Page 32 of The Staircase in the Woods

Together,she was about to say, but Matty pulled back for real this time.

One hard step in reverse.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Oh.”

Now: her turn to be disappointed, it seemed.

He said it again—

“I can’t, Laur. You might be okay with this sort of thing, but I have a future to think about. I really—”

This sort of thing,she thought, repeating his words again and again in her head.

“Really what?” she asked, words tinged with bitter root.

He sighed. “Hey! Let’s head back to camp. They’re probably wondering where we went and, um, we can tell some pretty killer ghost stories, right? C’mon.” In his voice, she heard something, though—a sudden distance, like they were two different people now.

No, likeI’msomeone different now, to him.

He moved toward her—

(Her heart quickened.)

—then past her.

Brushing his hand against her arm, her back, as he went.

Fuck,she thought.

Her disappointment gave way to anger.

You might be okay with this sort of thing—

I have a future to think about—

What, like she didn’t? She wanted to scream at him:I’m ambitious, too. I’m smart and I get what I want. I don’t need you, Matty Shiffman.

I can do this all myself.

She let the anger have its moment, then she hit it over the head and threw it in a deep grave, and from that earth she grew a garden of vigorous indifference.

Can’t hurt me if I don’t care, asshole.

“Fuck it,” she said to herself in a happy-bitter voice. She took both of the acid-drop sugar cubes and popped them in her mouth. She letthem melt before crunching the last of the sugar granules between her teeth. Lauren imagined them as tiny bones.Matty’s finger bones,she thought, and it was a dark, insane, totally fucked thought, and she loved it. She laughed like wind chimes in a hurricane and then followed him through the woods, back toward camp.

19

Tales Told, and a Covenant Invoked

So, with Matty and Lauren back, the five of them sat around and told scary stories, as was the way. Not just ghost stories, either, but local weird folklore shit—the Ratfinger Man of Dark Hollow, the glass house cannibals of Haydock Mountain, the eerie ghost lights of Hansell Road, the haunted quarry at Ramble Rocks, even the 120-year-old orchard cult of Henry Hart Golden. Hamish tried to get Lauren to tell them more about her neighbor’s house, which was supposedly haunted—Owen knew a little of it, since her neighbor Scotty (who was older than them by a few years, already off to college) told stories about all his electronics coming on at weird times in the night and how he sometimes heard what he called “angels singing” inside his walls. But she didn’t want to tell anything. She just sat there on a fallen log, knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped so tight around her shins it was like she was trying to disappear inside of herself. Lauren had found her tie-dye sweatshirt and put it on, too, and she peered out from the darkness of its hood. Sometimes smiling, but not in an okay way—and not at anything they were saying or at anything going on around her. Matty, on the other hand, joined in with the rest of the group, laughing and telling stories. Acting even louder and happier than usual.Like he’s putting on a show of it,Owen decided.

All that meant something was up between Lauren and Matty.

They had come back out of the woods not too long after they wentin—upon return, their energy was different. Matty came out ahead, Lauren a good ten steps behind. He seemed troubled then, and she seemed…almost venomously carefree, arms swinging, chin up, but eyes decidedlydown. She plonked herself at the fire and snatched the bottle from Owen’s hand and drank a good glug of the whiskey before giving him a wink and a sneer.

“You okay?” he had asked her.

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