Chapter 1 - The Girl in Green

When the lights went out, I had a knife in my hand.

The darkness surprised me, and the razor-sharp chef’s knife slipped effortlessly through the tip of my middle finger, the cut so clean it was painless—temporarily. The animal swell of fear hit before the pain.

My brain registered attack.

I turned, ready to stab whoever was lurking behind me in the dark.

There was no one there. Just the vague outline of the schlumpy couch that doubled as my bed. The walls of our garage apartment.

I was in the middle of speed-chopping onions for Tuscan bean stew. It was for a recipe I found on TikTok—the kind of meal that looks like it takes fifteen seconds to make from start to finish, but in reality requires a full forty minutes of dangerous slicing and dicing. I’d gotten off late from work at my corporate coffee shop job. Late, because my manager, Bob, wanted to discuss my job performance. I’d gotten confused and overwhelmed, and had left a bunch of wrong orders cooling, melting whipped cream on the drink stand—again.

The job was terrible, but at least it wasn’t behavioral school.

I sucked in a breath as the delayed pain hit me—sharp, metallic, and angry. I set my knife down, grabbed a dish towel, and wrapped it tightly around the middle finger of my right hand.

“Rolling blackout,” I muttered to myself. Had to be.

Unless Mom had forgotten to pay the bill.

It was late August, 110 degrees in the afternoon, and the City of Austin had been threatening the rolling blackouts for over a week. So far, it hadn’t happened, and it was nighttime, so the timing was strange.

I grabbed my phone and switched on the flashlight, pointing the light at the cutting board—a riot of onion streaked with blood.

My finger throbbed, and I delicately probed the end of my finger with my thumb through the now-damp dishcloth. No bone, so at least it wasn’t that bad.

I peeled back the dish towel. I’d sheared a chunk off the top of the middle finger of my right hand, and a good bit of the nail. That exposed bit of nail bed hurt more than anything. I only caught a glimpse of the cut in the weak beam of the phone light before the tip of my finger filled with blood again.

I turned the light toward Mom’s workbench nearby. She had a side hustle selling candles and jewelry online and at local festivals. I knew that I could make a bandage with her supplies. Sure enough, there was a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a roll of duct tape, and a small wicker basket full of cotton balls on the back of the bench.

I dropped the dishrag on the chair and dabbed rubbing alcohol on the tip of my finger, biting back a yelp. The sting of the alcohol hurt far worse than the initial cut. I stuck cotton balls to the tip of my finger and wrapped my finger up tightly with some duct tape. I shined the light around the room, unable to shake the irrational feeling that someone was lurking in the dark, waiting.

I couldn’t help it. My flashlight beam traveled past the bloody knife on the counter, and the sight triggered a memory I would rather keep buried.

A bloody steak knife, a pale cotton thread from a shirt stuck to the serrated edge.

I looked away quickly.

The dim beam of light revealed an uncharacteristically clean workbench. Mom’s candles were gone, which was weird. Mom had made dozens of strange pyramid-shaped candles scented with frankincense and myrrh, embedded with tiny baby Jesuses and crosses to sell at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. “Christmas is big business,” she’d said, as though she’d just heard of Christmas for the first time and was excited by the potential of this exotic new holiday. She’d spent months and too much money making candles for Christmas. I wasn’t entirely sure Christians wanted to watch burning hot metal babies and crosses cascading out of candle wax.

The candles were gone.

I held my hand over my head in the hope that it would slow the bleeding. We didn’t have the money for a doc-in-the-box, but if the bleeding didn’t stop soon, I’d have to tell Mom.

I peered around the corner to the sliding glass door in Mom’s bedroom, which led to the slab patio outside our garage apartment.

Mom was out there talking to Michaela. Michaela was our landlord. Sometime during the nineties, Michaela had written a pop song that was a number one hit. She’d plowed the money she’d made into restoring a sprawling yellow Victorian house north of the UT campus. We’d been lucky enough to live in the garage apartment behind her house for eight years.

On the rickety table between them sat a bottle of red wine and three frankincense candles burnt down to puddles. Mom had been planning to sell those candles for twenty-five dollars apiece, which meant she’d just lit seventy-five dollars on fire.

We didn’t have that kind of money. Not on our best day.

I tucked my duct-taped hand behind my back, strode over to the sliding glass door, and pulled it open.

“Weren’t you planning on selling those?” I asked, gesturing to the molten piles of wax. The smell of frankincense and myrrh mixed with the tomato-green tang of Michaela’s nearby garden.

“Well, the lights went out,” Mom said, as though she had no choice but to burn the most expensive thing she could find. “I had to do something.”

I looked down at the puddle of candle wax threatening to lap over the edge of an oversized plate. Mom had to have lit the candles over an hour ago, well before the blackout, but I let that pass.

“What’s with the electricity?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Michaela said. “Apparently, it’s the whole neighborhood. I checked out front. No lights anywhere on the street.”

“I’ve got something to tell you, Jess.” Mom said. “Something wonderful.”

