At dinner, I keep surreptitiously looking at my mom’s eyes, replaying what she said the morning after the party. He’s lost a lot and so will you. My shoe in Hazel’s bag. Ivy’s sharp face. Lost things. Findings.
Rose comes over after dinner. We sit on my bed and I plug in the string of lights that hang above it. They twinkle on the pictures of me and Rose, the pressed flowers, the concert tickets, the collection of tiny porcelain cats I’ve been keeping since I was a kid.
Rose lies back on my pillows and when she speaks I smell the alcohol on her breath. “Did you find your mom’s bracelet?”
I shake my head. “I even went back to the field where the party was in case I’d dropped it there, but if I did it’s long gone. Speaking of which, where have you been and why haven’t you answered any of my calls?”
“I’m sorry. I just needed to take a mental-health day.”
Usually, we take our mental-health days together. “And replying to any one of my messages would have been detrimental to your mental health?” I ask.
“My mom kept confiscating my phone.”
“Your mom was at work all day, Rose. And yesterday, too. Is this about what happened in German yesterday?”
Rose sighs. “I dunno.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
Rose tries to say, “Nothing,” but I make a face in warning and she says, “I just lost it a bit,” instead.
I ack in frustration. “Rose,” I say.
“Olive.” She imitates my tone. “Some of the guys were being particularly annoying, so I tore up their notes.”
“With your teeth?”
Rose grins. “You shouldn’t listen to rumors, Olive,” she says.
She leans over to tousle my hair, but I move out of her reach and say, “Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you’d actually, you know, talk to me. Or answer my calls.”
Rose sighs and twists her mouth to one side. Finally she says, “Sorry. I just needed to be alone for a bit.”
“Did I . . .” I line up the words in my head before saying them. Why are you mad at me? is too needy. What did I do wrong? screams of guilt. “Did I do something stupid at the party?” is what I end up asking.
“Olive, we drank a bottle and a half of vodka between us, passed out against a hay bale, and only got home at six in the morning,” Rose says. “Stupid’s one word we could use.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into this.
“You promise we’re okay?” I say.
“I promise we are always okay.”
I clink my mug of tea against hers and set aside my worries. I can’t ask for much more than a promise.
“Well,” I say to change the subject, “wait till you hear where I’ve been all afternoon.”
Rose listens intently as I tell her about Rowan, Hazel, and Ivy.
“And they’ve been living there? At Oak Road?” she says when I’ve explained the entire surreal encounter. “Why?”
“Family stuff, I guess.”
“I’ve heard those houses are full of asbestos. And ghosts. Totally full of ghosts,” she says. “And Hazel had your shoe? That’s some fairy-tale shit right there.”
“Ivy said that. I half expected Rowan to try it on me to see if it fit.”
Rose smirks. “Trust you to fall in love at first sight with some shady squatter,” she says.
“I’m not in love with anyone,” I protest. “He’s just really very pretty.”
When Rose finally rolls off my bed and heads home, I lie underneath the lights for a long time, listening to the rain. It hammers on the roof and against the window I cracked open earlier to air out the room. I get up to close it and nearly trip over my schoolbag. It topples over and vomits a pile of books onto the carpet.
I start to shove it all back in with my foot, but I stop short when I see something that doesn’t belong to me. A slim red notebook, leather-bound and fastened with a black rubber band. Spellbook of the Lost and Found.
Laurel
Wednesday, May 10th; Thursday, May 11th
Found: TV remote (gray, broken); wallet (black, leather); makeup bag (large, red, gold zipper); set of car keys (dog-charm key ring); reading glasses (purple); soccer ball (white and green); hairpins (approx. fifteen); blue plastic lighter; two tarnished teaspoons; one sock (multicolored, stripy); silver, star-shaped hair clip; delicate gold bracelet with tiny charms
On the way to the woods on Wednesday I rolled over a TV remote in the middle of the road. It crunched under my tires, and I spun to a halt, Ash and Holly hot on my heels. I kicked it into a ditch, not thinking that a small rectangle of plastic could be the start of something.
