A Light Most Hateful E-Book

Hailey Piper

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 363

Beschreibung

When a summer storm sweeps through a sleepy town unleashing a monstrous and otherworldy power that threatens to break reality, Olivia will stop at nothing to find her best friend and get them to safety. Mona Awad's Bunny meets Stranger Things in this mind-bending and terrifying examination of female friendship and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love, from the Bram Stoker award winning author of Queen of Teeth Three years after running away from home, Olivia is stuck with a dead-end job in nowhere town Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. At least she has her best friend, Sunflower. Olivia figures she'll die in Chapel Hill, if not from boredom, then the summer night storm which crashes into town with a mind-bending monster in tow. If Olivia's going to escape Chapel Hill and someday reconcile with her parents, she'll need to dodge residents enslaved by the storm's otherworldly powers and find Sunflower. But as the night strains friendships and reality itself, Olivia suspects the storm, and its monster, may have its eyes on Sunflower and everything she loves. Including Olivia.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1. What Movie is this?

2. Devils

3. Monsters

4. Sickness

5. Glass

6. The Girl of Midnight Sunshine

7. Safety in Numbers

8. Psychic Connections

9. Sunset Pass

10. The Tide

11. No Past

12. People from the Moon

13. Stitching

14. The Kiss

15. Another Thing

16. No Future

17. The Girl who Swallows the Sun

18. Truth

19. Mouth of Glass

20. Labyrinthine Prey

21. The Mason House

22. Hateful Light

23. God

24. Underworld

25. The Girl who Cries Beneath the Hill

26. The Dreamer

27. Anywhere, Anyplace

Acknowledgments

About the Author

‘Thrillingly original. Piper deftly stitches threads of vulnerability, existential anxiety, and complex friendship power dynamics into a feverish, nail-biting, writhing-in-your-seat nightmare. A juicy horror tale you’ll want to sink your teeth into, before it sinks its teeth into you.’

Rachel Harrison, Bram Stoker® Award-nominated author of The Return

‘Hailey Piper’s prose crackles sharply and thrums with the mesmerizing pulse of a passing summer storm. A vivid, imaginative, and chillingly tense novel, A Light Most Hateful cements Piper as one of the most spectacularly fierce talents working in horror fiction today.’

Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

‘What has sprouted out from Hailey Piper’s head is a fully-formed goddess of a novel, equal parts terrifying, awe-inspiring, and downright worshipful. I’m still scorched by A Light Most Hateful, even after closing its pages, blinded by its brilliance.’

Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters

‘Piper’s prose will leave you breathless in this stormy, jagged little pill of a novel about love and hate and acceptance in a world gone mad. A furiously compelling and propulsive read.’

Gemma Amor, Bram Stoker® Award-nominated author of Dear Laura

‘Piper has spawned a slick mess of family dynamics.’

Polly Hall, Bram Stoker® Award-nominated author of The Taxidermist’s Lover

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A LIGHT MOST HATEFUL

Print edition ISBN: 9781803364209

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364216

Published By Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Hailey Piper 2023

Hailey Piper asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To anyone who’s ever needed to run,this book is for you

Why are you like this?

You hate me so much, but I hate you too.

I’ve always hated you.

Hate. You.

1. WHAT MOVIE IS THIS?

The hill screamed at nightfall, the high-pitched panic of a child caught in a bad dream. Its power rattled Olivia Abram’s car windows, her teeth and bones.

She pumped the brakes in the middle of the street, and her uneasy sedan paused only a few yards from the curb where the Mason House stood. No sign of anyone shrieking in its windows, on its lawn, around its neighbors.

Olivia looked out her driver’s window at the curb, to the nearest standing streetlight, and then eyed her rearview mirror. Behind her, tongues of pavement formed turn-offs and intersections. Every route in Chapel Hill spread from Main Street, either heading south past the Mason House toward the interstate, or north toward the Starry Wood, the business district, sterile suburbs, and Sunset Pass. An older woman in tank top and shorts walked a yellow Labrador, and both she and her dog looked toward Olivia’s maroon Chevy, as though she’d been the one to make the sound.

Which at least meant she hadn’t imagined it. She listened for it again, some way to give it a sensible origin, but only crickets sang in the trees ahead.

Had it really been a scream? She had heard a noise, glass shattering across Chapel Hill’s sky, no doubting that, but had it been human for certain? Too far away to be the squeal of drive-in speakers gearing up for tonight’s show. Maybe some commotion on Main Street? Or maybe Olivia’s tire had run over twisted metal in the road, but she couldn’t guess why it would make that anguished screech. Another listen would help her figure it out, but the sound didn’t come again.

Hills didn’t scream, no matter how lonesome.

Olivia couldn’t idle here much longer. She pulled forward on the narrow road and beeped her horn twice, interrupting the night with a noise of her own. It came in two flat squawks.

