Page 47 of You Belong Here

BEFORE: THE KEY

“What’s the matter?” Adalyn asked when I returned to the dorm, dusk settling. She was plaiting her hair, tying the braids tight.

“That guy Cliff, we had a thing back in high school. Briefly,” I added at her shocked expression, even though that wasn’t exactly true.

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Look at you, full of secrets.”

“I saw him today,” I told her. “He was looking for me. Adalyn, those guys in the truck, they’re coming tonight. They’re going to track us into the woods.”

It was a warning, a gift. The only words Cliff and I had spoken in years: They’re coming.

She turned to me, bemused. “Are you scared of them?” she asked. As if I were something to study, like my mother would do. As if my humanity were a curiosity, my emotion a data point.

I hadn’t learned to mask my thoughts from Adalyn.

I hadn’t learned to hold on to my secrets in the silence.

“I don’t think we should go tonight,” I said.

She frowned briefly, then picked up her black wool hat, turning it so the eyeholes were facing her. “I think,” she began, “that they should be scared of us .”

“They’re not.” They were not the type, which was the problem.

Both Cliff and I understood. The howling was a game for not just the students but the folks in town, too.

Now there was a different undercurrent. The stakes had escalated.

Her necklace, their truck. I’d seen their vehicle crawling through campus.

They knew who we were—where we were. It was their move next.

“Did you get the key?” she asked, maneuvering away from my comment.

I pulled it out from under my sweater, where it hung around my neck.

The ornate, looping design fed through one of my silver chains.

I’d used my father’s access to sneak into the archive room in Beckett Hall during lunch.

I’d opened the case. I’d taken the key from the school.

From my father, the keeper of its history, the holder of its past.

Adalyn smiled wide, then cut the final hole in her hat, the snip of the woven wool crisp and satisfying.

I felt a rush of fear and adrenaline as I watched her pull it slowly over her head, unrolling the fabric to conceal her face, two blond braids extending from the bottom. So that, out of the dark mask, all I saw were a pair of blue eyes and her berry pink lips.

And then the shape of her mouth as she whispered, “Are you ready, Beck?”