Page 1 of Soul of Shadow
1
His shoes were found during the bonfire.
They were hanging from an ash tree, a pair of bright-white Adidas roped together by their bright-white laces. They were easy to spot, a patch of white among a crown of dark-green leaves. Were it any other night, the group of freshmen might not have even noticed. But it wasn’t any other night; it was the night after Robbie Carpenter had been officially pronounced missing.
The nimblest freshman scaled the tree and plucked the shoes from their branch. As soon as he hit the ground, he and his friends started to run.
Charlie Hudson watched the bonfire, feeling not even the least bit excited about junior year.
As she looked around at the party unfurling before her—the star-speckled sky; the plastic beer pong table stuck into the sand; the kids falling into little cliques in the crowd based on grade or social group; the gentle waves of Lake Michigan lapping against it all—she didn’t feel what she was supposed to feel. What the rest of her friends surely felt.
The back-to-school bonfire was a rite of passage for Silver Shores High School students. Every year, on the Saturday before classes began, they showed up at the beach with a half-dozen kegs of beer and enough vodka to drown a man in the desert. And every year, they got at least a few hours of partying in before the sheriff showed up.
Everyone there—kids that Charlie had grown up with, now at a time in their lives where they were not quite children but not quite adults—gathered around the bonfire, excited. They chattered loudly about which classes they were taking, how they expected the football team to perform this year, who was hooking up with whom. It was all infused with a sense of wonder, as if they stood at the precipice of possibility.
This year it felt different. Off. Some of the conversations were hushed, careful. Charlie heard words likecluesandinvestigationandkidnappingthrown in with the usual chatter. One of their own was missing, and no one knew how to handle it.
At the far northern end of the beach stood the tall, rusty fence covered in signs that said things likeDO NOT ENTERandBEWARE. At the end of the fence, where the sand met the water, chain-link gave way to a tall, thick pier made of rocks and metal. During previous back-to-school bonfires, one or two people got too drunk and tried to climb up onto the pier, but no one—not a soul—ever touched the fence. It was an unwritten rule in Silver Shores. An homage to the dozens of people who lost their lives during the accident at the Oxford Power Plant.
Still, the overall atmosphere that night was one of celebration, not mourning. Everyone seemed festive.
Everyone but Charlie.
She had nothing against junior year in particular. It wasn’tthat this year, of all sixteen years that she had lived to that point, would be considerably worse than any of the ones that preceded it. It was more of an ever-pervasive feeling. A thin sheet of grime that covered every inch of her otherwise normal existence.
Reality didn’t suit Charlie. She loathed its repetitive days, the constant feeling of running through mud. She often came to this beach on her own and sat down atop the dunes. Closed her eyes. Felt the saltless wind on her face, the tickle of reed grass on her calves. These were her feeble attempts to break the rhythm of her life. To feel something new, anything at all.
She knew she should be more grateful. That she had a good life, good friends, a steady family, spare cash when she needed it. But she could never shake the feeling that something was missing. Some key fragment of her soul.
It had been that way since she’d lost Sophie.
Sophie had been Charlie’s identical twin sister. They’d had the same dark hair, the same thick eyebrows, the same blue eyes—light on the inner ring and darker on the outer—the same smattering of freckles across their nose and cheeks. Sophie had been her shadow. Her second half.
Until, late one night the first week of freshman year, she wasn’t anymore.
Charlie didn’t like to look too closely at her emotions. She didn’t like to acknowledge the voice whispering at the back of her mind, the darkness bubbling just below the surface. Sometimes she thought she could feel it, as if it were a creature living within her. She imagined it as a jumbled mass of pulsing, multicolored threads, wound too tight to ever untangle.
She sighed, pulling herself out of her thoughts, and rejoined the conversation her two best friends were having. The three ofthem were seated on a lopsided piece of driftwood, their feet stuck into the cool sand, a pleasant contrast from the fire roaring a few dozen paces away.
“I’m not telling you to join the student council,” Abigail declared from her place on the tallest part of the driftwood. She sat with her arms and legs folded, a can of Busch Light in one hand. “I’m just saying that another extracurricular would look good on your resume.”
“AndI’mtelling you,” Lou said, crushing her empty can with one hand before tossing it into the black trash bag hung up on a log a few feet away, “that swim team already takes up too much of my time as it is.”
Being around her friends was good for her. It drew her out of her mind. Let her think and feel andbesomething that she couldn’t be on her own. Let her forget, however temporarily, the shadows that lingered.
“But we havecollegeto think of.” Abigail leaned forward, one dark, delicate hand resting atop her black jeans. “Showing devotion to a particular sport is good, but having a wide breadth of interests is just as important.”
Lou tapped one finger on her freckled chin. “Does being able to shotgun three beers in a row count as an interest?”
Charlie stifled a snort, then tuned out the conversation again. It was the same one she had heard a hundred times this summer: Abigail stressing over college admissions, and Lou doing her best to drive Abigail insane with how little she cared. She often wished she were more like them. More normal. Less locked in her own mind. But she wasn’t.
Her eyes wandered the moon-streaked sand around them. This beach was the largest and most popular strip of sandy lakefront in Silver Shores. Despite being located in Michigan, Silver Shores was a beach town. A beach town that froze into a spectacle of blistering snow and purple ice in the winter, but a beach town nonetheless.
The sand was cool between Charlie’s toes. The bonfire burned wild and hot. Laughter and bright orange sparks danced up into the sky. Lake Michigan was like the smooth surface of a diamond, broken only by the occasional ripple caused by the drunken sophomores who had decided it was a good idea to take out a canoe. Charlie shook her head as she watched them paddle sloppily across the horizon. Silver Shores didn’t need any more disappearances this week.
The party on the beach—an illegal bonfire surrounded by even more illegal drugs and alcohol—was an obvious and flagrant violation of local law. Not that anyone in attendance cared.
The person who cared perhaps least of all was Mason Hudson, Charlie’s older brother. She could just make out Mason’s face from between all the leaping flames. He was splitting a joint with a girl Charlie thought might be one of his many ex-girlfriends.
