The Shuddering

caught so much hell.” Ryan chuckled, shaking his head at his best friend. “You remember Coach Miller?”
    “Oh god ,” Sawyer muttered. “I haven’t thought of that guy since we graduated.”
    “What was with Coach Miller?” April asked, finally deciding to join the conversation.
    “Coach Miller was our biology teacher, but he wasn’t qualified,” Jane explained. “They just stuck him there because there wasn’t anyone else to teach it.”
    “So Sawyer walks into bio one on the first day of freshman year,” Ryan began, “his face full of makeup, his hair pulled up into a six-inch Mohawk—”
    “That I had to iron to get to stand up straight, might I add—” Sawyer noted.
    “And Coach Miller looks up from his desk like he’s just seen a goddamn nightmare. He looks straight at Sawyer and he goes…” Ryan squared his shoulders and squinted his eyes, scrunching up his face in an attempt to look seriously perturbed. “‘Son, what in the Sam Hill is wrong with your face?’ And Sawyer says…”
    “‘I’m ugly, sir?’” Sawyer replied, a nostalgic grin pulled across his face.
    “And that is why you should watch Rocky Horror ,” Ryan concluded. “Because Sawyer used to be a sweet transvestite.”
    April forced a smile, then covered her mouth, hiding a yawn. Jane looked down to her plate, a pang of irritation scratching at her heart. April wasn’t even trying . She wanted to ask her why she had even bothered to come at all. But she swallowed her annoyance and offered the table a conclusive nod.
    “That’s our cue,” she said. “We should get to bed if we’re getting up early tomorrow.”
    “Six o’clock sharp,” Ryan clarified, only to be met with a communal groan. “What?” he asked. “It takes an hour to get up there, not to mention packing up, eating breakfast…”
    “Chocolate cake,” Lauren mused, sliding her finger across the bottom of the cake plate to scoop up a bit of frosting. “The breakfast of champions.”
    Jane plucked the cake off the table, more than half of it still up for grabs, and Lauren picked up their dirty plates and icing-smeared forks, walking them over to the sink as the rest of the group stretched and rose from their seats.
    “I should take a shower,” Lauren said. “Or I’ll have to get up even earlier, and you know me and mornings.”
    Jane nodded. “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll finish up here.”
    “Are you sure?” Lauren asked, making a face at the stack of dishes on the counter.
    “I’m just going to run the dishwasher. I’ll meet you up there.”
    Lauren was the first to disappear down the hall, followed a moment later by April and Sawyer. Jane watched them for a long while, her heart twisting around a seed of jealousy.
    “Hey,” Ryan said, snapping her out of her daze. “You okay?”
    She turned to the sink and nodded sternly. “Fine,” she said. “Just tired.”
    He leaned in, pressing a kiss to her temple. “Thanks for dinner,” he said. “You’re tops, Janey. Just swell!”
    Jane smirked and smacked him with a dish towel as he turned to join the others upstairs. “Idiot,” she murmured, turning on the tap.
    After running the dishes beneath a stream of hot water, Jane arranged them in the dishwasher, occasionally glancing up at her own reflection in the window above the sink. She wondered what Sawyer saw in that girl. Maybe Jane was just being harsh—maybe April was great; she was just uncomfortable around so many new people. But the way she had sat at the table while they all laughed, stone-faced, like she couldn’t have been bothered to even try to be part of their group…it made Jane angry. It was as though April had come up to the cabin with Sawyer only to ruin his good time—their last time at their childhood haunt, at a place they’d never see again.
    Jane squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the burn of tears at the backs of her eyes. Everything was different. Ryan was leaving. She and Sawyer felt like strangers. The house already felt like a memory. And then there was that girl, screwing it all up.
    With a dinner plate in hand, she paused at what sounded like thumping on the deck. She knitted her eyebrows together, listening for it again, and there it was—a muffled shuffling against the wooden planks, like Oona wandering around just beyond the kitchen door.
    “I swear to god,” she said beneath her breath, sliding the plate into the machine before snatching the dish towel off the counter and wiping