We stare out across the parking lot together. After about a minute Rose takes my hand.
“You’re the only person I’ve told,” she says.
I kind of laugh and say, “Same.” I don’t tell her there’s a lot more I’m not telling. “I’m probably a shitty first person to tell,” I admit. “I’m a complete stranger and I have literally no advice for you.”
“You know my best friend; you’re not a complete stranger. Although you are pretty strange.”
I properly laugh this time, and say, “You have no idea.”
Then she says, “I like strange,” and I wonder if she might be flirting with me. I look down at her hand in mine. She’s upset. Fuck upset—she’s in pieces. She’s probably just looking for somebody to listen. For advice. For a solution. I can still just about see a few letters of a word written in marker on her wrist. Like Olive had on her arms yesterday. Does everybody write on their arms in this town?
I look up at her suddenly.
“I don’t have a solution for you,” I say. “But I do have a spell.”
“A spell?”
“Yeah. There was a book. A spellbook. I found it yesterday on my way home, in the same field the party was in last weekend. Someone must have lost it there. Spellbook of the Lost and Found, it’s called. It’s got a spell to call up lost things. I guess if your virginity is a thing you can lose, maybe it’s a thing you can find again.”
I don’t tell her I don’t have the spellbook anymore. It doesn’t matter. I read that spell so many times, I know it by heart.
Then, quick as a flash, I remember something. Something Olive muttered when she read it. There was an ingredient for each of us. And rose thorns. There’s an ingredient for Rose.
Another flash of memory: The spell calls for poteen. It was something about the waters of Lethe, which Ivy said was a river in Greek mythology, but it said you could use poteen instead. It all lines up.
We’re going to have guests, Ivy said she saw in the crossword. When Olive showed up yesterday, we all figured that’s what it meant. But what if it meant two guests? She’s important, Ivy said. Maybe Rose is important, too. Olive and Rose, the spellbook, the poteen. I know already that Rose and Olive will drink it with us. I know already that they will help us cast the spell.
Mags appears at the back door of the pub. She shades her eyes and scans the parking lot. I’m late back from my break.
“Olive told me about the spell,” Rose says, her eyebrows drawn together. “But I didn’t think it was actually . . . real.”
I shrug. “I live with a girl who believes in magic and work for a woman who’s probably a witch. Real is a kinda fuzzy concept.”
“I can imagine,” says Rose. Her smile is seven kinds of sunlight.
I stand up and dust off the back of my trousers. “Come by the development this weekend,” I say, stamping my cigarette out on the ground. My belly’s a cage full of butterflies. “Real or not, it can’t do any harm to try.”
Olive
Friday, May 12th
Lost: Faith in the world
On Friday morning, unexpectedly, it’s my mom’s voice that wakes me. It cuts through dreams of thorns piercing skin. I am glad to be woken up.
Without my hearing aid in, I can’t make out what Mom is saying. I raise my good ear up off the pillow and her voice comes slightly into focus.
She’s saying something about raking through rubble for her past. It takes me a second before I recognize the words: It’s the first few lines of “Delta” by Adrienne Rich. My mom’s the one quoting poetry this morning.
I think I can make out my dad’s voice laughing from the other side of my bedroom door. “Usurper!” he cries in mock horror, but he throws open my door anyway, as if he were the one reciting. I hear Emily’s door bang open, then Max’s.
I put in my hearing aid and meet Emily on the landing.
“Are our parents having a poem-off?” I ask her, brows furrowed.
“Sounds like it,” she says cheerfully. “I guess she must have heard us talking about Adrienne Rich.” She yells down the stairs after Mom. “Go feminism!”
I give my sister a baffled look and am not nearly discreet enough to hide it. It’s one thing to find out she reads poetry; it’s another to discover she identifies as a feminist. Maybe I have more in common with my little sister than I thought.
Max appears behind me, clutching Bunny in both hands. “If you don’t close your mouth, a fly will fly in,” he observes. I close my mouth. He makes his way past me and down the stairs, almost tripping over the ends of his Batman pajamas. “And then you’ll have to swallow a spider to catch the fly, and then a cat to catch the spider, and then a dog to catch the cat . . .”
I shake my head. I am growing up in a madhouse.
“. . . and then a horse to catch the cow, and then a lost soul to catch the horse . . .”
“Wait, what?” I call down to him, but Max has reached the bottom of the stairs and is running into the kitchen for his breakfast. I make a mental note to change my hearing-aid battery before I go out, and I grab a towel and run into the shower before anybody else can.
Rose only comes to school halfway through lunch break, before our first exam. At this point, it’s not like I’ve been expecting her in class. We sit in the spiky midday shadows of the bike rack and I hand her a stick of licorice from my schoolbag.
“Emily said something to me yesterday that I wanted to ask you about,” I say, but Rose cuts me off.
“I met Hazel last night,” she tells me.
That distracts me for a second. “You did? Where?”
“Just bumped into her. I recognized her from your description,” she says. “Although she was wearing significantly more clothes.”
