The Wicked Unseen by Gigi Griffis

Author:Gigi Griffis [Griffis, Gigi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2023-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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After school, David and I go back to the lake to search the other side of the lakeshore hiking trail. The water is a cloudy blue under an overcast sky. The drying leaves on the trees rattle like so many snakes. And I’m thinking about Monica.

She missed school again. Another migraine. And I hate to join Team Ryan on this, but what if it isn’t a migraine? It shouldn’t be a big deal that she’s out, but with everything else going on, something sinister slithers around my heart. I think back to the first night I met her. The bonfire, the story I’d started in my fool mind.

If this were a horror movie, I’d decided, Elle would die first and Monica second.

Monica second.

Now Elle is definitely missing, and Monica is mysteriously absent. Absent with a migraine? Absent with grief? Or absent because something is wrong, because she’s hurt or missing or knows something?

A thought won’t leave me alone, and even though I know it’s impossible, it feels so true it hurts: What if by picking them off in my mind, casting them in a horror flick, I’ve somehow made this happen? Summoned a demon like the church believes. Thrown the first Jumanji dice. Put a pin in the graveyard map, like in the classic fifties horror flick I Bury the Living, and watched in shock as the very-living owners of the grave plots dropped dead like the map was a voodoo doll.

The thought was so relentless all day, I kept thinking I was going to have another panic attack. In first period, I left for the bathroom without a hall pass, the teacher sputtering behind me. I got called to the office for that. The principal lectured me about leaving without permission until I stopped him dead in his tracks with words designed to make a straight man blush: menstruation and gushing blood. At which point he threw his hands up and said, “Don’t do it again.” Then waved me out of his office like he was shooing away a persistent New York pigeon with an eye on his croissant.

I would have laughed if I hadn’t felt so dire.

Maybe if I talk about something—anything—else, I can stop feeling like it’s my fault. “Your sister is cool,” I say. It seems relevant since Natalia just dropped us off, regaling us with a perfect impression of the principal followed by a perfect impression of a protesting David followed by a Celine Dion serenade, which David most definitely joined in on. Even thinking about it makes my heavy heart a little lighter.

“Eh, she’s all right.”

“But for real, you two seem close.”

“Yeah,” he says, fondly this time. “She’s the best.” Then: “What about you? Your mom seems cool. Do you get along with your family?”

I blink fast, thinking of Dad. “Yeah, my family is a bunch of weirdos. I fucking love them.”

“Weird how?”

“Well, did I tell you my sister is obsessed with bats? She’s building bat boxes for the backyard. Supposedly, when

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