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It was the fall of 1976. There were vines on the outside of Kenward County High School. There were vines everywhere, really. But they choked the life out of the already corpselike brick building with amazing strength. They ran through the parking lot. They flowed near the football field, but those were always trimmed away when the season rolled around.
That was just about the only time the vines were cut.
Nobody seemed to care enough to do it themselves, so it simply never got done. And nobody noticed either.
Except Cheryl.
Cheryl Williams sat on the cold risers by the football field, finding it hard to get comfortable on the icy steel, not that it mattered. She was too busy working away on her latest project. Still life. She had decided to draw the big oak tree just outside the field, but it had been so taken over by the vines she was struggling to make it a decent enough tree. It just looked like a sailor’s knot made of browning flora.
Hideous.
She sighed, laying down across the bench, setting her sketchbook next to her. She was never going to be a famous artist if she couldn’t draw a damn tree. She looked up at the churning blue sky, watching the clouds as they swirled and danced. A storm was coming.
A storm was coming and she’d have to walk home. Cheryl had been hoping that her brother would have had a heart today and would have offered to drive her. He didn’t. He also told her she’d have a better chance of hitchhiking than having him chauffeur her around. She told him to go fuck himself.
Maybe that’s why it had taken him so long to come back and get her.
“Is that Little-C Williams I see?”
She shot up as a familiar voice broke the afternoon silence. A lanky figure climbed the bleacher steps and plopped himself down right next to her.
“If it isn’t No-Fret Chet!” She smiled, giving a tiny wave.
Chester -Chet- Kaminski. He was one of her brother Ashley’s friends. Ashley, Scotty, and Chet, they were the three stooges. Constantly throwing parties, constantly in trouble with the law. Cheryl would be lying if she said they were good students. She’d also be lying if she didn’t admit hanging out with Chet was fun as hell.
“Why are you still here, Williams? Is your brother around too?” Chet asked, turning Cheryl’s wave into a high-five.
“Ashley left me again, said he needed to go to the shop,” Cheryl explained.
Their father owned the only hardware store in town, and while Ashley was adamant he was going to do anything with his life besides selling power tools, he often used that as an excuse to not have to deal with his sister. She couldn’t really complain, when she didn’t want to see him, she’d go to the woods behind their neighborhood and pick little wildflower bouquets. He said he’d rather be caught dead than caught picking wildflowers with her, said they made him look gay.
“Damn, he just left you? That really blows,” Chet said, scratching the top of his head and leaning back against the bleachers, “And to go to your Pop’s store? That’s real believable. Need a ride home? Y’know, I could drive you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cheryl answered quickly. Maybe she’d have taken him up on that offer, had she not seen him pound at least three shots worth of vodka before eighth period. No telling if he’d had anything since then.
“It’s about to rain, you sure?”
“Chet, man, I’d feel safer riding in a car driven by a blind toddler,”
“Your loss, Williams,”
Chet didn’t say much else. Not right away. He just sprawled across the bleachers and closed his eyes. Cheryl would never admit, but it was really nice to have him around. She didn’t have many friends, not that she didn’t try. It was just… Everyone else had closer friends than her. She was always the spare. Only fun when there was no other option. The bottom of the barrel.
It felt nice that Chet didn’t seem to care.
It was nice that he treated her like a person, not just his friend’s sister.
“So, Cher,” he said, his eyes still closed. “What are your plans for tonight?”
She thought for a second, “Not anything much,” she answered, “Just some drawings I’ve been working on. If I’m lucky, I’ll finish those and be able to start reading a new book I got.”
“Sounds thrilling,”
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic,” she rolled her eyes.
“No, I’m being serious, that sounds fun,” a ghost of a smile crept across Chet’s lips, “It’s just…,”
“Just what? Go on Chet, what is it?” Cheryl challenged.
“It isn’t nearly as thrilling as going to my party tonight,” Chet answered.
“Your party?”
