Holly Black - The Darkest Part of the Forest

And if there was another part of her that wished her parents were the kind who might protect her from needing to kill monsters all on her own, at eleven she already knew that was unrealistic. It wasn’t as if her parents didn’t love her; it was just that they forgot things a lot and sometimes those things were important.

Which meant for two years, Ben learned to play different instruments (including wineglasses and a tuba) at the fancy school, while Hazel learned a new skill—how to be an unrepentant flirt.

Hazel wasn’t the best in her classes, nor was she the worst. She might have been good at a sport, but she never bothered to try out for one. Instead, after school, she signed up for self-defense classes at the Y and practiced techniques she learned from YouTube videos of sword fighting. But, at twelve, Hazel discovered something she was weirdly better at than other people—making boys squirm.

She’d look at boys and smile if they caught her looking.

She’d twirl her red curls around her finger and bite her lip.

She’d prop up her boobs with her arm, the desk, or one of the new underwire bras she persuaded Mom to buy for her—all of them silky and brightly colored.

She’d pretend to do badly in all her classes—once or twice because it was true and then chronically when it wasn’t.

Flirting didn’t mean anything to her. There was no plan, no goal. It was just a little rush, just a way to be seen in a place where it would be easy to drown in invisibility. She never meant to hurt anyone. She had no idea that was even possible. She was twelve and bored and really didn’t know what she was doing.

While she was flirting, Ben was falling in love for the first time, with a boy named Kerem Aslan. They met every day after school to whisper together over their homework and sneak kisses when they thought no one else was looking. Sometimes Ben would play snippets of a song he was working on, a thing he’d never done with anyone but Hazel before. She still remembered the way she’d seen Ben trace the boy’s name along his arm in water. Aslan , like the lion from Narnia. Kerem looked a little bit like a lion, too, with golden brown eyes and shaggy black hair.

Hazel and Ben went from having everything in common to having nearly nothing. They went to different schools, had different friends, different stories, different everything. Hazel was miserable, and Ben had never been happier.

But then Kerem’s family found out about the relationship and his parents called to have a horrible awkward talk with Dad and Dad hung up on them. And Ben cried at the kitchen table, head buried in his folded arms, no matter how many times Dad hugged him and told him it was going to be okay.

“It’s not,” he whispered, insisting he would never feel any less miserable than he did in that moment. He insisted his heart was broken forever.

At lunch the next day Ben texted Hazel to say that Kerem had been avoiding him and talking shit to their mutual friends. After her classes were over, Hazel decided to walk to his school instead of going straight home. She knew his last period was a long individual study on the flute. After that, they could go get gelato at the place that poured a shot of espresso over it and maybe Ben would cheer up.

No one stopped her from going in; she slipped past the security guard and headed down the hall to the bench next to the music room. Perched there, she was surprised to see Kerem Aslan of the lion eyes and lion name walking down the hall toward her.

“Hey, little sister,” he said. “You look pretty today.”

Hazel smiled. It was automatic, half a reaction to a compliment and half the familiarity of smiling at him. She’d smiled at him a thousand times before.

“You know I always liked you. Whenever I came over to the apartment, I’d ask if you wanted to come hang out with us, but Ben said that you were busy. He said you had a boyfriend.” Kerem sounded as if he was flirting, but there was something in his face too close to fear for the words to be convincing.

“That’s not true,” Hazel said. She’d seen him and Ben, heads bent together as they whispered and laughed, oblivious to the rest of the world.

“So you don’t have a boyfriend?” Kerem asked. She could tell from his tone that he was misunderstanding her on purpose, but it still flustered her.

“No, I mean—” she began.

And then, with a sideways glance down the hall, he leaned in and kissed her.

It was her first kiss, outside of grandmas and elderly aunts, outside of parents and brothers, despite all the flirting she’d done. His mouth was soft and warm, and while she didn’t kiss him back, she didn’t exactly squirm away.

It wasn’t nice, her hesitation. It lasted only a moment, but it ruined everything.

“Stop it,” she said, shoving him. Some other musical-prodigy kids looked over. A teacher came out of her classroom and asked if everything was okay. Hazel’s voice must have been louder than she’d thought.

But everything wasn’t okay, because Ben was staring at them. Then there were only the sight of her brother’s backpack, the heels of his black Chucks, and the slam of the music room door.

“You did that on purpose,” Hazel accused. “You wanted him to see.”

“I told you I liked you,” Kerem said, raising his eyebrows, but he didn’t sound all that triumphant.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking as she waited for Ben outside his classroom, listening to the strains of music that escaped the soundproofing. She wanted to tell her brother what really happened, explain that she hadn’t wanted to be kissed. But she didn’t get the chance, because a few minutes later his music instructor collapsed from a myocardial infarction that nearly killed her. The paramedics came, with Ben and Hazel’s parents arriving soon after. Ben wouldn’t talk to anyone, not then, not on the way home.

He’d played music when he was upset, when he was probably angry, and his instructor’s heart had stopped. Hazel knew he must be blaming himself. Hazel knew he must be blaming the magic, and she knew he must be blaming her.

By the time she went up to Ben’s room to try to apologize, he was sitting on the floor, door open, cradling his left hand.

“Ben?” she said. He looked up with haunted, red-rimmed eyes.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” he told her, voice weak, and she realized what he must have done to get his hand like that. He’d slammed it in the door. More than once, probably. The skin wasn’t just red, it was purple , and his fingers were on the wrong angle.

“Mom!” Hazel screamed. “Mom!”

“It has to stop,” he said. “I’ve got to stop. Somebody has to stop me.”

They took a taxi to the hospital, where the ER doctors confirmed that he’d broken bones, lots of them. His instructors confirmed that he wouldn’t be able to play anymore, at least not for a long while. He’d have to wait until the bones set and do exercises to give them greater mobility. He’d have to be very careful and diligent.

Even though Ben never said a thing to their parents about what he’d done or why he’d done it, even though Hazel never told, they got the message and moved the family back to Fairfold not long after, back to their sprawling mess of a house and their old life.

Ben was neither careful nor diligent with his hands.

He listened to music, lots of it. He gorged on music. But after they got back, he wouldn’t even hum along. He didn’t play again, which meant the next time a tourist went missing in Fairfold, Hazel hunted alone.

It was different without him, and it was hard going back into the forest after all the time away. The strap for her sword—the one that had allowed her to carry it on her back—no longer fit right. She had to adjust it for her hip, although that felt wrong, too. She felt silly, almost a teenager, returning to a child’s game. Even the woods had become unfamiliar. The paths weren’t in the same places, and she kept finding herself putting a foot wrong when she tried to race through them the way she used to.