I never wanted to be the villain, I never wanted to wake in the woods with the cold weaving its way along my bones, and a certainty that something bad has happened click, click, clicking against my eardrums. Something I can’t take back.

But it’s not always a path you choose—becoming the villain—it’s a thing that happens to you.

A series of circumstances that lead you to a fate you can’t escape.

Ahead of me, set back in the trees, sits the cemetery with its crumbling headstones and overgrown greenery and dying trees. It’s an old graveyard, and I wonder if it’s even still used. If locals still bury their loved ones here.

I step through the small metal gate, which sits bent at the hinges, into the plot of land—and I know I’ve been here before. The memory doesn’t wash over me clear and sharp. Instead, it’s a knot that binds inside my stomach—the feeling of the hard, hollow ground beneath my footsteps. The shock of air, like stepping into a cooler. Stepping into a tomb. I’ve felt it all before.

I walk a few paces, listening to the morning birds caw from the nearby pines, and then my feet stop. My legs refusing to go any farther. I’ve stood beside this row of graves before, where the ground is uneven, the headstones decaying in the winter wind. My ears begin to ring, a memory wanting to push to the surface, and I recall the name on the grave at my feet, without even needing to read it: Willa Walker.

I stood here in the dark, snow under my feet, stars smeared out by a low layer of clouds, and peered down at this same grave.

Voices rise up in the back of my mind, back of my throat. Memories scratch and claw at me, drawing blood, violent bursts like a punch to the chest.

I press my hands over my eyes and try to blot them out.

But I hear them anyway. And I know I wasn’t alone that night.

The others were here too—the boys from my cabin. Rhett and Jasper and Lin. They were all here. Snow fell around us, a storm blowing in. I can taste the whiskey at the back of my throat, feel the warmth in my stomach, hear the stiff, sharp laughter.

We were here that night. I was here. My heart thumped too fast, my legs ached to run—I didn’t want to be in this cemetery with a storm drawing close.

But it wasn’t just the four of us.

There was someone else. Another boy.

Their laughter echoes against my ribs and I take a step back. Then another. I don’t want to be here—the memories beginning to slice me open. Raw and serrated.