When We Were Monsters

The day before we kill Meredith Graffam is calm and blue. Like Massachusetts in summer after the rain. The scent of earth and flowers and fresh, clean air. Just a perfect sunlit day.

None of us will walk into the forest that night planning to commit murder. It’s easy when you’re surrounded by beauty and opulence and acres of privilege, when you’re young and filled with possibility, to convince yourself that life will always be as rose-colored as this and nothing can go wrong.

At the end of a long, sweeping drive, lined by the tallest trees, surrounded by forest and the sea just beyond, lies the campus of Brighton and Hove. The student body is, for the most part— present company excluded— comprised of the offspring of the very rich and the highly accomplished who can afford to send them anywhere but choose to send them here, to the woods of northeastern Massachusetts. But like every too - bright place, darkness lingers at its edges. The wizard behind the curtain. The painting in the attic. Hyde. It’s there in the hazing of first-years that occurs each fall. In the ruthless competition among students. In the surrounding forest, where, each January for sixteen days, eight of the school’s best and brightest are handpicked to live and study with someone world-famous and world-renowned at the Moss, the rambling old home of Moss Hove, our founder.

We don’t have secret societies at Brighton and Hove. Instead we have Jan Term, its own elite, slightly nerdier organization of students past and present—our equivalent of beingtapped. Everyone eager for the illustrious, powerful connections it promises outside these halls. In our real lives. In our future lives.

Built in 1916, the Moss sits surrounded by ten thousand acres of pristine forestland— formally known as Murton Wood, informally as Murder Wood—with whole swaths of primeval trees and miles of unpaved roads, all of it owned by the school. Unless they’re lucky enough to be chosen for Jan Term, most students don’t wander too deep into Murton. A seventeen-year-old student was killed there in 1995, a tragedy—a blemish—the school has never forgotten.

Proving that bad things can happen anywhere, even on a campus as beautiful as Brighton and Hove. Even on a crisp, star-filled January evening. Even to the four of us.

Isaac, the legacy, who carries the world on his shoulders.

Vanessa, the wallflower, who never thought she belonged.

And Arlo, the prodigal son, who returned to the school he walked away from two years earlier.

We were just four individual people before Meredith Graffam, the Meredith Graffam, arrived at Brighton and Hove.She was the one who brought us together. And the one who tried to tear us apart.

Tomorrow she will die.

I will wish for today, the day before, this bright, calm, blue day, like Massachusetts in summer after the rain. Or better yet, three weeks before. The beginning of the new year, back when Graffam was still alive and I couldn’t think of anything to write because the only thing that had ever happened to me was too painful. I was anxious for material, for a story of my own. And now I have one.

Here it is.