at least one other person around my age here. Our luggage is tucked under benches amidst all the duffel bags and backpacks. As I grab my suitcase, I think, This should be even heavier. After all, my entire life is in here.
“I’m Jared,” the boy says. He has an earnest, friendly face. “Leave that there and we’ll take it up to the inn for you. You can wait for me up under the trees at the end of the dock if you want and I’ll show you where we’re going.”
“We’re not staying at the inn,” I say.
“We’re at the Birches’,” Mom adds, her hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off.
“I’ve got it, Jared.” The voice belongs to a boy who’s my age, or maybe older, and who has what I call resting wiseass face. He’s suntanned and barefoot, baggy shorts hanging off his hips, black T-shirt, dirty blond hair. He’s taller than Wyatt, and his voice is a lazy Southern drawl.
I step off the ferry and my eyes meet his. And, for a fraction of a moment, less than a millisecond, I freeze and he seems to freeze too.
Then he looks me up and down and flashes this big old grin, dimples, the whole nine yards, and goes, “Here comes trouble.”
I roll my eyes and make a point to look away. The air is a hot, wet blanket and I’ve just traveled five hundred years to get here. My hair is matted to the back of my neck, my dress is plastered to my skin, and my makeup has completely melted off my face. Even my elbows are dripping. But this boy isn’t sweating like the rest of us. He looks like he just rolled out of bed and landed here from somewhere cool and shady.
I turn to look at him and he stares back. And then Archie the dog goes running past and nearly knocks me over.
“You okay there, sunshine?” The boy says it like I’m just so, so amusing.
“Amazing.” I give him my fiercest smile, one that tells him, Your charms don’t work on me. Take them somewhere else. Because I don’t plan on getting to know anyone here. I will stay in Addy’s house until it’s time to go back to Ohio.
He arches an eyebrow and then collects all our bags and leads us up a white sand path littered with crushed shells. He is talking to my mom but looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I put on my headphones and walk behind them, looking at everything but him, listening to the same Françoise Hardy song I’ve been listening to since we left Mary Grove: “Tous les garçons et les filles.” Which roughly translates into “All the boys and girls in the world are happy but me. I, Claudine Llewelyn Henry, will be alone forever.”
Suddenly we are under this canopy of trees, and it’s like nothing I’ve seen before. They’re live oaks, right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, grotesque, knotted, twisted creatures that look as if they could come alive at night. An ancient wood from a fairyland, a strange, haunted-looking place. Spanish moss hangs off them like spiderwebs, like ghosts, and it is impossible to see the sky.
The inn sits majestically in the midst of this, like a genteel and elegant old lady, all polite good manners. Wide porch, white columns, red roof. As I told Jared, we’re not actually staying in the inn itself, but in a house across the way, the one belonging to Addy.
I follow the boy and my mom down a path that leads past a handful of shotgun shacks painted bright green, yellow, and pink, and past a barnlike building with an old gas-station pump in front and kayaks stacked inside and outside. There are wild horses grazing underneath the live oaks. When we get to the two white columns that sit on either side of the main path—the one that continues round in a circle past two more shotgun shacks and back to the inn—we are there. At a coral-colored one-story house with a broad porch, blue shutters, and a red tin roof that looks like a squashed hat. It sits, surrounded by blooming flowers, on the edge of the tree line, forest on two sides.
I cut through the grass, ahead of my mom and the boy. He yells something, and I pull off one of my headphones and turn.
“What?”
“I said you don’t want to cut through there because of cactus spurs.”