New Boy Read online

parents had sent him back. Somewhere in his file was the word.

  Sedatephobia.

  Callie wasn’t the one afraid of silence. He was.

  Turning away from the window, Dylan reached for his iPod and began unpacking his meager possessions. The music roared in his ears, shutting out the voices—the ones that only he could hear when everything else was quiet.

  He started school the next day. Seelie High, home of the Druids. Vivian insisted on walking him in.

  “It’s okay, really,” he told her as they climbed out of the car. “I can find the office.”

  “It’s no problem,” Vivian said, offering him a timid smile. “I’d like to see the school.”

  “Haven’t you seen it before?”

  “No. We only…moved here about a month ago,” she said, hesitating a little over the word “moved.” It was a little thing, but Dylan tended to pay attention to the way people said things. It often told you so much more than the words they spoke.

  “Where were you living before?” he asked.

  “Oh…someplace far away. Come on. You don’t want to be late on your first day.”

  Callie had arranged everything ahead of time, so all he had to do was walk into the office, pick up his schedule, and say goodbye to Vivian. She seemed strangely unwilling to let him out of her sight. Maybe she was just nervous about being a foster mom for the first time. Maybe she had heard stories about delinquent foster kids skipping school, doing drugs, or running away. He had had one foster mom who had been certain he was going to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down the second she turned her back.

  “I’ll be okay. Really, Vivian,” he said as she fluttered uncertainly outside the main office, not quite able to leave him there. “I’ve changed schools loads of times. I know the drill. And the school has your number on file, so I can call if I need anything.”

  A bell rang and the kids hanging around in the halls began to shuffle off toward their homerooms. Dylan noticed that he and Vivian were getting a lot of curious looks. Probably most kids didn’t bring their moms to school with them.

  “I’d better let you get to class,” Vivian said at last. “Have a good day.” She gave him a quick hug and hurried away.

  He pulled his iPod out of his backpack and was just about to turn it on when someone bumped into him.

  “Sorry! Oh, it’s you!” The girl was short, freckled, and topped by a mass of frizzy blond curls. The girl from the tree. “I was wondering if you’d start today.” She glanced down at the iPod. “You’d better put that away. Some of the teachers get really tetchy about phones and things.”

  “Thanks,” he muttered, slipping the iPod into his backpack. “So, you spend a lot of time climbing trees?”

  She laughed. “Only that one. I live next door to the Tierney’s. That house used to belong to my grandparents, but they moved into one of those retirement community places across town. Grandma got tired of cleaning such a big house when it was just the two of them. Sorry if I scared you yesterday. I just wanted to see what you looked like. Mrs. Tierney told my mom that you were coming to stay with them. I’m Daphne, by the way.”

  Dylan felt himself relaxing. Daphne talked almost as much as Callie. But while the social worker’s constant chatter had been irksome, Daphne’s was somehow calming.

  “Dylan. Which way to…um…” he glanced down at his schedule, “D104?”

  She grinned at him. “Come on. I’ll show you. I’m going that way, too.”

  He didn’t see Daphne again until lunch. He kept hoping she’d show up in one of his classes, but no luck. It was too bad because one else seemed inclined to befriend the new kid. In fact, the other students, and even a couple of the teachers, seemed to go out of their way to avoid having any kind of contact with him. They’d stare at him when they thought he wasn’t looking, but as soon as he glanced their way, they’d become absorbed in something else.

  But Dylan was used to being the new kid. Sometimes it just took a little work to break through the social strata of a new school. So he’d tried talking to a pretty girl in his algebra class.

  “Is there always this much homework?” he’d asked as they packed up their belongings. He flashed her his most charming smile. He was good at charming. Or so he’d always thought.

  Not today, apparently. The girl had looked at him, her brown eyes filling with alarm. “Um…I guess…” And shoving her textbook into her backpack, she had fled the room.

  He went to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. Nope. He hadn’t developed a hideously disfiguring disease in the last two hours. There was nothing green stuck between his teeth. He didn’t even have any noticeable zits. What was the girl so scared of?

