We were a coven; we were a crowd. We were a forest; we were a three-headed dog. Now all I want is a minute alone with the two of them, without feeling his breath hot on my neck.
Holly’s been losing weight. I can tell by the bones of her wrists and shoulders, even though she never knots her shirt anymore, doesn’t take off her kneesocks or tuck her skirt into her underwear when she climbs. She wears her scarf all the time now, wrapped so many times around her white throat, it’s like a blanket. I don’t know how she stands the heat.
Holly’s been losing her voice. Her words have lowered to a whisper.
Holly has lost her heart, but haven’t we all? Ash’s hand in the back pocket of Jude’s jeans, her laugh loud every time he speaks. And even me. It’s like my eyes always know where he’ll be. I argue and I roll my eyes at his pretentious words, but I want him to think highly of me. I want him to see my straight spine, my sharp teeth, and I want him to fear my bite but desire it.
I should tear this page out. I’m going to. Crumple it, bury it, make sure it stays lost.
Ash and Holly can’t know this: Last night I waited until all my sisters had gone to bed and I snuck out—the youngest dancing princess alone without a ball. I tied a flashlight to my handlebars and I rode to the oak tree. The rain had washed out the world, and the wind had swept the clouds in under the rug, and the sky was all speckles of stars and the moon, glowing. I didn’t need the flashlight after all.
Jude was there, waiting for me.
Down in the deeper forest he kissed me, pressed up against the body of a tree. I dug my fingers into the trunk so as not to claw his clothes off. My hands came away filled with Scrabble tiles. I opened my palms to show them to him and he picked out two letters: L and J. He stuck them onto the soft bark of the tree and took my wrists in his hands, turned them so that the rest of the letters rained onto the mossy ground. If they spelled anything, the words were lost in the darkness.
My hands, now empty, ached to be filled. They clutched his T-shirt of their own accord and pulled it over his head. He kissed me harder. My hands grabbed at his hair, clawed their way down his back, hooked at the waistband of his jeans, and pulled him fast against me. I could feel every pulse point in his body as my own. Burn, burn, burn.
Then somehow my T-shirt was off, my bra unclasped, my back against the tree and pressing so hard against the bark, I’m marked by it still. His hands holding my face, his palms either side of my neck, his thumbs making paths down my breastbone, his fingers splayed over my breasts. His lips left mine and followed his hands, down, down, a chain of kisses, kisses like pearls, like tears. My mouth was open, my eyes closed, my breath heavy in the silence.
I only opened my eyes when I felt his hands at the buttons of my jeans, and when I looked down I saw that he was naked. It wasn’t like when we swam in the lake, laughing, eyes averted but also drawn to each other’s bodies, beer bottles in hand and water all around. It wasn’t like that at all. It was dark but I saw everything, felt everything. The moonlight shone through the leaves and lit up our skin and the Scrabble tiles on the ground around us. As he took off the rest of my clothes, I could see the letters: the L that fell from where he stuck it on the tree, an A, an H. He took my hand and guided it down to where he was hard against me, and I looked up into the tree to see if the J was still there, stuck on with sap. He started to pull me away from the tree, to lie me down on the letters and the leaves, but my friends’ initials stared up at me and all at once I wanted to be anywhere but there, anywhere but there with him.
Suddenly I was cold, and the forest felt dirty. Suddenly I didn’t want to be naked anymore. I pulled my clothes back on without saying anything and still he kissed me. He ran his hands over me even over my clothes. He left bite marks on my T-shirt. I kissed him until I had the courage to turn away. I rode home shakily. He stayed in the forest. I realize now I’ve never seen him out of it.
It was on the road home that I noticed the dogs. Big brown Labradors, one every few miles, walking toward the forest. They were old and slow. Something about them made me shiver.
