Lost: Blue plastic lighter; mug (brown, chipped)
It’s very early morning when the wind blows the boards off my window and they shudder to the ground below. I’m in the last phase of that light sleep that’s kinda like an acid trip and the world’s not really real. I see my dad at the window. I’m on the first floor. Maybe he’s hovering like in those vintage vampire films where you can practically see the strings. Levitating. I go to the window and the floor slopes. There’s something wrong with the walls. Probably I’m still dreaming. Probably I’m sleeping through all this.
By the time I reach the window I’m mostly awake. The walls are normal. My dad’s not levitating outside my bedroom window. Of course. I start to close the windows and I see a shadow move by the wall of one of the other houses. I freeze. The shadow detaches itself from the blocky black of the space between two houses and walks—shit—it walks like the shadow of a person across the front of the house opposite ours, just a few yards from where I’m standing. My window’s open and the boards are gone. It’s obvious now that this house isn’t empty.
The only light outside is from the moon and the stars and you wouldn’t think that would be enough to see by, but it is. The shape in the darkness turns into a boy. He steps out from the shadow of the house and grins up at me. He’s my age maybe. His hair is long and there are beads that look like teeth strung around his neck.
I duck back against the wall, pulse thudding in my throat. I think I can hear a snatch of musical notes coming through the open window at me. A little refrain. Like the boy’s whistling through his teeth, loud enough for me to hear clearly. Darkness and shivers. When I chance a glance back out of the window seconds later, the boy is gone. I close the window by wedging my thickest clothes into the cracks to make curtains. I don’t fall asleep for a long time.
In the morning I call Mags to tell her I want a ladder.
“I’ll drop by with it later,” she grumbles. “You could have told me your boards’d broken before I came by this morning with the paper.”
I frown. “I didn’t tell you the boards broke.”
“Didn’t have to,” Mags says. “I may be old but I’m not blind.”
“Right.”
“Your mom—” she starts to say, but someone calls for her, a voice I can only just hear over the crackle of crappy reception.
“What about my mom?”
“One sec,” Mags says, to me or to the person she’s with. “I’ll call you back, pet.” She disconnects the call.
It was probably nothing. It’s not like she could possibly have heard from my parents. But I feel the nerves bunch up around my throat anyway. Someone’s coming, Ivy said. Expect guests. I still think the crossword meant Olive and Rose—to cast the spell, to bring back what we’ve lost.
I part the clothes covering the window and look out. It’s bright and calm. The development is empty. The boy is gone. My dad was never there. I keep the clothes over the window anyway.
There are flowers on the table when I come downstairs. Like we’ve got company. The kitchen putting on its best dress, fresh lipstick. Someone has even cleaned the counters. The flowers are roses, thorny and beautiful, maybe snipped out of someone else’s garden. Probably Ivy put them there. Rowan and I can’t afford to buy flowers now, with our parents’ credit card not working anymore.
I really should tell him about that. It’s been three days already.
I slip out of the back door with my tea and walk to the edge of the development that borders the forest. Rowan is sitting up on top of the pile of rubble with his guitar. I can hear a few notes of the song he’s singing float toward me on the breeze.
I climb up carefully, all hands and knees, my mug clinking on the cement and stone, and join him. We’re far enough from the first trees of the forest for the sun to shine straight down on us, and I turn to face it and close my eyes. Rowan stops singing and puts down his guitar.
Eyes closed, everything orange, I can smell the smoke from a cigarette. I open my eyes to slits and squint sideways at my brother.
“Since when do you smoke?” I ask, then I close my eyes again in the glare of the sun. “Don’t tell me you’re taking up cigarettes to go with your alcohol problem.”
“Says you,” Rowan retorts. “Thanks for the heartwarming concern, but I’m fine. I found a packet with two cigarettes left in it right here.” He flicks open his lighter, clicks it shut again. “Figured it was my fate to smoke one of them. They were completely dry and everything.”
“So you’re saying you had no choice.”
“Exactly.”
I side-eye Rowan again, but he looks pretty cheerful this morning, basking sober in the sunshine with his guitar and a found cigarette, cap at a jaunty angle, king of the rubble heap. It makes me want to draw him. Maybe Mags was right. Maybe sometimes people are more interesting than things.
“You said there were two cigarettes?” I say, remembering that I lost my last two cigarettes the other day. “Weird. I think they might be mine.”
He hands me one and his lighter. Its silver reflects the sunlight onto my glasses, nearly blinding me. It’s heavy in my hand.
“The credit card was declined the other day,” I say quickly, so I won’t be able to take the words back.
Rowan goes very still. “Faulty machine,” he says.
“I tried every shop on the street.” I blow on my tea and send the steam wafting away from me like dandelion clocks. “It’s gone.”
Rowan takes a deep drag of his cigarette and coughs.
“Well,” he says. “It was only a matter of time before they’d cop we took it. I’ll bet that’s why they’ve canceled it. They’re trying to get us to come back.”
I shake my head.
“Do you think maybe we should?” Rowan says slowly.
“Should what?”
“Go back.”
