The Pricker Boy (9 page)

The Cricket’s eyes grow wide. I can’t tell if his amazement is pantomime or sincere wonder.

“But it’s okay, because I’m a good witch. I’m the best witch ever.” She winks at the Cricket. “And I put a spell on you, Stanley. A good spell, to keep you safe.” She pulls her hands away and resumes her meal. The Cricket smiles and picks up his fork. Nana looks up and down the table. “Where’s Peter?” she asks.

Pete used to take three or four meals a week with us. My parents always made sure that we had enough food to include him. He hasn’t sat with us for a while, and every so often Nana notices the absence and remembers that he should be here.

I stop eating and wait for one of my parents to answer. My father reaches over and touches Nana’s hand. “Remember, Mom? I explained about Pete.”

“I don’t remember,” Nana confesses.

“He’s not my friend anymore, Nana,” I say. A simplification to be sure, but a much shorter story than the truth.

“Perhaps that’s for the best,” she says. “For now, anyway. But wait for him. When he calls, he may need you to get back, Stucks.”

My mother catches my father’s eye, then looks over at me. My father shrugs. “Are you planning on doing any fishing this summer, Stucks?” he asks awkwardly.

Before I can answer, Nana continues. “Something’s turned in Peter. I saw what he did to young Ronnie. It was cruel. The demon’s come to him, for sure.”

My father tries to cut her off. “Mom? I think we should—”

Nana ignores him, instead looks directly at me. “But heed these words. Alone one might get lost. But don’t underestimate what the unity of friends can bring to bear against the demon.” She points at all of us around the circle of the table, then at the center. “You’d best listen, Stucks. Don’t underestimate it. It’s always right here.”

I feel myself flush. I pray my parents don’t ask her what she’s talking about. “Well, let’s not leave the conversation at that,” my mother says, laughing nervously.

An awkward silence rolls over us, and desperate for a way to fill it, my mother continues her line of thought.
“Robin, remember last summer? Pete was very kind to you.”

Robin cringes. “Yeah,” is all she says.

“What are you talking about?” I ask. I don’t remember Pete doing much of anything last summer that could be considered kind.

“Nothing,” Robin says.

“Tell me.”

Robin allows her fork to wander over her chop suey. “Last summer, I really thought that my parents were going to get divorced.”

“I remember,” I say quietly. I may not like Robin all that much, but that doesn’t mean that I wanted Uncle Bill and Aunt Ellie to split up.

“Well, before I left for the summer, my mother said to me that if they had one more fight, she was going to leave him for good. Then a few weeks after I got here, I called them, and I heard it start, right over the phone. My mom started laughing, and she said to me, ‘Well, honey, this is it.’”

Robin pauses for a moment, and I notice that Nana and the Cricket aren’t paying attention. She has started teasing him with a noodle, trying to stick it in his ear.

“When I got off the phone, I went down to the water, and then Pete found me. He didn’t say much, just that things weren’t great with his own parents. But he was really sweet and patient and spent the whole afternoon with me, listening.”

Nana gets the noodle in the Cricket’s ear. He laughs, then sits up straight. He growls like Frankenstein. He reaches up with a supposedly undead hand and pulls the bit of noodle brain from his ear. He looks at it, growls at it, then eats it.

Robin continues. “I know about his bad side, but when he was good, no one was better. I miss him.”

“Oh please. You spend two months out of the year here, if that. He’s my best friend year-round. Don’t go getting all dramatic on me.”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” she snaps. “I’m not good enough for you and your pond and your woods because I’m only here in the summer.”

“You only come when it’s warm,” I say dismissively. “Try coming when the wind whips over the ice and cuts through your coat even when you’re all the way out at Whale’s Jaw.”

“So I’m not as strong as big bad Stucks? Maybe I shouldn’t even go tomorrow then.”

“I don’t want you to go anyway.”

Robin shakes her head. “You’re such a jerk.”

