Darkness My Old Friend

it felt like to be young and in love, because he had shown her kindness when others couldn’t be bothered, she made a silent promise to him that she would take what she’d seen that night to her grave. And she would, even though Mack was gone now. She’d keep their secret, no matter who came calling.

When the police knocked on her door all those years ago, she’d told them that she’d seen a black sedan, that Marla Holt had gotten into it and ridden away. She had seen that, many times. The vehicle would come to a stop outside the house, and Marla would run outside and climb in, always dressed up pretty. Once she’d had a small valise. Claudia had seen that, just not the night Marla went missing.

Among all her secrets, her little bits of stored knowledge, this had been her most precious. Watching from her window as the lights went on inside the Holt house, lights she hadn’t seen burning in years, she knew that someone had discovered the truth. And she felt angry, bitter, as though something had been stolen from her.

She shut the blinds and went to bed.

chapter thirty-eight

THE HOLLOWS SUCKS. Willow wrote this in her notebook as Mr. Vance handed back their essays about A Separate Peace. She barely glanced at it as he put it on her desk. An A, of course.

“Nice work, Miss Graves.” She looked up at him, and he smiled at her, the way he used to. And she smiled back. He leaned in to whisper, tapping on her notebook, “It’s not that bad.”

They spent the rest of the class talking about the essay question. Willow stayed silent until the end, when Mr. Vance glanced in her direction.

“Willow wrote an extraordinary essay,” he said. “Would you care to share your thoughts about the book? You’re uncharacteristically silent today.”

Everybody was looking at her in the way they had been for the last couple of days. Everyone, it seemed, knew about her running away, falling into the Black River, being fished out by the police. They thought that she’d been chased by Michael Holt. (In fact it was only Jolie who claimed to have seen him. That’s why she was screaming. But Willow wasn’t sure it was true.) They’d really been chasing Jolie, trying to get her to come in from the rain.

In some rumors Michael Holt had confessed to Willow about murdering his mother. (She’d never even seen him. By the time her mother and Mr. Ivy got her back to the car, he’d been taken away already.) They all knew now that she’d been the one to see him digging in the Hollows Wood. They’d stopped sneering and laughing at her, for some reason. Everyone wanted to talk to her, to hear about that night in the woods. And Willow was happy to tell the tale for them. Finally she had something to say that was harrowing and extraordinary, and not a lie at all.

“I think Gene did knock Fin from the tree on purpose,” said Willow. “He bounced the branch.”

“But they were friends, best friends,” said Mr. Vance.

“True. But sometimes we hurt the people we love, and we do it because something inside us is hurting,” she said. “It doesn’t even have to do with the other person. Sometimes there’s just this ugly, unhappy place inside us. And everything bad-anger, jealousy, sadness-it all lives there.”

Mr. Vance was looking at her so intently that she almost stopped talking. Everyone was looking at her.

“Go on,” Mr. Vance said.

“And sometimes you go there-you live in that place. And when you’re there, you might do and say terrible things. Because things that are good and happy and bright seem ugly and cause you pain. You want to smash those things. You want other people to hurt, too. So you hurt them, even if you love them.”

“Very insightful, Willow,” said Mr. Vance.

She shrugged. “It’s just a book.” When she glanced up at him, he was smiling, but he still looked sad. She was sad, too. He was one of the people she had hurt, and they couldn’t be friends, not like they used to, anymore.

“Story is life, Miss Graves,” he said. She’d heard him say that a million times. She finally understood what he meant.

Out in the hallway after class, Cole was waiting for her. He took her backpack and walked her to her locker.

“How was class?” he asked.

She held up her essay.

“Brainiac,” he said. He leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Want a ride home?”

“I have to ask my mom,” she said. She gave him a roll of her eyes.

“So call her,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

“How was it today?” she asked him.

He shrugged, looked down at his feet. “Fine.” He wasn’t much of a talker.

It was his first day back at school since the night in the woods. His father had been arrested for embezzlement or something like that. And Cole had been reunited with his mother. They were both staying with his stepmother and his half siblings-which Willow thought must be the weirdest possible situation. She tried to imagine her and her mom living with Brenda the stripper. It would not be okay. But Cole seemed happy with it. His mom needed a place; he wanted to stay in The Hollows and be close to Claire and Cameron-and to Willow. So, for now, it worked. When his mom got a good job, they’d get their own place.

“Cole asked if he could give me a ride home,” she said when she reached her mom. The hall was thinning out, people heading to the buses. They started moving toward the door, in case she said no.

“Willow.”

“We’ll come straight there,” she said.

Willow had been sure she was going to be grounded for life after the woods. But instead she and Bethany had stayed up all that night talking. They talked about things they’d never really discussed-the night Willow first ran away in New York City, the lies she’d told that alienated all her friends, how lost she felt, and how much blame she had felt after Bethany’s divorce from Richard. She’d just wanted to disappear, not die, not end her life. She wanted to dissolve, be invisible. It was hard to explain, but her mother seemed to listen and understand.

When Willow had chased Jolie in the rain, trying to get her to come back to the car, she’d slipped and fallen into the water. And after the shock of the cold, panic set in. And as the water took her away from Cole and Jolie, who chased her through the trees and finally fell behind, she screamed for her mother.

In her frightened mind, she believed that her mother could always hear her when she called and would always come for her. That her mother was just like the mom in that story she loved. And she’d realized she believed that because it had always been true; her mom was always there. Even if she did invite Mr. Ivy to dinner. But she also believed that she had to stay close by for her mother to hear her. And Willow had strayed very far. Her mother couldn’t hear her calling for help.

And then her foot got stuck and she was pulled under. She didn’t remember much after that, except opening her eyes on the bank, seeing Jolie and Cole looking at her in horror like they thought she was dead.

She told her mother all this. And her mother, amazingly, didn’t cry. And because she didn’t, because she seemed strong, Willow told her about that dark, angry place she had inside sometimes. The place that helped her understand Gene in A Separate Peace. She’d been in that place when she was so mean to her mom at dinner with Mr. Ivy. She had never told anyone about that.

They went to see Dr. Cooper together the next day and talked to her about what had happened, how they could move forward together in a better way, what they could do to earn each other’s trust. Grounding for eternity was not on the list of things to do.

She was actually breaking one of her promises right now, by calling in to question a rule her mother had made. No riding in cars with boys.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll take the bus.”

“He can meet you here,” she said. “We’ll bake cookies.”

She was about to make some smart comment about how they weren’t three years old and cookie baking had