I can hear my heart in my ears, and it’s not beating a rhythm I recognize.
“We can’t stay here forever,” Rowan goes on.
“We don’t need to stay here forever. Just until we turn eighteen. Then Mags can employ us legally and we can rent out a room somewhere and—”
“And what, never see Granda again? Never see Mom again?” He doesn’t even mention Dad.
Thud goes my heart. Thud-thud.
“What if . . .” I say really, really slowly. “What if that’s not why the card’s been canceled?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what if something’s happened? To Mom and Dad?”
Thud. Thud-thud. Thud.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “Somebody would have told us if they’d been found mangled in a car crash or something.”
Unless, a small voice in the back of my mind says, nobody could find us to tell us because we’ve been off the grid for almost a month.
“People go missing all the time,” I say softly. “People get lost.”
I remember Rose crying into her knees, blowing bubbles across the pub parking lot. “Ivy’s right, I think,” I say. “Someone must’ve cast that spell. At the party last week.”
Rowan nods—we’ve talked this over a few times since I found the spellbook. Found it, then lost it again. We’ve looked everywhere. It’s gone.
“I met someone on Thursday,” I tell him. “Someone who needs that spell.” I don’t say that I need it, too. That I need it just as much as she does. I didn’t tell her either. “She’s a friend of Olive’s,” I add, and Rowan perks up a bit. He probably doesn’t even notice it. But I do. So I tell him all about Rose. I tell him that I think what the crossword said last week, about expecting guests, meant Rose as well as Olive. I tell him I think this means we need to cast the spell.
He looks at his hands for a long time. I know my brother. I know what he looks like when there’s something he’s not sure he wants to say.
“What?”
I ask him. “Is it that you don’t believe in it? Because you said it yourself—everybody’s lost something since Saturday. You can’t believe Mags can predict the future with the morning crossword and not believe in a spell.”
“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s just . . . You did read it, right? The whole spell? You remember.” I nod. I remember it all. “It’s just that there’s a lot of . . . darkness to it, I guess. All this talk of regret and sacrifice and blood. I’m just . . . not sure it’s such a great idea to put our trust in something that could very well be evil.”
“Evil?”
“You don’t know—we don’t know—what kind of magic it is. What kind of things you have to lose so you can find something else.”
“Rowan,” I say. “Rose needs that spell.”
I need that spell. And so does he. He just doesn’t know it.
I put my cigarette out in the dregs of my now-cold tea. Just below us, beyond the low stone wall that borders the development and the woods, something white catches my eye.
I clamber quickly down off the rubble and hop over the wall.
“What’s wrong?” Rowan calls after me.
It’s paper, tangled up in leaves. There’s a date at the top. Wednesday, May 10th. Two days ago.
“Hazel?” Rowan asks from the rubble behind me.
“I found something,” I call. “I think it’s out of someone’s diary.”
I’ve never kept a diary. Too many things I don’t want anyone to know. They’re supposed to be secret, but here I am, clutching a whole bunch of someone’s private thoughts in my hand right now. It’s too easy to lose things once they’re written down.
I come back over the wall and Rowan stands and holds out a hand to help me up. “Is it Ivy’s?” he asks, and his voice is kinda funny. Probably he’s worried she’s written about whatever’s going on between them in her diary. Whatever happened at the party. He’s probably worried I’d read it and find out. But it’s weird: My stomach doesn’t twist with familiar jealousy at the thought of it. For some reason, instead, I think of Rose.
“It’s not Ivy’s,” I tell him, checking the handwriting. “And I wouldn’t read it if it was.”
“Me neither,” he says defensively.
Then I remember waking up in the middle of the night. The whistling boy. His grin. His long hair. The teeth around his neck.
“I thought I saw someone,” I say to Rowan. “Last night. In the development.”
Rowan looks at me. “Shit,” he whispers, his face stricken.
“I thought I might have been dreaming,” I say. “It looked like a guy our age. I guess he must have dropped these here.” I don’t mention how my skin crawls thinking about him. “Just keep an eye out, yeah?” I say instead. Rowan nods. “We can’t afford to have people nosing around or telling the police.”
Ivy’s in the kitchen when we come back inside. The kettle is singing. The paper is open on the table and the crossword stares blankly at the ceiling. Ivy has the end of a half-melted pen in her mouth, and she grins around it when she sees us.
“Look what I found,” I say, joining Ivy at the table. I show her the diary pages and start to read the words aloud.
“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.”
“Sounds like a story,” Rowan says. He nods at me to read on.
Like any teenager’s diary, it’s mostly about being in love. Or lust, I guess. I smirk a little as I read parts out. “His voice is like music—did I mention that before? This girl’s got it bad.”
“Seriously?” Rowan says. “You’re reading out someone’s most intimate thoughts and you’re just going to poke fun at them?”
“You’re listening,” I huff at him. But I stop my teasing and read on. There’s something kinda compelling about this girl’s story, even if it’s just about being in love with some pretentious guy.
Rowan eats half the chocolates in the tin on the table, and Ivy absentmindedly fills in the crossword as she listens. Then the diary mentions the spellbook.
