Chapter 169
Chapter 168: The Shadow
Drew POV
I was four years old and three months and twelve days.
I knew this because I counted. Not every day, but often enough that the number was always somewhere in my head, ready if I needed it. Lake said that was weird, that nobody counted their age like that, but Lake also thought that all crows were the same and they weren’t, so his opinion on counting wasn’t the most reliable.
The shadow started on a Tuesday.
I wasn’t sure it was a shadow at first. That was the problem with noticing things-sometimes you noticed something and you didn’t know if it was a real thing or a thing your brain made up because it was looking for patterns. I was good at patterns. Dad said I was very good at patterns, which was usually a compliment but sometimes came with the face that meant he was also a little worried about it.
The face wasn’t the worried one when he said it lately.
Lately Dad had a different face.
The school was called Maple Ridge, which I liked because of the name. There were actual maple trees on the road to it, which I’d confirmed by leaf shape and bark texture. Lake went to the same school now, which had happened when Lucian moved Lake from the other school, and having Lake at school was different from not having Lake at school in the way that most things with Lake were different-louder, more reported, more thoroughly documented by the person living them.
On Tuesday I was in the yard at lunch.
I was near the fence at the edge of the yard, which was where I usually was at lunch because the fence was good for leaning against and from there you could see most of the yard without being in the middle of it, which was important. The middle of the yard at lunch was a lot of running and shouting and things changing direction very fast, which was fine but not what I wanted to do with my lunchtime.
I was watching a bird on the fence post at the far end.
Not a crow. Smaller, rounder. I thought it was a black-capped chickadee based on the head markings but the distance made me uncertain and I didn’t like being uncertain about identifications.
That was when I felt it.
Not a sound, not exactly. More like the feeling you got when someone was looking at you-the specific back-of-the-neck feeling that happened when attention was pointed at you from somewhere you couldn’t see. I’d had it a few times before, mostly in crowds, and I didn’t like it.
I turned around.
The fence ran along the edge of the school property. On the other side of it was a street, and on the other
The Shadow
Claim
side of the street were parked cars. There was a man standing near one of the cars. He was too far away for me to see his face well but he was looking at me, or at the yard in general-I couldn’t tell which. When I turned, he didn’t move away. He just stayed where he was for another few seconds and then got in the car.
I watched the car.
It drove away slowly.
I looked at the fence. Looked at the yard. Lake was on the other side of it playing something with three other kids that involved a lot of jumping.
I went back to watching the chickadee, which had moved to a different post.
I was pretty sure it was a chickadee.
I didn’t say anything about the man.
The second time was Thursday.
Dad picked me up from school on Thursdays, which was one of the good parts of the week. He came at three-fifteen and he was always on time because Dad was always on time and we usually stopped somewhere on the way home-a bookshop, or the park, or once a place that had very good hot chocolate that I thought about sometimes when it was cold.
We were walking to the car.
Dad was talking about something-I wasn’t fully listening because I was watching a gutter that had something interesting in it, a configuration of leaves and water that was doing something I wanted to understand better-and then I had the feeling again p>
The back-of-the-neck feeling.
I looked up.
There was a car parked across the street. It was a different car from Tuesday’s, I was pretty sure-different color, blue instead of gray-but the man was in it and I thought it was the same man. Same shape of person. Same way of sitting.
He was looking at us.
Or looking at Dad. Or at the car. I wasn’t sure.
I looked at Dad, who hadn’t noticed. He was finishing what he was saying about something at his work, something about a document that had the wrong date on it, which was the kind of thing that bothered Dad a lot but that I found only mildly interesting.
When we got in the car I looked back.
The blue car was still there.
It was still there when we pulled out.
I watched it through the back window until we turned a corner and I couldn’t see it anymore.
2/3
The Shadow
thought about saying something.
+ decided not to.
Chaum
Partly because I wasn’t sure. Maybe the man was looking at something else. Maybe the car was parked there for a reason that had nothing to do with us. I didn’t like saying things I wasn’t sure about-it was better to wait until you had enough information to say something accurate. If I told Dad and I was wrong, that was a waste of both of our time and would produce the worried face. A worried face that I would have put there for no reason at all.
And partly because Dad’s face had been different lately and I didn’t want to change it.
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Florence
A passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.