“Yeah,” I say in answer to his earlier question, my eyes on his eyes, my hand spread out over the tattoo on his chest, the tip of my little finger just touching the waistband of his boxers. “I like you.”
He leans forward and says in a whisper, “I like you, too.”
It takes a fraction of a second for me to close the gap between our mouths and kiss him. He takes my face in his hands and deepens the kiss. I touch my tongue to his and tangle my fingers in his hair. We kiss hard and serious, every moment deeper, every second more urgent until I completely lose control and pull myself forward so I’m straddling his hips and I can feel him hard against me.
He throws off his glasses and his hands reach down to cup my breasts under my top, so I pull it over my head, tossing aside my insecurities as quickly as I can think them. I press myself even harder against him and he lets out his breath in a rush.
We kiss like we’ll lose our minds if we don’t, and when he takes my bottom lip between his teeth my nails dig into his back of their own accord. He grins and lowers me backward, hands running the length of my body and slipping off the shorts Hazel lent me after my borrowed pajamas got soaked in the storm. I move my arms to lower his boxers and we get tangled in legs.
He laughs into my hair. “I like you a lot,” he says. “Olive, like the tree.”
I trace the freckles on his cheeks, the side of his neck, his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, and I trace the thin line of hair from his belly button all the way down. Eyes shut, he shudders. When I move my hand around him, he curses quietly and says my name.
When he touches me, I have a moment of worry—that I’m not as pretty as Ivy, that I’m not as thin, that I should be sucking in my tummy or hiding my thighs—but soon his hands are all over me, his tongue at my breasts, his fingers dipping down between my open legs, and there’s nothing else I could possibly think about, probably ever again.
I’m woken several hours later—I can tell by the brighter light spilling in the gaps between the boards over the window—by Rose opening the bedroom door. She squints in at me. Rowan sleeps on. I disentangle myself from his arms and his bedsheets and I join Rose on the landing, pulling my clothes on as I go.
In the light of the skylight brightening the landing, Rose is all long brown legs in a short borrowed dress, tangled hair, and yesterday’s makeup. She looks me up and down.
“Well,” she says.
“Well.”
We both glance toward the doors of the separate rooms we slept in, then back at each other.
“You have a love bite on your neck,” I inform her.
A smile creeps over my best friend’s face. “I could really do with a cigarette.”
“You quit,” I remind her helpfully. “You can blow some bubbles and have a cup of tea.”
Rose throws an arm around my shoulder. “That sounds great,” she says, and we go downstairs together.
Ivy is in the kitchen, looking out of the French doors to the glimmering world outside. The overgrown grass and the weeds are wet from last night’s storm, but the sun’s beaming down, reflecting off the raindrops.
When she hears us come in, Ivy speaks without turning around. “Were you . . . Did you go outside last night?”
“We all did,” I remind her. “We chased after Ash. Remember?”
“After that,” Ivy says slowly, her eyes still on the garden.
Rose and I exchange a look.
“No,” Rose says in the same careful voice as Ivy. “Why?”
Ivy beckons. We approach the French doors. The boards are hanging off. I thought Ivy must have moved them, but they’re lopsided, the edges scored like they’ve been clawed.
“What the . . .” Rose says.
There’s mud trampled all up the back steps. A boot stain on the glass like someone tried to kick the door in.
“Ash?” I ask, uncertain. But the boot print is much too big.
“Not Ash,” Rose whispers. I shiver.
“Ivy,” I say. “Are you sure it’s safe for you guys to be staying here? It’s awfully . . . secluded.”
“Maybe Rowan’s right,” Ivy whispered. “Maybe we should never have cast the spell.”
“This isn’t about the spell,” I tell her softly. “This is about you guys squatting in an empty development. I mean, it’s romantic and bohemian and all, but, well, maybe it’s not the best idea anymore?”
Rose’s eyebrows are knitted. “What about your mom’s house?” she says. “Hazel said they’ve stayed with you before.”