Homes on this side of town stood ancient, almost too old for Chapel Hill, for America, as though they had watched continents divide and stars die. The Mason House was a two-floor house with a split-level breaking the black rooftop between the main area and the risen second floor, where two bedrooms haunted the upstairs. Dark wood formed its skin and organs. Olivia had stepped inside plenty of times, but the house never seemed to welcome her any more than the woman who owned it. Only her daughter offered a kind word.

There was no sign of Sunflower. The front door stood unmoving above the stiff porch of grim planks, empty of a petite silhouette or blond locks. As if no one lived here.

Olivia craned her head out the driver’s side window. “Sunflower, where did you get?”

She only then noticed the driveway, where an aging Volkswagen should have sat beside the white Honda. No Volkswagen meant no Sunflower. And despite the number of bedrooms, only two people lived here.

The door at last cracked open, where a bony frame in a white dress emerged. She shut the door hard, her back to the street. Her face was hidden behind gray-streaked dark locks, as if her head were only made of hair across an endless faceless scalp.

Olivia tensed to drive off. She wanted to escape before Hazibel Mason could descend the creaking porch steps and snag her in unpleasant conversation. This was supposed to be a pickup-and-drive kind of visit. Nothing to make Olivia late for the Friday night shift.

“She isn’t here,” Hazibel said, still not turning around, her tone flat and unfriendly. Keys jangled in her hands. “Isn’t she with you?”

“Yes,” Olivia said without a moment’s hesitation.

She hit the gas and drove on before Hazibel could ask another question. Better to spread confusion now and concoct the right lies later. Anything to appease Hazibel’s blue-dagger stare.

The sedan slid toward Main Street, where the bars, shops, and restaurants thrummed with life, and the sidewalks and streets brimmed with cars and people. If Olivia didn’t know better, she would have assumed Chapel Hill to be fighting its small-town status with small-city aspirations.

No such thing. This was a go-nowhere, be-nobody town. Always would be, as long as it stood. So where the hell could Sunflower be? Her boyfriend Roy Addler’s house? The craft shop?

Maybe the drive-in, with any luck.

Olivia drove a block along Main Street before chasing north and turning onto Ridgemont Road. Her home on Cooper Street beckoned from the west side of Chapel Hill, if only she could waste the evening cozy there instead.

But she headed east, passing sterile suburban neighborhoods where slanted rooftops capped timber houses, each looming over nearby lawns and streetlights before disappearing in her rearview. Van Buren Avenue, then Riggs, then Newport all on the right, trees on the left, until Ridgemont Road curved north and sent her driving straight into the Starry Wood.

Night painted the trunks, limbs, and needles in a blue-black hue where the town’s light couldn’t reach. Their darkness coated Chapel Hill’s northern edge, guarding town from a steep descent. You could even stare down that gaping drop from Lookout, but that was east of the drive-in, meant for making out, feeling up, and other activities you needed two or more to do, and Olivia drove alone.

Starry Wood Lane had no streetlights, hiding the forest beyond beneath a black curtain. Switching off the headlights might have given Olivia a meager glimpse of starlight above, but the outstretched tree limbs obscured much of the sky, forming shadow hands that grabbed at her car in passing.

According to one of the astrology books Shelly and Dane kept in the craft shop beneath their apartment where Olivia lived, this August’s new moon and the positions of the northern stars promised her that tonight would be okay. But books and stars could be liars, and maybe the not-scream noise meant to remind her of that. There was no such thing as an okay Friday night shift at the Starry Wood Drive-In.

Crossing tree limbs and branches soon thinned from the winding road against the subtle lights ahead. Rows of gravel formed a tight square spreading beneath the enormous drive-in screen, its black speakers rising as sentinels to either side for anyone whose radio might be busted.

Booth Bill sat in a lawn chair where Starry Wood Lane deposited cars into the driveway, a gentle giant of a man. He and Olivia waved as she drove past. He would sell tickets until showtime, and then he would man the projector himself, while Olivia juggled the work of two or three people at the concessions counter. The owner would be sorry if either of them quit, but he knew the same as Olivia. No one in this town ever went anywhere, got anywhere, and no one was coming to make this night any easier for either of them.

Not even Sunflower, it seemed. She was supposed to hop into Olivia’s car on the way in, that had been the plan—keep Olivia company through the first film of tonight’s double feature. Not to help, but for Olivia to have her best friend against the August heat and nighttime stillness. That would have been enough.

Only a couple of cars were parked in the drive-in’s gravely rows, neither of them Sunflower’s Volkswagen. Other cars would come, and there was a chance none of them would bring Sunflower. She might have found better things to do than hang around here.

Olivia needed to get her head on straight. She hurried into her red uniform shirt and pulled her dark brown hair into a gentle ponytail. A mounting ache throbbed behind her forehead. She’d have to muscle through it. Pain wouldn’t make the double feature any easier, but regardless of lying books, she wanted to pretend the stars had something nice to say.

Tonight’s crowd came rowdy. Too many high school graduates and seniors-to-be soon stuffed the drive-in’s rows, with little intention of watching the movies. August’s retro night—the owner’s idea—gave Chapel Hill’s teenage populace a substitute location for necking rather than piling their cars at the cliffs of Lookout in a mock orgy of flesh and steel.

