“Your mom’s one?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” I start to scoop the detritus back into my schoolbag. Amid the mess, I’ve managed to find my globe-shaped pencil sharpener, a wrinkled fiver, and a silver, star-shaped hair clip from the same set as the one I was wearing and then lost at the party. I’m glad I still have one left at least.
Rose is immaculately made-up as always, her black hair gleaming and her uniform skirt stapled three inches above the required hemline. She’s the photo negative of last night’s mess.
“Ooh, cute.” Rose seizes the hair clip and uses it to pin back her waterfall of hair. It works about as well as trying to hold back an actual waterfall.
Ms. Walsh has started the class, but I lean toward Rose and quietly say, “Are you going to tell me where you went after the party?”
Her gaze goes blank for a second and she says, “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Going to tell me where you went?”
“Home,” I tell her. “At, like, six a.m. Without you.”
“I went home,” she says. “At, like, six a.m. Without you.”
I scrunch up my mouth with suspicion. It’s possible, I suppose, that we missed each other. That she woke up minutes before me and went to pee behind the trees. That I was up searching for her when she came back to get me.
“It didn’t look like you’d been home when you came to mine last night,” I say, and I poke her shoulder playfully. “Where were you really? Did you go somewhere with a guy?” I say guy because it’s unlikely she found a girl to go somewhere with. We live in Balmallen, County Mayo, population 2,400. There’s only one secondary school; if there were any eligible girls around, we’d know it. Last year Rose and I drunkenly decided that, as the only two openly bisexual girls our age in town, we should probably give it a go. Turns out some people really are just meant to be friends.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Rose.
“You must still have been seriously wasted,” I observe.
Rose laughs. “I wasn’t the only one.”
Can I’ve another kiss before you go?
“You’re not wrong,” I concede.
After English, Rose and I retrace my steps through the school and out across the yard to the bike rack, but my bracelet isn’t there. I hope it’s at home and not lying in a ditch somewhere.
All day, I keep catching myself rubbing the words on my skin—the ball of my right thumb bumping over the tiny bones of my wrist, the blue and purple veins, the never be found. Like the blood on Lady Macbeth, it doesn’t want to come off.
“Olive,” Mr. O’Neill says sharply for the second time in the first ten minutes of geography class.
“Sorry, sir.” I grab my pen, although I have no idea what I’m supposed to be writing. Rose shrugs infinitesimally beside me.
Mr. O’Neill, in an uncanny fit of telepathy, says, “You’re supposed to be writing about the three Fs of primary economic activities in this specific peripheral region.”
I stare at him blankly. “Um.”
“Anyone? The three Fs?” Mr. O’Neill opens the question up to the rest of the class. Rose scribbles three words on the textbook between us: frolicking, flying, fucking. I cover the paper quickly with my hand before he can see.
I lean over and whisper, “I don’t want to think about Mr. O’Neill doing any of those things.”
Rose’s ensuing “HA!” is so loud that it gets both of us kicked out of geography. We decide to take this as a sign from the universe that we’re not meant to be in a hot, airless school building on a beautiful warm day and that instead we should spend the rest of our morning beside the lake. We have two free classes before lunch and neither our teachers nor my parents will ever know I’ve defied their grounding if I’m back in school by math class.
We unchain our bikes in the silence of the schoolyard and set off out to the edge of town. There isn’t much to Balmallen, and there isn’t much to the edge of it either. We ride past the supermarket and the industrial park and we take a sharp right just after the main road. I glance back behind us for a glimpse of the field where the bonfire party was held. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe the boy with the glasses and the dark curly hair who I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Rose rides straight ahead, leading us right down to the forest by the lake, and the abandoned development that sits there like a ghost town. Oak Road.
It was built in the boom years: a nice, modern development, all mod cons, identical houses with identical gardens in a neat little semicircle of misguided economic optimism. But then the recession hit and the economy crashed and for the last few years all these perfect little patches of pastoral suburbia have been left sitting empty, the rooms never furnished, the grass never cut.
The city council boarded up the windows and put up signs with halfhearted warnings like TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, but we trespass all the time and no one has yet come to prosecute us. We can’t actually get into the houses—we’re not about to break down the boarded-up doors just for kicks—but on weekend nights we drink in the storm-drain tunnel and on weekdays, when our classes are boring and stressful, we like to hang out on the overgrown lawns, smoking, reading magazines, listening to music on our phones with tinny speakers, painting our nails. Nobody ever comes looking for us.
We haven’t been here in a few months and already the weeds—killed by frost over winter—have grown up past our knees. “This is kind of like Neverland,” I say as we lay out our sweaters on the tangled grass to sit on.
“So, what, does that make us the Lost Boys?” Rose asks.
If there is anybody in the world who looks least like a Lost Boy, it’s Rose. Chewing gum aggressively—the only way Rose knows how to do anything, apart from dramatically—she’s busy pulling off her kneesocks and balling them up in the long grass beside her, hitching up her skirt and unbuttoning her top three shirt buttons.