Ivy’s eyes are on the ground beyond the window. Boot prints trampled in the mud. “My mom’s gone visiting a friend. She’s not at home. I thought we’d be safe here. Like an adventure.”
“Does your mom know where you are?” Rose asks.
Ivy shakes her head. “She thinks I’m staying with Mags.”
“Why don’t you call her—” I suggest, but Ivy freezes suddenly and says, “Do you smell smoke?”
“Smoke?”
There comes the sound of feet on the stairs. Hazel bursts into the kitchen and says, “I thought I saw smoke from my bedroom window—is something burning?”
Rowan is right at her heels, pulls on his shoes in the doorway. “It looked like it was coming from the forest,” he says.
Suddenly we are all standing. Going outside. A plume of gray smoke rises from the trees.
“Is it coming from down by the lake?” Rose asks, and I think of the red-headed girl’s wet clothes last night, her bare feet.
The grass underfoot is all dewdrops on spider’s webs and, as we run, frogs scatter. We slip down the mud of the slope and grab on to wet branches for balance, and when we reach the bottom we split up, each following where we were sure we saw the smoke.
I break out of the forest to the shore. The tide is high after the storm; the little beach we found the beer bottle on yesterday has disappeared, the water hiding our footprints. I stop for a moment to catch my breath.
There’s mist hanging three hand-widths above the lake like a veil. I can hardly hear the others searching through the forest behind me. Only the occasional trout leaping out of the water disturbs the quiet. When the breeze blows, the fog rolls like I only thought it did in books. Maybe it was the fog we saw. A plume of it rising like smoke in the distance. Everything’s so wet from last night’s storm, it’d be impossible for anything to catch fire. Unless somebody really wanted a flame to take.
I remember the phoenix on Rowan’s chest pressed to my bare skin, burning. Kisses like little flames.
The lake is clear and shallow at my feet. Underneath my rippled reflection I see stones and grit, moss, and minnows darting between blades of sunken grass. Something splashes in the water and I startle, but it’s just a frog jumping from rock to slimy rock on the shore a few yards away from me. It flies off the last rock and disappears into the water and something glints under the ripples left in its wake. I bend to pick it up.
It’s a silver lighter. A Zippo, expensive-looking and engraved. The same one Rowan keeps flicking open and shut. I turn the lighter over to read the engraving, expecting to see Rowan’s initials, but instead they’re his sister’s. HK. She must have dropped it yesterday. I shake the water off it and dry it on my top as best I can. I flick it open and give the flint wheel an experimental roll. The lighter sparks to life, a flame rising merrily as if it hadn’t spent the whole night underwater.
“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” I mutter to myself, and the others come through the forest toward me.
Rowan walks backward, looking up at the tops of the trees. “Where did the smoke go?” he asks. But there are only the misty clouds, breaking and re-forming against the glow of the sun.
“Did you find anyone?” I ask him. Rowan turns around and shakes his head slowly.
“There’s no one there,” Rose says. “There�
�s no fire. There’s just a whole bunch of trash scattered around the forest.”
“Trash?”
Ivy opens her clenched fists, and in the palms of her hands are three marbles, two hair clips, half a clothespin, a big red button, and a whole bunch of Scrabble tiles. “There’s more,” she says. “There’s so much more.”
“What is all this?” Hazel whispers.
“The lost things,” Ivy says, but it can’t be. No matter what the rest of them seem to believe, there really isn’t such a thing as magic.
“They must have come from the trailer park,” I say. “Or the dump. Or things blowing in off the wishing tree.”
“Then where did the smoke go when we came looking for it?” Ivy says, with uncharacteristic force. “What did we hear last night out in the storm? Remember the footsteps and the howling?”
I rub my eyes. “A fox,” I say wearily. “On the roof of the tunnel. A dog howling in the woods.” I look back at the forest and say, “Chimney smoke from a cottage somewhere that looked like it came from the woods.” I point down at the things Ivy’s brought down from the forest. “A bunch of trash that fell into the water.”
