u/Hypn0kast

By the time November of two thousand and ten rolled around, there was no one left in Green Hollow. The town was completely devoid of life. No movement, no sound, no sign that anyone had ever been there at all. Rolled-down shutters and boarded-up windows had become permanent fixtures along Main Street. The old theater had shut down years ago, though the marquee still read “COMING SOON” in fading red letters. 

I used to stop outside the theater on my walk home from school, peering through the glass doors and trying to imagine what the place must have looked like in its prime. The old green carpet was still visible beneath the dust and stains left behind by decades of spilled soda and muddy shoes. Near the entrance, a glass concession cabinet sat empty except for a few scattered popcorn kernels fossilized in the corners. Sometimes, if the sun hit the glass the right way, the lobby almost looked alive again.

But not everything in the town felt dead. There were nights that the quiet emptiness was mournfully beautiful, especially when Nora Halpern was by my side. 

I don’t remember when Nora entered my life. She’d always been there in some form or another. Birthdays, holidays, and summers that felt endless when we were children. We grew up side by side the way people in small towns often do until it becomes impossible to tell where your memories end and theirs begin. Back then, loving her felt as natural as breathing.

It wasn’t until I turned sixteen that I realized how badly I loved her. Sometimes just hearing Nora laugh across a room was enough to make my chest ache. Her dark hair curled around her shoulders in uneven waves, and her eyes carried that deep emerald color you only ever saw in forests after rain. She had the kind of pale skin that never seemed to belong to summer.

By the spring of 2010, we were old enough that bonfires had stopped being just bonfires. They turned into parties out on backroads and in empty houses, where weed and vodka replaced beer, and nobody really bothered pretending innocence anymore. It was around then that you learned to knock if you didn’t want to see people fucking. Most of the parties passed in a blur; there were usually one or two a week, and everyone knew everyone in Green Hollow, so even if you weren’t invited, you knew when and where they were happening. Word would spread through school by Friday afternoon, and by nightfall half the high school would be crowded into a house somewhere along the backroads outside town.

I don’t remember most of them. The nights blurred together in the way they do when you’re that age and trying not to be alone with your own thoughts. I showed up anyway, most of the time. It was easier than staying home.

The last one I remember clearly has stuck with me ever since.

The party was at a house on the edge of town, one of those places you only notice when there’s music coming from it. It belonged to a senior named Chad Bell. Quarterback, honor roll, the kind of person adults used as proof that things were still working the way they were supposed to. I didn’t know him well; I didn’t really know anyone well that night. But I went anyway.

I pushed my way through a throng of shifting bodies that danced rhythmically to pounding bass, trying not to gag on the stench of sweat, perfume, weed, and hard spirits. A few people tried to pull me aside and talk to me, but I ignored them, intent on finding a drink and a corner I could curl up in. 

Nora was leaning against the kitchen counter, a red solo cup in hand, watching people dance like she was half in the room and half somewhere else entirely.

“Eli,” she said, smiling when she saw me. “You made it.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, come on.” She nudged my arm with the back of her hand. “Don’t look so down. You’re telling me you’re not having fun?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just not really my scene.”

“That’s not an answer.”

I shrugged. “Not particularly.”

She gave me a look—half amused, half accusing. “Then why are you here?”

“Because it’s better than sitting at home and listening to my parents.” That made her laugh.

“Wow,” she said. “That was pretty sad.”

“I know, but I am fine. Seriously”

“Mm-hm.” She took a sip from her cup, still watching me. “You always say you’re fine, you know that?”

“I am.”

“Sure.”

A pause stretched between us, filled with music from the living room and the bass shaking through the floorboards. Then she bumped my shoulder again, softer this time.

“Come on,” she said. “At least pretend you’re alive for a little while.”

I followed her through the kitchen and onto the dance floor, where we disappeared into the shifting mass of bodies and colored lights. The music was loud enough to blur thought entirely, bass rattling through my ribs hard enough that, for a little while, I could almost forget myself.

Almost.

Nora danced like nobody was watching her. There was something reckless in it, something loose and effortless that made everyone around her seem slower somehow. Her hair whipped across her face as she laughed at something I couldn’t hear, and for a few minutes I convinced myself that being beside her was enough and that it always would be.

After a while—ten minutes, maybe less—Nora leaned close enough for me to smell vodka on her breath and motioned toward the back door.

