorced parents, and kids who were mad at the world, but all that anger and uncertainty made it worse. And I thought, like, boohoo, my life sucks, all that. Can’t get worse. But haha, the universe was like ‘Fuck that,’ and she—my mom—she died. Um. She killed herself.”

I knew it was coming, but the words still took a chunk out of me. I stayed very still when he said them, because I didn’t know what else to do.

He breathed in and out, soft. “And my friends didn’t know what to say to me, and my dad didn’t know what to do with me, so it was pretty much me and books. But I didn’t want the touchy-feely tragedy crap my therapist gave me to make me feel like I was less alone. I wanted that distance. I wanted that uncaring, ‘here’s your blood and guts and your fucked-up happy ending’ fairy-tale voice. But, like, the Andrew Lang stuff wasn’t cutting it for me anymore.