“Hell yeah,” grinned Chet, “Me, Scotty, and Ash found this sick ass barn just out of town, and it’s completely abandoned too, so Scotty’s gonna bring his folks’ old film projector and we’re gonna watch a movie on the side of the barn. It’ll be fun. We’ve invited a bunch of our friends, there’ll be a ton of girls- and guys too, cause, Y’know, girls like those-,”
“And you’re… inviting me?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Chet continued, “It’s fine if you’re not interested, it would just be pretty nice to have you there…,”
Cheryl’s heart might have skipped a beat. She got invited to a party thrown by one of the most notorious upperclassmen at Kenward, most notorious in the surrounding areas of Michigan too, probably. He invited her. He wanted her to be there. There was no chance the blush of shock didn’t show on her face. She must have looked like a fool.
“Well, I’ll need a ride,”
——
“Cheryl, I swear to God, if you embarrass me tonight I will make your life a living hell,” Ashley said, gritting his teeth while he drove.
“I promise I won’t Ashley-,”
“It’s ASH. If you call me Ashley in front of Linda Baker..!,”
“Okay, okay!” Cheryl said, throwing her hands up as a show of mock solidarity. It wasn’t worth trying to apologize.
Cheryl Williams sat shotgun in her brother Ashley’s Delta, watching the serpentine dirt roads wind by. It had felt like they had been driving for hours, but she knew that was just her excitement speaking. Her mother always said that a watched pot never boiled, and that it would take longer to get somewhere if you knew you were counting down the minutes. Maybe she was right.
“One last thing,” Ashley said, “You can’t tell Dad I let you come here, not that I had much choice. If you touch any alcohol, that’s not my problem. Smoke anything funny? Still not my problem. You’re old enough to take care of yourself, so… Just… Take care of yourself, okay?”
Cheryl nodded nervously as she saw the old barn rise up from over the hill. Chet was right, it was completely abandoned, and it looked like it too. Half of the roof was falling in. The other half looked like it was being tied down by creeping vines. As they pulled into the dead cowfield, Scotty and Chet met the Delta with huge waves and even bigger smiles.
“Ash! Good to see you brother! You brought the beer, right?” Scotty said, popping open the Delta’s trunk, and before he could get an answer, he was already moving six-packs to the cooler that Chet brought. “Ashy, you’re not gonna believe what Chet-dar over here managed to get his hands on, tonight is gonna be sound as a pound!” His face dropped a bit when he saw Cheryl. “You brought your sister? Look man, when I said bring a chick, that’s not exactly what I meant-,”
“Chet invited her,” Ash said, shaking his head and tossing Scotty another six-pack for the icebox.
“What the fuck, Chet? Why the hell would you invite a freshman?” Scotty asked, as if Cheryl couldn’t hear him.
Chet shrugged, shooting Cheryl a sympathetic look, “She seemed like she wanted to come. Besides, Big Williams is fun, Little Williams is too.”
“Chet, if you didn’t know the secret recipe for the Pink Fuck I think I’d shoot you right here,” Scotty said, loading the last of the beer and wheeling the cooler inside the barn. “Ashy! I snagged some movies from the old drive-in, go and grab whichever you’d like, would ya? I don’t really trust Chet to make any more party-planning decisions for tonight. They’re all in my front seat, I made sure to get the good ones.”
Ash left to go rummage through Scotty’s pickup truck as Chet turned back to Cheryl, “Sorry about him, he doesn’t mean any of that you know. I’m sure he’s happy to have you.”
Cheryl struggled to paste on a smile.
“What’s a Pink Fuck?” She asked.
“You’ll have to wait and see,” Chet replied, waving his fingers like phony magic. “But since you’re here early, we might as well put you to work. You can help me string up these lights.”
——
People started to arrive at the barn just as the night fell and the sprinkling of stars beamed through the soggy rainclouds. It hadn’t rained a lot, but it was enough to dampen the cowfield and muddy everyone’s shoes. But nobody noticed any of that over the sights and sounds of the party.
Cheryl had never been anywhere like it. Tons of people had shown up, and all of them had brought more snacks, movies, and drugs. But mostly drugs. Music was blaring as loud as it could be, because nobody except them was going to hear it. Some people danced, some migrated to the corners and cow stalls and passed blunts and beer, some watched the movie that Scotty had chosen- even if it was a trashy zombie flick.
Cheryl Williams had never broken so many rules in her life.
