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So a small, dinky high school out in the boonies. Exactly what I was expecting.

“No one around here really cares about designer handbags or two hundred-dollar sunglasses. It’s all about the hunting trips and the ATV trips, and in the summers it’s all about the festivals. It’s partially why I wanted to move out here with Dave.” She let out a sigh, as if remembering her dead husband. “And silly me thought things would be easier here than they were with my parents… well, you know them.” Aunt Maggie seemed to catch herself, “Knew.”

Her father, my grandfather, had been dead now for four years. I could still remember that day.

Fourteen years old, I’d been old enough to know that his death had meant things would change around the house. It meant I’d be with my grandmother alone, along with the maid and the chef. I’d been the one who’d found him in bed, laying there all peaceful, his death having taken him while he slept. I’d been the one to go get my grandmother and bring her to his body, watching from the doorway as she rushed over to him, screamed his name, and tried to shake him awake.

Not once, in my whole life had I ever heard such emotion coming from my grandmother. Always, no matter what the circumstance, she was a calm lady, meticulous and cruel. She never cried, never shouted—but that day she did both.

Why hadn’t she woken up and found him dead? Easy: they’d been sleeping in separate bedrooms since before my mother was born. Grandfather snored, or so she’d claimed. It was easier for her to sleep when she had the room to herself, and so that day, when he never woke up, she’d really let it all out.

Yeah, I remembered that day perfectly clear in my head, even now.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral,” Aunt Maggie was busy saying, pulling me back to the present. “I… I guess I just didn’t want to go back there. It was the life I’d left. I had a husband and a son. I was happy where I was.”

“Are you still happy now?” I asked.

She looked at me, stared at me for a few seconds, slow in saying, “I’m getting there.” She closed the distance between us, lifting a hand to my face and gently tucking some of my hair behind an ear. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you or your mom, Sloane. If there’s one thing I regret, it’s not being there for her after…” She couldn’t say it. I didn’t know why everyone had such a hard time saying it.

After she watched her best friend die. After she was raped by a serial killer. After her sanity had been broken into countless tiny shards, never to be remade again.

In the end, she moved past the part she couldn’t say. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you your whole life, either. Now that your mom is doing good, and finally sane enough to leave all those rich assholes behind—sorry for the swearing—I’m glad to have you both here. I want you both to see that life doesn’t have to be like that. All fake smiles and lies and money. Your life is what you make of it. You can be happy here, if you let yourself be.”

She pulled away from me. “Now, those cookies are getting cold. If you want to use them as a peace offering, I’d do it soon—but, you know, if you wanted to keep them to yourself, that’s fine, too. Elias will come around. It’ll just take him some time.” She gave me a smile before leaving my room.

My gaze shifted to the bed, where the plate of cookies sat. I meandered over to it, the smell of the cookies wafting up and filling my nose. Store brand, premade dough, judging from how similar all the cookies looked. Still, a cookie was a cookie.

I picked one up and bit into it, letting out a sigh as the warm, melty cookie nearly disintegrated on its own in my mouth. My grandmother never made cookies. She didn’t like sweets in general in the house. Birthdays and holidays were the only exceptions.

They were good cookies. I could probably eat the whole plate myself, but what would be the fun in that?

Once I finished the cookie, I picked up the plate and wandered across the hall to Elias’s room. The door was shut, which I assumed was the norm for him. I didn’t knock. I went right in, finding Elias on his bed, sprawled out.

He glared at me, but he said not a word. It’d been… strange, these past two days with him at school during the day. It had left me alone with my mother, and God, there could not be a more boring person out there than my damn mother.

I meandered to his nightstand, moving his phone—which lay there, plugged into the charger—to set down the plate of cookies. “Your mom made these. She said you have a big sweet tooth and I could use them as a peace offering.” I turned away from the plate, staring at him, taking in the hateful expression he wore. “But, do you want to know a secret? I don’t want a peace offering,” I whispered.

Elias didn’t say anything. The only thing he did was continue to glare at me.

“You can hate me all you want. You can do whatever you want to try to get me to leave, but as long as I want to stay, we’ll be staying here.” I puckered my lips in a pout. “You don’t know me well yet, but here’s your first lesson: I always get what I want.”

I turned around and left him with that, a sense of smugness crawling over me. With our mothers downstairs, there wasn’t much he could do or say to me right now. No, it was when we were alone that things would get fun, when we were at school together, in the car together, that his venom could be unleashed.

I couldn’t wait to see what he had in store for me. This Podunk of a town might not be so bad after all.

That night, when sleep took me, I had a dream. A strange one, definitely odd for me. I dreamed I woke up to find someone standing beside my bed, shadows on their face, obscuring their identity to me. But the height, the way that person stood… it had to be Elias.

It was just a dream, right?

Chapter Four

Friday rolled around, and after school, Elias told his mother he was going to a party. Not asking, but telling. I was sitting on the couch with my mother, watching some mindless TV show rerun, and Aunt Maggie was busy getting ready for work. She had to work all weekend, sadly.

“Oh, you are? You should take Sloane with you,” I overheard Aunt Maggie tell Elias in the kitchen.

“What? Mom, come on—” It was evident Elias did not want to take me to the party.

“I’m serious. You could introduce her to your friends and everyone else. That way, she’ll know some people before her first day at Blackrain.” Elias started to argue with her, but she had strolled across the hall and come into the living room, standing with her hands on her hips. The smocks she wore had dozens of tiny yellow ducklings on them. “Don’t you think it’ll be fun to go to a party, Sloane? Get out of the house, have some fun with people your own age, meet some of your future classmates?”

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