My mother and father exchange a look. Another awkward silence settles on the table, and this time I’m the one to break it. “Are Mr. and Mrs. Morgan going to get divorced?” I ask.

My father clears his throat. “We don’t talk with the Morgans about their personal problems. We’re not their therapists.”

“I know, but I was just wondering—”

My mother interrupts me. “Let’s change the subject.”

“I think we’ve tried that a few times,” I say. “Without much luck.”

Now it’s my mother’s voice that gets sharp, which is a rare thing that always throws me off guard. “Well, then you start us off. You’re planning a trip out into the woods tomorrow. Looking to get a good case of poison ivy?”

“Yeah, sure, Mom,” I say, turning my eyes to my plate and ignoring the satisfied smile on Robin’s face.

“Just be careful. You know what poison ivy looks like. Remember when you were little and you got into some? You had it on your arms and your legs and your stomach, even your—”

“Yeah, Mom, we get the point.”

My father chimes in. “You’re a bit too old to have your mother putting calamine on your bottom.”

Robin laughs so hard that she coughs out a bit of chop suey.

“How you got it there I’ll never know,” my mother says.

“Could we please stop talking about poison ivy and calamine and my bare ass?”

“Calamine is crap,” Nana tells the Cricket. “I can make him a mint balm that would do the trick. And, he’d smell all minty and fresh, which would be nice for the rest of us.” The Cricket can barely hold in his laughter.

Luckily, my dad comes to my rescue. “I remember my
first case of poison ivy. Remember, Ma? I didn’t know what the plant looked like. Bill told me that the leaves would give me magical powers, so I let him rub a little on my back. Little did I know that he was spelling out the word ‘nitwit’ in broad letters across my shoulder blades. Ma, why didn’t Bill get in trouble for that?”

“Because it was funny,” Nana replies.

“I guess it was.”

“And it taught you good lessons. Watch out for poison ivy. And watch out for Bill, I suppose.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see.… Bill was probably nine, so that would make me seven.”

“My father did that to a seven-year-old?” Robin asks. “That’s so cruel!”

“You don’t understand boys,” my father tells her. “They’re rough-and-tumble. They just do things like that. You’ll understand someday when you have boys of your own. Boys like running around and playing games and exploring the woods.” My father smiles as if the wondrous days of his youth are flooding back to him. But I see my mother and Robin bristle. He doesn’t realize that he just stepped smack-dab into a tar pit that will gum him up for the remainder of the evening.

“Uncle Stan!” Robin barks. “Girls like to do those things too!”

“Sometimes I just cannot believe that I married this man,” my mother says, her hand slapping her forehead.

“I was just saying …,” Dad starts, desperately searching for an explanation to retreat to. “I was just saying that boys, generally speaking now, not all boys mind you, I mean, not all girls don’t, but more boys like the woods than girls do. Just generally.”

“Right,” my mother says. “Girls, you see, like to play with dolls and have tea parties.”

“Well, more so than boys, yes,” my father says sheepishly.

“Uncle Stan!” Robin says.

I smile. I love my family’s hunger for debate. This argument could carry us safely through the end of the meal and across dessert, and surely my father will still be trying to defend himself as the dishes are drying in the rack.

Nana blinks her eyes and looks up and down the table. “Where’s the Morgan boy?” she asks again.

W
e all stand together for a moment next to the Widow’s Stone, the sentinel that marks the boundary between our land and the land that belongs to our spiked bogeyman. Before us, nets of intertwining thorns stretch off into the distance, broken only by the occasional stone wall or lonely tree. Our first destination, the Hawthorns, looms ahead. Their dying branches reach up toward the sky with open, brittle fingers. Their roots tangle in the dirt with those of the pricker bushes. Between us and the Hawthorns, a ragged path cuts through the brush.

Emily takes the lead. As she goes, she plucks at the long thorn branches that loop across the path, passing them back to the next person, who in turn passes them to the next. I look around at the thorns. They really do seem endless.

