The Box Under the Shed

The bus brakes squeal the exact same way they did last summer, and Casey decides that's either a very good sign or a very bad one.

"Some things never change," Miguel says, dropping into the seat beside her with his same beat-up binoculars around his neck, just a little tighter than they used to be. "I half expected them to replace this bus. I half expected the bus to replace itself out of embarrassment."

Casey doesn't answer. She's looking out the window at the timberline, dark and quiet against a bright blue sky, exactly the way it looked the first time she ever saw it — except now, looking at it doesn't feel like looking at a stranger. It feels like checking on somebody you know is sleeping and hoping they stay that way.

Cabin assignments haven't changed either. Porcupine, again, though this year it's mostly new faces — except for a small, serious-looking girl with a notebook tucked under one arm, sitting cross-legged on the porch steps like she's been waiting there her whole life.

"I'm Wren," the girl says, when Casey climbs the steps. "Is it true this cabin has a water stain shaped like a wolf?"

Casey stops with one hand on the screen door. "How do you know about that?"

"My cousin came here two summers ago. She said Porcupine's the good cabin. Said there's a stain on the ceiling that looks different depending on who's looking at it." Wren squints up at her. "She also said something growled at camp once, but I think that part's just a story kids tell to sound cool."

"Probably," Casey says, and does not look at Miguel, who is very pointedly not looking at her either.

Gus is exactly where Gus always is, sitting on his overturned bucket outside the equipment shed, sharpening something that does not appear to need sharpening. He looks up when Casey and Miguel drop down beside him, and something in his weathered face eases, the way it always does now when he sees them.

"Gremlins," he says. "Back again. Camp still standing, I see."

"Barely," Miguel says. "How's the box?"

"Box is fine. Box has been fine for a year. Box is going to stay fine, because nobody but us three knows where it is, and that's how it's staying." Gus sets down his whetstone. "Quiet winter. Quiet spring. I checked the trailhead myself in April — trance-trail's dark. Has been since you two put it to bed."

"We put it to bed," Casey says. "We didn't put it away."

Gus doesn't argue with that, which is somehow worse than if he had.

That night, lights-out comes and goes the ordinary way — a new counselor named Delia sticking her head in, the screen door creaking, footsteps fading down the row. Wren whispers about her cousin's stories until her voice slows into sleep. The cabin settles into the kind of quiet that used to make Casey's skin crawl and now, mostly, just feels like camp.

Mostly.

She's almost asleep when she feels it — not hears it, feels it, the way Ben described feeling the humming in his feet before he ever heard a sound. It comes up through the floorboards of her bunk, faint as a held breath, so soft she almost convinces herself it's just her own heartbeat pressed against the thin mattress.

She sits up anyway.

Across the cabin, Miguel's not in Porcupine — he's two cabins over, in Badger, same as always — but she doesn't need him here to know he'd feel it too, if he were awake. She presses her palm flat against the wall, where the wood meets the floor, and waits.

It comes again. Once. So faint it could be nothing. So faint it could be everything.

On the bunk below, Wren's breathing stays slow and even, undisturbed, and for one long, cold second, Casey watches her small shape in the dark and thinks about a boy standing at a treeline in his pajamas, and a girl walking through a grown woman's hands like she wasn't even there.

One hundred years, Gus said. Maybe it's finished for good. Maybe.

Casey lies back down, but she doesn't close her eyes, and somewhere far off — up past the yellow markers, past the last worn trail, right where the mountain disappears into shadow — she could swear, just for a second, something answers back.