We cut class to be with Jude. We sat in the shade of silver birches and studied for our end-of-year exams. Jude snorted at our textbooks, our homework journals. He made us his own list of required reading: Keats and Coleridge, Kerouac and Vonnegut. He took his own tattered paperbacks out of his satchel and read passages aloud.
His voice is like music—did I mention that before? He doesn’t have our accent; this town is etched on each of our vowels. His voice is almost accentless, like a TV presenter, like he’s never stayed in one place long enough to speak like a local. Like he’s only ever been a local of our dreams.
Or at least that’s what he wants us to think. Ash and Holly listened raptly, but I found myself sighing impatiently at his beautiful voice. He only ever wants to talk about “things that matter,” but everything about him seems increasingly like a careful front. When he took a breath to rest, I asked him where he lived, where his parents were.
“Small talk,” he said, brushing my questions aside with a wave of his beaded wrist. “I can’t abide small talk. Let me tell you the myth of Icarus. Let me tell you how he almost flew into the sun.”
I didn’t tell him that I knew the myth of Icarus, that I’d already read Kerouac and found it all pretty boring, that sometimes small talk is a good way to get to know somebody better. But I’m beginning to suspect that Jude doesn’t want us to know him at all.
“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Jude was reading. “The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
Ash was nodding furiously. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”
Holly’s eyes were closed. Frustrated, I scratched out the equation I was working on and started over. Burn, burn, burn.
Ash wandered into the trees to pee. We heard her feet rustling leaves and small twigs and it reminded me of the spell for some reason, the moss we foraged, the penknife we used to cut the tips of our fingers. I can still feel the seam of the cut, tidy and white. It is right over the whorls of my fingerprints, marking them, changing my identity. I am not the person I used to be.
When Ash came back, she was holding a wallet.
“I found it,” she said. “Sitting on a rock like it’d been rained there. With a twenty inside, no ID.”
We left Jude with our things and rode into town. We waited until one of my sisters was on her break from the bakery, smoking outside, and beckoned her over.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asked.
“We skipped class. We’re studying in the forest.” Then I gave her the money and asked her to buy us a couple of six-packs.
“You little rebel,” she said to me with admiration. “Finally.”
We rode back to the woods with the beer in our schoolbags, the bottles clinking every time we hit a pothole on the bumpy road. If we hadn’t been watching the road for stones and holes, we wouldn’t have found the next thing.
A powder compact, red and shiny, the powder several shades darker than any of our skins. It was sticking out of a big red makeup bag sitting on the ground just at the edge of the forest, after the road turns away. We brought it with us. We stowed the beers in t
he hollow between the branches of the old oak tree at the fork of the road, where Holly had found the spellbook. It seems so long ago now that we first read the spell to get our diaries back.
We sat among our schoolbooks and took turns admiring ourselves in the compact’s mirror, drawing pictures on our hands with the eyeliner, trying on the lipstick. I went back and found the TV remote I’d kicked into the ditch and we put them together: the makeup, the wallet, the broken remote. We set them up like a shrine.
“The spell is working,” Jude said. “Look: The lost things are coming home to be found.”
Ash and Holly nodded, but I knew this wasn’t what we wanted. We’d written only two words each on the branches of the oak tree when we cast the spell. My diary. Three times.
“Why would we be finding this stuff now,” I asked, “when we’ve already found what we’d lost?”
“The power of the magic,” Jude replied, but Holly bit her lip. I knew Holly believed in all this, even if I didn’t quite. I knew she’d learned the spell by heart. The part about balance. The part about sacrifice. If it was real, and we were finding so much more than we’d lost, did that mean others were losing things because of us? Or were our findings just coincidental?