The concessions stand was a sticky countertop, a glass window guarding the candy, not the staff, and a sloping roof jutting from a squat white slab of brick at the drive-in’s edge. Most of the building’s insides offered supply storage, a pantry, and a walk-in fridge. Public restrooms haunted the building’s far end, while the locked door to the employee restroom stood a few feet down from the soda-stained tiles where Olivia juggled her responsibilities at the register, popcorn machine, soda fountain, and everything else the owner stuffed back here to accommodate guests.

Rows of cars spit endless customers, approaching with endless requests. Every request for buttered, unbuttered, root beer, clear soda, candy—it all piled on Olivia’s shoulders, everyone scrambling to get their share before the screen lit with tonight’s spectacle.

She only caught a break when the first movie rolled. Couples retreated to their cars, and most wouldn’t return from swallowing soda, snacks, and each other’s tongues until the between-movie rush. Only the occasional straggler popped in mid-show. The runtime gave her room to catch her breath, recount the cash in the register, even grab a drink for herself.

And to scan the area again for Sunflower Mason.

She might have gone wandering anywhere amid the rows of parked cars, now ashine with flickering light. Concessions stood to one side of the drive-in, and the windshields offered clearer pictures of the movie than the screen itself at this angle. Had she known the movie, Olivia could have followed the reflected technicolor blur, but retro night meant cinematic mystery meat. She had been too focused on starlight and the half-heard scream to note the title placard outside the drive-in, and now the reflected screen filled with suggestions of spaceships and robots.

No Sunflower amid the cars. No Volkswagen, not even Roy’s Ford rust-mobile. The world stretched empty beneath the encircling trees, busy screen, and starlit sky.

A figure broke from the gloom, the glint of a pinkish face under the movie’s glow.

Olivia stood straight and dusted her shirt. This might be another drive-in patron, but it could be Sunflower at last. Olivia needed to get herself together. Be nonchalant, and also excited, and maybe annoyed too. She could say something like, Look who finally showed up, or maybe, I thought you died.

The eagerness sank into her stomach as the figure grew definition. Hair too dark, shoulders too broad, legs too long. Only the darkness and Olivia’s delirious optimism could have convinced her this guy was Sunflower.

He was Roy’s friend, Taggart Dempsey. He appeared in his corduroy jacket and ripped-up blue jeans, cocking his shaggy head.

Olivia wanted to shrink away, pretend she wasn’t here, ignore him, but then he waved a dollar bill, transforming him from annoying acquaintance into customer. No choice but to attend him.

“What can I get you?” Olivia asked. “Please don’t say anything that will make me point to the sign.”

Taggart glanced overhead, where a white placard behind Olivia read, WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. He swallowed whatever he’d been about to say and slid the dollar across a butter stain.

“Twizzlers,” he said with a charmless grin. “Cherry.”

Olivia passed him two dimes of change and a pack of crimson Yum-Yum Whips. His teeth tore open the plastic and drew out a whip as if snapping a cigarette from its pack. Olivia had seen Hazibel Mason do that a thousand times, as if she sustained herself on nothing but nicotine.

“Think they’ll ever get real Twizzlers?” Taggart asked. “The knock-off’s never as good.”

“I couldn’t predict,” Olivia said. “You’re free to drive to the theater in Langston, ask their concessions.”

“How about Roy? Got him back there?”

“No Roy. You couldn’t afford him.” Olivia bit her lip. Any more words than needed and Taggart would feel encouraged. He dreamed of Roy and himself dating Sunflower and Olivia, but his idea of small-town coupling entitled him to nothing.

His teeth flashed red with licorice. “Haven’t seen him? Or Sunflower?” Neither had graced their loser friends with their attention. “I could keep you company. Like a date.”

Olivia usually cleaned or knitted under the counter at spare moments, but she had forgotten her scarf project in her bedroom. Just as well; she didn’t really need Taggart asking, Is that a knitting needle, or you’re just happy to see me? for the fiftieth time.

“Devin Shipley’s here,” she said, chinning at a black Ford down the rows. “He asked me out first, and I can’t say yes to you until I’ve said yes to him. No line cutting.”

Taggart chewed half a whip. “Shipley hasn’t said two words to you since graduation. He’s with Stacy Keppler tonight.”

Didn’t people in this town have anything better to discuss than each other’s personal lives? Olivia had always assumed graduation would flip life’s light switch from nonsense to progress. She had forced sudden change when she was fifteen, a runaway hitchhiker from Hartford, Connecticut who landed in Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania. It could happen again, but nothing had changed between graduation and tonight. High school only bled into the wider world. Olivia still worked the drive-in. Devin and his football buddies still shared blue-and-gold letter jackets with high school sweethearts, or new girlfriends if the old ones thought they could escape Chapel Hill for college. Most would thicken their roots on this hill and sprout lifelong jobs and families.

