3- the dark way home
Deno drives me home from school in his 1999 Chevy Venture minivan. It’s rusty, smelly, and makes an ominous front-end rattle that Deno willfully ignores. What had once been someone’s kid-shuttle is now gutted and sticker-covered, used primarily for hauling musical equipment. He drives Lacey to school since she doesn’t have a car. She bought a hundred-year-old violin, instead.
I sit in the one remaining back seat, thankful that they’re not making me talk. Lacey has the sense to not deconstruct the cafeteria scene. But Deno has difficulty with silent spaces. He likes to fill them with sound—any sound. Even now, his fingers tap the steering wheel to a beat in his head, because the radio stopped working six months ago. I curl up and press against the threadbare seat. Tomorrow will be better. It always is. How long until graduation? Four months and eleven days.
“That was decent of your neighbor,” Deno says. “He didn’t have to say anything to Kiera.”
I close my eyes, wishing the radio worked. “No, he didn’t.”
“Risky, too. Being his first day and all.”
“What’s your point, Deen?” Lacey asks.
“No point.” Deno shrugs. “Just saying he might not be an asshole, that’s all.”
A harsh breath hisses from Lacey’s teeth. “You might have spoken too soon,” she murmurs, pointing to an old black sedan turning down the street toward my neighborhood. “Isn’t that Kiera’s car?”
My eyes fly open and snap to the window. Kiera does drive an old black sedan, along with about a half dozen other kids, but she doesn’t live in my neighborhood. The only reason she’d be here is to give Reece a ride home.
“Nah.” Deno turns into my development right behind the sedan. “See the hockey mask sticker on his bumper? That’s Trevor Bent’s car.”
Lacey squints. “Oh. You’re right.”
“Angie.” Deno swivels, shoots me a curious look. “Am I driving you home today because the new kid saw Kiera’s ugly in the cafeteria?”
Lacey smacks his arm. “I told you, she’s upset.”
“Over the new kid?”
“Over the whole awful thing,” Lacey says. “You are so dense sometimes.”
I relax into the seat with pointless relief. So Reece is getting a ride home from Trevor. That doesn’t mean he isn’t into Kiera. It doesn’t mean anything.
“Geez, Angie.” Deno leans forward to look up through the windshield. “What’s with all the crows in your neighborhood? Someone not bagging up their garbage?”
“What?” I sit up and look out, pulled out of my sulk. Sure enough, there are about a dozen crows flying around the van and the black car in front of us. “There’ve been a lot, lately.” I say it casually, but I don’t like this. I’m very happy to be inside a layer of metal and glass right now.
“They’re quite large for crows,” Lacey adds. “I think they’re ravens.”
“What’s the difference?” Deno asks, braking at a stop sign.
“They’re different species.”
I am about to agree with Lacey, when one of the crows—or ravens—flies up right alongside the minivan. It hooks its claws on the window frame and squawks at me.
“Whoa!” I jerk back, even though I know it can’t get in. The crow cocks its glossy black head at me, as if peering inside. It blinks a round eye and, even through the tinted glass, I can see the bird’s eye is not black, but garnet red. It glitters like a cut gem in the cold afternoon light.
It’s got something—a speck of gold glints in its closed beak. I lean forward to take a better look.
“What the hell is that?” Deno hits the gas and the crow loses its tenuous hold on the window frame. The bird takes to the air and soars into the trees with a rough kraa.
I keep a death grip on the seat, gaze locked on the birds, flying circles around the cars. The sedan pulls into Reece’s driveway. Rock music burns through the seams of Trevor Bent’s car.
Something’s up with those birds. Something not entirely natural. The bunch of them diving at Reece this morning could be explained—the birds might be tame. But the red eyes on that one were too strange to ignore. I’d still like to know what it had in its beak. I didn’t imagine it. I’m beginning to think I didn’t imagine the man with the changing face from this morning, either, and I don’t know what to make of that.