“First round of Pink Fuck! Come on, everybody!” Chet called, and half of the partygoers swarmed him like flies to spoiled meat as drinks were chugged and minds clouded.
A good other chunk of the populace was surrounding Scotty, as he led a game of poker. She had no idea where Ashley had run off to. He’d probably found Linda Baker. Everything was so loud, so bright.
She loved it.
“Hey, Cheryl,” Chet said, coming up behind her, “I saved you a sip, want to try?”
He held a party cup filled with about a centimeter of an opaque pink beverage. It swirled like a magic potion.
“Pink Fuck?” Cheryl asked. “What’s in it?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be my secret recipe!” Chet smiled, handing the cup to her. “It’s nothin’ bad, you’ll be fine after a minute!”
“I don’t think I should-,”
Chet interrupted her, shrugging, and downed it in one gulp, “Suit yourself,”
“Is this what these parties are always like?”
“Mhm!” Chet said, his face limp, “It’s great, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is,” she admitted.
——
The partygoers dwindled from the barn as the party went on. Some people started a rumor that they were all going up to the hayloft, though the sounds from up there seemed to disprove that theory. Slowly but surely, the partygoers all went home, until there was nobody left at the skeleton of a barn except Cheryl and Chet. Scotty had left hours ago with a girl, and Ashley and his missing Delta seemed to tell the same story.
She got left behind again.
“Damn, so he just left you again?” Chet laughed, “Shit Cher, I guess that does happen all the time.”
“Hahah, yeah,” she struggled to keep a smile. “All the time,”
“Well, d’you drive?”
“Not legally,”
“Probably the most legal thing you’ve done tonight,” Chet said, tossing her the keys. “Try not to scratch it up too badly, it belongs to my grandma.”
——
“You ever had a boyfriend Cheryl?”
The road ahead was dark. Chet’s grandma’s car only had one headlight.
“Nope,” Cheryl answered, after a second. She had liked this boy before, but it had been years ago. She needed to bother herself with getting actual friends before she worried about dates.
“Me neither,”
He was drunk. Cheryl tried to focus on the road.
“You ever had a girlfriend?” Cheryl didn’t answer that one. “I haaaaaave!”
She nodded. Not that Chet could see. He was sprawled across the backseat, vomiting into an old casserole dish, that he assured her was empty and left over from his grandma’s church luncheon. Chet’s car was easy enough to drive, no harder than the Delta, but nerves and excitement and anxiety and mostly nerves coursed through Cheryl’s mind, stampeding through her brain like a pack of yapping dogs.
She didn’t mean to hit it.
She heard the crack of bones and felt the car jostle before she’d even realized she’d ran something over.
“Jesus fuck, Cher!” Chet yelped, “You hit a kid!”
“ Shut the fuck up !” She screamed, ripping off her seatbelt, and fumbling for the flashlight on Chet’s key-ring, “ GODDAMNIT! Fucking goddamnit!!”
It wasn’t a kid under the car, though Cheryl knew how unlikely that was in the first place. Sprawled across the road was a furry brown creature, whose light pelt had been dyed a ruby red.
A coyote.
It was still breathing.
“Chet!” She called faintly, fearfully.
He didn’t answer. As she stood in the dark embrace of the night, her hands trembling in fear as the flashlight beam flickered. It was still alive. Its eyes looked up at her, as its gored body twitched.
Could it see her?
Could it see the terrified look in her eyes?
She bent down, reaching to pick up the animal. She would take it to a veterinarian. A nature reserve. Something. She couldn’t just leave it there.
It didn’t put up any fight.
She scooped it into her arms, as moaning screams of pain erupted from the creature’s mouth. Blood dripped down her shirt as the air began to fill again with rain. Looking down at the knowing brown eyes of the beast, she just stood.
She couldn’t move.
She just stood as rain began to pour down on the dusty dirt road and slowly dim the crimson stain the coyote had made. Like it was never there at all. She stood looking at the pitiful creature before her, in the glow of lightning that cracked open the sky. The rain cleaned her hands of the monster’s blood, and it ripped across the coyote’s face like tears.
Cheryl couldn’t cry.
