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He slides out of the sleeping bag and just as quickly pushes throughthe slice in the tent. Moving through it feels special somehow. Monumental. Like he’s being reborn.
Billy takes a few steps toward the forest before pausing. He feels no sadness. Already he’s forgotten most of what Ethan said to him. He only remembers a few key words.
Weirdo. Freak.
He doesn’t blame Ethan for calling him those things. They’re the truth, after all. He is a weirdo. He is a freak. Which is why he thinks the ghost came for him. It sensed that Billy is a kindred spirit and came all this way to announce that he isn’t alone. That there are others just like him.
And Billy knows exactly where to look for them.
The Hawthorne Institute.
A place he can return to anytime he wants.
Which is why Billy quietly continues to the forest’s edge. He didn’t think to put on shoes when he left the tent. Now it’s too late to go back and fetch them. It might wake Ethan, and then Billy will have to explain what’s happened and where he’s going. Not a good idea. Although it’s not a short walk to the falls and the Hawthorne Institute, it’s manageable, even in bare feet.
Before entering the woods farther, Billy allows himself a brief backward glance toward Ethan’s tent and then his own house. He’s not sure when he’ll return to either, or if he’ll be back at all. He has no idea what the ghosts have in store for him.
When Billy finally turns away from his house and his best friend, it’s not with fear, sadness, or regret but with fondness. He’s grateful for every moment he’s spent with his family and friends because it’s led him to this.
Billy starts to push through the woods, eager to find out what awaits him on the other side. He’s so eager that when he reaches the road bisecting the forest, he’s unaware of the headlights popping over the horizon in the distance.
Or the car careening through the darkness.
Or the teenager behind the wheel, nervous because it’s late and she shouldn’t be driving at all. Not without a license. Not with several drinks making her brain fuzzy.
As the car gets closer, Billy steps into the road, his eyes focused only on his destination, and how when he reaches it, he’ll be accepted at last.
THIRTY-FIVE
“It was an accident.”
A puzzled look crosses Ashley’s face. Like she didn’t mean to say it. Like it’s not her speaking but some other person forcing the words out. A ventriloquist. A demon. But now that she’s talking—and now that Andy has set Henry back on the outcropping’s solid ground—she keeps going, even though I don’t want to hear any of it.
“I need you to believe me,” she says, looking at me but addressing all of us. “I never would have hurt Billy on purpose. It just happened, and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
The words come faster now, riding the rush of confession.
How she went to a party with her friend Tara, driving them there in her mother’s car despite not yet having a driver’s license.
How Tara had hooked up with some guy named Steve Ebberts and Ashley got angry and left without her.
How she was buzzed, not drunk, because a drunk person wouldn’t have had the foresight to avoid the cops by taking only backroads home.
How one of those roads was the one that cut through the forest.
How she was speeding down it, worried about getting caught by her parents, paying more attention to the dashboard clock than the road itself.
How maybe shewasdrunk and that’s the reason she didn’t see a deer in the middle of the road and careened right into it.
How afterward she pounded the brakes and screeched to a stop and looked in the rearview mirror, the road behind her glowing crimson from the car’s taillights.
How she unhooked her seat belt. Slowly. And got out of the car. Slowly. And crept around it. Slowly. And saw that it wasn’t a deer she’d hit.
“It was Billy,” she says, her voice melting into a sob.
The more Ashley talks, the worse the story gets. Every word brings a spike of pain to my chest. Like nails being hammered into my heart.
She tells us about seeing Billy in some brush on the side of the road and knowing immediately he was dead. She tells us about screaming, then crying, then crawling to his side and cradling him and telling him she was sorry, so deeply sorry.