We started on the beers that afternoon in the branches of the tree, and when we got tipsy we stumbled down to the lake and waded in the water. It started to rain and we sang and laughed under the drizzle, drops collecting on our hair. In the shallows, Jude and Holly kissed. Ash and I clapped and whistled, but I thought I saw a look of pain flash across Ash’s face. We fell over each other and the rocks on the shore. I stepped on something sharp and looked down to see a set of car keys poking between my toes. I pocketed them and drank some more.
The rain became a storm: thundery showers blurring the world around us. Since we were wet already, we all took off our clothes and swam in deeper. Holly averted her eyes as we undressed, and Ash and I pretended not to watch, but we caught each other looking and reluctantly grinned. Holly is thin and very white, blue veins showing under the translucent skin of her chest, veins like lightning strikes connecting her hip bones and rivering down to the soft blond hair underneath. She looked like she might disappear into the water and never come out again. Ash is more like me: our thighs touch and our breasts are round; the hair between our legs is coarse and wiry—mine black and hers as red as her fiery curls.
Jude stood naked on the largest rock under the rain, beer bottle held aloft. Boys’ bodies are strange to me, not quite human. But maybe that’s because I’ve seen so few. I am used to the way I look, to girls’ bodies in changing rooms, to the hairs and lumps and curves and colors, but boys are different. They are something entirely other. My breath caught in my throat, but I tried not to make it obvious. I think we all breathed easier when Jude joined us in the water.
We giggled and shivered, keeping our beer bottles just above water, gulping from them as we went. Splash, splash, ducking one another and drinking lake water. Kiss, kiss, Holly and Jude wrapped around each other and me and Ash watching. A pair of reading glasses floated by and Ash grabbed them. When we came dripping out of the lake, a soccer ball rolled down the hill toward us. Hairpins twinkled in the rainy trees. I reached up and picked one like a silver, star-shaped fruit.
We rode home late and shaking, wobbly on the flooding road. I was lucky; my sisters covered for me. They smuggled me upstairs and stood me in a hot shower fully clothed until I was warm and sober. They told Mom I’d eaten something funny and they tucked me into bed. Holly’s parents were less forgiving. She spent the evening crying in her room, grounded until after the exams. Ash’s parents tried the same trick, but only got a screaming match. Ash is not the crying type.
“Mom and Dad are worried,” Holly whispered over the phone to us the next day. Ash’s legs were crossed over mine on my bedroom floor, her ear pressed to the house phone. “Haven’t you heard? A boy from town has been missing since the party.”
“Who?” I asked.
“D’you mean whatshisname in the year above us?” Ash said. “I heard my mom talking about it to her friend Caroline again this morning.”
“Whatshisname?” I asked. I vaguely remembered Ash’s mom saying something about a boy who hadn’t come home when she was talking on the phone the other day. He’s probably just sleeping off one too many beers over the weekend. He’ll be back before you know it.
Ash shrugged. “You’d know him if you saw him. He’s scruffy and blond and he’s got his eyebrow pierced.”
“He hasn’t been seen since Saturday night,” Holly said, her voice coming so softly through the phone. “I’m scared that we . . . That it was because of us.”
Be careful what you bargain with;
Every lost thing requires a sacrifice—
A new loss for every called thing found.
It couldn’t be. I shook my head and heard Holly take a nervous breath.
“It wasn’t us,” I tried to reassure her. “We didn’t do anything, Holly. Spells and magic aren’t real.” But I wasn’t so sure anymore. “Anyway, nobody’s saying this boy is really lost. Like Ash’s mom said, he’s probably just still out partying or hungover somewhere.”
That afternoon, Ash and I skipped class and sat under the trees and tried to study to keep our minds off our guilt about the missing boy. We didn’t tell Jude about him and he didn’t seem to know. Maybe he doesn’t listen to town gossip; maybe it’s too close to small talk. Maybe he just doesn’t care.