Would Olivia? She had always meant to head for Hartford again and find some resolution with Mom and Dad. She imagined them both still coming home from the family’s pet store smelling of fish and dogs and everything they ate, but perhaps their lives had grown while Olivia stagnated in this overlong rest stop.

She pulled a white rag, blotchy with saffron stains, from beneath the counter and wiped at its surface. “Anything else? I’m on the clock.”

Taggart tightened his fingers around the licorice bag. “Fine, not now, but I’ll keep you company after shift. Not like anyone’s waiting up at your house checking a curfew.”

Olivia’s muscles tensed. Enough scrubbing, and she might wipe Taggart out of the picture, too. “Because Shelly and Dane aren’t smothering me.”

“Because the Kincaids aren’t your parents,” Taggart said. “They’re only going to care so much.”

Olivia glared at him. “That’s your game plan? Pissing me off?”

His smirk returned. “It working?”

A lithe figure slid from the drive-in’s dimness. “Goodbye, Taggart,” her familiar voice sang. Olivia grinned at the sound.

Taggart spun around, licorice swinging. “I’m allowed to—”

“Good. Bye. Taggart.” A white hand pressed him out of the way, his body an organic sliding door. He stumbled to one side, eyes fixed intently on his licorice bag, and then moseyed off to find someone else to bother.

Sunflower Mason’s corn-yellow hair glowed beneath the concession stand lights. A gentle smirk graced her perfect, petite face, and then she grabbed the counter, hoisting herself overtop, jeans narrowly missing a dried splotch of butter. Roy’s red-and-black jacket billowed around her shoulders, two sizes too big. Her sneakers slapped the brown tiles.

Olivia dodged out of the way. She said nothing, only stared in disbelief.

“What?” Sunflower asked. “Why scrub the counter if not for little old me?” A smile pressed at her porcelain cheeks, and mascara-clad lashes fluttered over pale blue eyes.

Olivia could fall into those twin skies. “You know it.”

Gravel crunched under sneakers closer to the rows of parked vehicles, where Taggart probably hunted for Roy. Olivia had every right to ask why Sunflower hadn’t waited at her house, why Olivia had been forced to cross paths with Hazibel, but after shooing Taggart away, to question might sound ungrateful.

Sunflower scoffed in his direction, a bad taste on her tongue. “Got enough headache without buddy boy there,” she said. “Any Motrin?”

“Your head, too?” Olivia asked.

She made for the personal effects cabinet, where her purse nestled inside, alone. Her fingers prodded the jumble of lipsticks, tampons, candies, and a thousand other things for the Motrin bottle. She should have popped one when she arrived. Even with her headache having mostly subsided, invisible hands squeezed her head, stormy tension filling the air with a threat of thunder. She glanced above the screen-lit parked cars, where the night remained starlit, not a cloud in the sky. No reason she could see out there for the pain. Maybe her period was coming early this month.

Her nail scratched a plastic cylinder, and she snatched the Motrin bottle before her purse could swallow it again.

“Thanks for clearing Taggart,” she said, batting a couple pills into Sunflower’s palm. “But he won’t leave once Roy shows up.”

“Roy’s not coming,” Sunflower said, helping herself to the soda fountain and chasing the Motrin with Mountain Dew.

Maybe the stars were right and tonight wouldn’t be an absolute disaster. “Hang here,” Olivia said, beaming. “We’ll half-watch the movie, and you’ll play Taggart repellent.”

“He’s not coming, and I’m not staying.” Sunflower cupped a hand beneath the fountain drink’s ice dispenser and then crushed the gathered chips against her forehead. “Heading to Lookout.”

Olivia scrunched up her face. “Roy and Taggart?”

Sunflower batted those lashes again. “Me and Roy.”

A long stare stretched between them. Hazibel Mason went out each Friday night, usually with friends, sometimes on a date. She wouldn’t be home to expect Sunflower’s return. Any other night, Roy and Sunflower meeting at Lookout wouldn’t have meant more than groping and necking. They would drink, stargaze, and maybe watch the lights of distant towns beside other couples. But Lookout was empty tonight, every other rambunctious duo having gathered at the drive-in to make-out beneath the shimmer of retro film. Sunflower and Roy could do the same, but they weren’t.

Which meant they had other plans. Had been making them. Reason enough for Sunflower’s absence earlier and a much longer absence when she laid on a leather back seat at Lookout.

“Oh.” Olivia almost laughed. “And you decided this, when?”

“Morning impulse.” Sunflower scratched the back of her neck. “Positive by noon. Don’t make that look, I’m already nervous.”

Olivia patted her face for some alien expression and found herself gaping. She forced a smile, took Sunflower’s arms, and pressed forehead to forehead.

“Easy, easy,” Olivia said, her voice softening. “No need for nerves, Sunshine. You’re the most amazing person in the world.”

Sunflower exhaled hard. Her forehead nuzzled Olivia’s, and then her smile flared with certainty as she dipped back.

“Am I good?” Sunflower asked. “Looking sleek, Liv? Check me out.”

