Small towns have long memories and short tolerances.
It started with small things, the way it always does. Janice Mercer, who lived two houses down, told her neighbor that Nora Ashfield gave her the creeps — had always given her the creeps, ever since that girl was small. Said it in a low voice, the way you say things you hope will spread.
They spread.
By February of Nora's junior year, she had become a story people told. She could feel it — the shift in how cashiers looked at her, how teachers' eyes tracked her in the hallways, how mothers at the grocery store pulled their children a half-step closer when she passed. She was seventeen years old and she had become a warning.
The worst of it came from Brianna Keller, a girl whose cruelty was the organized kind — precise, social, invisible from a distance. Brianna had seen Nora and Daniel together and decided, for reasons that had more to do with Daniel than with Nora, to take an interest.
She started calling Nora "Hex." Casually, in hallways, in the cafeteria. Just loud enough. Within two weeks, half the school had adopted it. Not all of them meant it cruelly — some of them thought it was cool, even, in a distant way — but it didn't matter. A name like that follows you home.
Then Brianna's cat disappeared.
This was not Nora's fault. She knew this. The cat was an outdoor cat and probably just gone to the next street over. But Brianna stood in the school parking lot and said, loudly, to a group of people: "I don't know, it's weird. My cat goes missing right after that freak put her hands all over my car."
Nora had steadied herself against Brianna's car briefly, once, when she'd tripped. That was all. That was everything.
It escalated quickly from there. Someone scratched the word WITCH into her locker. Maya helped her sand it out and didn't make a big deal of it, but Nora saw the worry in her face — saw how scared Maya was for her, which was different and worse than being scared of her.
Daniel wanted to confront Brianna. Nora told him not to. "It makes it worse," she said. "If you react, it becomes a story. If you ignore it, it's just noise."
"You shouldn't have to ignore it."
"I know."
But she had been ignoring things her whole life. She was practiced at it. She knew how to make herself small, how to smile with her teeth without her eyes, how to walk through a crowd that hated her with her head up and her hands in her pockets and the hum under her skin at a level just barely below eruption.
She was good at surviving. She was tired of only surviving.
One night she lay in bed and asked the ceiling, honestly: Is this all it will ever be? Am I always going to be something people are frightened of before they know me, something they destroy before they understand?
The ceiling didn't answer.
But in the morning, a letter arrived in the mail — her name on the envelope, no return address, written in an ink that shimmered green-black like starling wings.
She opened it with shaking hands.
Inside, one line: You are not alone. Come to the edge of Caldwell Wood at the next full moon. Come alone.
She stared at it for a long time. Then she folded it, put it in her pocket, and went to school.
She didn't tell Daniel. She didn't tell Maya.
Some things, she had learned, you have to walk toward by yourself.