Deno puts the van in park in front of my three-car garage. Lacey gets out to open the sliding side door for me because the handle on the inside is broken.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say to Deno.
“Sure thing,” he says, shaking his head. “You should try driving your own car to school. This hill you live on kills my gas mileage.”
I give Deno a mock salute, and he grins as I climb out of the minivan.
Lacey pauses before getting back inside. She glances at the border of trees between my house and Reece’s. The branches are thick with crows. “There’s something wrong with those birds,” she says in a quiet voice. Her eyes are troubled. Unlike myself, Lacey is a believer in things like omens and signs and superstitions. She likes to think she’s tuned in to the vibes of the world, or something like that.
“They’re birds,” I say.
Her dark eyes narrow. “Well, yeah. I’m just not sure that’s all they are.”
I nod, wishing I could argue with her. “What else do you think they could be?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying it.” She tilts her head toward mine. “So. Are you okay with what happened at lunch today?”
“Yeah.” I hunch my shoulders against the chill and thoughts of Kiera Shaw. “Nothing some time in the basement with my guitar can’t fix.”
She hugs me, a little too tight, then pulls back and turns a leery eye to the sky. “It’s going to rain.”
Not today, it isn’t. “I’ll take anything but more snow.”
Her brow knits. “No, this is different.”
Overhead, the sky is blue. One dark cloud tumbles in amongst the white puffy ones. I stifle a shiver and tug my coat tighter. I have no clairvoyance. I’m not tuned in to the vibes of anything, but I can’t deny the uneasy feeling uncurling through the air like a dark ribbon.
Also, there are facts. Since the Ortley family murders, the neighborhood has been quiet. Nothing strange has happened until the Fernandez family moved in. Along with vibes and omens, I also don’t believe in coincidences.
Upstairs in my room, I toss my backpack on my bed and go to the window. I have a partial view of Reece’s house and notice a few lights illuminate windows as a quiet curl of smoke winds from the chimney. Trevor Bent’s car has left.
My gaze catches on something small, gleaming in the dirt of the flower box outside my window. Gold. I unlock the window and shove it and the sliding screen up enough to reach for the object. Cold air pushes through the narrow space and bites my hand. The begonia stems, which had bloomed there in the summer, look like brown veins trailing over the soil. I reach out and pluck the thing from the dirt. It’s a small gold earring, missing its back. The tarnished setting once held a stone but is now empty. I close the window, locking the cold back outside, and peer at the earring in confusion. It’s not mine. I’m sure of it.
A low krahhh sounds from the deck below. I glance down to see a crow sitting on the railing, looking up at me. It tips its head up and cocks it to the side. It looks pleased with itself, if that’s possible. Logical answers are usually the correct ones, but here, the logical answer is that someone dropped it there. But…who? The only other person who comes to my room with pierced ears is Lacey, and as far as I recall, she has never even looked out my window, let alone leaned out of it.
I swallow hard and glance at the crow. It’s starting to make a racket down there. Um, didn’t that bird have something shiny in its beak when it came to the van window? The crow flaps its wings a few times but doesn’t fly off. One of its wing feathers is pure white. Red eyes and a white feather. That’s…different. I stare down at the bird, working to make sense of this. I suppose it’s possible—remotely—that it put the earring in my flower box for me to find.
With a scowl to the crow, I yank my curtains closed and turn away from the window. I move to throw out the earring, but I hear that gentle krahhh again and drop the gold stud into a glass dish on my dresser. A shiver wiggles down my spine. It may not be wise to throw away gifts from this bird. It’s clearly trying to communicate something.
I collapse on the bed and fling an arm over my eyes. What if that really is an earring of mine I forgot about? I don’t remember owning any gold studs. All my jewelry is silver. Also, I only got my ears pierced four years ago, but hell—I don’t even know anymore. Maybe this is all in my head. I groan into my pillow, because if I’m imagining these things, it’s very bad news for me. What if the mental demons that plagued my mother have finally come for me? She didn’t survive them. Would I?