“I’m seventeen,” I said. “But if anyone asks I’m twenty.”
Then I took my top off. His expression was priceless.
“I want these words,” I told him, handing him a piece of paper. “Here.”
I ran my hand along my ribs. The very top, just under my bra line. His Adam’s apple bobbed and I scowled. In the end, he undercharged me.
Rowan’s voice carries through from the kitchen. “I said I didn’t see the damn thing, Cian. You must have lost it.”
Cian mutters something in reply.
“If he says he didn’t see it, he didn’t see it, Cian,” says Alicja peaceably.
I root through my shopping bags for my cigarettes.
“I don’t see you asking Alicja if she’s seen your phone,” Rowan’s voice cuts accusingly through the air. Cian’s reply is covered by the clattering of dishes in the sink.
“Because what?” Rowan’s almost shouting now. “I’m not from around here, so automatically I’m a thief?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“It certainly sounds like that’s what you’re saying,” Rowan says to Cian, who mutters something in reply.
I was sure there was a pack with a couple of cigarettes left in this bag.
“Turn around and say that to my face.” Rowan’s voice is dangerous.
It sounds like Rowan’s taking a leaf out of my book. He’s never really been the fighting type. He’s got an easy grin that brushes away insults and tends to shrug things off. Unlike me. Just like your mother, Granny’d say when she was particularly disappointed in me. She didn’t really mean it, though. She knew it was the only thing that ever worked—hearing those words’d make me calm down pretty fast. I miss her so much, it’s like a burning. Her and Granda both. My veins fizz up again, beat in time with the shouts from the pub kitchen. I guess my brother’s veins can get to feeling like live wires, too.
I quickly step into the kitchen to stop Rowan from doing something stupid. Inside, the air is like a sauna, if saunas smelled of pub grub and were full of guys about to fight. I grab my brother by the elbow and pull him away from Cian. Rowan shakes me off, but he doesn’t move forward again.
“Might want to think about getting a muzzle for that brother of yours,” Cian says with a sneer.
I arch an eyebrow. “Whatever you’re into, man, it’s none of my business.” And I steer Rowan out of the kitchen.
“What’s up with you?” I say through my teeth.
“He’s an asshole,” Rowan starts to say, but cuts himself off when Mags suddenly appears, heading outside for, like, her twelfth smoke break of the day.
“We need a new thing of Coke,” she says as she goes outside. “They’re in the basement. And make sure that can you carried down yesterday is still out of sight.”
The can of poteen. Not on the inventory.
The kind of thing no one will notice if some of it goes missing.
I step into the storeroom and dig through a couple of boxes while Rowan continues muttering darkly about Cian by the door.
“Here,” I say, and I thrust an empty lemonade bottle at him, the kind with the cork that swings into place over the lip. “Mags has a fresh can of poteen behind last week’s Guinness kegs. I don’t think she’ll miss a few drops.”
Rowan gives me a weird look. “Poteen?” he says.
“It’s like ninety percent alcohol,” I tell him. “It probably tastes like shit, but I’ve heard it gives you visions. I think we should try it.”
His eyes are still narrowed.
“What?” I say.
He shrugs. “I’ve heard it rots your teeth and makes you go blind.”
“Yeah, well.” I hand him the bottle. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
By the end of the night, Rowan and Cian have almost come to blows five times and Mags is starting to get bristly. I wait for Cian to leave before rounding on my brother.
“Take it easy, okay?” I tell him. “Can you at least try to keep out of trouble?” He doesn’t remind me that I’m usually the one causing it. “We want to stay here as long as we can.”
Rowan gives me a look. “I know,” he says.
“Seriously, if the police find out we’re—”
“I know, Hazel.”
“And if you want to keep up this whatever-it-is with Ivy, then we can’t be starting fights—”
“I said I know. Jesus.” He clatters down the hall, thumping the doorjamb on the way out.
He didn’t say there wasn’t a thing with Ivy.
He didn’t say there was either.