The Hawthorns are like three old women, frail and
barely breathing. Ancient and silent, the trees have never borne many leaves, but they sprout just enough to stay alive each spring. Parts of them are rotted, just waiting for the next hurricane to come along and shake the dead pieces to the ground. Other parts are clearly alive, flowing sap, but slowly, as if asleep. Each tree is covered with three-inch spikes. The Hawthorns sit about twenty feet from each other, and if you were to draw lines between them they would form a perfect triangle. In the middle of the triangle sits a granite boulder, about waist high with a flat top.

Vivek touches a spike on one of the trees, then immediately jerks his hand away. “Sharp as they look,” he says, shaking his hand in the air.

“Hawthorns are sometimes called witch trees,” Ronnie states. “In folklore, it was believed that hawthorns were witches that had turned themselves into trees. And … uh …”

“Yes?” I prod him, already knowing the rest.

“Well, according to what I’ve heard …”

Emily breaks in. “According to legend, if you find several of them growing together, it’s best to stay far, far away. It’s said that only carnivorous insects will fertilize the flowers, and because of that, the flowers smell of death and murder.” She reaches out and plucks a clump of small red berries from the branches. “The fruit are called thorn apples and are believed to be poisonous. In one story, a mother applied the juice of the apples to her nipples to kill an unwanted baby.”

“That’s ghastly,” Robin says. “Are you making this up? Because if you are, you can stop now.”

“She’s not making it up,” I say. “And if you knew a flower from a fungus, you might know about hawthorns too.”

Vivek bursts out laughing. “‘A flower from a fungus?’ You sound like you were raised in Munchkinland.”

Emily clears her throat. “The fruit and the sap of the tree were supposedly used in witches’ potions. The tree is also very unlucky. You should never, ever bring a sprig or flower of the hawthorn into your home. To do so will bring death to a family member. And the trees are said to attract fairies. Those fairies get very upset if the tree is harmed in any way and will bring sickness to the house of the offender.” She studies the hawthorn berries in her hand for a minute, then absently tosses the pieces to the ground. Ronnie stares down at them fearfully.

Vivek is walking around the boulder inside the triangle. He gasps. “Oh boy! Something scary! I mean, something scarier than Emily!” He jumps back from the stone.

I move around to where he is standing, and what I see makes me feel icy cold inside. Two words have been scratched into the back side of the stone:
I
’
M SORRY
.

“I don’t like talking stones,” Vivek whimpers.

Ronnie crouches down next to the boulder. He reaches his hand toward the letters but quickly pulls it back before his fingers reach the stone. His other hand closes around his wrist, covering his scar. “Looks like it was carved by a rock or a piece of metal. Who would have done this? And why?”

“That’s what I want to find out,” I say.

“Is this some joke?” Robin asks, directing her words right at me. “If so, then you’re sicker than I thought.”

I shake my head. “Oh for crying out loud.”

“Well, look, Stucks, who did that? Who wrote that? This might be your idea of fun, but I don’t like being scared. I—”

“The universe doesn’t revolve around you, Robin!” Her face goes a little pale, and I resist the urge to add, “I told you that you couldn’t hack it out here.”

“All I’m saying—”

“Is that you’re a baby! So go back to the house! I don’t care.”

“Nobody’s going back,” Emily says calmly. She steps between us, facing me. “We agreed to do this together, remember?”

“Stucks, you make me want to puke,” Robin says.

“I’ll hold your hair back for you!” Vivek shouts. We all laugh. Even me, even Robin. The color comes back into her face. “Onward,” Emily says. She steps toward the path on the other side of the Hawthorns. She picks through the thorny branches carefully, handing them back to Vivek, who hands them to my cousin, who then hands them to me. I hand them off to Ronnie.

I hear Ronnie curse. I look behind. One of the thorn branches has caught Ronnie’s left arm, dragging a ragged cut. Tiny bits of blood form, and one drop falls and hits the ground. He looks up at me.