Olivia guided Sunflower in a slow spin, examining every inch from her raggedy jeans to her manicured nails and tussled curtains of hair. Her locks had mussed in the back where Sunflower scratched her neck, and Olivia smoothed them together again. Her fingers traced skin, where a faint, risen blemish formed a crescent moon—Sunflower’s birthmark. Olivia had always found the mark funny. Sunflower—partly named for one celestial body, skin bearing the resemblance of another.

Hurricane wind swept beneath the birthmark, and Olivia realized she’d let her touch linger.

Sunflower tilted an impatient head. “Good?”

Olivia spun Sunflower to face front. Good didn’t cover it. “You’re gorgeous.”

“Gorgeous?” Sunflower snapped into a shrill giggle. “I’m so nervous, I need to pee.”

The concession stand clutched at Olivia like a child needing a mindful mother. “I can’t go with you right now, but—” She pointed to where the public restrooms jutted down the building.

Sunflower wrinkled her perfect nose. “You’d make your best friend slum the public cesspool?” Every word dripped audacity.

“I clean those up every shift,” Olivia said, but Sunflower’s face was too bright-eyed, too sweet. Deflated, Olivia plucked the staff restroom key off her hip ring. “No one else.”

Sunflower snatched the key, pecked Olivia’s cheek, and darted past the popcorn machine to the black door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Olivia would have watched the door shut, but a figure approached the counter out the corner of her eye. Not Taggart; a real customer, though Olivia couldn’t remember their name.

Besides Shelly and Dane, with their devil-may-care approach to taking in the hitchhiking stray, no one had opened up to Olivia like Sunflower. Small town law dictated that once an outsider, always an outsider, with Olivia rendered more a mild curiosity than someone to get to know. Certainly not a friend. Sophomore year, Olivia’s first day at Chapel Hill High, nearly everyone had treated her like a rusty nail jutting from the floor. Step too close, she’d run their feet through.

Not Sunflower. Olivia, she had said, appearing in the courtyard that September lunch period, a golden halo circling her head. That’s a pretty name. I’ve always liked that name.

She couldn’t have seen anything but a gawky short girl with big features on her small face and bright brown eyes that no one ever called beautiful. Where Sunflower had grown lean, Olivia was more a marshmallow. While Sunflower’s smile gleamed perfect, Olivia’s lips peeled from her gums when she grinned or laughed. Attractive, Olivia felt—hoped—but uninteresting, as much an ordinary part of the scenery as Chapel Hill’s bricks and parking lots.

And yet, she and Sunflower had become glued to each other that day. Nothing had changed since except the swelling in Olivia’s heart.

The customer departed, cradling a box of Rocket Raisin-Nauts and a Diet Coke, as the staff restroom door whined open. Sunflower danced out on sneakered tiptoes.

“I still have a headache,” she said in singsong.

“Maybe tonight’s not the night?” Olivia asked.

“Tonight’s perfect.” Sunflower glanced at the moonless, cloudless sky, as if the stars had aligned solely for her to stretch across Roy’s back seat.

Olivia’s cheeks burned. “Break a leg, Sunshine. And if you need me—”

Sunflower squeezed Olivia. “Butterflies, nothing worse.”

Olivia only meant to say that she was here, would always be here. She kissed Sunflower’s cheek. “Love you.”

“Love you back.” Sunflower broke away.

Her soft hands trailed Olivia’s uniform sleeves, her hands, and then she hopped the countertop, back to the rest of the world. A few boys from the letter jacket crew milled between rows of cars, cigarette smoke rising between them. Half a dozen blue-and-gold sleeves raised Sunflower’s way, and she waved back at them.

And then the night sucked her in.

Olivia slumped beside the register, chin in palm, and stared at the drive-in’s black tree line. A strange cry swelled from the speakers, the film throwing out something between an animal roar and a synthesizer shriek. Had an amplifier test caused the scream Olivia heard outside the Mason House? She’d been idling on the far side of town though, and after the drive here, attending customers, hearing Sunflower’s news, she couldn’t be certain she even remembered the scream accurately. It might have been a tire screech. A dying raccoon.

Her imagination playing with her, some extrasensory bullshit warning she might be losing her best friend.

Olivia pried her face from her palm. No, that wasn’t true, she wasn’t losing anyone she hadn’t lost already. Sunflower was a sweet, carefree creature. Small towns made few like her. Her plans with Roy tonight wouldn’t change anything the last couple years hadn’t made clear between her and Olivia. A cheek kiss, holding hands via commiseration, nights gossiping and giggling—these would stay. They were friends, and nothing would change.

Wasn’t that Chapel Hill’s way? It wouldn’t offer Olivia any deeper of a future than Hartford ever had. She had escaped that emptiness once, but back in Connecticut, she’d had no one. Parents who couldn’t understand. A world that would only take. Chapel Hill clutched tight, but it wouldn’t steal anything that didn’t belong to it. Olivia could find passive, unchanging stillness here and maybe settle with that. She wouldn’t run. Wouldn’t leave Sunflower.