When we messaged her to tell her we’d be coming to town, we made a pact together, him and me. If we got here and we were both still in love with her, neither of us could make a move. If something happened between them at the party, he’s broken the pact. He’s lost my trust.
After my shift, I search through my bags for my cigarettes. Groceries, wallet, sketchbook, phone, box of charcoal pencils, half a chocolate bar, no cigarettes. Maybe Cian’s right: Maybe there is a thief about. Or maybe I just dropped them on the way across town.
I bum a cigarette off Mags and sit on the back doorstep, facing the parking lot, to smoke it. My phone rings, vibrating shrilly in my back pocket against the concrete I’m sitting on. It’s Ivy.
“Did Mags say anything to you about today’s crossword?” she asks the second I answer.
“Huh? Oh. No, nothing. Why? Is the generator gonna break down again?” I say it lightly, but really I’m worried the second she says it. Worried the clues Mags points out—the ones she somehow knows can predict our immediate future—have finally said police or Hazel or monster. Have finally told Ivy what I’ve done.
“No,” Ivy says, and her voice is kinda worried. “I was just hoping she could clarify something for me.”
“Like Mags ever clarifies anything.” Mags refuses to even acknowledge that she sends the fortune-telling clues. “What’s it say?”
I can hear paper rustle.
“Someone’s coming,” Ivy says. “The clues were expect and guests.”
My heart starts to hammer in my throat. “You think it means the police?”
“They wouldn’t be guests, though,” she says uncertainly. “Would they?”
Something rises in me. Something scared and twisted and hopeful. “Ivy,” I say. “Have you had news of my parents?”
“Oh. No. But it might be them. I mean, who else could it be?”
“I dunno. Your mom maybe. Did you tell her where we’re staying?”
“Oh, no,” Ivy says. “It’s best if she doesn’t know.”
“You’re probably right.” Even Ivy’s mom might draw the line at us staying in a boarded-up house in an abandoned development.
“So it might be them,” Ivy says again. “That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?”
It wouldn’t, but I don’t say that to Ivy. I take a deep drag of my cigarette. “Ivy, you know my parents,” I say, and I’m surprised my voice is steady. “And I thought you were sure the crossword said we’d lost them.”
“If someone’s lost,” Ivy replies softly, “it means they can be found.”
Not always, I think to myself, and hang up at Ivy’s quiet good-bye.
I lied—my veins aren’t live wires. They’re liquid lava. They’re fire. I don’t know what I’d do if my mom showed up at the door of the house in Oak Road. Hope and fear bubble up in my body like a physical thing. It’s like oil on the flames in my veins until I remember the real flames. The real fire. The real reason I don’t think my mom is going to show up at our door. Ivy and Rowan don’t know it, but there’s a reason why I don’t think my mom’s going to show up anywhere anymore.
Olive
Monday, May 8th; Tuesday, May 9th
Lost: Purse (purple, embroidered with mirrors)
; I’m lost without Rose, and without my bracelet. I walk my bike all the way home from school, keeping my eyes on the road. It takes two hours and by the time I get home I’m cranky and starving and still braceletless.
I search the whole house. Between bedsheets, in the shower drain, under couches, at the back of the fridge. The dogs follow me, sniffing around as if they know what I’m looking for.
My dad is in the study, marking essays, listening to tuneless modern jazz. He takes his role as a stereotypical, eccentric poetry professor very seriously.
There are boxes full of my mom’s old things stacked up around the desk. They’d been in my nana’s attic since Mom left home at nineteen. Nana begrudgingly kept them the whole time we lived in Dublin, but has been trying to get Mom to move them into our own attic since we moved to Balmallen five years ago. Nana must finally have gotten her way. I take a quick look inside the open ones, but my bracelet hasn’t fallen in there either. A couple of old photographs and a bunch of loose papers flutter out.
“Weren’t you supposed to be back from school two hours ago?” Dad asks.
“I walked home; that’s why I was late.”
Dad raises his eyebrows.
“I swear. I was looking for my bracelet. I was worried I’d dropped it on the way to school this morning.”
“And now you think it might be in a box that’s been in your nana’s attic for the past twenty years?”