I followed her outside without a word.

The porch was cold and nearly empty. Out here, the music faded into a dull pulse beneath the sound of wind moving through the trees. Somewhere beyond the yard, deep in the dark woods behind Chad Bell’s house, I could hear insects humming in uneven waves.

“I can be honest with you, right, Eli?” she asked suddenly.

“Y-yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

She smiled a little at that, though it looked nervous somehow.

“How long have we known each other now?”

I laughed softly. “What kind of question is that?”

“I’m serious.”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” I said. “Since we were kids. Ten years? Longer, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Nora murmured.

The wind moved through the trees behind the house in long, uneven breaths. Somewhere inside, people were shouting along to music neither of us could hear clearly anymore. Nora looked down into her cup for a moment before speaking again.

“There’s… something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

My chest tightened so suddenly it almost hurt.

Even now, after everything that happened, I can still remember that feeling: Hope.

Pure and awful. All at once, every small thing between us over the years started rearranging itself in my head. Every late-night phone call. Every lingering glance. Every moment I’d spent convincing myself I wasn’t imagining the way she looked at me.

“You know you’re my best friend, right?” she asked quietly.

I nodded too fast. “Yeah.”

“And I trust you more than anyone.”

The world had already started opening beneath my feet. Then she smiled, not at me, but at the thought of someone else.

“There’s this guy in my chemistry class,” she said softly. “Caleb Mercer. And I think I’m falling in love with him.” Something inside me collapsed so completely and so quietly that I don’t think she even noticed.

“God,” she laughed softly, exhaling through her nose. “It feels good to finally tell someone.”

Before I could respond, she leaned over and wrapped her arms around me.

“You’re a good friend, you know that, Eli?”

Friend. The word landed harder than Caleb’s name had.

“Uh huh.” Even to me, my voice sounded distant.

Nora pulled away slightly, studying my face. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied automatically.

She smiled, apparently satisfied with that answer. “Anyway,” she said, lifting her cup slightly, “I’m going to go get another drink. You coming?”

For a second, I just stared at her.

At the porch light that caught in her hair. At the easy smile on her face. At how completely unaware she was that my entire world had just caved in around her.

Then I shook my head. “In a minute.”

“Okay.” She nudged my shoulder gently as she walked past. “Don’t disappear on me.”

Then she slipped back inside, swallowed by the music and light pouring through the doorway.

And just like that, I was alone.

I stayed on that porch for god knows how long.

The cold had started to settle in, but I barely noticed it. I could still hear the music through the walls of the house, the bass muffled and distant now, like it belonged to another place entirely. Every so often the back door would swing open, and a wave of laughter would spill out into the night before disappearing again. Nobody ever looked out and saw me there.

I remember staring out into the dark woods behind the house, thinking how easy it would be to just walk into them and keep going. Not in any dramatic way. I didn’t want to die. I just understood, suddenly, how a person could disappear without ever making a decision to. Piece by piece. Conversation by conversation. Until there was nothing left of them anyone would think to reach for.

I thought about home. Mom and Dad wouldn’t have noticed right away. Not at first. They were always busy in their own ways—working late, arguing in the kitchen, drinking in silence when they thought I was asleep. The kind of busy that looks like absence if you stand far enough away from it. And for a moment, standing there in the cold, I wasn’t sure I existed strongly enough to be missed at all.

I don’t know when I decided to leave the porch. One moment I was standing there; the next, I was walking past the tree line, then running away from everything. Branches tore at my sleeves, and leaves crunched loudly under the pounding of my feet. I kept moving, deeper and deeper, until the light and sound had faded totally, replaced with the cold and empty silence of the forest. 

Something was building in my chest—anger, emptiness, loneliness—twisting together until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

“I just—” I gasped, trying to force air back into my lungs. “I just want her—”

My voice broke, and my vision blurred, the tears coming without warning, hot and sudden.

“I just want her to love me.”

The words echoed into the quiet mass of trees that surrounded me; for a moment there was nothing to answer. Then, suddenly, the silence shifted. It was still quiet among the trees, but this time there was a tension to it. I straightened up, acutely aware of the weight that pressed in around me. 

“Hello?” I called out, the words sounding like the cracking of a whip. I looked around, trying to see what had shifted.

