“That’s because you’d never met me,” I returned, smirking.
Elise wiped sweat from her forehead with the hem of her shirt. “She nearly killed us.”
“Hardly,” I replied. “And you loved every second of it.” I turned back to Zack and held out my palm. “Now hand over my prize.”
“X has it.”
Xavier jogged over to complete our foursome. Two weeks ago, I’d arrived in Chiang Mai with no friends and no plans, but booking a space at a decent hostel was a surefire way to meet new people. Zach and Elise were siblings from California, while Xavier had traveled on his own from somewhere in Spain. Right away, I had a good feeling about all of them. It was a buzz—a vibe of sorts—that assured me it was all right to temporarily allow them access to my own adventure, but I didn’t know their last names, and they sure as hell didn’t know mine.
Xavier knelt on one knee and bowed his head, while Elise and Zack made praying hands in the background and hummed out of tune with each other. I snickered as their voices clashed. Our ridiculous friendship ritual was probably all kinds of offensive, but it never failed to further cement our provisional bond.
“Bridget Dubois,” Xavier said gravely, his thick accent making my last name sound foreign and unfamiliar. “You are the champion of today’s challenge. You are the master of mopeds—”
“Debatable,” Elise interjected.
“I’m not done!” Xavier scolded. “You are the goddess of our hearts, and it is with humble servitude that I pass the totem of our mutual devotion on to you. Behold, the elephant of good fortune!”
We all gasped in mock admiration as Xavier opened his palms to me. He held a small elephant carved from wood, a cheap trinket that we had picked up in one of the markets as a joke. The etched details had already been worn smooth. The little figurine had traveled miles with us, in a pocket or a backpack as we ziplined over the rainforest, hiked through mountains, and jumped off of waterfalls.
I plucked the elephant from Xavier’s hands and lifted it over my head. “Beloved friends. I commend your bravery and wit, but in the end, only one shall be victorious—ooph!”
Elise had punched me in the midriff, her knuckles bouncing off the tightened muscles of my stomach. It didn’t hurt, but it was enough to take me by surprise.
“That’s for scaring the shit out of me,” she declared. “Oh Victorious One.”
I laughed, slinging an arm around her neck. “Come on. Let’s find this jump. I’m dying to push you over.”
A path led away from the clearing, flattened by the thrill-seekers who came before us. According to the local women who worked at the hostel, where we were headed was off the beaten path. Not many tourists sought out this part of the jungle. They preferred to stick to the safer excursions, but “safe” had never really been my thing.
The brush ended where the cliff began, a sudden drop-off to the water below. It was the biggest jump we had encountered so far, and I was itching to leap off. Elise, on the other hand, squeezed my fingers as she peeked over the edge. Her hands were shaking.
“Are we really going to do this?” she asked.
“Why not?” I sat down to unlace my boots. Then I peeled off my tank top and threw it off to the side. We would hike back up to get our stuff later. I stepped up to the cliff’s edge and looked over my shoulder. “You guys coming?”
Xavier, who was closest to matching my opinion of what constituted a desirable adrenaline rush, kicked off his shoes. Elise remained as far away from the cliff as possible, while Zach lifted an apprehensive eyebrow at the churning white water below.
“I don’t know about this,” he said. “Now that I see it—”
“You’re chickening out?” I challenged, shaking out each leg.
“I am,” Elise confirmed. She backed away from the cliff. “Damn, Bridget. Aren’t you scared of anything?”
I faced the drop, clutching the elephant of good fortune to my heart. “Not anymore.”
And then I leapt.
Hours later, we returned to the hostel with sunburnt shoulders and wet clothing. After some persuasion—and the fact that I hadn’t died at the bottom of the cliff—everyone, including Elise, had taken the plunge. Granted, she’d walked farther down the hill so that the jump wasn’t as intense, but we were proud of her initiative nonetheless, so much so that I passed on the elephant of good fortune to her without ceremony. Now, it lay nestled in the back pocket of her jean shorts, the outline of its trunk visible against the muddy denim.