My best friend is the daughter of a stout, ruddy man from Cork whose accent I can never decipher, and a beautiful, willowy, half-Indian Dubliner. She is her mother from the tips of her painted toenails to the ends of her long black hair. From her father, she only inherited her impressive vocabulary of curses. Her eyes are always smoky, her eyebrows perfectly arched, and her nails painted. Rose was made for fashion magazines, not children’s books.
“I get what you mean, though,” she says. “No teachers or parents to tell us not to smoke—”
“I’ve never smoked,” I remind her. “And you don’t anymore either, remember?”
“Or drink, or keep the music down.”
“Second star to the right,” I say with relish, opening a bag of chips. “And straight on till morning.”
Looks-wise, Oak Road is as far from an enchanted island as you can get. The houses are an ugly, faded mustard like the wall surrounding them and the grass is dotted with daisies and dandelions. The road through the development is unfinished, ending in a heap of rubble on one side and an exposed storm-drain tunnel on the other. It’s completely incongruous with the forest beside it, the lake shining blue just beyond.
“Who’d even ever live here?” Rose asked the first time we came, watching with a sort of rapt horror as two rats fought in the rubble at the back of the development.
“Lots of people,” I told her. “I mean, apart from the paint job, they’d’ve been nice houses. Big. Modern.” In my own house, the windows are single-glazed and let in every molecule of cold air. The plumbing is archaic and if anyone runs a tap while you’re showering the hot water disappears completely. My parents wanted the Authentic Country Life, and they’ve got it, bad wiring and everything. Also the deer eat all their fuchsias.
Rose and I sit sunning our legs in the long grass, our skirts hitched up so high our underwear is visible, not that there’s anyone around to
see it. (Not that we would care if there was; if I am prone to embarrassment by myself, my shyness is generally eclipsed by Rose’s constant ease.)
I roll my eyes when Rose takes out a little yellow bottle. She quit smoking three months ago and after several weeks spent chewing the ends of the wooden sticks used to stir paper-cup coffee, or plastic straws, or raw spaghetti, she has now taken to carrying a bottle of bubbles everywhere she goes. She blows them out like exhaling smoke, the wand held between two fingers like a cigarette. Soap bubbles pop on car seats and kitchen windows, leave wet rings on footpaths and wooden school desks.
She sits with her elbow on the knee of one long leg, and I am always surprised at how she can take such an innocent act and make it look lascivious. It’s a disturbing talent.
“You’re in great danger of becoming a parody of yourself, you know,” I say.
“It’s helping my craving,” she replies blithely.
“So would a nicotine patch.”
Rose blows a whole batch of bubbles straight in my face. “Tell me about the saint thing again,” she says.
The saint thing. I root through my schoolbag for the little metal medal I found with the bubble gum in the denim jacket I wore home from the party. “Saint Anthony,” I say, showing her. “The patron saint of lost objects.”
Rose rubs the medal between two fingers as if it’s a genie lamp she could wish on. She brings it up to her myopic eyes (she refuses to wear glasses even though she owns a pair of those thick-rimmed vintage kind that makes her look like a secretary in a porn film). She scratches a thumbnail over a stain that looks like brown rust. Then she brings it to her mouth and bites down on the edge of it, like a pirate.
“Fool’s gold,” I mutter.
“It’s tin.” She tosses the medal into the air with a flick of her thumb that sends it spinning, then catches it and slaps it on the back of her hand. “Heads or tails?”
I take the bubble wand and blow. “Tails.”
“Heads,” she says. She scrutinizes the medal again. Then she takes the bubble wand back from me in exchange for the saint.
“My nana says a prayer to Saint Anthony every time she can’t find her car keys.”
“Don’t your aunts hide them from her?” Rose says.
“That’s probably why she can never find them.”
My grandmother is ancient and cantankerous, and drives like it. I doubt Saint Anthony ever helps her with her keys, unless he is also the patron saint of finding things that well-meaning relatives have hidden from you.
Rose leans toward me and takes the medal again. “Who’s the baby?”
Saint Anthony, crowned with tin stars, appears to be holding a slightly rusted child in his arms. I shrug. “Jesus?” I guess. “Peter Pan? Who knows?”
Rose stretches out languorously on her back. “Lost Boys,” she says, pocketing the medal. “I get it.” A flurry of bubbles rises into the air.
Rose’s phone pings. It has done this about twelve times in the last half hour. She ignores it. She’s ignored the last eleven, too. My self-restraint is wearing thin.
“Are you ignoring your messages?”
“Nobody messages me,” she replies breezily. “Except you, and you’re right here.”
“Yeah, I’m right here. So I can hear your phone playing the world’s most monotonous song all by itself over there.”
“Oh, they’re just reminders.” She waves a metallic-green-nailed hand dismissively.
“Reminders for what—to stop your best friend murdering you over the incessant pinging?” I throw a chip at her. “I give up. I need to pee.”
The problem with hanging out in a ghost town is that when you need to pee there’s nowhere to go but the forest.
I keep an eye out for rats in the rubble and hunker down behind the wall on the forest side, uniform skirt bunched up in my arms. Back in the center of the development I think I can make out Rose’s raised voice, but it might just be a video or the music she’s playing.