The staff restroom door whined open, snapping Olivia from a trance. How long had she been staring into space? She didn’t know the movie and couldn’t make out the screen clearly, so glancing at windshield reflections of the current scene couldn’t tell her how much of its time had passed, let alone her own.

Sunflower couldn’t emerge from the restroom again without heading back inside. Someone else must have sneaked in while Olivia was staring into space, thinking of screams and Sunflower and disappointing futures. She couldn’t see who hovered in the doorway. Only a hint of scalp lightly coated in spines of dark red hair cut past the doorframe. No one Olivia knew.

“That bathroom’s employees only,” she said. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“That what you call that stint between you and Blondie?” the stranger asked, their voice sun-dried and crackly. “Employees only benefit?”

“No customer entry. Please leave.”

The stranger’s head bobbed as if shrugging. “Didn’t buy anything. Guess Blondie didn’t either.”

They emerged before Olivia could again ask them to leave. She had hoped for some lost high schooler, the kind she could handwave from the employee side of the concessions counter. Someone full of attitude, maybe, but who would buckle when pressed and return to the vehicle rows.

The lithe figure unfolding from the doorway melted her expectations. Most people overshot Olivia by a few inches, but the stranger towered, their face looking twenty, maybe twenty-one, limbs of wiry muscle, their cropped hair shifting from dark crimson to blood-red in the light.

“I don’t know you,” Olivia said, fighting a tremble in her voice. “You can’t be here.”

“Call me Christmas,” the stranger said. “I bring joy wherever I go.”

Their encroaching shadow covered Olivia. Limbs and spine folded again in an awkward squeeze as Christmas half-stepped, half-slid over the concessions counter, black jacket crinkling at their elbows, jeans straining not to split at the knees.

Olivia didn’t realize she’d been shaking until the useless countertop divided her from the lanky newcomer.

“There,” Christmas said. “That make it easier to talk to me?”

Olivia studied the register as if it were her boss. “I’m on shift. Attending customers.”

“What if I decide to buy something?” Christmas folded their arms beneath their chest and leaned in. “You got to talk to me then, yeah?”

Would this shift never end?

Olivia threw on a generic customer service smile. “What can I get you?” she asked.

“Clarity,” Christmas said. “One minute, I’m at Steve’s. You know the bar? Next, I’m here. Now, being no shot glass of a girl like you, I can hold a drink, so there’s no way I got that black-out drunk since dusk. I wonder, is this some oasis? A mirage?” They reached a long-fingered hand over Olivia’s forearm.

Her skin buzzed from wrist to spine, and she drew back her hand.

Christmas smirked. “Too solid for my imagination.” They lifted their outstretched arm and flexed the fingers. “Or am I the illusion? I want to hear Olivia’s thoughts.”

Olivia blanched. How could this stranger know her? Had they been asking around? No, she realized, her dull red uniform bore a name badge over her left breast. Her eyes cut to Christmas’s chest, as if she expected everybody to wear one.

“Missing Blondie?” Christmas asked. “No, you want out of this conversation, but you’re stuck in the retail cage.”

Olivia’s tongue stiffened. “If there’s nothing I can get—”

“Get me?” Christmas’s dry voice flattened to a growling hum. “Yes, you can get me.”

Olivia gestured to the backlit menu board, her hand a quivering baby bird cast from its nest too soon. “You can customize your popcorn,” she said, reciting script. “Butter, extra salt. Coke, Pepsi, a variety of—”

“I want your heart,” Christmas said.

2. DEVILS

Olivia didn’t believe in any hells of the Christian sense, but caught in the clover-green gaze of Christmas’s eyes, for a split-second, she believed in the Devil.

“My heart?” she whispered.

“Ever hear the two rivers theory?” Christmas asked. “Each of us flows through the world like a river, trying our best to steer clear of each other. Sometimes, two rivers run parallel. And sometimes, it rains.”

Olivia listened, almost expecting raindrops to patter across the roof. The stars still shined too bright for storms, and yet she kept looking skyward. The night looked too clear, its lack of hiding places suggesting it must be hiding something.

“Flood those rivers, and they’ll make inroads toward each other,” Christmas went on. “Exchange fish, frogs, what have you. The rivers swap spit, stop being two rivers. End up a mess.”

They now leaned entirely over the counter, their face and teeth consuming Olivia’s sight. All the better to eat you, said that wolfen grin, ready to skin Olivia alive.

“You kissing her, or what?”

Taggart appeared at Christmas’s side, the Yum-Yum Whips bag crumpled in his fist. He’d either eaten every whip or handed them out to non-friends across the drive-in. His voice yanked Christmas back, a snake recoiling from the concession stand to the real world. Air flooded Olivia’s lungs. She hadn’t meant to hold her breath, and now she wheezed.

“This guy bothering you, Liv?” Taggart asked.

Freed from the concession window, Christmas unfurled to full height and crested Taggart with ease.

His lips formed a quavering O. “Or—”

“Or what?” Christmas asked.

