The Mountain That Listens

Chapter One: The Boy Who Hates Mirrors

Today is October 24th, and I need to tell you about the bathroom mirror at Harlow Ridge High School, because it’s where it started getting worse.

But first I need to tell you that I am a coward, because you’ll need that context.

I am sixteen years old. I’m five-foot-nine on a good day and five-foot-eight when my posture gives up. I have my father’s nose and my mother’s ability to apologize to furniture when I bump into it. I run cross-country not because I’m fast but because it’s the only sport where nobody yells at you for being average. And I’ve been in love with Nora Vance for four years, three months, and eleven days, a statistic I would rather die than say out loud.

Also: I don’t look in mirrors anymore.

This has been a Whole Thing at home.

“Eli,” my mom said that morning, standing in the doorway while I brushed my teeth with my eyes shut, “you’re going to stab yourself in the eye.”

“I’m very careful,” I said, through foam.

“You’re going to get cavities in your forehead.”

“Mmf.”

She sighed in the soft, exhausted way she’d been sighing for four years, ever since the day Theo stopped sleeping with his light off. She put her hand on my shoulder for a second. Then she went downstairs, and I heard the clink of a plate set down, and a pause, and another plate.

Six plates, I thought. No. Four. Mom, Dad, me, Theo. Just four.

I kept my eyes shut and spat.

Harlow Ridge High is a brick building shaped like a shoebox somebody sat on. It sits at the base of Mount Verrin, which means that in the afternoon the mountain’s shadow slides across the parking lot like a slow, patient hand, and everyone’s phone loses signal for exactly nine minutes. We call it The Quiet. Teachers have stopped trying to fight it.

I was standing at my locker when Mason Reed materialized beside me, which is how Mason arrives at things.

He was eleven now. A sixth-grader. But the middle school and the high school share a back hallway, and Mason, who had never once in his life respected a boundary, treated this as an open invitation.

“Dude,” he said. “Dude. Eli. Dude.”

“That’s three duds, Mason.”

“It’s urgent dudes.” He was holding a sandwich in both hands like a sacred offering. “I need your opinion. If a ghost eats a sandwich, does the sandwich become a ghost?”

“Why are you in my hallway?”

“Answer the question.”

“The sandwich is a regular sandwich.”

“Then where does it go?”

“Mason—”

“Because I did an experiment last night,” he said, lowering his voice, “and I left half a sandwich in the graveyard and in the morning it was gone, and there were no ants, no raccoons. Just crumbs in a perfect circle.”

“That’s a raccoon, Mason.”

“A raccoon that neat?”

I opened my mouth to argue, and that’s when I noticed he wasn’t joking. Not completely. Under the sandwich bit, under the grin, his eyes had that tight, slept-in-his-clothes look that I recognized, because I’d seen it in my own bathroom mirror in the days before I stopped looking.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “You okay?”

He shrugged with both shoulders, the whole-body shrug of a kid trying to be smaller. “I keep hearing my mom in the walls,” he said. “She’s at work. She’s at the hospital, she does nights. But I hear her. In the vents. Calling me for dinner.”

The hallway noise went on around us. Lockers. Laughter. Somebody’s phone, playing a song I’d never learn the name of.

“What does she say?” I asked.

“She says, Mason, come downstairs.” He swallowed. “But we live in a one-story house.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

Here’s what you need to understand about the six of us. We never talked about it. Four years, and we never said the word cave in the same sentence as the word wall. But we’d stayed close, in the strange way people do when they’ve survived the same car crash. Theo and Mason were inseparable. Piper and June had become a two-person government. And Nora and I orbited each other like two planets who each secretly suspected the other was the sun.

I found Nora at lunch, in the courtyard, on the cold concrete bench by the dead fountain.

She had her knees pulled up and her hair tied back in that messy half-knot she did when she was thinking, and she was drawing something on the cover of her math notebook. Nora drew constantly. Faces, mostly. The kind that looked like they were about to say something.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, Marsh.” She didn’t look up. That was our thing. She called me by my last name, like a teammate, like a friend. It killed me every single time.

I sat down. There was about eight inches of bench between us. I measured it, the way you measure the distance to a diving board.

“You look tired,” she said.

“You look like a person who’s about to say something annoying.”

“I’m always like that.”

“Fair.”

She smiled, just a corner of it, just the gap-toothed ghost of the girl who’d found a cave. Then it dropped.

“I need to show you something,” she said. “And I need you to not say it’s nothing, because I’m going to throw my notebook at your face.”

“Noted.”

She turned the notebook around.

It was a drawing of a mirror. A tall one, in a plain wooden frame. But she’d drawn it from inside. In the glass, there was a reflection of the room she’d been sitting in, her bedroom, I recognized the poster of the band she liked and the lamp shaped like a mushroom. And in the reflection, standing exactly where Nora would have stood, was a girl with Nora’s face.

Only she was smiling.

And Nora, in the real drawing, wasn’t.

“I didn’t draw that,” Nora said.

“Nora—”

“I mean it, Eli. I drew the mirror. I drew the frame. And then I went to sleep, and I woke up, and the girl was in it. In pen. And I don’t even own that pen.”

My throat was a dry thing.

Then Nora did something I’d never seen her do, not in four years, not once. She reached over the eight inches of bench and put her hand on top of mine.

It was shaking.

“It’s her again,” she whispered. “The one from the cave. She’s learning my face.”

“Okay,” I said. And I meant it as okay, I believe you, but it came out sounding like okay, I’m going to throw up, and for one miserable second I thought I’d ruined it.

But Nora laughed. A little wet, a little cracked. She laughed and wiped her eye with the back of her wrist, and she didn’t take her hand off mine.

“Was that a tactical okay?” she said.

“It was a surrender okay.”

“Good. Surrender’s good. Surrender means we have a plan.”

“Do we have a plan?”

“No,” said Nora Vance. “But we’re going to make one. After school. My house. Everybody. And you’re going to bring your little brother, because I’m pretty sure he’s the one the mountain likes best.”

I felt something cold slide down my spine.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because he’s the one that said hello,” Nora said softly. “Politely. And if I were an ancient, hungry mountain, Eli, I’d want to keep the one that was nice to me.”