Part Three: Nightfall

The Students of Tempest High School: Now

At the start of senior year, when Imogen Lilly showed up without her personality and with eyes like sea glass, everyone noticed.

And then weeks went by and friendships demanded their attention and tests annexed their brains and the fear of college tugged at their collective heart. So when Imogen actually went missing, they didn’t see it.

Not at first.

A day off meant nothing. The second day went equally unnoticed. But as Imogen’s absences pile up, they become officially worried.

“How long will it take before her parents admit she’s missing?” asks a girl with an online girlfriend somewhere in Montana.

“A month,” her straight friend says. “Maybe two.”

“Has anyone talked to her sister?”

They track Haven down, corner her by her locker in freshman hall, and ask her the same pointed questions that half a dozen students have already asked. She sighs, twisting red hair around her finger like string. “She ran away, I guess. I don’t know. She usually stays close to me, and then I woke up and she was just . . . gone.”

Some of the girls with bottles of water sloshing around their necks want to believe it’s true. They text each other endless possibilities.

Maybe she went to San Francisco

Or LA

The Rockies?

Tempest was never big enough to hold Imogen. They imagine her into epic new settings, a spiral of red hair and a challenge of a smile against the background of pastel Victorian row houses, neon-laced strip malls in pink and mint, mountains that rise high enough to put even the redwoods to shame.

No matter how many lives they brew up, they can’t quite shake another vision: a headstone with her name on it, a grave with no body. That’s what happens to the people in Tempest who walk into the woods and never come back.

On their way home from school, as the autumn days trim down shorter and shorter, Imogen’s classmates look at the redwoods out of the corners of their eyes. They’d gotten used to coexisting with these beautiful monsters. But now the students side-eye the trees as if they might grab someone.

In the daylight they tell themselves they’re being ridiculous. Imogen was too savvy to do something as dumb as get lost in the woods — not when GPS exists. There has to be another explanation, a finger to point. And the students of Tempest High know where to point it.

They pull the new girl aside. They drop notes in her locker, visit her when she’s frothing milk for lattes at Coffee Gods. “Be careful,” they say, looking around to make sure they’re not being overheard. “The weird girls are at it again.”

“At what?” Danny asks, acting stupid on purpose. The Grays already have their sparkly black nails in her.