Taggart should have risen up, forced some empty bravado to compensate for his size and hesitation, but a meekness tugged at his features.

Olivia’s guts twisted in pity. “Don’t hurt him,” she said.

“Didn’t plan to,” Christmas said. They clapped Taggart’s shoulder hard, and the candy bag drifted down his leg. “No guts, no heart, nothing. I can sort you out. Find me at the Sprinkle Shack later, slick, and I’ll tell you my two rivers theory.” Their head turned from Taggart to give Olivia a nod. “And you—guessing I’ll find you later, come hell or high water.”

Christmas then shoved their hands in jacket pockets and strolled toward the vehicle rows and Starry Wood Lane. The concession stand lights briefly stroked the skin on the back of Christmas’s neck, where red hair stopped at a curving brown mark.

A crescent moon to match Sunflower’s.

“Gina?” Olivia whispered.

That didn’t make sense. Christmas didn’t seem enough like a girl to be Sunflower’s long-lost sister, or a boy for that matter. Besides, not even twins shared birthmarks, let alone siblings split by years. The mark had to be a coincidence.

Taggart braced an elbow on the concessions counter. “Knew you cared.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t going to let them bully you.”

Taggart beamed, regaining his voice. “That code for you kind of liking me?”

“You don’t even like me, Taggart,” Olivia said. “You’re just lonely.”

Taggart shrank beneath the lights. “Yeah. Aren’t you?”

“It isn’t the same.” Olivia glanced past him, toward the drive-in rows. If she acted like someone else were coming, maybe he would drift away again.

Six bumpers down from the concession stand, a figure slumped low to the ground. A tangled hill of tarp and blanket climbed from her back. Gnarled, scraggly hair dragged at the gravel, split ends inspecting each pebble. Some vagrant, wandering the drive-in for change and discarded snacks. If she started to bother customers, Olivia would have to intervene, one more headache tonight. Hopefully the woman would leave on her own. This evening already stretched eternal, and the drive-in hadn’t even started the second picture.

“Can you watch the front a sec?” Olivia asked. “I need to check the staff bathroom, make sure tall, dark, and growly didn’t flood the toilet.”

“You’re deputizing me?” Taggart asked, standing tall.

Olivia ignored him. The black door opened without resistance, and she didn’t realize Sunflower had never returned the key until it winked from beside the sink. No murky water pooled on the tiled floor, and no new carvings scarred the walls.

But someone had left a present. Black sludge stretched weblike fingers halfway up the far corner. Either a smoker’s lung, or the vomit of someone who’d been eating cigarettes all day. Not Sunflower’s. Definitely Christmas’s doing. Where had that weirdo come from? Chapel Hill offered few reasons to swing through. Maybe Christmas was somebody here’s friend, or maybe they’d hitchhiked off the interstate, much the way Olivia showed up three years ago.

Three years? She’d really been terrified of Hartford, yet resentful of Chapel Hill for that long?

That meant she’d been carrying this torch for Sunflower across three damn years as well. She’d known Chapel Hill had a way of keeping life stagnant, but to leave it that unmoving from age fifteen to eighteen? Math was cruel. Chapel Hill might be crueler.

And hearts were cruelest of all. Sunflower had to have met up with Roy and parked at Lookout to the west by now. Out there, the Starry Wood earned its name, no drive-in lights to pollute the cosmos. The night would shine beautiful from the cliff, distant towns lighting the northern counties, as if the starry sky had swallowed the world beyond Chapel Hill. He would have a hand on her breast this minute, his mouth to her neck. Her eyes would close in ecstasy.

“Good for her,” Olivia whispered, retreating from the blackened restroom corner. “She deserves to be happy.” Had Christmas known better, they wouldn’t have asked for Olivia’s heart—a barbed wire organ, long snagged on someone who couldn’t feel the same.

Olivia needed a mop and pail from the utility closet. Maybe she could deputize Taggart into cleanup duty.

His arms waved overhead as she appeared from the restroom. “Olivia, check this out,” he said, his voice tensing with worry.

If he’d found a dead body in the popcorn machine, Olivia didn’t want to know. She’d had enough tonight.

From the register, her gaze followed Taggart’s pointing arm toward the vehicle rows. He aimed at the vagrant woman, still harmless. Olivia opened her mouth to tell Taggart off, let the poor woman be, but he wasn’t pointing only at the woman. Shadows surrounded her where several people had left their vehicles.

The letter jacket crew had finished smoking their cigarettes, but few had returned to where they’d parked along the drive-in’s vehicle rows. Instead, their shoes and boots crunched over gravel, forming a loose circle around the tarp-covered woman.

She hunkered low to the ground now. Her knees had to be bending far up her torso, and if she leaned any lower, she could easily crawl on all fours. Maybe her back was aching, but none of the letter jacket crew reached out to help her. They didn’t even raise friendly arms to wave at her like they’d done for Sunflower. A humid stillness closed over them. The boys eyed each other with predatory sureness that they had found easy game.

Easy prey.