She didn’t know how long she’d stood there for. Too long. When she found the courage to take any step, it was only met with silence from the poor animal. Its caramel eyes were glazed and filled with rainwater. Its mouth leaked spit and blood and was filled with rain, like it was gargling with it.
She’d let it die.
The world around her grew deathly silent, echoing the noise in her head. She stepped to the side of the road, holding the woeful beast in a sort of final embrace. There was a tree there. A tree whose branches were well ripped bare, but dark bushes rippled around its trunk.
No.
Not bushes.
Vines.
She lowered the corpse into the bed of foliage by the infrequent flashes of lighting. Like a one-woman funeral procession. Should she have said something? She wasn’t particularly religious. Should she have prayed? It wasn’t like she could think of anything worthwhile.
No.
Coyotes don’t go to heaven.
She gave the poor thing one last glance, before she slowly made her way back to the car, and drove away without a word to Chet.
——
“Ashley?”
It had been two weeks since the party. To say Cheryl was paranoid was an understatement. She wasn’t sure of what exactly, but her dreams had been plagued with speeding cars, Chet Kaminski, and the dead coyote wrapped in vines.
“What do you want, Cheryl?” Ash asked, not looking up from the physics homework sprawled on his bed.
“Ashley do you remember when-,”
“Please quit calling me Ashley. It’s Ash. My name is Ash,”
“Sorry,”
“Mhm. Go on,”
“Do you remember when we were going to the movies, and… and we saw that coyote? And you killed it?” She asked sheepishly.
“Holy shit, why are you thinking about that?” Ash’s gaze snapped to meet her own, “That was years ago.”
“Ash, I really messed up and I feel so horrible-,” Cheryl’s breathing got quicker.
“One thing at a time!” Ash interrupted, “What happened? Why are you talking about that coyote?”
“It was after the party! Chet let me drive his car and-,”
“Why were you with Chet?” Ash asked, suddenly critical.
“‘Cause you left me! But as I was saying-,”
“No, what were you doing with him?” Ash narrowed his eyes, “He didn’t give you anything, did he?”
“What does it matter?”
“Cheryl, I swear to God, if Chet gave you any hard drugs I will kill him myself,”
“No! No!” Cheryl shook her head, “Please, just listen! See, you left me, then I drove Chet’s car home, and on the way… Oh fuck… On the way home, I hit a coyote.”
“So?”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘so’? I hurt it and it was my fault and I’m so scared-,”
“…And there’s thousands more coyotes too,” Ash said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, it doesn’t matter.”
“How can you say that?”
Ash shrugged, “Things die all the time, it’s not your problem. As long as you don’t try to kill things… You’re fine I guess.”
“I can’t believe you think like that,”
“Cheryl, you’ve gotta live life while you can. You never know when it’ll end,” Ash said, “Who knows? Someday maybe I’ll be hit by a car driven by a coked-up kid and dumbass Chet. If that happens I’ll know I died happy, living the best life I could have.”
“…This is the best life?”
Ashley looked around his room, at the posters of girls in bikinis and rock bands, at the rows and rows of beer bottles and soda cans, at the piano that sat collecting dust in the corner. He didn’t answer her.
“Ashley, do you believe in fate?” She asked, sitting on his bed next to him.
“No,” He tried to focus again on the homework.
“It looked like you,”
“What? That is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard in years,” Ash said as he skimmed the physics textbook.
“It looked like you, it had your same eyes,”
“Cheryl, I’m going to need you to leave,” Ash said, standing up, “I put up with a lot of your hippie bullshit, but this is ridiculous.”
“Ash, what if it meant something?” Cheryl pleaded.
“Like what? Don’t drive under the influence?” Ash spat.
“I wasn’t on drugs!”
“Yeah? What about now?” Ash laughed, “Jeez Cher, do you hear yourself when you speak? You almost sound worse than Dad!”
“Don’t compare me to him! I’m not crazy!”
“No, but you’re too fucking old for dumbass superstitions,” Ash said, “Get out of my room.”
——
“Well Cher, I’m not really into all that voodoo shit, but whatever you say,”
“You believe me?”
Chet and Cheryl sat in the front seats of Chet’s grandma’s car, Cheryl behind the wheel. It had been about a month since she’d driven the car, and a month since she’d hit the coyote. They sat parked next to the barn again, one of the few places Cheryl knew nobody else would be around.
