Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“He’s not the same,” she says.
I raise a brow, wondering how much she knows, if anything. “You could say that.”
“People change,” she says lightly. “That’s the way it goes. You’re not the same person you were back then either, I’m sure.”
She’s right about that.
“I know I’m not the same Mary who lived in Providence. Sometimes you change in different directions,” she goes on. “It happens. Nothing is in stasis. We are always changing.”
“Where did you learn that?” I ask.
“Well, it wasn’t from you,” she jokes. “Here I was thinking you were going to share all your studies from the school with me, and you’ve barely said more than hello.”
I rub my lips together, guilt panging me. “Listen, Mary, I know—”
She bumps her shoulder against mine in a skip. “I’m just pulling your leg, Kat. I know you don’t have any time, and…I know you don’t have a choice.”
“A choice?”
A knowing smile flits across her lips. “I know what you go to school for.”
Oh no. “You do?” I ask uneasily.
“I might be new to Sleepy Hollow, but I’m not dumb. This is a peculiar town, and the people are even stranger. I could tell you were a witch the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “What are you talking about?”
She turns to face me and starts walking backward. “You don’t know this, but the first day I saw you, you were crouched by the sweet pea patch at the side of the road. We just moved in, and I was looking around the new neighborhood. I heard your voice. You were talking to something. I looked over at you in the field and saw you crouched down and commanding a frog. Telling it what to do. It hopped from the ground to your finger and back again, onto your shoulder. It seemed to delight in you, and from that moment, I was delighted too.”
I don’t remember any of this. Then again, I was often playing with animals, talking to them. I had no idea that Mary witnessed any of that. “That doesn’t mean I’m a witch,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says, the lantern lighting up her big smile. “Then what are you? A normal average human being?”
I could lie. I could tell her yes, I was normal and average, and act like she thought she saw something she didn’t. But I’m so damn tired of the lies. “I’m a witch,” I tell her.
She claps her hands together. “I knew it. And then Mathias was telling me all about the way the school looked and how spooked out he was, and I couldn’t help but put it all together.”
I glance at her as she walks beside me now. “And yet you still wanted to come to bonfire night with me?”
“Of course,” she says. “You’re just more interesting than you were before.”
With a grin, she hooks her arm around mine, and we walk the rest of the way to town like that.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in Sleepy Hollow proper, and it feels quite different now. I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t been around such normalcy in a long time or the fact that it’s a crowded beehive of activity. It doesn’t help that so many of the townspeople stare at me as we walk down the main street. At least, it seems that way.
“Why is everyone looking at us?” I whisper to Mary as we go along the town square, where the giant bonfire is lit in the middle, the flames leaping high into the sky while townsfolk are gathered all around with hustlers and merchants selling their wares. Carved pumpkins lit with candles line the path around the fire, their lopsided smiles setting the festive mood.
“Because it’s a small town, and you’re a prize, Kat,” Mary says. Her words echo something Crane said to me during sex, that I was a prized student. How confident that had made me feel. Yet now, I only feel like I’m being judged. There are a few men on the other side of the fire leering at me, something insidious in their eyes. We were at bonfire night last year together, but I don’t remember the men looking at me this way then. Am I just paranoid now, looking for danger and the macabre everywhere?
“Besides, everyone is on edge because of the murder,” Mary adds.
My heart drops. Joshua Meeks. For a moment, I had forgotten. Being at the school, it’s so easy to become insulated, and with what’s happening with Brom, it’s easy to forget how real the problem is. But the man I was intimate with last year was murdered and gruesomely so, and I feel terrible that it left my mind. I still don’t know how Brom plays into it, if he does at all, but I can’t help but feel like I brought this death upon Joshua.