Olivia shoved up the counter’s staff partition and marched onto the gravel. The counter creaked and then crashed shut behind her.

Taggart dogged her heels. “Should I come?”

“Stay,” Olivia said.

“Am I still the concessions deputy?” Taggart asked.

“Just stay!”

Olivia hurried deeper into the drive-in. The movie ran on above her, Booth Bill oblivious to the trouble brewing between the rows. Technicolor men in gray military-style uniforms spoke against a background of red earth and black cosmos. Their cinematic universe seemed to stretch beyond the screen, where sudden clouds now blotted a section of the sky above Chapel Hill. A storm seemed to be coming after all. Above and below. Olivia could feel it aching in her head.

The graduated football boys weren’t alone in circling the tarp-covered woman. Their girlfriends joined them now, along with some of last semester’s juniors, and onlookers who hadn’t really been watching the movie.

A bright red can of Coca Cola sailed from Devin Shipley’s hand and crashed into the woman’s hump.

Her arms jerked toward the tarp’s underside like a turtle bucking into its shell. Hissing breath crinkled the tarp’s front edge, but the letter jackets’ cruel snickering drowned her out. Another hand raised a soda can, held by a boy with a blond goatee.

Olivia darted into the circle, arms outstretched. “Knock it off.”

The goateed letter jacket—face familiar, name forgotten—might not have expected a big voice from a woman her size. He looked around with a sheepish oops smirk.

“Lighten up, Olivia,” Devin said. His fingers twitched.

Olivia stepped between Devin and the crawling woman. Dark brown hair cropped to his scalp as tight as Christmas’s. Shoulders tensed as he cracked his neck. He didn’t seem out for blood tonight, just bored. Somehow, that was worse.

“No fighting,” Olivia said, lowering her arms. “Drive-in policy. We’ll stop the movie and send everyone home.”

Warm breath wafted up her calves. The vagrant dragged her hands at the gravel to rise. Olivia twitched to glance back, bend down, and help the woman. But if she dropped her guarded stance, Devin or one of the others might rush in, and the rest would start snickering again, juicing them up to keep going.

Just go, lady, Olivia wanted to say. Run while you can.

“This is how we keep the wrong kind out of town.” Devin thumbed at the concessions counter down the vehicle rows. “Don’t you have snacks to sell?”

“She don’t have a choice,” another letter jacket said, younger than Devin. “Ladies of the road stick together.”

One of the girlfriends whispered too loud, “Maybe she’s Olivia’s mom.”

That set Olivia’s teeth. “I’m on shift,” she snapped. “Which means I’m in charge, or I get Booth Bill to kick you all out.”

Another can hit the gray-haired woman with a sloshing metallic thud and then ricocheted against Olivia’s leg. Laughter barked from every direction. Taggart lingered with the crowd, dwarfed by broader shoulders and thicker arms. He should have stayed at concessions. His eyes wandered the gathered teenagers and then the sky, as if watchful for thickening clouds.

Olivia strafed around the circle, arms spread. “Stop.”

Devin chortled. “Look at that face, too. What a dog.”

“Not a dog,” another letter jacket said. “See her crawling? That’s a lizard.”

A raspy whisper sighed across the ground. “Yes,” the woman hissed. “That’s why she calls me Lizzie.”

Olivia turned to kneel and help the woman up, but Lizzie was already rising, her gray head with its scraggly hair aimed at Devin. Maybe she’d confronted people like him before. She was hunched and bulky, a shapeless mystery beneath her tarp, nothing of a fighter in her thin limbs and bony hands. How long had she been living rough?

This mini-mob bullshit couldn’t go on. Olivia would let Taggart cover the concession stand for two more minutes while she guided the drifter to Starry Wood Lane, a few more dollars in her pocket than she’d come with. No one deserved to be pelted by jackals.

“Ma’am,” Olivia started. “Lizzie? Let me help you.”

Lizzie didn’t look at Olivia. Her unkempt gray hair parted in places, offering glimpses of leathery flesh and pursed lips stretching far back along her jaw. The tarp rippled off her back as she grew taller than Olivia, than Devin, than everyone standing at the center of the Starry Wood Drive-In.

There was no hump swelling from beneath her shoulders. Bent arms jutted from her upper body where long hands dangled, fingers tensing. A serpentine torso uncoiled from her bending legs, where vertebrae peeked through clinging blankets like a row of lumpy teeth prodding beneath Lizzie’s skin.

Not like a lizard. Like a snake.

Lizzie’s mouth opened wide as Devin’s shoulders, and her unhinged jaw freed a flood of drool as white as Devin’s blood-drained face. Her bulbous head stretched high over his, and sharp, narrow teeth peeked beneath thin lips.

A collective jolt sobered the crowd. The letter jacket crew, their girlfriends, and unrelated onlookers flinched back, or let their jaws go slack into black-holed mouths. Each of them stood frozen in shock, their cruelty broken a moment too late. Olivia held rigid beside them, paralyzed as if by a venomous snakebite.