Then, today, after her Saturday morning bridge club, Mom told me that people have been finding things all over town. The lost things aren’t staying within the boundaries of the forest anymore. They spill into the lake water, trinkets tinkling on rocks and hairpins trapping frogs’ legs together. Anglers catch brown trout heavy with more than their bones; when they gut them, they find car keys and small change in their bellies. In the nearby fields, horses rip up rings and earring backs with tufts of grass. Odd socks and the glass bulbs of Christmas lights are resurfacing in cow pies.
Then, this morning, a scattering of baby teeth appeared in a clearing. Jude and Ash laughed when they saw them, talked about the tooth fairy and coins under pillows, but Holly and I shivered. We buried the teeth. Hands deep in the soil of the forest, we decided to stay away from the woods.
I knew it then. I knew this was what we’d done. We hadn’t made a sacrifice. We hadn’t traded something we didn’t want to lose for something we wanted found. We got our diaries back because of other people’s sacrifices. Things they didn’t want lost. Things they didn’t realize would go missing. Trinkets, treasures, memories, beliefs. We stole them without knowing and now they were showing up all around us.
In town, people are wondering about thieves at the party, about something in the beer, about pollution in the lake and trash washing into fields with the rain. But it was us. It was the spell. It was three girls messing with something we didn’t understand.
I keep replaying the last words of the spell in my head. Be careful what you wish for; not all lost things should be found.
I can’t stop making lists of lost things that shouldn’t be found again. Lost hair. Lost blood.
Lost souls.
I remember how Jude just appeared in that tree after we cast the spell. No, I tell myself. Don’t be silly. He couldn’t possibly be.
Olive
Saturday, May 13th
Lost: Three earring backs; one friendship
On Saturday morning Dad wakes us up with a poem I don’t know. The first few stanzas are drowned out by Emily yelling, “It’s BEFORE SEVEN on a SATURDAY for God’s sake! LET US SLEEP!” at the top of her voice.
Dad opens my door and I blink in the light of the landing.
“Lose something every day,” Dad’s voice booms through the house. “Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.”
“THIS IS CHILD ABUSE!” Emily screams, but a little screaming has never deterred our father from quoting poetry.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” He throws his voice louder, his lungs large from decades of broadcasting words from the bottom of lecture theaters to sleepy students.
“YOU ARE EMOTIONALLY UNHINGED!” Emily shrieks.
“THEN PRACTICE LOSING FARTHER, LOSING FASTER,” Dad bellows.
I lock eyes with Mom on the landing. Everything gets kind of quiet despite the noise. “You think you know him,” she says softly, suddenly beside me. “You don’t know him at all.”
“What?” I have a moment of confusion where I think she’s talking about Dad, and then a longer moment of even greater confusion when I realize she’s not.
“We’re leaving early this morning,” Mom says, like she’s repeating herself. “Emily’s got dance and Max has his soccer practice.”
I look right into her face, her laughter-lined eyes, her short hair curling around the seven silver hoops in each ear, and I almost don’t recognize her. Maybe I am losing my mind a little now.
After all, I have planned to go see a group of tattooed teenage runaways in a ghost town so I can cast a spell with my best friend. I’m weirdly nervous about it. Maybe because I feel as if Rose and I should be going to the police about Cathal, not casting spells. Maybe because spells aren’t actually going to help. And also maybe because this all
means seeing Rowan again.
With that in mind, it takes a while for me to get ready. I pick out a summer dress that’s long enough to not look too attention-seeking, loose enough to hide my belly, and low-cut enough to draw the eye. I try to find a pair of earrings that still has its backs and put on my silver ballet flats.
When I come downstairs, Emily is bent over her phone at the kitchen table, eating thick chunks of my nana’s homemade bread while Mom reads the paper. Max is eating cereal messily.
“You look nice,” Mom comments, glancing up from her paper.
“Thanks. I’m going to Rose’s. You said I could, remember? I’m not grounded anymore?”
“Sure,” Mom says, eyes glued back to the paper. “Just don’t jump in the lake.”
“What?”
“Don’t be home too late,” Mom says.