“Five gold stars for participation today, Elise,” I said as I held the door to the hostel lobby open for her. “Actually, four and a half, since you didn’t jump from the top.”
“Don’t make me punch you again.”
Zack relieved me of my door-holding duties as two other residents trickled in after us. “Careful, Bridget. She’s got a mean right hook.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Xavier stopped at the front desk to bother Dao, the woman who ran the hostel. Before he could ask, she said, “No messages.”
Xavier’s shoulders slumped. He checked every day to see if anyone had contacted him. I hadn’t asked why, but I suspected that X was nursing one hell of a broken heart.
“None at all?” he said.
“Not for you,” Dao replied, dry as always. She gestured past him. “For her.”
Everyone turned. So did I. No one was standing behind me. I pointed to myself. “For me?”
“That can’t be right,” Elise said. “Bridget never get messages.”
Dao plucked a sticky note from the computer monitor and squinted at it. “Bridget Dubois, yes?”
“Yeah.”
She flapped the sticky note at me, an impatient invitation for me to retrieve it. I stepped up to the front desk and peeled it from Dao’s finger. All that was written on it was an American phone number.
“Well, who was it?” I asked.
“Spring, Summer, something like that.”
“Autumn?”
“Yes, yes.”
“What did she say?” I pressed.
Dao shrugged and shook her head. “English no good.”
Zack glanced at the note and bumped my shoulder. “Wow, Bridget. I have to admit that I was starting to think you were a figure of our collective imagination. I mean, this is the first time in two weeks that I’ve seen you make outside contact with anyone in the real world.”
“This is the real world,” I grumbled. “Can I borrow your phone?”
Not everyone wanted to stay as invisible as possible. I never bothered with a phone. I didn’t need one. I didn’t speak to anyone, and no one spoke to me. Each month saw me in a different country, and it wasn’t worth the hassle to hunt down SIM cards in foreign lands. Zack and Elise were less elusive. From what I gathered, they co-owned a vegan café in California, and they kept a working phone in case of business-related emergencies.
“Sure. Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
The phone was wrapped in a ziplock bag to protect it from the elements. As I freed it from the plastic, I stepped away from my adventure squad and into the hot air again. Through the glass door to the hostel, Zack, Elise, and Xavier watched me like scientists observing a strange new subject. I almost took offense. I wasn’t a cryptid. I did exist. There were people who cared about me. Theoretically.
I stared at the phone number, etched in splattered black ink against the yellow note. I checked my watch. Thailand was eleven hours behind North Carolina. It would be five in the morning in Belle Dame. Was it too early to call? I dialed anyway. Grainy, static rings kept time with my pulse.
“Hello?”
It was a low, coarse voice that answered, prickly with sleep. A man’s voice. I almost hung up but steeled myself instead.
“Hi, is Autumn there?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Bridget Dubois.”
There was a pause and then a grunt of realization. “Oh, yeah. Hang on.” I heard the springs o
f a mattress creak. “Autumn? Baby, wake up. It’s your friend. Holly’s sister.”
My stomach turned to acid at the mention of Holly’s name. How long had it been since I’d spoken to my little sister? When the months passed by without notice, it was easy to forget to check in as often as I should’ve.
Autumn’s familiar warm tone took over the line. “Bee?”
Reminiscence gushed through me. I hadn’t heard that nickname in years. “Hi, Autumn.”
A whoosh echoed through the phone, a sigh of relief. “God, I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. What’s wrong?”
When Autumn didn’t immediately declare that nothing was wrong and that wasn’t why she had called me, my stomach pitched again, threatening to reject whatever was left of our measly lunch that day.
“Bee, listen—”
“Just tell me,” I said. “Rip off the band-aid.”
“It’s Holly,” she replied. “She’s missing.”
In the hot setting sun of the Thai jungle, my blood went freezing cold. Every hair on my body stood at attention, raising goose bumps on my arms and legs. “What do you mean she’s missing?”