“That there’s a demon coyote trying to tell you something? No. That makes me think you need to be put on medication,” Chet took a long drag off of the blunt in his hand, “But the thing about you having funky dreams about the coyote? That’s weird, I could get behind that being divine intervention.”
“But you don’t think I’m crazy?” She asked.
“No, I definitely think you’re crazy, I also think Ash was right. You’re putting way too much thought into this,” Chet replied. “You really need to loosen up.”
“Chet, I can’t loosen up. I feel terrible. I’ve never taken the life of another living being before-,”
“You pick flowers all the time, isn’t that killing ‘em?”
“Shut up,” she laid her head on the steering wheel.
“But no, you’ve said this has happened before?” Chet asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I had just turned eight or nine, and I was walking through the woods with Ashley. We saw this coyote… and it was weird, because it wasn’t threatening or scary. Well, I wasn’t threatened by it. It felt familiar. Like looking in a mirror...”
“Have you ever been to a psych ward Cheryl?” Chet took another puff, “I won’t judge if so, but I mean…,”
“Chester Kaminski!”
“What? I just was asking,”
——
There were vines in the woods behind the Williams’ house. They’d been there for years. Cheryl couldn’t remember a time without them. There were vines creeping up the side of the Williams’ house too. They rapped on the side of Cheryl’s window, they scraped on the glass.
They sounded like claws.
Cheryl Williams laid curled into the tightest ball she could manage. She squeezed her eyes closed, but she couldn’t sleep. She was met with nightmares. Nightmares that she couldn’t tell from her blanket-wrapped terror.
The wind howled outside the house, screaming and crying like a dog.
Like the coyote.
“Please, please leave me alone,” she begged.
No one heard her.
Every shadow in her room twisted and bent itself into a spiderweb of vines. Vines covering rotting flesh. Rotting flesh covering red, bloody bones.
She couldn’t get it out of her head.
In every tired moment, her mind weaved falsities of the coyote. It was in her room. It was snarling, snapping its teeth. It was standing over her, its paws on her chest. It took her throat in its milk-white fangs, gnashing and tearing and leaving her neck a bubbling stump.
None of it was real.
It couldn’t be real.
“Please, I didn’t mean to hurt you,”
She wasn’t sure if she was crying. Lately, that had been the only way she’d been able to sleep. Sobbing until she woke up and dawn flooded the room again. She was sure that couldn’t be healthy.
But alas, still every time her eyes shut her own personal hell would come alive again and rear its ugly head.
She had to kill it again.
She needed to make sure it was dead.
——
“Chet, I need a favor,” Cheryl said.
“Cheryl, I promised your brother I wouldn’t give you any more weed,” Chet said, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
Cheryl Williams and Chet Kaminski sat on the hood of Chet’s grandma’s car. The air was crisp and the few dead leaves that remained on the trees rustled in the fossilized wind.
“Not what I need right now, Chet,” Cheryl replied. “Besides, it would be a lot better if you didn’t tell Ashley about this.”
“Yeah?” Chet shot her a look, “Cher… I can’t go and buy you any alcohol either, and people’ll get suspicious if I buy you shit like pregnancy tests, they’ll think I’m a perv-,”
“Chet! For the love of God, please just listen,” Cheryl shook her head, “I need your car.”
“My car?” Chet asked, “Can’t you take the Delta?”
“I can’t ask Ashley, Chet,”
“Why do you need my car?”
Cheryl paused, “I can’t tell you that.”
“Then I can’t let you take my ride.”
Cheryl bit her lip, “Look, I’ll bring it back to you in two hours, clean as a whistle. Cross my heart.”
“Lemme come too,”
Cheryl sighed, “…Fine. But I’m not answering any questions I don’t want to, okay?”
“You don’t have to,” Chet said, tossing her the keys. “You just better not crash my car.”
——
The sun was setting fast as Chet and Cheryl stood over the ditch.
“It was right here !” Cheryl cried.
“What was?” Chet asked, taking a swig of the vodka he’d hidden in an old fast food cup.
