Like it served her right.
It was the kind of karmic justice that didn’t usually happen in real life, or at least didn’t usually happen so fast.
Hazel headed straight for Franklin.
“Can I have some of that?” she asked him, pointing to the metal flask.
He looked at her blearily through bloodshot eyes but held the flask out.
“You won’t like it.” She didn’t.
The moonshine burned all the way down her throat.
But she slugged back two more swallows, hoping that she could forget everything that had happened since she’d arrived at the party.
Hoping that Jack would never tell Ben what she’d done.
Hoping Jack would pretend it hadn’t happened.
She just wished she could undo everything, unravel time like yarn from a sweater.
Across the clearing, illuminated by Stephen’s headlights, Tom Mullins, linebacker and general rageaholic, leaped up onto the glass coffin suddenly enough to make the girls hop off.
He looked completely wasted, face flushed and hair sticking up with sweat.
“Hey,” he shouted, jumping up and down, stomping like he was trying to crack the glass.
“Hey, wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey.
Come on, you ancient fuck, get up!” “Quit it,” said Martin, waving for Tom to get down.
“Remember what happened to Lloyd?” Lloyd was the kind of bad kid who liked to start fires and carried a knife to school.
When teachers were taking attendance, they were hard-pressed to remember whether he wasn’t there because he was cutting class or because he was suspended.
One night last spring Lloyd took a sledgehammer to the glass coffin.
It didn’t shatter, but the next time Lloyd set a fire, he got burned.
He was still in a hospital in Philadelphia, where they had to graft skin from his ass onto his face.
Some people said the horned boy had done that to Lloyd, because he didn’t like it when people messed with his coffin.
Others said that whoever had cursed the horned boy had cursed the glass, too.
So if anyone tried to break it, that person would bring bad luck on themselves.
Though Tom Mullins knew all that, he didn’t seem to care.
Hazel knew just how he felt.
“Get up!” he yelled, kicking and stomping and jumping.
“Hey, lazybones, time to waaaaaaake up!” Carter grabbed his arm.
“Tom, come on.
We’re going to do shots.
You don’t want to miss this.” Tom looked unsure.
“Come on,” Carter repeated.
“Unless you’re too drunk already.” “Yeah,” said Martin, trying to sound convincing.
“Maybe you can’t hold your booze, Tom.” That did it.
Tom scrambled down, lumbering away from the coffin, protesting that he could drink more than the both of them combined.
“So,” Franklin said to Hazel.
“Just another dull night in Fairfold, where everyone’s a lunatic or an elf.” She took one more drink from the silver flask.
She was starting to get used to the feeling that her esophagus was on fire.
“Pretty much.” He grinned, red-rimmed eyes dancing.
“Want to make out?” From the look of him, he was as miserable as Hazel was.
Franklin, who’d barely spoken for the first three years of grammar school and who everyone was sure ate roadkill for dinner sometimes.
Franklin, who wouldn’t thank her if she asked him what was bothering him, since she’d wager he had almost as much to forget as she did.
Hazel felt a little bit light-headed and a lot reckless.
“Okay.” As they walked away from the truck and into the woods, she glanced back at the party in the grove.
Jack was watching her with an unreadable expression on his face.
She turned away.
Passing under an oak tree, Franklin’s hand in hers, Hazel thought she saw the branches shift above her, like fingers, but when she looked again, all she saw were shadows.
CHAPTER 2
The summer when Ben was a baby and Hazel was still in their mother’s belly, their mother went out to a clearing in the woods to paint en plein air.
She spread out her blanket over the grass and sat Ben, slathered in SPF-50 and gumming a chunk of zwieback, on it while she daubed her canvas with cadmium orange and alizarin crimson.
She painted for the better part of an hour before she noticed a woman watching from the cool shadows of the nearby trees.
The woman, Mom said when she told the story, had her brown hair pulled back in a kerchief and carried a basket of young green apples.
“You’re a true artist,” the woman told her, crouching down and smiling delightedly.
That was when Mom noticed her loose dress was hand-loomed and very fine.
For a moment Mom thought she was one of those ladies who got into homesteading and canned stuff from her garden, kept chickens, and sewed her own clothes.
But then she saw that the woman’s ears rose to slim, delicate points and realized she was one of the Folk of the Air, tricksy and dangerous.
As is the tragedy of so many artists, Mom was more fascinated than afraid.
Mom had grown up in Fairfold, had heard endless stories about the Folk.
Had known about the nest of redcaps who dipped their hats in fresh human blood and who were rumored to live near an old cave on the far side of town.
She’d heard about a snake-woman sometimes spotted in the cool of the evening near the edges of the woods.
She knew of the monster made of dry branches, tree bark, dirt, and moss, who turned the blood of those she touched to sap.
She remembered the song they sang while they skipped rope as girls: There’s a monster in our wood She’ll get you if you’re not good Drag you under leaves and sticks Punish you for all your tricks A nest of hair and gnawed bone You are never, ever coming— They’d shouted it with great glee, never saying the last word.
If they had, the monster might have been summoned—that was what it was supposed to do, after all.
But as long as they never finished the song, the magic wouldn’t work.
But not all the stories were terrible.
The generosity of the Folk was as great as their cruelty.
There was a little girl in Ben’s playgroup whose doll was stolen by a nixie.
A week later that same girl woke in her crib with ropes of gorgeous freshwater pearls wound around her neck.
That was why Fairfold was special, because it was so close to magic.