Chapter One
I had never experienced motion sickness before. In all my seventeen years, I’d never asked my mother to pull the car over so that I could empty my stomach contents along the side of the road.
I’d never dreaded the act of driving until very recently. My whole life had been changed by a single car ride, and I wasn’t even present when it happened.
“Pull over!” I gasped, already clutching my stomach in one hand and covering my mouth with the other.
“Really, Camille, again?” My mother sighed and directed the car to the shoulder just in time.
There wasn’t anything left in my stomach by that point. I’d already purged myself three times during the four-hour drive from Colorado. Even so, dry heaves wracked my frame painfully as I tried to regain control of my body. My skin was covered in a sheen of sweat that seemed to sparkle in the midday sun, and I wondered how much longer I would have to endure this.
I looked up from my position on the ground and received my answer. Fifty yards ahead of me stood the city sign, casting a long shadow that almost reached my hands in the overgrown grass. The green paint peeled in several places, and the battered wood revealed years of wear and tear. The fancy cursive writing had faded over time, but I could still make out the greeting.
Welcome to Green Peaks, Wyoming! We hope you have a pleasant stay!
I sat back on my heels and allowed my stomach to settle. The sign might have been old and worn, but it was the most welcoming thing I’d seen in weeks. It could’ve read “Welcome to Hell! Have a wretched stay!” and I still would have preferred this place over the one I was leaving behind. As if to prove my point, my cell phone buzzed in my back pocket, alerting me to another text message.
I ignored it.
As I reclaimed my place in the passenger seat, I observed the green patches on my jeans from repeatedly propping myself up on my hands and knees. I hoped the grass marks wouldn’t stain.
“Do you think it was something you ate?” my mom asked, using her concerned-mother voice. I refrained from rolling my eyes.
“No Mom, it wasn’t something I ate.”
The silence stretched between us. We both knew the real reason the never-ending car ride was upsetting my stomach. It was the same reason that I was sitting in the front seat instead of the back.
I couldn’t pretend we were heading toward a family vacation, not without my dad acting as the DJ in the shotgun spot. The trunk full of luggage might depict the illusion that we were simply off on a weekend getaway, but the trailer bouncing and squeaking behind my mom’s SUV told the truth.
This was a one-way trip, and we were never going back.
As we neared our final destination, I got my first look at what Green Peaks had to offer. The town founders hadn’t had to stretch very far to come up with a suitable name. Both sides of the highway were furnished with long stretches of forest, a sea of rolling hills that were capped by green leaves and ferns. I didn’t know how far the lines of trees expanded, but it was evident that they encompassed the entire town.
We turned onto a smaller road that lacked a middle line, and it carried us into the center of town where there were exactly three four-way stops. I thought my hometown of Plainfield had been small, but at least we had stoplights. I didn’t think the blinking red lights perched on these stop signs like angry, guarding vultures really counted.
The town consisted of a volunteer fire station, a park bordered by a couple of elementary schools, a sleepy-looking gas station with two measly pumps, a post office, and a small home-owned pharmacy. There was a police station, a tiny hospital that looked more like a clinic, and a school that housed both the junior high and high school students two roads over.
And that was it.
“Where’s the Walmart?” I gaped out the window as we passed the tiny businesses. My mom turned the wheel and followed the twisting road the GPS directed us to.
“Green Peaks is too small for Walmart,” my mom said with a shrug, as if I should already know this. “There’s a Walmart in Rawlins a little over thirty minutes away. Pete said the gas station, G.G.’s Oil, has most of the groceries we’ll need, so we shouldn’t have to make the trip too often anyway.”
This new piece of information pulled me up short. I wouldn’t call myself a city girl by any means, but no Walmart? Were we living in the stone age? The homey feeling I’d first received when entering the small town suddenly turned into suffocation.
“Breathe, Cami.” My mom chuckled at my reddening face. I gasped in response and laughed as air filled my lungs.
“Amazon still delivers here, so you can order your art supplies online.”
I relaxed a little. I guessed it wasn’t the complete stone age if we still had Amazon. The meager art supplies I had left were packed up neatly in the trunk, but they wouldn’t last long if this place was inspiring enough for me to get back to my canvases. I hadn’t touched a paintbrush in weeks, and my fingers itched at the thought of capturing the sunlight breaking through the trees.