“I mean she’s gone,” Autumn said. “Your parents—”
“Bill and Emily are not my parents.”
“You know what I meant. They filed a report and everything.”
“When?”
“Two days ago.”
“Two days?” I paced in front of the hostel’s door. Inside, Zack and Elise had disappeared, but Xavier lay sprayed across three different chairs, watching me worriedly through the glass. “And you’re just now calling me?”
Autumn coughed, covering up a scoff. “Are you kidding? Do you know how hard it was to track you down? I’ve been calling every freaking hostel in Thailand. That postcard you sent Holly from Phuket a few weeks ago was the only hint I had to go off.”
I kneaded the bridge of my nose and turned away from Xavier’s concerned expression. “Look, I can’t talk for very long. This isn’t my phone, and this call probably costs an arm and a leg. What happened? Where would she have gone?”
“No one knows,” Autumn said. “The police don’t have any leads. It’s like she vanished, Bee. I don’t get it.”
I leaned against the hostel’s wall, sliding down to sit on the hot pavement. “This cannot be happening.”
Autumn’s voice was dark and hesitant. “What are you going to do?”
As the sun sank to the horizon, the sky stained itself purple and red. Overhead, a tiny speck floated through the clouds, a plane on its way to another world.
“I’m coming home.”
Chapter Three - The Definition of Home
Belle Dame, North Carolina was a full day’s flight from Chiang Mai, and every minute in the air was one more minute that Holly wasn’t where she was expected to be. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I was the missing child. I was the dropout, the runaway, and the unaccounted for. Holly wasn’t like me. She was the dependable star child.
I leaned forward in my economy seat, careful not to disturb the woman dozing beside me, and dragged my backpack out from under the chair. The straps were starting to fray at the shoulders. I should’ve bought a new one ages ago, but this one had just the right amount of compartments to fit my clothes, hiking boots, and limited personal effects, and I liked that the forest green canvas had faded to a more muted olive. I unzipped it and shoved my hand past the rolled layers of cargo pants, T-shirts, and shorts. There, at the very bottom, I found what I was looking for.
It was a small notebook, the one extraneous item I kept on hand at all times, but it wasn’t filled with the average travel jargon that others in my position tended to jot down. Instead, it held memories of someone else’s life. Holly’s life. She constantly found me. No matter the continent, no matter the country, Holly—sweet and untainted by the bitterness of adulthood—sent letters and pictures and updates, all of which I kept in the notebook as a record of her existence.
If my high school career had finished as planned, it would’ve looked something like Holly’s did now. She was seventeen, a senior at Belle Dame High, and an all-star athlete. Tall and lean, Holly’s relaxed posture exuded an easy confidence in all of her pictures, as did her usual attire of fitted jeans and varsity club T-shirts. Her hair was long and sleek, like she was determined to prove that girls could be beautiful and kick ass in athletics. When she started high school, Holly had been the only freshman to make the varsity teams for girls’ volleyball in the fall and softball in the spring. Like me, she played first base. After almost four years on the ball field, she outranked every other player in the state, crushing records left and right. College scouts swarmed like honey bees around her single tulip.
I flipped to my favorite picture in the notebook. It was of Holly on the softball field with the rest of her teammates, taken during last year’s championship game, right after Holly had caught the last out of the inning. The ball was still in her glove as her teammates closed in around her, each of them sporting a grin of pure, unfiltered joy.
“That’s a beautiful photo.”
Startled, I glanced up. The woman in the next seat over had woken up, smiling through her sleepiness. “Thanks.”
She pointed to Holly. “Are you related? She looks just like you.”
I looked back at the photo. The glossy finish had worn off, but the similarities between me and Holly—the strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes, and slim faces—were still noticeable. The difference was that Holly looked happy, while my reflection in the plane window showed a grim woman who’d let the world get the best of her.
“We’re sisters,” I told the woman.