“Just trash,” Rose repeats, but there’s a question in her voice that trembles.
I hold the lighter out to Hazel. “I found this,” I tell her. “I think it must be yours.”
Beside me, Rowan goes very still.
Hazel doesn’t move to take the lighter.
“It must have fallen out of your pocket,” I add.
“Where did you find that?” Hazel’s voice is very strange.
“Right here.” I point. “Just now.”
“No,” she says.
“Well,” I tell her, “yes, actually.” I throw the lighter at Hazel, who catches it automatically and then looks at it like it’s about to burn her.
Her hands shake. Her whole body shakes. She’s breathing too quickly. Rose reaches out to her, but Hazel squeezes her fist around the lighter, turns abruptly, and marches back up the slope into the woods as if she’s looking for something. Or someone. The rest of us look at one another and follow, almost having to run to catch up.
When we’ve clambered over the rocks and up the slope, we stop so suddenly, we leave skid marks in the mud.
There are things everywhere in the forest. Random objects on each leaf and in every tree. Marbles rolled under roots and winter gloves blown onto branches. Toys on the path. Jewelry in the bushes. What looks a lot like human hair tangled around the trunks of trees.
We don’t move. We stare.
I bend down and pick up a piece of paper. On it is a crude drawing of a skunk, like the one Eoin Kavanagh gave to Rose on Valentine’s Day when we were eight years old.
My thoughts race. Maybe this is all some elaborate hoax. Maybe someone came by with big black bags of lost things and scattered them around for us to find. But I have to admit that the idea is pretty far-fetched. Almost as far-fetched as the idea that our spell might have worked.
Our spell might have worked.
“But,” I say slowly, still not quite able to wrap my head around it, “why this stuff? Why this much stuff?”
“Balance,” says Ivy, the end of the word tilted up like a question. “Like it said in the spellbook. Every lost thing requires a sacrifice—a new loss for every called thing found.”
“No,” says Rowan, and his voice is dark. “It’s happening like it did to Laurel. Like she said in her diary. We didn’t make a sacrifice. Not enough of one anyway. Not for all the things we needed found.”
Ivy’s mouth makes an O like she’s understood. I’m not sure I have, though, entirely.
“So, what, we’ve, like, magically stolen all these things?”
“More like we’ve magically forced other people to lose things,” Rowan says. “So we could find things of our own.”
I show Rose the skunk drawing and her eyes go wide. She grabs it off me and turns it over and over, as if there’ll be a clue written on it somewhere. She looks at the forest around us in wonder. “So does this mean we won’t have to lose something in exchange?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Ivy says. “I don’t know. Maybe it depends on the things we want found. Maybe it depends on the things we lose. The bigger the thing we ask for, the more we lose. The more other people lose.” She quotes the spellbook again. “What will you let go of? What can you not afford to lose? Consider carefully before you cast the calling; it may not be for you to choose.”
I can remember quotes easily, too. I remember the part that comes after. Be careful what you wish for; not all lost things should be found.
At what point do you stop questioning and start believing?
“We shouldn’t leave all this here,” I say warily. “Right? I mean, it’s littering the forest.” But nobody wants to touch the lost things. Instead, we watch Hazel shake herself and march from tree to tree, searching.
“What are you looking for?” Rose asks, but Hazel doesn’t answer, keeps going from rock to rock, from tree to tree, becoming increasingly frantic. We follow, sidestepping small toys and phone chargers, wrinkled cardigans and folded umbrellas, pens and keys and wallets.
Hazel’s like a tempest, like a whirling storm. She breaks into a run, following—I can see it now—the scuffmarks of boot tracks in the mud. She leads us back up to the house, then over to the edge of the development, to the tunnel.