Close your eyes. The thought came to my mind, strong enough that, for a second, I assumed someone had said it out loud. I whirled around, hoping I could catch a glimpse of who had said it.

Close your eyes; it came again. Fog had started to roll in through the trees, limiting my ability to see. 

Close your eyes. The fog thickened, curling lower between the trees, swallowing the ground in slow, patient waves. My breath caught.

“No,” I said immediately, though I wasn’t even sure who I was saying it to. I backed up a step, then another; my foot caught on something unseen, and I stumbled, catching myself against a tree. Bark scraped through my shirt, and the pain, for half a second, helped me to focus. 

“I don't—" I mumbled. “I don’t know what the fuck this is, Chad, but you’ve gone too far. If this is your idea of some sick joke, it’s not ok.” I turned and started blindly running, anywhere, to get away. In any direction. But there was no direction; all the trees looked the same, and the fog softened any sense of detail that might have helped me navigate. 

Close your eyes, the thought came again, closer and more insistent this time. Behind me, the fog parted; off in the distance, I could just barely make out a shape making its way toward me. Entirely amorphous, I had a hard time telling where the shape ended and where the fog began. 

"Stop," I said, raising my voice. “What—what do you want?” The forest didn’t answer, and neither did the presence. 

And then I understood something that made my stomach drop: I had no way out of this. 

Close your eyes. So I closed my eyes. Against my better judgment, against every instinct that screamed at me to run, I closed them. 

With them closed, the world didn’t go dark so much as it thinned. I could still see, but not in the proper sense. I could see outlines of the trees, of the edge of the fog, and the vaguely human shape that stood before me. The only sound that reached my ears was the heavy gasping of my own breath. 

Then something touched me, resting so gently against my cheek that I almost didn’t notice it was there. It was cold to the point of feeling like ice and smooth like paper, with so little pressure behind it that it felt less like touch and more like the memory of it. I flinched instinctively but didn’t pull away. The hand lingered against my face before its fingers began to move, slowly stroking my cheek in a careful, searching motion. There was nothing rough or painful about it, yet the contact made my skin crawl. It felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain, like something trying to imitate tenderness from memory alone.

Then it spoke in my mind, My child, what is it that makes you ache?

“I-” There was a lack of words that seemed adequate. 

You are hurting. It wasn’t a question this time. Something inside me loosened painfully at the words, not just because they were true but because of how easily this thing had seen through me. My parents had never noticed me, and neither, it seems, had Nora. Hell, half the time, I wasn’t sure anyone did. But this thing had. 

“She broke my heart.” My response came. “I’ve spent years pining after her, and now she just throws me to the side for someone else.” 

And you wish to be loved by her? 

My throat tightened as I formed a response: "Yes." The affirmation was meek and barely made it past my lips. The hand grew still against my cheek, and for a long moment, nothing else happened. The fog drifted quietly through the trees, and somewhere far off in the distance I could hear the faint and muffled thump of music. Sounds of life that belonged to another life. 

The thing then spoke again: You wish that she had chosen you. I swallowed hard but said nothing. You wish to be the one her heart belongs to?

“Yes.” The hand moved again, this time running its skeletal fingers through my hair.

Then let me grant you what you seek.

Every instinct I had left screamed that something was wrong. That I should open my eyes and run and never come back to these woods again. But beneath the fear there was a small ray of light that cut through: hope.

“What do you want from me?” I asked quietly.

The fog shifted, and for the first time I sensed something in the words the presence spoke; it was amused.

I hunger for that which has no form. For that which gives life to hollow things.

A chill ran through me. “What does that mean?” I whispered. The hand against my cheek stilled.

Bring me vessels, it said softly, *and you shall have what you seek.* The cold in my chest deepened. 

“What do you mean?” The hand removed itself from my face. Its absence felt like a knife to my stomach. I hated when it touched me, but I disliked the sensation of emptiness it left even more. 

Those who wander unseen, it replied. Ones who are bereft of companionship. 

A knot twisted painfully in my stomach. “You mean people.” 

The living are only vessels, my child. They are urns for what I truly desire

I opened my mouth to say something, but I was at a loss for words. I should have run then, I know that now, but all I could think about was Nora: the way she smiled, the way her hair curled on her shoulders, and the way she spoke about Caleb. She had never once looked at me the way I’d always looked at her. And somewhere, beneath all the hurt, a thought took root: she was worth this.