The road we followed eventually narrowed onto a gravel drive, and within a couple of minutes, we arrived at the new house. My mom had told me we were getting an upgrade in the quantity of our space and a downgrade in its quality, but I still couldn’t believe how big the house was until I saw it with my own eyes.
It was Victorian-styled, with a tower that cast a pointing shadow over half the yard and a spacious front porch that I could see continued to wrap around the back. The crown molding was falling off in places, and the white paint was peeling even worse than that of the sign at the town’s border. The windows were dusty and probably no longer opened, but they were at least intact.
I loved all of it.
A red pickup truck waited at the end of the driveway, and the driver laid on the horn as we approached. The engine died and a man and woman stepped out just as we parked beside them.
“Lacey!” My mom cried as she bolted from our still-running car. I sighed and hit the button to stop the engine before opening my own door. I was lucky she’d managed to put it in park at all, but I didn’t hold her carelessness against her. She was as fragile as I was at that point, maybe even more so.
“Oh Terri, it’s so good to see you! I’m sorry we couldn’t make it to the funeral.”
My mom hugged her sister fiercely, and I could tell as the tears began to flow and the sobs racked her body that Aunt Lacey was doing a good job of holding her up.
Uncle Peter walked around the car with his arms wide, and I allowed him to crush me in an embrace.
“Good to see you, kiddo.”
He hadn’t called me kiddo in five years. But then again, I hadn’t seen him in five years either. Ever since my grandmother passed away, our families had stopped getting together for the holidays. Since I didn’t have any cousins to be friends with, it didn’t bother me too much. They still called each other and touched base a few times a year, but other than that we had all been content to just live our lives with the Wyoming and Colorado border between us.
It looked like it took a family crisis to bring my mom and aunt together again.
My uncle’s strong cologne filled my nose, and I tried not to scrunch my face up against it. After what felt like an eternity, or maybe that was because I was holding my breath again, he pulled back and held me at my elbows.
“You’re a senior now, huh? Almost a real adult? I can’t believe you got so tall!”
I thought about informing him that five feet and three inches was on the lower end of average for an adult woman, but considering how short I’d been the last time I saw him, I understood where he was coming from. I had been the shortest girl in my grade, and probably the grade below me too, up until I turned fourteen and hit a growth spurt. Now I was the same height as my mom, the spitting image of her with our long, dark hair and grayish eyes. The only things I inherited from my father were the waviness of his hair and the presence of a single dimple in my right cheek, assuming I smiled enough to show it.
“Yeah, I turn eighteen in two months,” I agreed, and gently backed away from his hands to turn towards the house looming in front of us.
“It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” Uncle Peter asked in my ear.
I nodded. I couldn’t agree with him more.
I gave Aunt Lacey time to put the pieces of my mother back together while her husband and I started unpacking the car. As we carried the boxes into the house, I was struck again with the sheer size of it all. . There was absolutely no reason my mom and I needed this much space, and I wondered how we could afford it.
“How did you pick this house out for us, Uncle Pete?” I dropped a box of kitchen utensils on the counter.
Uncle Peter lowered his own box of miscellaneous items and leaned against the bar that was larger than our old kitchen table.
“The school board is kind of like the city counsel of this town. We pretty much run things around here,” he began. “This house has been sitting for a hundred years without an owner and belongs to the township. It’s not in the best shape, but all things considered, it could be much worse. I was able to get a very good price for your mom.”
I nodded my head and looked around. Sure, the wood was dusty and the floor creaked with every step, but there were no signs of mice or any other creature trying to make this place its home. The house was like a black and white picture, a snapshot of what it had been a hundred years ago, almost perfectly preserved over time. The more I saw of the house, the more amazed I became.
I was suddenly very grateful for my uncle and his ties in this tiny, overlooked town.
Uncle Peter was the principal at Green Peaks High School, and apparently held a high seat on the school board as well. Only in a town this size would he be allowed to do both, but there probably wasn’t a lot of competition or people who even wanted to fill the positions.