The storm drain is still dry but brighter. We file in one by one. On the ground with the litter are the pens we left behind last night, and muddy footprints. It’s impossible to tell if they are only our footprints, or if someone else has been here. The tunnel walls are all black trees and red words and silver string, but when I come closer I can see that there are words there we didn’t write. I stop and look around quickly, even though I know it’s only the five of us squeezed inside. I touch the back of Rose’s hand.
“Look,” I whisper.
It’s a list. A list like ours, but written out all together, the letters strung out like rope, like a length of silver string. It starts by the mouth of the tunnel and climbs the walls like a vine to reach the other side. I point at the words running along the spindly branches of the rosebush, the gnarled olive branches, the rowan berries, the stout hazel trunk, the vines of ivy circling all the other trees.
I read: “Silver, star-shaped hair clip; makeup bag (large, red, gold zipper); set of car keys (dog-charm key ring); reading glasses (purple); hairpins (approx. fifteen); delicate gold bracelet with tiny charms.”
Rose’s makeup bag. My nana’s keys. My mom’s glasses.
I rub my bare wrist, the weight of the ghost of my bracelet still heavy around it.
Hazel continues to read when I falter. “Two tarnished teaspoons; packet of cigarettes; blue plastic lighter; three earring backs; human blood; four hearts.”
The tunnel is bright but still we shiver. I know we all recognize these as things we have lost. Things we’ve sacrificed to find what we needed. But was it enough?
My eyes are drawn again to the last item that Hazel read out. Four hearts. Rose and Hazel, me and Rowan. Have I lost my heart? I wonder. Not all losses are bad, Rowan said last night. How big of a sacrifice is a heart you lost willingly?
And then it occurs to me: In her diary, Laurel wrote about finding some of these things. Rose’s red makeup bag. The two tarnished teaspoons from the house at Oak Road. My charm bracelet. It’s written twice, once on the tunnel walls in my handwriting as something lost, once in the pages of a stranger’s diary as something found. I wish I understood this—how we’re linked with these three girls, with their spell and their losses and their findings. I wish I wasn’t starting to believe all this.
Hazel stops for half a second just before reaching the end of the list of lost things, and when she reads on it’s in a different voice, strained and frightened.
“Jack Kyle,” she reads, like she’s having a hard time getting the words out of her throat.
“Who?” I ask.
“Oh,” Ivy says in a very small voice.
I look to Rowan, but there is no expression on his face. He stays still, staring at the words on the wall in front of him. “That’s our dad’s name,” he says blankly.
“Hazel,” Ivy says as if in warning, but Hazel’s face is all fury.
“Where is she?” she shouts. “Ash. Where is she? Laurel and Holly. Where are they?” She flies to the mouth of the tunnel. “How the fuck do they know his name?” She storms up the side of the ditch like a sea. “Why are they doing this to us?” she shouts louder. “WHERE IS SHE?”
She bursts out of the tunnel and calls at us to follow. “She must be in one of these houses,” she says, her legs moving out of sight. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”
“Hazel, wait,” Rose calls, and she and Ivy hurry out of the tunnel after her.
In the silence of their absence, I turn to Rowan. His eyes haven’t left the wall.
“What . . .” I gesture helplessly. “What do you think this means? This list, your dad’s name?”
“I don’t know.” He barely blinks. “Every found thing requires a sacrifice, isn’t that what Ivy said?”
A list of things lost to balance out what we wanted to find. And his father’s name at the end of it.
My eyes find the words he wrote last night. They’re at eye level, red ink on black branches. Amy Aisling Kennedy. I didn’t really understand, until he told me about the fire, why he would write her name, why he’d want to find her, when he and Hazel were the ones who ran away from her. Now I almost get it. She isn’t a bad person, she’s just . . . lost. He wants her to find herself—to be the person she was always meant to be.
“They fight a lot,” he says, his eyes still on the tunnel walls. “I used to think love was just like that. I used to think they left us with our grandparents so they could go and be in love and not have these two needy children around ruining it for them. But sometimes I wonder if she didn’t keep on the move like that just to keep him away from us.”
Spellbook of the Lost and Found Page 19