“The corpse , you dumbfuck!” Cheryl ran her hands repeatedly through her bangs. “I put it here, next to this tree!”
“Cheryl… I hate to break it to you, but lots of things eat roadkill,” Chet said, “Like opossums and shit.”
“Opossums eat bugs, numbskull,”
Cheryl got on her hands and knees, brushing her fingers through the bushes and vines at the bottom of a lone tree. Nothing. No bones, no flesh, no coyote. Just vines.
“Cher, it’s been months…,” Chet said, “It’s probably decomposed all the way.”
“But there would still be something !” Cheryl replied, “Anything!”
“What would you even do if you did find it?” Chet said, taking another mouthful of booze.
“Give it a proper burial,”
“Great,” he said, “You really think that’ll fix your nightmares?”
“Can’t make them worse,” she said, not looking up from her search. “Besides, it’s worked in every ghost story I’ve ever read.”
“And if you don’t find it?”
“I’ll look somewhere else,”
“Where else can you look for roadkill?”
“Chet, why don’t you go wait in the car?” Cheryl hissed.
As Chet sauntered back to his grandmother’s car, Cheryl once again found herself alone. Alone as dusk was setting in and the old dry bones were nowhere to be found. There was nothing but vines.
——
Cheryl Williams sat in the library of Kenward County High. She’d been skimming books for hours. How fast does a body decompose? How fast does a small body decompose? What are coyotes' natural predators? What sort of animals eat carrion?
She’d found nothing worth her time.
But Chet had.
“Get a good look at this, Cher,” Chet said, leaning across the table to hand her a worn green book.
It had greasy yellow pages, and the distinct smell of sitting untouched for a long while. The cover was a rough canvas with emblazoned silver words along the front, and likely on the spine too if it hadn’t been completely missing. The poor old book was practically being held together by the binding and sheer willpower of the glue. The words read, The Coyote Woman: And Other Ghosts and Folktales . Chet was pointing at the cover, where a picture of an old woman holding a coyote cradled in her hands clearly caught his eye.
“Looks like you, doesn’t she?”
Cheryl nodded quietly. The woman did look like her. She had the same hair, the same eyes.
“And listen to this too,” Chet continued, flipping through the rotting golden pages, “She’s a ghost, people think, and is usually seen around here, in Elk Grove. Legend says she’s looking for someone.”
“For who?”
“Dunno,” Chet answered, “She’s called the Coyote Woman because people first saw her taking the bones out of a dead coyote- Ewwww, that’s so gross- with her bare hands .”
“Jeez Chet…,”
“ Yeah . And get a load of this!” Chet kept reading, “Says she uses a machete to kill anyone who gets in the way of her finding the missing piece of her soul!”
“Doesn’t sound much like a ghost if she’s using a machete…,”
“Nah, you’re right,” Chet agreed, “I just thought it was neat. Also the only coyote-related spook in the entirety of Michigan, so who knows? Maybe it does mean something.”
“How do I find her?”
——
“Cheryl, when you said you wanted me to come over, meet you in the woods behind your place and not tell anyone… Fucking witchcraft was not what I was expecting,” Chet said, holding the flashlight steady as Cheryl lit the candles around a piece of paper scrawled with symbols and what looked like old runes. Not that Chet had ever seen old runes.
“What the hell were you expecting?” Cheryl hissed, her voice low.
“I don’t know!” Chet exclaimed, “A date or something?”
“Chet Kaminski, now is not the time,” Cheryl said, lighting another candle.
“When is the time?” Chet asked, “Come on, Cher… How about we get out of here, let me buy you some dinner or something, and let’s go see a movie. Please Cheryl…,”
“Chet, listen,” Cheryl said, finally meeting his eyes, “I need to do this-,”
“-And I need to take you to the school dance on Friday!”
“Chester!” Cheryl’s voice was sharp, “Look, if you’re not going to help me with this, get out of here! I can do this myself. I’ll talk to the Coyote Woman on my own, and I’ll make her take away all my bad dreams, and I don’t need you !”
“Cheryl, the Coyote Woman isn’t real! You’re chasing after a fairy tale!” Chet pleaded, “Cher, this isn’t healthy!”
