‘Want me to come?’

I pause. Peyton must sense the mania now. She’s looking at me, eyes pleading for something I can’t place.

‘No,’ I snap accidentally.

Peyton recoils.

‘I’m sorry. I’m really stressed out. There’s a lot happening. I really don’t want to go home.’ I can tell that something about this has hurt her. I’m not sure there’s enough will left in me to mind. ‘See you later.’

I hate what’s happened. I hate myself for letting it happen. I want her. Of course I do. Honestly, maybe I want anyone. Why have I been wired this way? God, I want to join the human race. Even when I like people, I feel different. I want to explain everything to her. I almost want to tell her about Celeste, so she’ll understand, so she won’t be hurt. As far as she knows, I’m an entirely normal person who’s making awful decisions for – I don’t know, my own strange pleasure. And maybe that’s true anyway.

I hate how I’ve made her feel. I get the sense of a time and place wasted – something that doesn’t even come round that often. Not even wasted it – obliterated it. What have I done? What have I done with yet another chance to be loved?

Even though I desperately want her to, Peyton doesn’t watch as I slip out of the room.

Into the woods.

I have no choice. The situation has brought itself to me and now I’m being forced to participate.

I don’t tell Ellis. I don’t even know where he is now. I feel sick with paranoia, retreating further and further into my own head.

The woods were shut to the public officially two months after Roxy’s disappearance.

I roll up to the No-Names parking lot with the flashlight on my phone and that’s all. I’ll have to look again in the morning. I couldn’t sit in that dorm knowing there might be something here waiting for me.

I walk along the fence, weaving the chain link in and out of my fingers.

My palms are filmed in sweat. Maybe I should’ve brought Ellis after all. Or Peyton, not that she would have agreed to come, or agreed with any of this. But the aloneness is overwhelming, the aloneness that results from a force of nature duelling with a much, much smaller force of nature that is barely a force at all. My teeth crack against each other. The trees tremble and the sound of leaf scraping leaf shoots goosebumps across my body. There’s birdsong from somewhere.

I want to do this by myself. I want to keep Ellis from what I might find.

But I’m worried it’s more selfish than that.

I return to the cut section of fence. I have to go in.