Page 3 of You Belong Here

Delilah had taken to calling my parents Doc and Hal.

I wasn’t sure if it was their idea, but knowing my mother, she would’ve found this charming, delightful.

Precocious. A breath of fresh air. Maybe she missed being known as Doc by all her students now that she was retired.

When I was growing up, there had been a rotating group of upperclassmen who’d come over for family-style dinners on Friday nights, with a new topic of conversation each week.

Even when I was young, I was encouraged to participate.

If nothing else, my parents had taught me to develop strong opinions and prepare to defend them.

I had learned to hold my own, regardless of my age.

I had also honed a stubbornness early; seen conversations as something to win.

“There it is,” Delilah said, just as the sign for Wyatt Valley came into view.

I tried to focus on the things I loved about this place—because once upon a time, I did.

I loved this place fiercely. The town was set in the foothills, tucked against the Blue Ridge, where the haze drifted down into the valley and hovered over the trees.

It was hard not to appreciate the clarity of the view, the distinct ridgeline in the distance.

Something I could trace like my own heartbeat.

I could feel Delilah’s gaze on me instead of the road. I wondered if she had ever clocked the view herself, noticed the way it matched the tattoo on my wrist, hidden under the wide strap of my watch—the number of peaks like a barcode transporting you to this one place, from this one view.

But she was just looking at my grip on the steering wheel, white knuckles and blanched fingertips.

Her fingers drummed against her knee, as if my nerves were transferring to her. As if she could feel it, too—a sense of dread with no apparent cause.

Maybe it was the unnatural stillness of the place. The silence. The way the flags hung down from the front porches and the leaves on the trees seemed eerily static, like you were moving through a movie set.

I lowered the windows, just for a sense of movement, felt the hot rush of humidity pushing in, sensed a wavering of air over the tar-black pavement—an illusion in the stillness.

There are two states of being in Wyatt Valley: the stillness, when the fog settles like a cocoon, and the tree branches hang slack, and nothing stirs; and the howling, when the wind funnels down from the mountain like a cry in the night, first the leaves spiraling, then the snow swirling in eddies up and down the terrain.

In town, we used to await the first howling, welcome it like a ritual.

For us, it marked the unofficial turn of the season, ushering in the fall.

The stillness always made me antsy, like I was slowly being suffocated.

Even the arrival of a new batch of students each year couldn’t shake things up on its own.

There were just over a thousand undergrads on campus, and they stayed largely behind the iron gates up on the hill. When they spilled out, they generally kept to the first perimeter, with the places that had been built and dedicated to them. But the town sprawled downward through the valley.

We drove past the fixtures that hadn’t changed in all the time I’d been gone: the town square, with its maze of streets and restaurants in a grid; and the old sign for Cryer’s Quarry, now with a chain hung across an unpaved access road, though I knew there was a shortcut by foot—a hiking path branching off from the parking lot behind the deli.

Instead of pointing these out to Delilah, I felt the sharpness of twenty years prior.

On the hill in the distance, I saw the campus where I’d spent so much of my youth, and thought: The spot where the smoke rose over the trees, ash falling over fresh snow.

I pulled onto my parents’ street, two blocks from campus, and thought: The corner where Adalyn Vale was last tracked before disappearing, never to be seen again.

I was lost in my own memories, so I hadn’t noticed at first how Delilah had leaned forward until her hands were on the dashboard.

I followed her gaze to the end of the block, where my parents’ street intersected with College Lane—which had once been Fraternity Row, before a series of incidents in the nineties led to their systematic shutdown.

The properties had since been annexed back to the town, where they typically housed a rotating assortment of employees and their families.

Now there was a noticeable gap in the row of homes, an empty plot at the T intersection—so that we could see straight through to the edge of campus.

“What happened?” Delilah asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, feeling the unease that came whenever my memory did not line up with reality. “Renovation?” There was always construction happening around campus, and I could see a dumpster beside a heap of wood. But there were people lingering on the other side of the gap, staring.

I pulled up to the curb in front of my parents’ home, half a block from the empty plot. The sun was setting behind the mountains, the sky turning a golden hue, dusk falling.

I heard the distant chime of the bell tower marking the hour, and thought, like I had long ago: Run.