“I’m just covering all my bases,” I say.
“Have you tried the last place you put it?” Dad asks serenely.
I smack the palm of my hand against my forehead. “Of course!” I exclaim sarcastically. “I would never have thought to look there!”
The thing is, I’m still not sure where there is. Where is the last place I had it? Increasingly, I’m beginning to wonder if the girls in school are right.
What did you lose at the party on Saturday?
Everybody lost something.
The next morning, I ride slowly to school—partly because I spend half the journey texting Rose, and partly because I’m still hoping to catch sight of my bracelet on the way—and I’m almost late for my first class. I take my seat in chemistry behind Julia and Chrissy, and when the teacher isn’t looking I tap gently on their shoulders.
“Did you have any luck with your missing things?” I ask when they turn around. “The stuff you lost at the party.”
Chrissy shakes her head. “Why? Didn’t you say you didn’t lose anything?”
“I did,” I admit. “A bracelet. It was my mom’s. A charm bracelet.”
Julia makes a sympathetic face. “If we see it, we’ll tell you,” she says.
Rose doesn’t come to our next class, which we usually have together. Or to any of our classes for the rest of the day. She doesn’t ask me to tell our teachers she’s going home sick. She doesn’t ask me anything at all. She just fires off a quick text after the start of our next class to tell me she’s going home early.
I message her updates periodically even though she doesn’t reply to any of them.
NOT MISSING MUCH STOP. CHRISSY J AND CATHAL M HAVE HAD PHONES CONFISCATED TWICE ALREADY STOP CHRISSY FOR CRIME OF IN-CLASS SELFIES STOP CATHAL MOST LIKELY WATCHING PORN STOP IF I AM CAUGHT TEXTING AVENGE MY DEATH STOP OLIVE
I only hear what happened at the end of the day. Rose got kicked out of German class this morning.
Mr. Fallon comes up to me in the corridor after my last class and asks where she is. “I sent her to the principal’s office this morning, but that doesn’t mean I gave her a pass to skip her next class, too.”
I give Mr. Fallon a helpless shrug and an excuse I’ve heard Rose use before, word for word. “She had to go home sick, sir. Really bad period cramps. Couldn’t stand up straight. I get them myself sometimes when my flow’s particularly heavy. It’s basically hell.” I hardly even blush.
“Right,” Mr. Fallon says, looking a bit uncomfortable. “That might explain—But look, Olive, tell Rose that I won’t tolerate that kind of behavior in my class again, whether or not she’s having . . . woman trouble.”
Woman trouble indeed. I promise to keep an eye on her and Mr. Fallon goes on his way.
HEARD YOU WERE REBELLING WITHOUT ME STOP, I text Rose.
Rose doesn’t answer to elaborate on her behavior, so I have to assume she just drew rude pictures on her textbook or something again. But then I end up walking behind Chrissy, Julia, and Shannon on the way to the parking lot and I hear them say Rose’s name.
“I heard she punched someone,” Chrissy’s saying in a Chrissy-undertone that probably the whole corridor can hear. Julia replies in a low voice that I can’t make out.
Sean Moran, who is one of their boyfriends, but I can never remember which—possibly because they rotate boyfriends to keep the rest of us guessing—says, “I heard she started screaming and swearing in the middle of class and, like, tore up a book and threw it in some guy’s face.”
I speed up a little to stay within earshot.
“I heard she ripped up her homework and ate it,” Shannon says with relish, and Julia rolls her eyes.
“Oh, come on.”
That’s when they see me. “Olive,” Chrissy says, looking a bit uncomfortable. “You’ll know. What did Rose do to get kicked out of Mr. Fallon’s class?”
“I heard she’s been expelled,” Shannon adds helpfully, to which Julia snorts.
“Bullshit—it was just one class.”
I hurry past them and unlock my bike.
This doesn’t sound right. I thought I knew Rose as well as I know myself, but ever since the party something’s been different. It feels like I’m losing her. I send her a message before I ride home.
