Ten o’clock on Saturday, and my mind is split. Half of my brain is focused on finding that ninja-thing, glad we’ll finally have the time and daylight to trek into the woods and check out the abandoned lumber mill. The other half of my brain is still at school.
“Did you see him? Did you? He was practically groping her! Isn’t Kei supposed to be dating Hayley?”
“They’re not dating,” Destin says, sullenly. We’re in my kitchen, swiping food for our trek into the woods.
“As far as she’s concerned they are! He’s creepy, and he should just stick to Hayley and leave Jul alone.”
“He’s creepy,” is all Destin admits.
I glance sideways at him. “You’re acting weird.”
“I’m worried we’ll end up doing all the work on the project,” he says evasively.
“Not a chance. Hayley never does her own work when she can con someone else into doing it for her - but that’s probably why Miller put her with us. She knew we’d hold her to a line.” I nod to myself.
That doesn’t seem to comfort him. “I’m also worried about wandering around in a rotted out building in the middle of the woods. Why aren’t we telling anyone where we’re going?”
I grab my backpack and sling it over my shoulder. “Because adventure is its own reward.”
“That...has nothing to do with what I just said.”
“Oh! Grab that last sandwich, I forgot to put it with the rest.”
My sister's voice comes from the hall, right outside. "I think there's some juice leftover from - " Hayley and Amity walk into the kitchen and we freeze, holding an open backpack full of sandwiches.
Hayley raises an eyebrow.
“We’re hungry,” I say.
“The last time you made eight sandwiches, I found a note on your bed saying you were going to the Sahara, and would send me a postcard when you found King Solomon’s treasure. You were also nine. Aren’t you a little old for this?”
“You’re never too old for adventure,” I say dramatically. “And that state trooper totally brought us back in one piece, for the record. Now if you'll excuse us, we'll be - ”
“Scouting for a tree fort?” Hayley says, condescendingly.
"Playing cowboys and Indians?" Amity tacks on.
"Maybe some cops and robbers?" Hayley laughs. "Oh no, wait, or is it mutants and...whatever it is mutants fight? I wouldn't know, I'm not trapped in kindergarten."
"Survival training," I glare at her.
"For what, DragonCon?" Amity derides, naming Atlanta's yearly comic convention.
Hayley gives her a look of mild horror. "How do you even know what that is? I have an excuse, I live with that," she waves a hand at me.
Amity flounders slightly. "I...heard..."
"Never mind." Hayley gives a longsuffering sigh, and turns back to me. "You know there's no way Mom and Dad are letting you go into the woods. We've never been allowed out there."
"Well then maybe they should have picked a house that wasn't surrounded by woods," I return. "Seems like faulty logic to me." I zip up the bag and back towards the door. "Since we're such a huge blight to your eyes, we'll just get going."
"Did you even ask Mom if it was okay?" Hayley says loudly.
"Keep it down!" I hiss, but I already hear the sound of the office door opening, and my mom comes in, paint flecks in her dark blonde hair and a wide paintbrush still in hand. She has this thing for repainting rooms, but she ends up getting more on herself than the walls.
"What's dramatic now?" she says suspiciously, eying the four of us, one hand on the waist of her painting overalls.
"Hayley, as usual," I say.
"Mac and Destin are sneaking off to the woods," Hayley snaps.
Mom's eyebrows raise, blue paint smudge and all.
“We're not going far, Mom.” I reach for the handle. “We’ll be back by dinner, promise...”
“MacAlister Dupree,” my mom says harshly, and I cringe. “You are not wandering around in those woods. They’re full of snakes and poison ivy, and there’ve been reports of coyotes lately.”
Coyotes? Did that have anything to do with the ninja? “We won’t go out of eyeshot of the house, promise,” I lie.
Mom gives me the narrow appraising look that means she’s reading my mind. I hate that look. “No. The girls and I are going shopping in town, you’ll be coming with us. Destin, you’re free to stay or come with us, of course, but I’m not leaving the two of you here to wander off the instant my car leaves the driveway.” She didn’t have to ask him if his dad knew where he was. It was Saturday. Destin spends more time in our house than his own anyway. Also, his dad isn’t nearly so micro-managing as my mom.
“Aw come on, Mom, we wouldn’t do that!” I protest. We would. We absolutely would. But we’d absolutely be back before she was, so she’d never know.
She takes the backpack from me and starts transferring the sandwiches to the fridge.
“The woods are off limits,” she says firmly. “Always have been, always will be.”
Hayley gives me a smirk and sashays out of the kitchen. Amity glances back at us with an expression I don't quite understand - something like hunger - but quickly follows her out.
I glare at Destin for having the nerve to look relieved. Did he want to collate homework handouts? If we were going to clear our names, we had to find that little...whatever it was!
Alright so, to be fair, I should probably come clean about why the whole possibly-mythological-creature thing didn’t freak me out as much as it should. And, you know, Destin and the feathers.
When I was eight and he was nine, Destin fell off the jungle gym in my backyard. He was mostly fine – some scrapes on his hands and bruises – but there was this pile of feathers all around him. At first I thought maybe he fell on a bird or something, but then he swore me to ultimate secrecy and told me the truth.
He wasn’t human. Not him, or his dad, or his mom, or his sister. Their whole family was some sort of other race. Feral, he said. Apparently being feral sometimes meant you got abilities. Usually it was useful things like strength or speed or really good eyesight. Not Destin – he just molted when you scared him. Bummer of a superpower.
So anyway, that was how I first learned that there’s a lot more going on in the world than most people know. Naturally I wanted to know as much about this stuff as possible – but Destin’s knowledge about his heritage is pretty limited. Apparently his parents’ families immigrated from somewhere far away, to get out of a bad situation, and have wanted to lie low ever since. His dad was pretty vague about it to him, he said, and refused to explain any more. He also claims that if I ever let on that I know anything, his dad will go berserk. I’ve never seen the man so much as curse in traffic, so I don’t know about berserk, but so far I’ve kept my mouth shut and done my part to help Destin hide the feathers. The down jacket was my idea. Pretty clever, right?
Meanwhile, foreign people built a weird school in the middle of some old cotton fields and started collecting kids that give me the heebie jeebies.
“It’s the school,” I say. “I’m serious, there’s something really fishy about the whole situation.”
I’d managed to convince my mom to drop us off by the library downtown while she, Hayley, and Amity go dress shopping. Research is a much better fate than listening to them fight about skirt lengths.
“We’re not actually writing that paper for history, are we,” Destin states, as we cross the street to the large, three story stone edifice that is the Havenwood Public Library. For a town as small as ours, we really outdid ourselves on our library. I like to call it THE CASTLE OF BOOKS. In all caps.
“Who said anything about a history paper?”
“You did, five minutes ago, when you asked your mom to take us to the library.”