“Hey.” Margot tried to smile, even though the unexpected presence had unnerved her. There was no one else in the aisle; she didn’t know where his mother or father might be.
“Do you live on Gallows Hill?” He tilted his head to one side, eyes narrow in sharp scrutiny, as though he expected her to lie to him. A smudge of dirt or grease marked his chin, and although his clothes looked recently bought, a matching stain ran across his striped shirt.
“I do.” She tried to add some feeling to her voice, even though her smile was starting to grow stiff and unnatural and her headache was burrowing into the backs of her eyes. She added, almost in defense of herself, “It’s a very pretty place.”
The boy flicked his head slightly, as though to disregard that last comment. “My ma won’t let me go near it. I’m not even allowed to ride my bike on the road behind it, even though Asher and Deacon both are.”
“Oh.” There was almost something funny about that. The small jealous bite that can only be experienced in childhood when your friends are given liberties denied to you. “Well, you’re not missing much. It’s really just a hill with a house on it.”
“Deacon said there are ghosts there. From all the people that died.” His brown eyes bored into her, eager, hungry. “Is that true?”
Her mouth opened, then closed again. The words shouldn’t have startled her as much as they did. But Witchety’s hoarse warnings and even Kant’s nonanswers were burrs in the back of her mind, leaving her edgy, tense.
Nothing about this encounter—this store—felt natural. The fluorescent lights hummed like fat insects. Music played, but she had never heard the song before. The headache was swelling. The boy kept staring at her, unwilling to drop the question, and Margot had no idea what she was expected to say.
And then a woman inhaled sharply. A cart shoved past Margot’s side, bruising her thigh, and the woman who had turned away from her in the previous aisle grabbed the boy by his arm. “Levi. What did I say about talking to people from—”
The woman’s eyes flashed in her direction. The pupils were contracted, tiny dots in an expanse of blue—the fear-lanced glance of prey, facing down a predator. Then she blinked, and the expression was gone, and she pulled the boy at her side as she marched down the aisle. “Don’t talk to strangers.”
He sighed, a beleaguered noise, but didn’t fight her grip. As they neared the end of the row, he threw Margot a look over his shoulder: equal parts intrigue at her presence and frustration at being denied an answer.