When I’ve hopped back over the wall, I notice something strange: Just up ahead, in the cracks between the slats of the boarded-up windows of the next house, there is a light. It’s a sliver in the chink between one board and the next where there should be darkness. It flickers like a candle, or the reflection of a TV screen. I edge quietly toward the house.
It’s the farthest from the road and the closest to the lake. The nearer I move to it, the less I can hear whatever Rose is doing. Instead, I hear voices.
I flick the tiny boost switch on my hearing aid with my thumbnail, but the voices are still only whispers, so I creep around the back of the house to the wooden boards hiding the veranda doors. One of them is hinged slightly open.
That’s when I realize that I’m probably not in an extremely safe situation. The chances of squatters in an abandoned development being up to anything wholesome and law-abiding are pretty slim. Heart suddenly beating a little harder than before, I turn to hurry away—but something at the edge of the rubble to my right catches my eye. A gray-brown flat cap. It’s lying at a jaunty angle like it just flew off someone’s head. Like someone lost it heading home from a party in the early hours of the morning and never thought to pick it up.
I can hear Rose calling my name. I check the time on my phone. We have less than twenty minutes to ride back to school before the start of math. I give the house one final glance and I run as quietly as I can back to the grass.
Laurel
Monday, May 8th
Found: A boy
There have always been three of us: a coven, a crowd, a three-headed dog. We have names that our parents gave us, names our teachers call in class, names the girls in school shout nastily in the hallways, names written in our textbooks and sewn into our PE shorts, but they’re not the names we give ourselves. Laurel, Ash, and Holly. If there had to be a collective noun for us, it would be a forest. A forest of teenage girls.
There’s nothing two of us know that the other doesn’t. There’s nowhere two of us go that the other doesn’t follow. Although some of what Holly wrote in her diary was news to Ash. Holly has so much watery sadness. Ash has so much rage and fire. It’s a good thing I’m there to ground them. But then who grounds me? Maybe that’s the problem with being three.
There have always been three of us, but then yesterday Jude appeared, and now there are four.
It’s funny how you can completely understand somebody after having known them for a day. It’s funny how soon you come to realize somebody is going to change your life.
After school, we went to Ash’s house on the other side of town. They’re cutting down trees there to build on the land, so we stood on her wall and watched them. Ash whooped when the first tree fell.
“TIMBERRRR!”
But it wasn’t like that at all. No slow-motion trunk falling with a thud to the ground. Just chunks of dying trees, like when Mom cuts the carrots for stew, hacked off bit by groaning bit.
Ash crowed some more. “Ha-HAAAA!” She loves most forms of destruction; you can tell by how she tears her nails off in strips with her teeth.
Ash’s dad came out into the garden with a tray of chocolate digestive cookies and tea. Ash’s mom was on the phone in the hall, standing by the open front door. I like Ash’s parents because every time Holly and I come over they ask us what we’re reading, and the next time we visit they’ll be halfway through the same book.
“How are you liking The Sound and the Fury?” I asked Ash’s dad as he put the tray down on the wall beside us. Holly grinned. We’d decided to recommend something a little racier than usual, just to see how Ash’s parents would take it.
Ash scowled. She wasn’t interested in Faulkner. Or in talking to her parents about books. Holly and I have always been the readers, the daydreamers, the thinkers. Ash has always been the wildfire of movement that keeps us both awake.
“Look
at them go!” she shouted at the trees.
Ash’s mom, still on the phone in the hall, shushed her and her dad smiled. “Beautiful language,” he said. “Beautiful, meaty masterpiece.”
“Meaty?” Ash sneered. “It’s a big old book written two hundred years ago.”
“It was written in the twenties,” Holly said, surprised.
Ash rolled her eyes.
“Don’t worry, Caroline,” Ash’s mom was saying. “He’s eighteen—he’s probably just sleeping off one too many beers over the weekend. He’ll be back before you know it.”
She said good-bye and put down the phone, brows furrowed. She stepped into the garden to join us and said to Ash’s dad, “Caroline’s boy didn’t come home after the party on Saturday. You haven’t seen him around?”
Ash’s dad shook his head and Ash’s mom sighed, then smiled over at me and Holly. “Have either of you read James Joyce?” she asked. “Faulkner’s stream of consciousness reminds me of that. It’s beautiful and confusing.”
Ash’s dad nodded. “I’m definitely not smart enough for Joyce,” he said. “But you two sure would be.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” Ash said suddenly, loudly. She slammed the front gate open and left. Holly and I waved good-bye to her parents and thanked them for the cookies.
Ash walked ahead of us, as always, a trail of cigarette smoke behind her like a speed-cloud in a cartoon. It made it look like her bright red curls were on fire. I walked close to Holly, touched the back of her hand with mine. She’d been quieter than usual since the party, unsettled. I thought she’d be relieved to have her diary back, but something still seemed to be worrying her.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, not for the first time.
Holly shrugged. She leaned in toward me. “Was it real?” she whispered so Ash couldn’t hear.
“Was what real?”
“The spell,” Holly said. “The pages from our diaries came back. We called for them and they were found. Because of the spell.”
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 4