And all day long we found things in the forest. We brought some of them home to Holly, afterward, holed up in her bedroom. We laid them out on her covers like an offering. Two tarnished teaspoons, a blue plastic lighter, a stripy sock, and—my favorite—a bracelet full of delicate little golden charms: cats and stars and trees so detailed, each branch is individually etched in. Holly flicked the charms with a nail to hear them tinkle.
“Too bad it’s not a laurel tree,” she said.
“What kind of tree is it?” I asked. I didn’t recognize it from any of the trees in the forest or around here.
Holly looked closer. “It’s an olive tree, I think,” she said. “Look at these tiny gold pinpricks. They must be the fruit.”
We sat on her bed until her mom asked us to leave, talking about Jude, about magic, about findings and lost things. The blond boy was still missing, but we didn’t talk about that.
“Jude is the greatest thing we’ve found,” Ash said.
Holly nodded and her smile was so wide. “My heart’s the greatest thing I’ve lost.”
I avoided Ash’s eyes. I shouldn’t even write this, but I’m careful now to carry my diary everywhere; I’m careful not to let it out of my sight.
So there’s this: Jude’s arm around Ash in the tree while Holly isn’t there to see it. Jude and Ash wandering away from me. Laughter dappled through the leaves.
Olive
Thursday, May 11th
Lost: Reading glasses (purple); pink faux-leather handbag (gold clasps)
On Thursday morning I am awoken by my door being thrown open and Seamus Heaney boomed by my father from the top of the stairs. I suffer through “A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann” until the bit about cows before shutting my door and thunking my half-asleep head against it.
“At least he’s moved on from dirges,” Mom observes when I have shuffled downstairs for breakfast. She’s on her second coffee of the morning (I can tell by the ring stains on today’s paper) and is sorting through a towering pile of notebooks and old papers on the kitchen counter. Her hands are tanned and callused, the fingers covered in large silver rings: Celtic swirls and thick leaf patterns, big turquoise stones. A Claddagh with a tiny sapphire in the center serves as a wedding ring.
“Small mercies,” I mutter.
She disappears into the study and comes out with another pile of papers that she spills onto the table to sort through next. She has
moved a bunch of the boxes of her old stuff out of the study and they are currently stacked by the table, threatening to topple onto the dogs. I push Coco Pops’s head away from my plate.
Dad comes into the kitchen with a sleepy Max in his arms and doesn’t even put him down before kissing Mom.
“Ew,” Max whispers. Dad drops him onto a chair and kisses Mom harder.
“Take it outside, lads,” I say. Max makes his own kissy noises at the dogs and sneaks them toast under the table. Dad and Mom pretend not to notice. I worry about my parents being a bad influence on a five-year-old child.
“No, you take it outside,” Dad says. “And you can put the recycling out while you’re at it.”
I roll my eyes at his joke and haul the recycling out to the green bin beside the garage. My bike is leaning against the wall of the house by the back door, beside Emily’s. I don’t know what makes me glance into my bike basket, but I find some loose pieces of paper stuck inside.
They’re mushed up against the mesh of the basket, which has left diamond-shaped dents in the paper. They rustle when I pull them out. I expect them to be worksheets from school or notes that fell out of my folder at some point.
I scan the first page quickly. It looks like a page from a diary, in delicate handwriting I half recognize but can’t quite place. The top right corner says Sunday, May 7th. Four days ago. I slip the pages into my pocket and go back inside.
Emily stops me as I pass by the bathroom. “Have you seen my lucky socks?” she asks me.
“Your what?”
“My lucky socks.” She has something like defiance in her face, but when she realizes I won’t make fun of her she goes on. “The paisley ones. My exams start tomorrow and I want to wear them.”
“What?” I made a face. “You’re thirteen, your exams don’t count for anything.”
Emily gives me her best You’re an idiot look. “Listen,” she says then, unexpectedly. “I’m sorry for what Chloe said about Rose the other day.”
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