Hänsel said to Grethel, “We shall soon find the way,” but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest . . .
—“Hänsel and Grethel,” translated by Margaret Raine Hunt
The house looks inviting enough.
It’s white. Two stories with a wraparound porch. There are dark shutters and a turret, and a plume of pale mist issues from the chimney, despite the warmth of the summer night. As the girl and the boy stare at it from their hidden post in the woods across the street, neither really knows what to do. They’re exhausted after hours of wandering the dark forest, and the girl is so hungry, when she blinks, the whole place morphs, taking on the look of a massive licorice-topped cake heaped with vanilla icing and strategically placed Ho Hos.
Despite it being the dead of night, every window is lit from within. When the girl and the boy first spotted the house, they slowly approached from the edge of the woods they’d been lost in, drawn toward the bright beacon like bloodthirsty mosquitos to bare flesh.
“We should go knock,” Hazel says. Her stomach rumbles. “Like, fine: it’s late. But somebody has to be awake if all of the lights are on, right?”
The boy doesn’t respond.
“I’m sure they have a phone we can borrow, or if nothing else, they can tell us where we are. Plus, I really gotta pee.” She moves to step out from the cover of the trees, but the boy catches hold of her arm.
“Whoa now,” he says. “Chill with that, Hazel. It’s literally the middle of the night, and all them lights on is real suspect.”
“But, Gray—”
“We in the woods, babe. Pick a bush and handle your business.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so Hazel does as the boy suggests, grumbling as she squats, her back pressed against an oak tree. As she feels the sting of urine running over her swollen lady bits, it occurs to Hazel that the indignity of peeing in the woods is nothing compared to the shoved-up skirt and moved-aside undies by the river earlier. The boy above her, bare from neck to knees; Hazel on her back, her own knees splayed wide with him between them . . .
Flashes blitz through her mind and bring a flush to her face.
There’s a noise then, and the boy lets an expletive fly as he ducks behind a different oak to hide.
“Gray?” Hazel says, craning her neck to check what’s going on, but she’s unable to move because she’s . . . still peeing. “You all right?”
“Shhh!” the boy hisses.
There’s a rumble from the road while Hazel finishes her business. As she tiptoes back to join Gray, a dark SUV whips around a bend in the road, slows, and pulls into the rounded driveway. Five guys hop out. They’re similar to Gray in both style and skin tone—loose jeans, polo shirts, and sneakers; brown like a walnut shell—and likely no older than his and Hazel’s seventeen.
The group ascends the porch steps and walks right into the house without knocking. “Yo, I think black people live there,” Gray says, amazed.
Hazel’s retort is swift. “Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Bruh, whatever. You know of anybody who looks like us and lives in a crib like that?”
“No, but—”
“Exactly.”
Hazel huffs. She knows Gray must be just as tired and hungry as she is, but the way he’s treating her grates. Especially after their tryst by the river. Hazel’s stepfather once told her that Gray was “only after one thing,” and as much as she hates the man, those words now ring through her head.
“Yo, look, look, look!” Gray says, still focused on the house.
She sighs and follows Gray’s finger. Three additional vehicles have arrived. A second SUV and a large sedan unload seven more guys of varying ages and skin tones. A smaller sedan parks and empties of its white male driver, plus four young ladies in skimpy outfits and crazy high heels. When the driver opens the front door of the house and stands aside so they can go in, Gray turns to Hazel, his eyes wide.
There’s music playing.
She swats Gray’s arm. “They’re having a party, you scaredy-cat,” she says.
Not that Gray would mention it, especially right now, but she seems different since they did what they did at the river. She’s bossier and short on patience.
Or at least it feels that way to Gray.
“Now let’s go,” she snaps.
Anyway, Gray can’t put a finger on it, but something about all the lights on and the drop-offs and the girls in skimpy clothing gives him the heebie-jeebies. “Man, I don’t know, Hazel . . .”
“Somebody will have a phone we can borrow.” She tugs Gray to his feet. “You can call and let your mom know you’re okay, and we can figure out where the hell we are and how we’re gonna get back.”
And Gray just swallows. Because what is there for him to say? Let’s just go back into the dark woods instead of over to that nice house full of phones, and likely food too?
“Come on,” Hazel says. And she pulls him out of the forest.
The trouble started some six months back, when Hazel’s mother began seeing a monster.
Not that things were great for Hazel before that. She’d endured her mother’s emotional whims for as long as she could remember. For the most part, Hazel was used to it. She’d learned to shift and bend for the sake of avoiding, or absorbing, the heaviest of her mother’s mood swings. When Mother would soar—up, up, up, giddy and elated about everything—Hazel would make herself into the wind that kept Mother aloft for as long as possible. After the inevitable plummet and crash, Hazel would shrink down, morphing from a gale into a molecule, invisible to the naked eye, but able to observe and keep cover. The drops weren’t enjoyable, to say the very least—the highs weren’t great either, what with the knowledge that they wouldn’t last—but Hazel was used to them.
But then came the night Mama stumbled (literally) into their teensy two-bedroom apartment, giddy as a gumdrop, with a disgustingly foul creature on her heels.
Hazel didn’t know how foul back then, though if you’d asked her, she would’ve said he made her uneasy on sight. He was white (but tan). Tall with broad shoulders. Sharp jawline. Thick dark hair.
When he first smiled at Hazel, the light glinted off his too-straight, too-white teeth. That’s when she knew something wasn’t right. No regular person’s eyes were that blue. Not that Hazel had seen, at least.
“Well, well,” he’d said. “You’re just as stunning as your mother.” His voice made Hazel think of a square of butter gliding across the top of a warm biscuit. Too perfect. And then his strange eyes trekked over the hills and valleys of Hazel’s terrain.
Had he been lying about her mother’s beauty, Hazel might’ve picked up on him sooner. But Hazel’s mother was stunning, with impossibly smooth, deep-brown skin, high cheekbones, a wide nose she would contour slimmer with cosmetics, and long black hair she kept ironed straight. Hazel knew: all it took was a bat, bat, bat of Mother’s eyelashes to grab the attention of anyone she desired. A rich, white widower (according to him) taking interest in a black woman without a cent to her name made perfect sense, once you saw Hazel’s mother. Her beauty made her a prize.