The Creeping

“Ha,” Zoey scoffs. “Amateurs. That’s exactly why I wore my swimsuit under my dress.” She pulls her sundress up and over her head.

The fire rages on the rocky shore; the sky is open and empty above the massive tower of flames. The surrounding trees are frosted with white lanterns, hooked along their boughs, glowing like mammoth fireflies. The iron fence of the cemetery runs the length of the gravel lot to the left of us, and candles speckle the gravestones and tombs. Cole’s mouth flops open as she absorbs the spectacle. I can just make out some kids wearing Halloween masks. Monster-type stuff with messily stitched scars, ghoulish grins, and oozing blisters. Maybe I feel it all more—the heat of the fire on my cheeks, the snap of the cold where it doesn’t touch, and the masquerade—because Cole is experiencing it for the first time.

A drunken sophomore staggers past us with fangs in his mouth and fake blood painted down the corners of his lips. Zoey tosses her hair from her eyes and glowers. “Vampire loser. What do these freaks think this is? Effing Halloween?” There are a few plastic corpses hung from the trees, nooses knotted around their necks. Leave it to my twisted classmates at Weirdowood to go above and beyond the disturbing. We’re only a couple of yards away when Janey Bear, who is the biggest loose-lipped gossip at school, spots me.

“She’s here!” Her shrill cry slices through the thudding music. I freeze as face after face turns expectantly toward me. Their mouths are agape, grinning, muffling giddy laughter, practically salivating like hungry beasts who crave drama. A pack of sadists, really. All high on the mystery of what happened to someone else; of what twisted our little town into knots; of what they get to retell to kids who aren’t from here, claiming a little corner of the horror for themselves.

You’d think I’d be used to it by now. The last three years of high school have played out identically. Since my freshman year, my infamy as “the one who got away” has earned me an epic amount of popularity. I guess it could have turned out differently. If I’d been all morbid and gone goth in steel-toed boots and a safety pin through my eyebrow, then it would have turned me into a social pariah. Given that I’m more skinny jeans and ballet flats, am pretty with bright-green eyes, and have a monopoly on the whole survivor thing, my past has only added legend to my social status. It’s like those castles and forts you learn about in history that are glimmering museums full of tourists now but used to be leper colonies. That’s me, former leper colony.

But this time when the crowd turns, lifting their red plastic cups full of beer and toasting me, actually cheering me for being the one to survive, I see six-year-old Jeanie directly in front of the fire. Her cheeks are filthy and striped with tears; her dress is torn at the collar. It’s a blue gingham jumper that I recognize immediately as what she was wearing the day she was taken. This isn’t earth-shattering, since that detail was splashed all over the news.

What is strange is that she has a trickle of blood oozing down from her scalp, slithering over the skin between her eyes. And all at once I know that this is not my imagination. I’ve pulled this from the depths of my charred memory. She’s upright in front of me, but by the way her hair is pooled around her head, defying gravity, I get the impression that I’m looking down at her, lying on her back. For the first time, I can remember smelling Jeanie’s fear as she wet her pants, while I reached to hold her bloodstained hand.





Chapter Three


A hundred pairs of eyes crawl over me. After the image disappears I’m swallowed by the memory, capable only of staring at the empty patch of dirt where Jeanie was. Zoey shouts something bitchy and sarcastic at the crowd. They laugh like she’s kidding. She jabs her elbow into my forearm. Her skin on my skin jolts me aware, and I try to recover with a toothy smile and a wink. Everyone is either as observant as a wall or too drunk to notice my nutso behavior, because they cheer in response. Zoey turns to me, concerned, but before she can say anything, Taylor separates from the crowd, his duo of jock scum as one seething mass of testosterone and cinnamon-flavored whiskey in his shadow.