When the Fasten Seatbelt sign finally flickered on and the captain announced our impending landing over the cabin intercom, I woke from a fitful doze. Holly’s letters were strewn across my lap, tucked in between my knees and around the seat at odd angles. I must’ve fallen asleep reading them. Hastily, I gathered them up and replaced them in the notebook, checking the floor of the plane to make sure that I hadn’t missed any. Beside me, my neighbor took a rosary from her pocket, kneading the purple beads as her lips traced silent prayers through the air. She noticed my gaze.
“Flying was never my forte,” she explained. “God soothes me. Do you pray?”
“No.”
She lifted the rosary so that the image of Christ swung like a pendulum in front of my nose. “Would you like to try?”
“No, thank you.”
I lifted the window shade. A quilt of clouds blanketed the sky below us, as if the plane was skimming along the the top of a cappuccino. We flew parallel to the sun. My eyes watered as I stared into the light, and a droplet plopped down onto Holly’s notebook. I wiped it clean with the tattered sleeve of my shirt, tucked the notebook away, and shoved my backpack under the seat for landing.
On the ground, I beelined toward the pickup loop for arriving flights, bypassing the crowd that bottlenecked around baggage claim. Outside, the skyline lacked the striking hues that I had grown accustomed to, reminding me that I was no longer in Thailand. I balanced on the yellow strip of the curb, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I inspected the long line of cars in the loop. Jet lag weighed down my eyelids, but instinct made me jittery. Behind me, there were endless portals of escape. The pickup loop, conversely, shunted me in one specific direction. I shoved my shaking hands deep into my pockets. A car whizzed by, ruffling my clothes.
“Careful, miss,” one of the airport attendants said. He tugged on my backpack. For his sake rather than mine, I stepped away from the curb.
An unfamiliar white sports car pulled up in front of me, and the passenger side window buzzed down. I ducked to look inside and grinned.
Autumn Parker was as sassy and fashionable as she had been in high school. She wore cut-off denim shorts that showed off her tanned thighs, a flowy white V-neck atop which several long necklaces were layered, and pale pink retro sunglasses. One bare foot was propped
on her seat, her knee drawn into her chest, while the other manned the pedals. A collection of shoes cluttered the footwell of the passenger’s side.
“You look homeless,” she said.
The locks popped up automatically. I pulled the door open and hopped in, shoving aside a pair of wedges to make room for my feet, then swung my backpack off my shoulder and into the sports car’s nonexistent backseat. “I am homeless.”
She plucked the collar of my oversized flannel shirt, the sleeves of which swallowed my hands. “Yeah, but you look like a homeless old man that got lost in a circus tent, not Gwyneth Paltrow ‘I can travel the world with the same two outfits and still look pretty’ homeless.”
“It keeps me warm on the plane,” I countered, fiddling with the AC vents to direct the flow away from my face. My eyes were dry enough from the recycled air in flight. “And I doubt Gwyneth ever traveled anywhere with only two outfits.”
“Fine, but there’s no excuse for your hair. When was the last time you washed it?”
As I threaded my fingers through the oily strands, a car behind us beeped. Autumn flipped them a quick finger and cut off a minivan to rejoin the moving traffic. Some things never changed.
“So what’s going on?” I looped my fingers around the plastic handle over the window—something we used to refer to as the Oh Shit bar when Autumn first got her driver’s license—as we careened up the disappearing merge lane and onto the interstate. “Where’s Holly?”
“No segue, huh?”
“It’s my sister, Autumn.”
“Sorry, Bee,” she said, “but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that you’re actually here. Besides, you didn’t seem to care about Holly this much when she broke her wrist two years ago. Or when she was in the hospital with that ridiculous bout of food poisoning.”
“I checked in. I made sure that she was okay.” The heel of a black pump jabbed my ankle. I picked it up and chucked it over my seat, where it hit the rear windshield and thumped to the floor. “This is different, Autumn. You’re telling me that she’s gone. Like face on the milk carton gone. If any lingering sentiment of our friendship remains, then you should know that I’m freaking out right now, even if it doesn’t show.”
Little Girl Lost: Book 0 Page 2