Her eyes glowed with red wine and excitement. It made me nervous. Mom’s enthusiasms were like spring storms—sudden, violent, and over quickly. Like her Christmas candles, melting into worthless puddles.

It was then that I noticed what else was on the table.

There was a cream-colored envelope addressed to me in an elegant cursive. It was hard to read, but my name was calligraphed with an oversized J. Unmistakable.

It had been violently torn open at one end—Mom’s handiwork.

I picked up the envelope.

The return address was from a large D scribble scribble, large C scribble scribble.

The Danvers-Cutteridge School.

Danvers-Cutteridge would be my fourth school in as many years, if you could call Gardner-Betts a school. It wasn’t. It was prison—juvenile detention. No getting out.

After that, two different court-ordered behavioral schools, followed by a period of time when I pretended to be doing online coursework.

Now I was old enough to drop out of school, and the court no longer cared about me.

That didn’t mean Mom was okay with me not finishing high school.

Mom had found the Danvers-Cutteridge School during her online search. From the beginning, it had seemed almost too perfect. Danvers-Cutteridge was a high school for mostly neurodivergent kids nestled in the mountains of West Virginia. Sixty percent of the students received full scholarships, paid for presumably by a wealthy patron and parents of rich kids. It was a rare unicorn of a school—prestigious and free.

I never thought in a million years that the school would take me. Not after I wrote a blistering essay about how little education actually goes on in places like Gardner-Betts. Detention is all sit down, shut up, here’s a worksheet. I told the truth about all of it. I didn’t even care if anyone read my diatribe—it was cathartic just to write it.

I promised Mom that if Danvers-Cutteridge accepted me, I’d go. I never expected to hear back from them.

Instead, they wait-listed me—with the promise of a full scholarship if my name came up.

That had been months ago.

When August came and went, I breathed a sigh of relief. The fall semester had already started. I was free.

Or so I’d thought.

“Well, aren’t you going to take a look?” Michaela said.

I was afraid to open the letter.

I tucked the phone under my chin, with the light facing down, and pulled the letter out of the envelope. There was still blood on my hands, which I hadn’t noticed until this moment. I left a giant bloody thumbprint on the torn left edge.

Congratulations! the letter read. You’ve been accepted into the Danvers-Cutteridge School for Exceptional Students for the fall term. Your application showed outstanding academic potential. We think you have the Danvers-Cutteridge fighting spirit!

“Fighting spirit?” I said. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I think it’s a sports thing,” Mom said.

Mom had as much familiarity with sports as she did with Christmas.

“It probably just means that you didn’t bore the hell out of whoever read your essay,” Michaela said.

I glanced from the paper to Michaela. She gave me a warm, knowing smile. Michaela knew my history as well as anyone. She’d arrived home that day just as the police were carting me away. She’d calmed Mom down and provided her with herbal tea, red wine, and a lawyer.

“West Virginia,” I murmured.

“West Virginia is absolutely gorgeous,” Michaela said. “We used to have shows in Morgantown, which is just an amazing place. . . .”

Michaela went on, telling a story about touring with her band in the early 2000s, but I couldn’t concentrate. West Virginia had mountains—that’s all I knew. One of the behavioral schools had been in Hill Country, in the middle of nowhere. There were no fences or walls, and I’d asked how they kept students from escaping.

Trey, the stablehand, had laughed. Apparently, he got asked the question a lot.

“One road in and out,” he’d told me. “Forty miles to the main road. We just send a car.”

I took notes, and when I made my escape from that place, I took a well-trod footpath away from the main road. Trey had easily hunted me down on horseback.

That was just hills—not mountains.

“I know it’s far away,” Michaela said. “But you’ll be back for the winter break.”

“And we get to have a road trip!” Mom said, as though we were going to Padre for spring break, and not to a boarding school in West Virginia.

Michaela and Mom lifted their wine glasses and toasted.

“I wish I could go with you two,” Michaela said. “It really is beautiful there.”

I looked around at the puddle of wax and wondered where the rest of the candles were. Mom probably gave most of them away.

The candles were a clue.

Mom didn’t have to burn the candles. She could have packed me off to school and gone about her plans for the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar.

Maybe she had her own escape plans. She always talked about wanting to travel. But to get where she was going, she needed to get rid of me first.

“What if I don’t want to go?” I asked.

Mom and Michaela exchanged nervous glances.

“Just give it a chance, Jess,” Mom said softly.

“Sure.”

I turned and went back inside to clean up the mess in the kitchenette. So far, my duct tape bandage seemed to have helped, and the bleeding had mostly stopped. I pointed my flashlight at the counter. The sight of blood on the knife blade made me queasy.

I washed the knife with a pot scrubber and dish soap, rinsed and dried it carefully, and put it back in the blade protector. Michaela had given me the knife when I started teaching myself how to cook. I’d have to leave the knife behind, but I’d be back soon to reclaim it.

I was going to West Virginia, hundreds of miles away, to a school with “fighting spirit.”

I promised I’d give the school a chance.

I didn’t promise I’d stay.