CHAPTER ONE
Elmbrook, Virginia – May 6, 1968
When I stepped out the front door that morning, the sun was already too bright, like it was trying too hard to look alive. The porch creaked under my shoes, same as always, and the screen door slapped shut behind me before anyone inside could yell. Not that they usually did in the morning—they saved their voices for night.
The morning air in Elmbrook was thick with engine smoke and summer dust. Cicadas screamed from the trees like they were warning me of something. Maybe they were.
I lit a cigarette with shaky hands and tried not to think about how my brother used to do the same thing—same spot on the porch, same hollow stare. He came back from Vietnam with shadows under his skin and didn’t stick around long after. Sometimes I swear I still hear his boots on the floorboards.
My name is Jude Michael Ashford, but everyone just calls me Ash. My hair is dark brown which I style back into a pompadour look. A lot of people tend to say I look like Elvis but I really don’t see it. I’m nowhere near as handsome as he is.
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I took the long way to school, cutting through the overgrown trails behind Penn’s Auto, boots kicking gravel, smoke curling in front of my face like fog. It was still too early for anyone to be up, but I knew where the others would be. Same place as always when the world got too loud.
CJ’s hideout sat crooked in the trees like it didn’t care if it fell. Half-rotted floorboards, blankets for walls, and a view of nothing but green. It was ours.
I climbed the ladder slowly, careful not to startle them—like animals at rest. When I ducked through the tarp and stepped inside, they barely glanced up.
CJ sat by the window with her pocket knife and her silver chain catching the light. Cara Jean Rourke didn’t talk much, but when she did, people listened. Fierce and sharper than the blade in her hand. She’s fifteen and had long black hair and bangs that she would blow out into curls with hair rollers. Her eyes were dark and piercing, most people didn’t look into them for more than a few seconds.
Boone leans back against a crate, arms crossed, eyes steady. Sixteen-year-old Elias Boone Maddox has fists like cinder blocks and a heart he kept under lock and key. Some folks call him “Bulldog” on account of how hard he hits when pushed, but to us, he’s just Boone—solid, dependable. His hair is a bleached, almost white blond. It’s short, but not neat—messy in a way that felt effortless, with soft strands curling slightly at the ends and falling naturally across his forehead. His eyes are a light aqua, sparkling in the sunlight.
Cricket lays draped beside him, flipping a lighter open and closed with one hand like he was born bored. Wesley Ambrose Maddox, Boone’s older brother by barely a year, but twice as fast with his mouth. He can mimic any voice, any accent, and use it to get under people’s skin. He’s the type to grin while the world burns. His hair is shaggy and a light rust color. It kicks out in the front with a slight cowlick in the back. His eyes are like moss on river stones, holding secrets smoothed by time.
Thatch sits cross-legged in the corner, notebook in his lap, pencil moving like it has somewhere to be. Thatcher Noble Carroway has a mind wired for mysteries and a bad habit of looking for patterns where there weren’t any. He’s the kind of kid who believes in ghosts and doesn't trust people who don't. His deep brown hair is combed over with pomade and there’s a small curl that falls over his forehead. His grey-blue eyes are always fixated on drawing, writing or reading.
Indy—real name Simon Indigo Penn—was on his back with a candy bar in one hand and a cigarette in the other, talking a mile a minute about a shadow he saw near the train tracks. Fourteen going on forty and too fearless for his own good. Smallest and youngest of us, but somehow the loudest. His hair fell in front of his face in short blond chunks, covering his eyebrows, his eyes sharp and a shade of deep blue, like a cloudless summer sky.
That was the crew. Messed-up, dead broke, and loyal in the way only kids like us could be.
And for now, they were all I had.
“You look like hell,” Cricket says without looking.
“Morning to you too,” I muttered, sliding down next to CJ.
“Somethin’ happen?” Boone asked, voice low, steady. He didn’t ask things unless he meant them.
I shook my head. “Same as always.”
They didn’t push. That was the thing about us—we didn’t need to say everything out loud. Not when the silence already said enough.
Outside, the wind kicked up. A crow screamed in the distance. CJ glanced toward the trees.
“You been dreaming again?” she asked, almost like she didn’t want to.
I nodded once.
“Same place?”
“Yeah.”
The others went quiet. Even Indy stopped chewing.
None of us had said it yet, but we all knew the place in my dreams was real.
The old boarding school on the hill.
