Although I struggle to pick upthe phone when it rings. I end up climbing in the car in order to answer. I’m so frozen that I don’t even pay attention to who the caller is.
“Hello?” I answer through my shivering.
“Hello, slut,” the person on the other end says into the phone.
I’m in the middle of cranking up the heat but go still. “Who is this?’
“I think the real question is: who are you?” they sneer. “Did you know that if you come from evil, more than likely you’ll be just as evil, if not more.”
“Who is this?” I repeat. “Are you the person who’s been calling and breathing into the phone?”
They laugh. I can tell they’re disguising their voice. Either that or using a device to do so. The person who’s been harassing me for months, ever since that first girl disappeared, does the same thing. However, this conversation feels slightly different.
They laugh, a low, sinister sound that sends a chill slithering up my spine. “You were always so stupid. And I’m not surprised you turned into a slut.”
I curl my fingers inward. “Are you the person who paintedsluton my locker?”
“So many questions, and yet you ask all the wrong ones,” they say. “If you knew what to look for, maybe you wouldn’t have wandered into those woods. Then again, perhaps you wanted to, you little slut. So evil. So selfish. So?—”
Someone says something in the background, and then the call ends.
I lower the phone from my ear, my breath fogging up the windows. The call was listed as unknown, leaving me with zero clues as to who it could be, other than sifting through their words. It had to be the person who wrotesluton my locker a few months ago. They knew about the woods too.
My mind wanders to Trystan. Could it be him? Weirdly, the person in the background of the call just barely kind of sounded like him, but that would mean he wasn’t the one who called me. Maybe he had one of his friends do it?
I sit in the frozen car, watching the frost webbing the glass slowly fade away. The wiper blades finally unfreeze from the glass and begin to move, back and forth… Back and forth…
The windshield wipers move back and forth across the window as a snowstorm pours down from the cloudy sky.
“Are you sure we’re in the clear?” my mother whispers as she gazes out the window. “If there’s any evidence left?—”
“There isn’t,” my father snaps, causing me to jolt.
I’m in the back seat, hunkered down with a blanket wrapped around me. My eyes are swollen from hours of crying over the fact that we’re moving. My parents gave me hardly any warning, and I haven’t had time to process it. I yelled at them when they informed me three days ago that I was to pack what I could and get rid of the rest of it.
My father smacked me across the face when I cried.
My cheek still aches.
But it’s small in comparison to the pain of moving.
I’d finally made some friends, and now we’re moving, and to the mountains of all places. From what I read about Star Meadows, it’s in the middle of nowhere and is constantly cold.
I hate this.
I hate it so much.
As tears burn in my eyes again, I bite down on my bottom lip. But a half-sob manages to claw out of my mouth.
My mother’s attention darts in my direction.
“Ava, go to sleep. Now,” she warns, then gives a nervous glance at my father.
She always does that when she’s worried I’ve annoyed him. Part of me wants to annoy him more, but the throbbing in my left cheek causes me to swallow down the compulsion.
I lay down and tug the blanket over my head, facing the back of the seat. Time ticks by, and my parents utter nothing to each other. My eyelids grow heavy as I start to grow sleepy.
“Star Meadows has a lot of potential,” my father says. “So many mountains, and it’s more secluded. I think we’re going to flourish here.”