“It reminded me of the spell for some reason, the moss we foraged, the penknife we used to cut the tips of our fingers.”
Rowan and Ivy sit up straight.
“Give me that,” Rowan says, trying to grab the paper so he can read it faster.
“Stop it.” I keep my fingers tight around the page and read on.
“We stowed the beers in the 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.”
“They found the spellbook,” Ivy whispers.
“They’re the ones who cast the spell,” I say.
“‘The spell is working,’ Jude said. ‘Look: The lost things are coming home to be found.’”
Ivy’s mouth is open, her crossword forgotten. “Jude,” she says.
“What?” Rowan asks.
Ivy looks down at the crossword. “The patron saint of lost causes. Remember?”
I remember. And I remember something else. The whistling I heard last night. The song’s been stuck in my head all morning, but I’ve only just now realized what it is. “Hey Jude.”
“Shiiiit,” I say through my teeth. “This is really fucking weird.”
Rowan tugs on the paper again and this time I let him take it. He turns the page and keeps reading. The girls ask an older sister to buy them beers. They go skinny-dipping in the lake.
It’s got to be our lake—just over the development wall, down the slope of the forest and across the rocks.
Rowan reads on. He blushes at the descriptions of the girls’ naked bodies. He shakes his head at the list of lost things they find.
Reading glasses, makeup bag, hairpins. A charm bracelet.
“Two tarnished teaspoons,” he reads. He gets up and opens the drawer we keep our cutlery in and he takes out a single rusty spoon.
“We had three,” he says.
Ivy lets out a little breath.
I read on and we learn that a boy in town has gone missing.
I remember the words of warning in the spellbook. Be careful what you bargain with; every lost thing requires a sacrifice—a new loss for every called thing found. Consider carefully before you cast the calling; it may not be for you to choose.
Ivy’s face is white. Rowan looks a little shocked. I don’t know what to think.
I wonder, in a crazy kind of way, if the spellbook was left there for me to find. My head hurts with all of it.
“We have to cast the spell,” I say. “I mean, if we’re all losing shit because these girls cast it last Saturday, we need to do it ourselves to get our things back.”
“Hazel,” Rowan says like a warning.
“What? I told you—Rose needs it. And it looks like maybe we do, too. Or do you want more of your things to go missing because of these girls? It’s not like we’ve got a lot we can afford to lose.”
“Who’s Rose?” Ivy asks, so I tell her how I think she’s one of the guests we were told to expect. I tell her how I think she and Olive are meant to help us cast the spell.
“I’m really not sure about this,” says Rowan.
“What do you think?” I turn to Ivy.
Ivy looks from my brother to me. “I think . . . you’re right. I don’t want to lose what I’ve got. If we can undo what these girls’ spell did, I think it’s worth a shot.”
“It’s decided then,” I say firmly, and this time Rowan doesn’t argue. “Now we just need to find Olive and Rose.”
Laurel
Friday, May 12th; Saturday, May 13th
Fou
nd: Five lost dogs; twelve Scrabble tiles; a scattering of baby teeth
Holly was only grounded for a couple of days. When she came into the forest with us on Friday, Jude stood at the top of our shrine of lost things and spread his arms wide. He said grandly, “Look at this. Look at us! We are the finders; we are the keepers; we are the guardians of the lost and found!”
Holly clapped and Ash crowed. Jude stared at me and waited for my applause, but I just stood and watched him. Did the others not realize how pretentious he sounded? Did they not understand that we weren’t the guardians of anything, and that if it was because of us that these lost things were appearing, then we’d clearly done something very wrong?
I think we all believed it now, that this was happening because of the spell. As if our sudden belief in magic was another found thing. Every time we walked into the forest, we’d find something new. We’d started to gather them in jars. Vases of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Baskets of odd socks. Pint glasses full of hairpins. Jude had started finding things, too. He stood in the forest; the found things we’d gathered surrounded him like a dragon’s hoard and he was the beast in the middle. We were wood nymphs circling him. It’s like we’d forgotten that we were the ones who cast the spell, not him.
I kept asking where his parents were. I kept asking where he lived. He said, “Small talk, small talk,” and he waved my words away. He said, “Why don’t you ask the real questions, Laurel? The questions with fire. The questions that matter.”
So I asked him, “Where do you go with Ash when she sneaks out to see you in the middle of the night? What do you do?”
Ash’s cheeks flamed the color of her hair. Holly’s eyes were huge in the shade of the forest. They turned on me with so much reproach, but I only asked the question.
Jude, for his part, laughed. “That’s more like it,” he said with relish. “That’s the fire I’m looking for.” But he didn’t answer and I didn’t ask again.
I wanted to say something to Holly, and even to Ash. I wanted to apologize, or maybe warn them against him, maybe tell them that they deserved so much more, and better. Maybe they also deserved a better friend than me. But we are so rarely without him now. Even alone in Holly’s bedroom, her patchwork covers pulled up to our chins, it’s like he is there with us. We bend our heads together in class, but somehow he’s there, too. Our hair doesn’t tangle together anymore. The only strands I brush out at night are my own.
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 12