The Hazel Wood: Chapters 1–6

Now she’s gone again, fled to a turreted house in the deep dark woods, where she lives with her five-year-old daughter and her husband, an actual royal—she just can’t quit fairy tales.

My mom and I lived like vagrants, staying with friends till our welcome wore through at the elbows, perching in precarious places, then moving on.

My mom and I lived like vagrants, staying with friends till our welcome wore through at the elbows, perching in precarious places, then moving on.

She put her head down on my knees and sobbed once. It was a desolate sound that belonged somewhere else, out there with dark roads and dead-leaf smells, not in this bright room in the middle of a loud, bright city.

We tried to wait out a full school year in an LA guesthouse Ella rented from an earnest hippie with a trust fund, but four months in the woman’s husband started suffering from symptoms of chronic fatigue.

The same busker showing up with his guitar on every train I rode for a week, singing “Go Ask Alice” in his spooky tenor.

She laughed like I was far less worldly than she was...

He’d been reading Tales from the Hinterland, of course.

I was ten the first time I saw the book. Small enough for a pocket and bound in green hardback, its cover embossed in gold.

I’d sat cross-legged on the attic’s tacky rag rug and opened the book reverently, tracing my finger down the table of contents.

I gave him noncommittal answers until finally I cracked.

He took off his hat, folded the brim to make it more pretentious, and reperched it on his head.

She doesn’t name names, but she doesn’t stint on telling the reporter the good stuff: she was traveling with an older man, a married editor at a men’s monthly, lazing around the Continent with a group of other bored American tourists.

When she got back to New York she bought the Hazel Wood, going for a song after its last owner had died under seamy circumstances in a fire that damaged part of the estate.

Staying in motion was as much a part of who we were as my mom’s sharp laugh, my angry streak. Our bad luck days that abated with every move, then slipped back in like red dirt on our shoes.

She took care of me, and I took care of her, in a symbiotic sisterly relationship that looked cute on TV...

When a man watched me too long through a car window or at the grocery store, I didn’t see a perv, or the first harbinger of the bad luck coming: he was one of Althea’s messengers.

I was lanced by a pity I didn’t want to feel.

Her dress seemed designed to call attention to the tattoo climbing up her arm and almost to her throat: a psychedelic flower on a spiny stem that could’ve been a botanical illustration of a blossom found on Mars.

The anger ebbed away.

She was sprawled out in cutoff sweats and a tank top, always a little undercovered even at home.

“Coffee stunts your growth,” he said finally. “You want to look like a twelve-year-old your whole life?”

Maybe she’d ignore me; maybe she’d talk at me nonstop about some arcane statute of girl code one of her friends had broken.

Maybe she’d ignore me; maybe she’d talk at me nonstop about some arcane statute of girl code one of her friends had broken.

Instead, I had the perverse desire to argue.

His taste in books, his rigidity, his obsession with how things looked from the outside: all of it was antithetical to who she was.

Now the air between them was fraught, but for a little while it had crackled with something quick-burning and private.

There was a time when I would’ve used words to make one clean, cold cut in her, in the place where she was softest—the rubble of acne beneath the foundation layer that ended at her chin; her father’s offhand comments about the fit of her jeans; her own mother, out of touch but still plenty capable of cashing Harold’s monthly checks—then gone in for the evisceration.

Was it his Jersey accent that got her? The hair coming out the top of his shirt? My guess is it was the expensive watch glittering around his thick wrist—or, if I’m being less jaded, his eyes.

My Monday-morning ennui was overlaid with a low-level dread.

The first half of my day was Comp, Medieval Lit, Calculus, and lunch. My performance in those classes could be rated as good, fine, bad, and terrible, respectively.

Being the estranged granddaughter of a minor, largely forgotten literary celebrity mattered to pretty much nobody, especially in a school where fundraiser auction items tended to include guitar lessons with somebody’s pop-star father.

People passing by were nodding at Finch and giving me the appraising new-girl look.

He was sitting with a man I recognized from the internet as his father and a gaunt woman with a sharp blonde bob, trailing a steak knife through crème brûlée.

His words and the way he’d looked when he said them shivered under my skin and stayed there like poison. The only way to purge it was to pour a thermos of hot coffee into the keyboard of his laptop.

I looked straight at him, his dark, narrow face and mocking eyes, and a feeling of vertigo swept from my face to my feet.

Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I’d rather have retribution than comfort.

I pulled out my phone and called my mom. It went straight to voicemail. I called Harold—same thing. After a minute, with misgivings, I called Audrey.

I had a sharp flare of déjà vu as I eased it open.
It was a title page I’d seen just once, years ago.

“Alice-Three-Times,” it said in a dense script. Inked around it was a geode pattern that made me think of ice.