Free Shadow Creek by Joy Fielding

rest of the car’s inhabitants. “Wake me up when we get there.”
    Great, Val thought, letting go of whatever hopes remained for some quality time with her daughter.
    “And try to keep the hysteria to a minimum,” Brianne added, with a glance over her shoulder at James.
    In response, James burst into song. “ ‘The hills are alive,’ ” he sang out, Val and Melissa quickly joining in.
    I’m in hell, Jennifer thought sullenly, as they continued along Route 9 toward Prospect Mountain.

FIVE
    A S SOON AS SHE closed her eyes, she saw the blood.
    The sheer volume of it had surprised her, along with the way it had literally shot from its source in one great, exuberant whoosh. Also a surprise was its rich, bright red color. Her lips creased into a small, almost imperceptible smile. She always expected the blood to be browner, duller, less vibrant.
    Vibrant, she repeated silently, chewing on the word as if it were gum. Exuberant.
    Funny words to describe death.
    When she was younger and she used to cut herself with a razor, she remembered watching with fascination as the rivulets of blood streamed down her thighs and calves, relief quickly overtaking the initial pain of her self-inflicted wounds.
    “Doesn’t it hurt?” her friend Molly had once asked.
    “No. It feels wonderful,” she’d confided with a deep, satisfied sigh, about to continue, to tell her friend that every slice into her flesh was like scratching an overwhelming itch, that each cut brought with it its own heady rush, like a narcotic, temporarily freeing her soul, releasing the demons lurking just beneath the surface of her skin. She’d stopped only because of the look of growing horror on Molly’s face. Her friend was incapable of understanding what she felt, she’d realized in that moment. It was pointless to try to explain.
    “Does your mother know?” Molly had asked on another occasion.
    “Of course not.”
    “But there are marks all over your legs.”
    “She doesn’t notice.”
    “What if she does?”
    “I’ll tell her I fell into a bunch of bushes.”
    “What if she doesn’t believe you?”
    “That’s her problem.”
    “I think you should stop,” Molly cautioned before switching to another—safer—topic.
    And she did stop, although not because of Molly’s misguided concern or any fear that her mother might find out. She quit for the same reason she quit most of the things she’d once enjoyed—books, hobbies, friends. She got bored.
    Besides, she’d found something else that was even better at releasing her inner demons.
    She’d met a boy.
    A boy who not only understood, but supported and encouraged her darker impulses. Her “uniqueness,” as he liked to say.
    The smile widened on her lips. You don’t call someone his age a boy, she decided, even though she wasn’t sure exactly how old he was. Somewhere between twenty and thirty. He wasvague about specifics. “What does it matter?” he’d ask. “Age is just a number. It’s irrelevant.” He stopped short of saying, “You’re as young as you feel,” for which she was grateful. It was something she remembered her grandmother saying with irritating frequency.
    He was similarly vague about his name. “Call me Ishmael,” he’d said on one occasion, laughing with her at the reference to
Moby Dick
, a book they’d both loathed in high school. At other times he called himself Jonah or Moses or Elijah. He loved biblical names. Once he’d even told her to call him Jesus, but the name had proved to be something of a deterrent when it came to having sex, so he’d quickly abandoned it. Lately he’d turned to more mundane monikers—Brad, Steve, Michael. “I refuse to be contained by the boundaries imposed on me by others. I am whoever I want to be,” he said, encouraging her to follow suit. “You are your own creation.”
    And so one day she created Catherine, and in the days after that, Veronica, Clementine, Joanne.
    By far and away, her favorite so far was