  After that he kept to himself and tried to ignore the stares and whispered conversations.

  When the final morning class let out, he decided to just follow the general flow of traffic through the halls, hoping it would lead him to the cafeteria. He followed the crowd out into a large courtyard. The school library, complete with bell tower, took up one side of the square opposite the building he had just exited. He knew that a third side housed the main office and the school’s auditorium. So the fourth side must be the gym and, hopefully, cafeteria? That seemed to be where the tide was headed anyway. He allowed himself to be pulled along.

  In the middle of the courtyard, the crowd split and flowed around a…door? Dylan stopped to investigate. Sure enough, it was a large wooden door, covered in some kind of plant. It didn’t match the rest of the school architecture, but was otherwise just a normal door. Except that it wasn’t part of a building. It didn’t lead to anywhere. It was just a door in the middle of an open courtyard. He walked around it just to make sure, but the backside looked exactly like the front side, doorknob and all. Maybe it was symbolic? The doorway to education or something like that, perhaps.

  He was still staring at the door when Daphne showed up.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Turning, he saw her standing a few feet away, playing with a strand of frizzy hair. “What’s it for?” he asked.

  There was another girl with her, a redhead who was staring at him with a strange expression on her face. Not nervous or afraid, the way everyone else seemed to look at him, but puzzled. Like she’d never seen anything quite like him before. There was tall guy standing just behind her and something about his stance reminded Dylan of the way that his new foster father hovered over his wife. Were all the guys in this town so protective? Dylan nodded to him, trying to be friendly, but all he got in return was a blank stare.

  He realized something strange. All three of them were standing well back—not away from him, but away from the door. And come to think of it, the other kids in the courtyard were keeping their distance too, going out of their way to avoid coming too close.

  “Oh…It’s just a door, you know,” Daphne said casually. “It’s for…going through, I guess.”

  He laughed. “Like this?” Reaching out, he grasped the doorknob and twisted. He was surprised when it gave way under his hand and started to swing toward him. He hadn’t actually expected it to open.

  “No!” Daphne and her friends shouted in unison.

  “Don’t do that!” Daphne tried to pull him away from the door.

  Dylan glanced back at her over his shoulder. “Why not? I thought you said it was just a door? Is it going to suck me into another dimension or something?” He was joking, but no one laughed.

  He turned back to the door and pulled it all the way open. He expected to see the other side of the courtyard through the empty doorframe. Instead, he saw…A forest?

  If he had thought the trees on the way into town were wild, they were nothing compared to what was on the other side of the door. These trees were old. Huge, gnarled trunks soared up and out of sight; twisted branches reached toward him, beaconing as their dark green leaves rustled in a warm breeze. He knew—just knew—that if he stepped through the door, he would find a witch’s cottage waiting j
ust out of sight.

  A small figure pushed him aside a slammed the door shut, while other hands pulled him away.

  “You really shouldn’t do that. The last kid who tried to go through is still in a comma,” Daphne said.

  Her redheaded friend was holding onto his arm. She wasn’t much taller than Daphne so he had to tilt his head down to look into her face. She was staring up at him with bright green eyes that were slowly changing color. First her pupils and then her irises turned white, the color fountaining across her eyes like a glass of milk spilling across a table.

  “You mustn’t go through the door,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “You can’t go back. Not yet. They’ve been looking for you for so long.”

  “Aislin!” Daphne snapped, grabbing her friend’s wrist and yanking her away from Dylan. “You’re going to freak him out.”

  “Um…It’s a little too late for that,” Dylan said, slowly backing away from the girls. He glanced at the other boy. “What’s going on? What’s up with that door? Is it some kind of optical illusion, or what? And what’s wrong with her eyes?”

  The tall boy only frowned at him as he put a hand on the redhead’s shoulder. He bent down to whisper something in her ear. Shaking her head, the girl continued to stare at Dylan with her milk-white eyes. “They’ve been looking for so long,” she repeated.

  The courtyard was empty now except for the three of them. He had a hazy recollection of