What Lies in the Woods

by Kate Alice Marshall

There is a wilderness in little girls. We could not contain it. It made magic of the rain and a temple of the forest.

Our parents always spoke of the moment they found out—of hearing that three girls had gone into the woods and only two had emerged, knowing right away that it was their girls, because it was a small town and because they knew the way the wilderness called to us, the way we slipped down deer trails and searched for the tracks of unicorns beside the creek.

They told the story again and again, until they thought they owned it. We tried to forget. We didn’t tell the story. Not the real one. Not ever.

“I don’t want to turn my trauma into art. I don’t want you to turn my trauma into art.”

I laughed a little, surrendering. I’d have a drink, and we wouldn’t fight, and Stahl would stay dead, and the past would remain the past, and no one would ever have to know the truth.

I am sorry you got murdered, Kayla Wilkerson had written. Almost was added in with a little caret.

Survival had never even crossed my mind as a possibility or a concept. I’d crawled across the forest floor because in my blood loss–addled brain, I was trying to get away from the pain, like I could leave it behind if I got far enough.

I might have been the one who discovered Persephone, but Cassidy was the one who made her ours.

“No,” Cass said immediately, and I was glad. Because neither did I. I wanted her to stay Persephone. Stay a myth, a story. Stay our secret. The instant she had a name, we’d have to admit that she was a person. That she was more than the bones we’d found in the forest, and the magic we’d made from them.

but my reputation had always been made by things beyond my control. The idea that I had a say in any of it seemed faintly absurd.

It wasn’t Never again, but it was Not today, and we could string those days along one after another, a procession of sunrises we’d held on long enough to see.

“You’re my father,” I said. “I care. Can’t help it, apparently, and God knows I’ve tried.”

How was I supposed to help someone who didn’t want my help? It wasn’t like he’d ever done a thing for me, other than not kick me out. I didn’t owe him a goddamn thing. Except that he was my dad.

I wished I didn’t care—that I could be like Liv and want only for Persephone to find her way home. But why should she be able to leave the woods, when I never had?

I’d been a little in love with Cody Benham even before he saved my life, that day in the woods.

“So far I’ve managed to bring up your newly ex-boyfriend, your strained relationship with your dad, and that time you almost died. Why don’t you pick the subject?”

He wasn’t a bad guy, Mitch. The trouble was he’d mistaken drama for virtue and suffering for art, and felt impoverished by his own good fortune.

I wouldn’t let him get to know Naomi Shaw, because he couldn’t. He’d just turn her into a story that made sense to him.

The forest stood dark and deep before me. Persephone was in there, somewhere. Because she was why we’d been out there that day, because Stahl was one secret and she was the other, they’d tangled together in my mind. My monster and my goddess, their fingers always catching at my hair, trying to drag me back to that day. I’d always fought that pull.

We knew the world was cruel and dirty and dull, and it was all so brutally unfair that we refused to accept it.

There was agony in not knowing the truth of my own recollections. Agony, and hope—because if things were that scattered, maybe I had remembered, for a little while.

“Bad things happened to you. It doesn’t mean you deserved them. You have earned the right to protect yourself. You don’t owe the world anything. It owes you.”

Hot tears streaked my cheeks. Trash. You’re trash. My lungs burned. I wasn’t Artemis, wasn’t a goddess who could endlessly run through the wilds with her sacred deer.

There wasn’t anywhere for me to go. I was where I was supposed to be: with Olivia. In the woods.

Liv was dead. She’d killed herself, but we’d killed her, too. We hadn’t listened to her. We’d wrapped our hands around our secrets like barbed wire, even when they cut into us. Even when there was no goddamn reason not to let go. I was still holding on.

“She was,” I said. And then, “She was complicated.” “The best people always are,” he replied.

For all the fights and stumbles along the way, she was still one of the two people in the world who knew me best. The only one now.

“Why the hell not? It’s what Liv wanted. She wanted Persephone to be found. To have peace. We have to do it for her.” I set my jaw, rising to my feet. “We pushed her to this. We were afraid and selfish and we wouldn’t listen.”

and I had no desire to gaze into the maw of human darkness in some quest for understanding.

She’d been nice enough to ask if I minded her listening to the ones about me, and she hadn’t asked any intrusive questions afterward, but she was always looking at me weirdly. Somewhere between worship and hunger. Though maybe those were the same thing.

If it weren’t for me, their daughters would have been normal. Fine. But when that knife went into my body, it was their good girls who were truly wounded, and their wounds that mattered.

Jessi wasn’t Persephone but Eurydice, and Liv was Orpheus, guiding her back toward the surface only to—foolishly, inevitably—look back as she had been forbidden to do, and now both of them were lost below.

“Or Jessi fell and hit her head, and Liv killed herself,” I said. And I was the only villain in the story after all. The girl who lied.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. He kissed me, softly, and I shut my eyes and told myself that my father was right and none of it meant anything at all.

I shut off the water and toweled myself off, and didn’t feel clean at all.

There were just things that needed to be true for the world to hold together. So you didn’t look too closely. But now I had, and I could see the cracks running through the foundation of everything I’d believed.

The flesh does not acknowledge linear time, a therapist had once told me. The past is written alongside the present on our skins. I told him he should have written poetry instead of prescriptions. He accused me of deflecting insight with sarcasm.

I didn’t want to like Ethan Schreiber. I didn’t want to trust him. But I needed to. Sometimes, surrender was the kindest thing of all.

“You should get yourself cleaned up,” Ethan was saying. “You look—” I held up a warning finger. “If you ever want me to ill-advisedly hop into bed with you again, you will stop talking,” I said. “Stunning. Truly stunning,” he course-corrected. I rolled my eyes.

“Should I trust you, Ethan Schreiber?” I asked him. “I want to be someone you can trust,” he said. “That’s not the same thing,” I said, like it was a joke, not sure how to react. All he said was, “I know.”

How many times had I tried to push Cass away? We’d fight, or I’d just stop talking to her, burying myself in my own misery. And every time, she was there to dig me out again. She had never given up on me. Except for once, a soft voice whispered in my mind. When I lay dying.

“Thank you,” I said. I stepped into his arms, and he held me there, my cheek against his chest. I felt safe in his arms—the safest I’d felt in a long time. It was starting to scare me.

i gotta call this shit now in writing he's defo stahl's son and if i am wrong i will just die or something idk BUT LIKE I GENUINELY THINK HE WANTS TO HELP IF HE DOESN'T IDK WHAT HE'S DOING HERE AND HE WAS SO ADAMANT ON STAHL BEING A KILLER AND WHATEVER

She looked so much like Cass at that age—the same wheat-colored hair, the same slender nose and big eyes. Eleven years old. Exactly the same age we had been that summer. It made my breath catch.

I stared at the page inside the folder. It was paperwork for having his name changed in the state of Washington to Ethan Schreiber— From Alan Michael Stahl, Jr.

PROPHET PROPHET

My body echoed with the ghost of his touch. I had lost nothing, I told myself. A man I’d known for a few days, who turned out not to even really exist.

“You destroyed her,” I said softly. “She was wonderful, and you destroyed her.”

She was a monster. She was my best friend. She was dead on the ground and the dirt was stained dark beneath her.

A mistake had killed Jessi Walker. Silence had killed Liv. And the truth had killed me now.

But then I remembered the timid way she watched the world and wondered what it had been like, to have a mother like Cassidy Green.

Persephone had made it out of the forest at last.