“Whatever,” Rhett balks. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You have to tell it right, or it doesn’t sound true,” Max argues.

Rhett rolls his eyes and looks away.

“They’re witches,” Jasper continues. “That’s all you need to know.”

Max steps closer to me, his blue eyes unblinking. “And there’s one that still lives across the lake.”

“I thought no one lived in those homes,” I say, my arms crossed, not wanting to be here. “I thought they were all boarded up for the winter.”

“The Walkers stay during the winter,” Max answers. “They’re the only ones.”

I swallow sharply, certain that whoever lives across the lake isn’t actually a witch, but I keep my mouth shut. If they want to believe a witch lives in one of those homes, I couldn’t care less. I just want to get this over with.

“You have to say her name three times,” Jasper instructs now, resting his long, gawky elbow on the edge of a gravestone.

“Whose?” I ask.

He points a finger at the grave below him. Etched into the stone is the name WILLA WALKER.

“If you say her name three times, you’ll summon her up from the grave,” Rhett says, wagging an eyebrow for effect, as if it makes his words more creepy. Or more true.

“Legend says that Willa Walker wept into Jackjaw Lake and made it bottomless,” Jasper adds, as if reciting it from a book—perhaps the very thing a boy said to him when he first arrived at camp.

I make a sound I don’t intend, a sound of cynicism, and Max steps closer to me, shoulders rigid. “You don’t believe us?”

I pull my jaw tight—I know how these things go. How initiations work. They want me to keep my mouth shut and obey whatever they say. The sooner I fall in line, the sooner I’ll be back in my bunk asleep. And if I do what they ask, they won’t pick on me after tonight. I’ll be one of them. And when the next new kid arrives, they’ll want me to make him do the same stupid shit.

Max backs away from me and even Jasper stands up from the grave where he had been slouched. They give me room to summon this old dead witch. I exhale through my nose and say the name three times. “Willa Walker Willa Walker Willa Walker.”

A hush settles over the graveyard, and for a moment, it feels as if the wind stops blowing. As if time falls still. My eyes skim the cemetery, the old dead trees and the snow falling between the markers, and for the briefest moment I think maybe they’re right. Willa Walker has been summoned from her grave. But then Jasper breaks into laugher, followed by Rhett, and it echoes over the gravestones.