I nearly trip over Emily’s dance bag on the way to the fridge and realize that Chloe, her partner in crime and jazz hands, is not at her usual spot beside her, waiting for my mom to drive them to class.
“Where’s Chloe?” I ask Emily.
Emily tears off a bit of bread with her teeth and scowls. “Up her own ass,” she says with her mouth full.
“Emily!” Mom puts the paper down on the table with a slap. Max breaks into uncontrollable giggles, smacking the table so hard in his glee that he spills half his Honey Nut Cheerios onto the floor. The dogs descend upon the mess he’s made.
“Sorry, Mom,” says Emily. “She’s up her own posterior.”
Mom gives Emily a measured look, then shrugs and picks her paper back up. “Slightly better,” she says. “Although that sounds uncomfortable.”
Emily manages a grin. I make myself a cup of tea and take a package of cookies out of the cupboard. Max wanders off in search of Dad, and Emily scowls at her phone.
“I take it you had a fight?” I ask, offering her a cookie.
Emily rolls her eyes, but to my astonishment she actually answers. “She’s being unreasonable,” she says.
“Unreasonable about what?”
Emily takes the cookie and asks me, mouth full of crumbs, “If I told you that someone close to you had done something bad, would you want to know?”
In Emily’s world, something bad is more than likely one of her friends buying the same top as another, or tagging an unflattering photo, or considering kissing a boy another friend liked. “Sure,” I answer.
“Even if you could never unknow it after?”
“Of course.”
“And you wouldn’t, like, shoot the messenger?”
“I’m guessing Chloe shot the messenger,” I say.
“Bullet wound. Straight to the heart.” Emily nods solemnly and clutches her chest. “I thought she was my best friend,” she says with an angry shrug.
“Sometimes best friends screw up,” I tell her. “Give her time. I’m sure she’ll come around.”
Rose appears at the back door right at that moment, flushed from the heat and breathless from the ride. The dogs bound over to her. My mom, who was probably monitoring our conversation for signs of sisterly bonding while pretending to be absorbed in this morning’s news, looks up at Rose carefully. How is it that moms always seem to instinctively know when something’s wrong? It’s almost as if Emily does, too; she quickly begins to chat animatedly—and uncharacteristically—with Rose, who for her part looks a little unsettled by Emily’s attention.
“And then I was just saying to Chloe, like, you are the best example of not having to straighten your hair all the time, but, like, if I tried to have hair like yours, it’d just be a big ball of frizz, you know?” Emily is saying.
Rose gives me a look. I shrug and grab my bag from the chair beside me.
Emily is still chattering. “And, like, I was saying to Chloe, because I was reading all about it online, but isn’t it, like, just really racist that we think straight hair is the best hair? Because forcing black women and, like, Indian women to straighten their hair, like, invalidates their heritage?”
“Um, I guess?” says Rose.
“We’re going now,” I announce.
“Oh, okay, cool, well, um, if you have any tips for frizzy hair . . .”
I tune Emily out and grab Rose’s hand. “Okaaay then,” I say. “We’re off now.” I give a little wave and usher Rose out of the door.
She stops just outside the kitchen, though, and turns back to Emily. “Coconut oil,” she says. “On damp hair after the shower. Don’t brush it or blow-dry it. If you wear it in braids at night, it’ll be wavy in the morning and the oil will keep the frizz away.”
“Thanks!” Emily chirps, and I shut the back door before the dogs can follow us or the rest of my family can do or say any more strange things.
“What was that all about?” I say to Rose as we ride out onto the road.
“Don’t ask me,” she says. “She’s your sister.”
Before last week I would’ve said something about how Emily and I are polar opposites, but after learning that she has actual opinions on racist beauty standards, I just shrug and say, “Ah, she’s all right, as sisters go.”
At Rose’s suggestion, we take a slightly longer route out of town that takes us past Maguire’s, so that we can check if Rowan and Hazel are working today, which would slightly sink our spell-casting plans. We pull into the parking lot by the back door of the pub.
