The Bracelet: From Nobody to the Chosen One

Chapter One: The Thing in the Woodpile

There's a particular kind of humiliation that only exists in your own bedroom, and I found it at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, standing in my doorway with my backpack still on my shoulder and my key still in my hand.

Chloe didn't even look up.

"Get out," she said, not to me, exactly — more to the general vicinity of the door, the way you'd tell a dog to move off the couch. Her boyfriend of the month, some varsity kid with a jaw like a cinder block, had the decency to at least flinch. Chloe didn't flinch. Chloe never flinched. She was draped across my comforter like she owned it, like she owned the room, like she owned the whole sagging, secondhand house at the end of Larkspur Lane, and in a way, I supposed she did. Everything in that house belonged to somebody else before it belonged to me. Even the air felt borrowed.

"This is my room," I said, which was the single dumbest sentence I have ever produced, and I've produced a lot of them.

"It's a room," Chloe said. "Rooms don't have names on the deed, dork. Now get out before I make you watch."

I got out.

I want to tell you I slammed the door, that I said something cutting and perfect, the kind of line you think of at two in the morning three days later. I didn't. I closed the door as quietly as a person can close a door while their ears are on fire, and I went and stood in the hallway for a second, breathing through my mouth, doing the thing where you catalogue every humiliating detail of your life like it's evidence for a trial nobody's going to hold.

Sixteen years old. Orphan — parents gone before I was old enough to remember their faces, just a photograph on the mantel that Aunt Diane dusted twice a year out of guilt rather than love. Glasses so thick they left grooves on the bridge of my nose. A scholarship kid at Ashcroft Preparatory Academy, which is a polite way of saying the poorest boy in a school built entirely out of old money and new cruelty. And apparently, as of about ninety seconds ago, a boy without even a room to call his own.

"Alex." Uncle Marcus's voice floated up from downstairs, flat and disinterested, like he was reading it off a grocery list. "Go sort the garage. Diane wants the summer stuff boxed before Chloe's party Friday."

Not the garage. The garage was a place you sent things you didn't want to look at. I qualified.

I went out back instead, past the garage, to the leaning gray shed we called a woodpile shed even though nobody had burned wood in it since before I moved in. It smelled like mildew and old gasoline and something sweeter underneath, rot working on rot. I flicked on the bulb — one bare bulb, the string half-frayed — and started digging through the boxes nobody wanted, because that, at least, was a job I understood down to my bones. I was good at being where nobody wanted to look.

That's where I found it.

It was wedged behind a rusted paint can, half-buried in a nest of old rags, and my first thought was that some raccoon had dragged in a piece of costume jewelry to build a den. It was a bracelet — a cuff, really, wide and tarnished, the metal gone the color of a dead penny, and set into it was a stone the deep, murky green of pond water in October. Not sparkling. Not pretty, exactly. It looked *tired*, if a rock can look tired, like it had been waiting in that shed for so long it had given up expecting anyone to come.

I turned it over in my hands. There were markings along the inside, worn nearly smooth, that might have been letters once, in some alphabet that didn't belong to any language I'd studied. It was heavier than it should have been for its size, the way a good hammer is heavier than a bad one, a density that told you it meant business.

I should have kept it. I want you to know that, right up front, before the story convinces you I'm the smart one — my first instinct, standing in that shed with my glasses fogging up from my own breath, was to throw it away.

"Not my problem," I muttered, and I mean it as a kind of prayer I say to myself a lot. *Not my problem.* Chloe on my bed, not my problem. Aunt Diane's guilt-dusting, not my problem. A weird old bracelet clearly worth nothing that some raccoon or ghost or whoever left in a shed — extremely not my problem.

I chucked it out the shed door into the weeds behind the fence, more annoyed at myself for touching it than anything, and went back to boxing up beach towels nobody would use.

It was maybe twenty minutes later that I heard the yowling.

Cats do not sound like anything else on earth when they're having a moment, and this was a moment. I went out expecting a fight — a possum, maybe, or the neighbor's terrier finally making good on eight years of threats — and instead found something that made me stop with one hand on the fence post and just stare.

There was a cat back there. I knew the cat, vaguely — a scarred-up, one-eared tom that haunted the alley behind the Hensley place, the kind of stray that looks like it lost every fight it's ever been in and started every one of them anyway. Except the cat currently sitting in the weeds, tail curled neat around its paws, coat suddenly gleaming like it had been groomed by a salon instead of surviving on garbage, was not losing any fights tonight. My bracelet was looped snug around one back leg like an anklet some very confused jeweler had made for a cat. And arranged around him in a loose, worshipful semicircle were no fewer than five other cats, all female as far as I could tell, all staring at Scarface like he'd personally invented tuna.

I stood there with my mouth open for a solid ten seconds.

"No way," I said, to nobody, to the yard, to the single visible star coming out over the fence line. "No *way*."

The cat looked at me. I want to be clear that I don't believe cats can look smug — I'm not an idiot, I know how animal faces work — but that cat looked smug. He gave me a long, slow blink, the kind cats give you when they've decided you're beneath negotiation, and went back to accepting the adoration of his court.

I climbed over the fence, heart going harder than it had any right to for a stray cat and some old jewelry, and I got close enough to see it properly. The stone wasn't tired anymore. It had a light in it — not blazing, not obvious, just a faint pulse of green like a coal that hadn't quite gone out, the kind of glow you'd miss completely if you weren't already staring right at it.

I didn't touch it. Not that night. I want that on the record too. I went back to my woodpile-shed exile with my head absolutely roaring, sat down on an overturned bucket, and tried to explain to myself, using actual logic, why a bracelet had just turned the ugliest cat in a four-block radius into the most eligible bachelor in Millhaven.

I couldn't. So I did the only reasonable thing a sixteen-year-old boy who has just witnessed feline sorcery can do.

I decided to try it on myself.