Not only did he score this house for us, but he was able to find my mother a job as well. While fifth grade had always been my mom’s favorite class to teach, she was happy to accept the second-grade teaching position that had just opened up that summer. With only one adult to provide income for the family now, it was essential that she found a reasonable job to pay the bills.
My mom and Aunt Lacey walked through the door and praised all the hard work we had accomplished so far. We didn’t have a ton of belongings to bring with us from Colorado, but I’d carried enough heavy boxes to work up a sweat.
“This place is amazing, Pete! I can’t believe you found this for us!” My mom kissed Uncle Peter on the cheek, and he batted her away playfully.
“You girls are my family; I’d do anything for you!” He smiled at me widely before turning to grab more boxes.
Upstairs, I picked out the room that seemed the biggest to call my own. My mom preferred a room on the lower level, so I basically had the whole second floor to myself. Surprisingly, the house was furnished for the most part, lacking only appliances and a good cleaning, and the queen-sized mattress I plopped down on exhaled a much smaller plume of dust than I’d been expecting.
My room faced the back of the house, and out the smudgy window I could see the lines of trees that began on both sides of the backyard. Our property had to be on the very edge of town because the forest surrounded us on three sides and left the only opening to face the road that brought us here.
I was gazing out the window when my phone buzzed again, like a little incessant creature that demanded I know it was there. I’d considered asking my mom to get me a new phone with a new number, but I didn’t want to bother her with everything else she had going on. Figuring I might as well get the beating over with, I extracted it from my pocket and lit up the screen. Three new text messages stared up at me.
You and your family are total trash.
There’s not enough booze in the state of Wyoming to satisfy your alcoholic family.
Your father got what he deserved that night.
Three messages from three different numbers I didn’t have in my contact list. I might not have known their names, but I knew they had to be my fellow Plainfield High School classmates.
I’d always known my father liked to drink, but it had never been an issue in my household. He would have a few beers, many times more than just a few, but he never grew mean or hostile or ever treated my mom or me harshly. If anything, the alcohol made him rather silly and sometimes more fun to be around.
He had not, to my knowledge, ever driven drunk before.
The night we received the phone call, everything changed. It was a Friday night, and Dad had been at the bar with a few of his friends having a good time. Witnesses say he didn’t seem incoherent, but the bartender encouraged him to call a cab, supposedly. I had a feeling he added that detail to protect his bar’s reputation.
Dad didn’t call a cab, though. He tried to drive home after too many drinks. If he had simply driven off the road and met his end against an electric pole or tree, I wouldn’t have been receiving nonstop text messages for the past two weeks. If he’d simply taken a cab, the entire town wouldn’t hate us.
Roger Stone met his end when his Chevy Malibu made contact with the little Mazda Miata that was heading home after a date at the movies. They said it was a head-on collision, and both drivers and one passenger were pronounced dead at the scene.
That night, my mother and I lost an essential unit in our family and Plainfield High lost its star quarterback and cheerleading captain. Amelia Piper and Nathan Miles, winners of the cutest couple award three years straight. They were in my class, both about to begin their senior year, and both holding scholarship offers to colleges across the state.
It was funny how one day no one in the school knew my name, and the next everyone had my number and was sending me death threats. Overnight, I’d become a sort of celebrity. I had exactly one friend left, a flamboyant boy named Michael Varner, and he was the only one sad to see me leave.
My mom and I needed a fresh start, and here in Green Peaks, Wyoming, we were hoping to get just that.
I shoved my phone into the bedside table and slammed the drawer a little too hard. Even if I blocked those numbers, more would take their place. Their words were already branded on the inside of my eyelids, reminding me not only of my father’s death but also that he had died a murderer.
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the window, not caring about the layer of grime anymore. I tried to relax and let my emotions take over, but the tears still wouldn’t come.
As I stood there staring out the dirt-streaked glass, I couldn’t help feeling drawn to the forest spread before me. Something inside me was being tugged forward, like it needed to be lost in the sea of green and leave this life and all my sorrows behind.
Within the shadows of the trees, I thought I saw a figure move. But then I blinked, and there was nothing but green leaves and darkness.