SERIOUS QUESTION STOP ARE YOU OK STOP PLEASE TALK TO ME STOP OLIVE
My phone finally pings just as I ride in the gate.
UNDER HOUSE ARREST STOP PHONE USE DISCOURAGED STOP MOM INSISTING ON BONDING TIME STOP BEING FORCE-FED SCONES AND MEDICAL TV SHOWS STOP KILL ME NOW STOP ROSE
I prop my bike against our overflowing recycling bin and reply, leaving the letters and bills and receipts that have fallen out of the bin to skitter across the garden.
THAT DOESN’T EXPLAIN YOUR ABSENCE ALL DAY STOP WAITING TO HEAR WHAT HAPPENED IN FALLON’S CLASS STOP KEEP ME A SCONE OR OUR FRIENDSHIP IS OVER STOP OLIVE
Emily and Chloe are doing their homework at the table when I get home. Dad is washing the dishes. They don’t notice me. If they had, maybe Chloe would have stopped talking about Rose.
“—heard about Rose Driscoll going crazy this morning?” she is saying to Emily. I stop on the threshold. Emily looks over at my dad and leans toward Chloe to answer in a voice too low for me to make out.
“I know, right?” Chloe says loudly. “And then she, like, flipped out,” she goes on. “Tore up the money and”—a slight pause for effect—“like, stuffed it in her mouth.”
“Well, maybe if she had a mouth as big as yours she’d be able to fit more in there.” I speak before I realize I’m speaking.
Chloe freezes, an expression of shock on her face. Emily has the courtesy to look ashamed.
“Don’t you have any other vapid rumors to be spreading?” I ask, my tone scathing.
“I’m just saying what I heard,” Chloe says. “It sounds like she seriously lost it. I’d be worried if I were you. I heard she stuffed a ten in her mouth and chewed it all up and spat it out again right on the teacher’s desk.”
Dad, ostensibly not eavesdropping, turns from the sink with an exaggerated gasp and cries, “Lock the back door!”
Chloe starts, obviously having forgotten my dad was there at all. She shoots Emily a look that clearly communicates, Your dad is a weirdo. Emily studiously avoids my eye.
“The phrase you’re looking for,” I tell my dad calmly, “is shut the front door.”
“Ah,”
Dad says. “Right. That’s the one.” He winks at me almost imperceptibly as he turns back to the dishes. Emily and Chloe flee the kitchen, as if his embarrassing nature is contagious.
My dad is sneakily good at defusing situations.
When Dad’s finished with the dishes, he places a wet, sudsy hand on the top of my head. “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink,” he says solemnly.
I wave his hand away and shake my head to dislodge the drops. “Coleridge,” I say. “Samuel Taylor. Born in 1772. Credited with several important idioms, contemporary of William Wordsworth, probably never frizzed up his daughter’s hair after she’d managed to keep it perfectly straight all day.”
Dad nods with approval. “I could never live up to such a man.”
“Coleridge abandoned his family after his daughter was born,” Mom says, having come into the kitchen without me hearing. “He was also addicted to opium and was horrible to his wife. There’s not much to live up to there.”
Some manner of enthusiastic pop music blasts in through the kitchen door from Emily’s bedroom upstairs. I click the battery out of my hearing aid and the world’s volume mercifully turns down. Sometimes, being deaf in one ear can be a serious asset. I can still feel the bass reverberating in the ceiling.
“Can we abandon Emily?” I mumble. Neither of my parents hears me.
Mom looks around the kitchen. “Where’s Rose?” she asks.
“I’m grounded, remember?”
“Well, yes, but I didn’t think Rose would actually stay away.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Dad says cheerfully, and he disappears into the hall. Seconds later we can hear him loudly and enthusiastically singing along to Emily’s music on the landing. Emily turns it off mid-song.
Mom sighs in relief. I click the battery back into my hearing aid just in time to hear her mutter, “She’ll probably never listen to that song again.”
“Her life’ll be the better for it.”
“As will mine.” Mom closes her eyes. “I’m dropping your grandmother down to Dr. Driscoll’s for a checkup. Back in an hour or so.”
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 6