“And?” I say.
Rose looks a little wistful. “She’s kind of larger than life, isn’t she? Confident, gorgeous, flirts with anything that moves.”
I give a little laugh, remembering her clothes and her compliments. I’ve got more where that came from. “Yeah,” I say. “So I was talking to Emily about the party last Saturday—”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Rose talks over me again, grabs some paper out of her bag, and waves it in my face.
“I found these,” she says. “They were in my schoolbag this morning, like I grabbed them by accident when I stuffed my books in.”
I take the pages out of her hand. “They’re from someone’s diary,” she says, but the moment I see the handwriting I know that. I know it’s the same girl. Laurel.
Monday, May 8th, it says.
“Shit,” I whisper. “This is really weird.”
“Just read it,” Rose says with an intense look on her face. “You have no idea.”
I read it. Laurel, Ash, and Holly. Those aren’t their real names, I learn. I look around me, at the uniformed kids everywhere. Now they could be anyone.
The three girls watch trees fall; they talk about Faulkner; they worry about the spell. They find a boy. They fall in love with the boy. 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.
I look up at Rose.
“Have you finished?” she says. “It’s freaky, right?”
“It is freaky,” I tell her, zipping open my bag. “I found some of her diary yesterday. That’s what I thought was so weird about it. It’s from the day before she wrote this one.”
“What?”
I take out the diary pages. Rose grabs them and reads quickly, mouth half open. I look at the people milling around the yard, eating lunch on the steps of the school building, smoking behind the cars parked outside. Laurel, Ash, and Holly. They could be right here and we’d never know. How weird is it that we were at the same party, that we seem to be so linked, but we have no idea who they ar
e?
The party. Everybody lost something. Rose is exclaiming something about the weirdness of it all and I’ve figured something out. About what Emily said earlier. About what Rose is clearly avoiding discussing. Little details click into place. Skin and thorns. “You never did tell me what you lost,” I say to Rose. “Did you lose something at the party?”
“Not really,” Rose says. “Can I see the pages I gave you again?”
I hand them to Rose and, finally, I ask her, “Did something happen with Cathal Murdock at the party?”
Rose reads Laurel’s words again and ignores mine.
“I wish she’d used their real names,” Rose says. “How can we find out who they are?”
“I dunno, but back to the party—”
Rose props her legs up on the bike rack in front of us and stabs her licorice strip toward me. “Don’t interrupt me, I’m reading.”
I don’t allow myself to be sidetracked. “Allow me to summarize,” I tell her. “All we know about them is that they went to the party, so they must live in this town, there’s a Trina McEown in their class, and Ash wears red nail polish. Did something happen with Cathal at the party?”
“Everyone wears red nail polish,” Rose says. “We’re hardly going to go around to every girl in Balmallen wearing red nail polish and ask if her friends call her Ash.”
“You make a valid point,” I say. “Did something happen with Cathal at the party?”
Rose takes out her phone and starts to search for Trina McEown. “There are like a billion,” she says. “What about Jude? Does he have a surname?”
I shake my head impatiently. “I don’t think so. About Cathal—”
“He sounds like trouble,” Rose says.
“We know he’s trouble. He rates our classmates’ bodies out of ten and gropes girls in the cafeteria.”
“Jude, I mean.”
“Oh. Well. Him, too, I guess.”
Rose hands me the diary pages, and I fold them up and put them back into the poetry book I was keeping them in.
“Yes,” she says finally. “Something happened. At the party.”
“With Cathal?”
“No, with Santa Claus,” Rose says sarcastically.
“Well, I always thought his omniscience was a little suspect. Also, who wears red to climb down a chimney?” I tear at the licorice with my teeth. “What happened?”
Rose purses her lips.
“I lost my virginity,” she says.
My mind is blank. “You lost your what?”
She does a weird flailing-hand shrug thing. “There you have it,” she says.
“Wait. Start again. Explain.”
More hand gestures. “I . . . I don’t really remember. I was pretty wasted. I think I fell asleep? Or passed out, more likely, because of all the drinking you already mentioned.” She traps her hands under her legs. “And then, apparently, some girls cast a spell and everyone started losing things, and I lost my virginity and—”
My mind catches up with my ears like a train. There is an epic crash. Brakes scream, locomotives derail, carriages pile up in a mess of metal.
“Rose.”
“Olive.”
“Did Cathal . . . Was this . . .” I try to get my words in order so they don’t come out jumbled. Or insulting. Or upsetting. Or plain wrong. Or maybe right. “Consensual?”
Rose is quiet for so long, every single one of those options overlap and intertwine, crawling and clawing over each other to get free of the wreckage. Does she like Cathal? Has she always liked Cathal? Is what I’m suggesting completely insulting to her? Or does she think he’s an idiot like I always thought we both did? Did she sleep with him drunkenly anyway? Rose’s tear-streaked face in the bathroom, my unanswered calls, her absence from school. No. I’m right. I have to be. (I don’t want to be.)
(Oh God, I don’t want to be.)