“No shit it’s not healthy!” Cheryl shouted, her voice cracking, “ It’s not fucking healthy to see your own death every time you close your eyes! You haven’t seen ANYTHING I have, Chester!” Cheryl stood up, moving a step closer to Chet with every seething word, “ Chester Kaminski, do you know how you die? I do! I know how you die, I know how Ashley dies, I know how I die… I need it to stop! ”
Cheryl was breathing heavily, a fire burning deep in her eyes that scorched hotter than the blazes of hell.
“Chester. I need it to stop,” Tears welled in those fiery eyes, and her hands were balled into fists.
“Come here, Cheryl,” he was quiet as he wrapped his arms around Cheryl’s shoulders, pulling her close. “Let’s talk, please just talk to me.”
“Chet, every time I go to sleep, I watch myself and everyone I care about die,” Cheryl choked out as the fat tears fell down the back of Chet’s jacket. “I get strung up in these horrible vines, and you… You get… I can’t-,”
“How long has this been happening?,”
“Since the party at the barn, when I drove your car home,”
“Cheryl, that was over a year ago!”
“I need it to stop,” she cried, “I can’t stand every night watching you die.”
“Shhhhh, it’s okay,” Chet said, “I’m not dead yet. Let’s just breathe.”
Chester Kaminski stood holding Cheryl Williams for fifteen minutes. He felt his knees locking up and he heard the sounds of the forest, bold and angry. He heard her anguished tears and he heard her quiet muttering apologies.
And he heard the soft footsteps in the trees.
Outlined in the candlelight, an old woman watched the two teens. Her face was pale and her eyes were knowing and filled with a drowning sense of sorrow. He knew her. He just couldn’t place how. But in the endless labyrinth of the forest, she stood tall and silent, not saying anything, but keeping her eyes trained on the girl in his arms.
She left not even a moment later. She bent down slowly, and left a small something near Cheryl’s little ritual. Then the stranger turned on her heels and melted back into the trees. Into the vines. But she gave one last look to Cheryl, and as Chet hugged her tighter, one last look at him.
“I’m sorry,” the woman whispered, “For everything, Chet. You were a good friend.”
Cheryl didn’t hear her.
——
“How are you feeling?”
“Nervous. I don’t usually get invited to things.”
Chet Kaminski and Cheryl Williams sat in Chet’s grandma’s car, parked crookedly outside Kenward High. The sunset air crackled with the energy of the seemingly thousands of people pouring into the school, all dressed in their best. Chet had borrowed one of his dad’s old suits, and it was about two inches too short in the legs and about two sizes too big in the jacket. Cheryl hadn’t felt this fancy in years. She wore a forest green dress with a slick texture that made her finders recoil every time she went to nervously bunch at the sides. Her hair was all brushed and she’d even bothered to put on eyeshadow.
“You know Ashley’ll kill us, right?” She said, looking over to Chet.
“He won’t even know we’re here,” Chet grinned, “We’ll be too busy having fun.”
Cheryl smiled softly, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,”
Nobody moved. Neither of the pair made any indication that they were prepared for the fun night ahead. They were frozen in time, statues of ice, nerves, and teenage angst.
“Are you… okay, Cheryl?” Chet said, his eyes looking forward not meeting Cheryl’s.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“It’s been a couple days since-,”
“Since the woods?” Cheryl interrupted, “I know.”
“And you’re doing better?”
Cheryl nodded, “I haven’t had one of those dreams since.”
“Good,” Chet said, “Then I guess your creepy ritual worked.”
“I guess so,” Cheryl chuckled, taking Chet’s hand, “Let’s forget about that for tonight.”
“Yeah,” Chet agreed, “That’s in the past.”
For the first time in years, stepping out of Chet’s car, all the vines on Kenward County High School were gone.
——
It had been about two weeks since Chet had agreed to meet Cheryl in the woods. A week since he’d seen that strange woman, and a week since he’d pocketed whatever she’d left at Cheryl’s creepy altar. It was a drawing. A clock. He’d pored over every pencil stroke for many weed-induced hours, just wondering if there was anything he was missing.
He wasn’t.
It was just a clock. A clock that read 6:50. Drawn on artist’s paper. With a signature on the back.
The signature read; C. Williams, 1981.