“You go in,” Rose says. “I’ll watch the bikes.” She takes out her bubbles and blows a few as I get off my bike.
Just then the back door opens. We both look up, but it isn’t one of the twins who emerges from the steamy belly of the pub; it’s Mags herself. She’s accompanied by Lucky, who, more wobbly on her legs than when she was happily drooling all over me on Wednesday, drops heavily onto the step and unrolls her long tongue.
Mags nods to me in greeting (Lucky’s tail beats feebly on the step as a hello), takes out a cigarette, and gestures to Rose after she lights it. “Should have started on the bubbles when I was your age,” she says gruffly. “But it’s far too late for me now.”
Imagining Mags Maguire at seventeen is an exercise in the suspension of disbelief. Some people look like they were born sixty-five.
Rose laughs and offers Mags her bubble wand. “Come on,” she says. “You’re never too old for bubbles.”
Mags cocks her eyebrows, but accepts the wand and blows a flurry of bubbles back into the dingy, cobweb-hung hallway of the pub.
Rose leans nonchalantly on the doorframe and says, “So, um, we were wondering—”
“Day off,” Mags cuts in.
“Sorry?”
“The twins. It’s their day off. That’s what you were going to ask about, yes?”
“Oh,” Rose says, looking about as taken aback as I feel. “Well, yeah.”
“Actually,” I say, “we were wondering about something else, too.”
“Of course you were.” Mags hands the bubbles back to Rose and takes a deep drag of her cigarette.
“We were?” Rose asks.
“Laurel?” I remind her. I ask Mags, “You wouldn’t, by any chance, know of three teenage girls with tree nicknames who might have taken some of your poteen before the town party last week?”
Rose gives me a look. Probably I could have phrased it better.
Mags looks a little put out (although that may be her face’s default setting) and gives us nothing more than an “I don’t stick my nose into other people’s business” for our pains. She stamps out her cigarette on the back step and retreats into the pub with Lucky limping behind her.
“So much for that,” says Rose, and we hop back on our bikes and head in the direction of Oak Road.
As we pass the supermarket close to the edge of town, we slow down. Rowan is arguing with someone in front of the main doors. There’s a lot of gesturing and aggressive body langua
ge, and a small crowd of onlookers is beginning to gather. I raise myself up on my pedals so I can see better.
“What are they saying?” I ask.
“I can’t make it out,” says Rose. Without discussing it, we drift over to that side of the road.
The guy with Rowan breaks away and comes striding purposefully toward us. He’s a man in his twenties, sandy-haired and broad-shouldered. When he’s only a few yards away, he turns back and shouts something I can’t quite hear—and suddenly Rowan runs toward him and punches him in the stomach.
Fights in films are all choreography, but this looks more like an embrace. Within seconds, they’re locked together, struggling and grabbing, legs circling the concrete, and the store security guard runs up and separates them.
“Take it easy, Cian, take it easy,” the security guard is saying to the other man, and he holds Rowan’s arm in a grip so tight, I can almost feel the pinch.
Rowan is breathing hard, his freckles standing out starkly from his flushed cheeks. Just watching him makes my own face warm up.
“He jumped me,” says Cian. “You saw that—I hit him in self-defense.”
Rowan’s jaw is red and swelling. His chest rises fast.
Out of the supermarket walks my aunt Gillian, who’s clearly just finished her weekly shop. She sees the fight, then frowns as she spots me and Rose.
“What’s going on here?” she says in her official police voice.
“Cian says this young lad was shoplifting,” says the security guard.
“He’s been stealing from work—” Cian starts to say. “I mean, from people I work with.” Cian knows that admitting he works with Rowan will get Mags in trouble; she’s not legally allowed to employ anyone under eighteen and, if the rumors about her poteen are true, that’s not the only illegal thing happening on her premises. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.”
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 13