“I don’t . . . really remember,” Rose says finally. “So I guess maybe it . . . wasn’t not.”
I stare at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says, like it’s something she’s rehearsed. “I’ve read all your feminist websites and listened to your weekly rants and I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that. I was really drunk but so was he. He probably just thought I was playing hard to get. And even if he didn’t—even if he didn’t care that I didn’t . . . want to—there’s nothing I can . . . I mean, it’s done, it’s done, right? It’s not that big a deal.”
Not that big a deal.
“You said you didn’t want to. You said you’d passed out.”
“Yeah, but, like, so did he afterward.”
“Rose.” I want to cry. I don’t understand why she isn’t.
“It’s fine,” she says. “It happened. I just want to forget about it and move on.”
She takes out her phone and opens up a message conversation. She hands the phone to me and waits in silence while I read. I start to feel sick.
I can’t believe I didn’t understand sooner, or ask better, or listen at all. I am the worst friend.
“Let’s go to the police,” I say.
Rose looks annoyed. “And tell them what? Some guy I drunkenly got with didn’t get the hint? There’s literally no use, there’s no proof. I’m not even sure that’s even what happened and also he was texting nice things for a while before he realized I was ignoring him. . . . I don’t know. I just know I never want to see him again.”
I drop the last of my licorice on the ground. I don’t know what else to say.
Rose wraps her arms around her knees and rests her forehead over the words markered there.
Everybody’s lost something.
As if she’s heard my thought, Rose says, “Your virginity is something you can lose.”
“I really . . . I really don’t think this is about those girls and their spell.”
“But—”
“No really,” I say, trying to keep calm for Rose’s sake, but probably failing spectacularly. “What happened that night has nothing to do with any spell and everything to do with Cathal Murdock. So the girls who cast that spell—if it was even real, which I’m not saying it was—are not to blame for what happened. Neither are you. That was one person, and one person only. And I will ruin his fucking life for what he did to you.”
That’s when Rose bursts into tears.
“Oh, shit,” I say. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
Her shoulders shake. Her breath shudders. I wrap my arms around her like I can shield her from what happened, from what she’s lost, from the train-crash wreck of her feelings.
When her sobs have quieted down, I say softly, “I really, really think it would help to talk to my aunt Gillian.”
Gillian’s my mother’s sister. She’s also one of the local police. She’ll know what to do.
Rose sniffs and shakes her head. “There’s literally no use,” she says. “There’s nothing she can do.”
“But—”
“I told you, Olive, I’ve read all those feminist blogs you link to. I’ve read all those articles and news stories. I know there’s nothing she can do.”
My face feels heavy. My all of me feels heavy. “I hate the world,” I whisper so low, I know no one can hear.
I stroke Rose’s hair. We are silent for a long, long time.
Then Rose speaks from underneath her own arms. “Hazel said we should try the spell.” It comes out only slightly louder than a mumble.
“What?”
“Hazel?” Rose raises her head. “She said we should try the spell.”
“For what?” I ask.
“For . . . what happened. For bringing back what I’ve lost.”
I want to tell her again that we should talk to Aunt Gillian, but there are mascara tearstains all down my best friend’s face and her ey
es have brightened at this ridiculous suggestion. “Okay,” I say. “I have the spellbook. They—it’s in my room. It got put into my bag somehow the other day. We can try the spell.”
“You have it?” Rose’s eyebrows shoot up, then she gives me a meaningful look. “Olive, I think this was meant to be.”
If it was any other time, I’d question her sudden belief in fate, but for now I close my eyes quickly against the tears still building behind them and give Rose my bravest smile. “Maybe,” I say. Meanwhile, I think hard about how I would go about asking Aunt Gillian some hypothetical questions about a hypothetical friend over our family lunch on Sunday.
“So we’ll do it,” she says, and she stands up. “Let’s go.”
“Rose.” I gesture toward the school building. “You have your German oral in, like, five minutes.” The very idea of having to sit an exam after all this is ludicrous. But the idea of letting Rose fail an exam because of Cathal bloody Murdock is unthinkable. My stomach twists painfully into knots.
“Afterward then,” says Rose. “Let’s go to Oak Road tonight.”
Rowan’s face flashes in front of my eyes.
“I can’t, Rose. I’m still grounded.”
“Olive, please.”
“My parents will kill me—”
“When are you not grounded?” Rose cuts me off. “I need to cast that spell.”
I shake my head. Our exams are starting, and I’ve spent fewer hours studying than I have daydreaming about the trio at Oak Road. I need to study. I need to not be grounded anymore. I need to help my best friend.
Also, and I’m not sure why, there’s something about the idea of the spell that I find discomfiting. I think back to when I read it through at Oak Road. The part about human blood maybe. The part about sacrifice. The part about being careful what you wish for. Because right now, more than anything, I wish Cathal Murdock had never been born.
I reach out for Rose’s hand and my resolve strengthens. “Tomorrow. We’ll go tomorrow.”
Hazel
Friday, May 12th
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 11