PROLOGUE
That
night, everybody lost something.
Not everybody noticed.
It was a Saturday night on the cusp of summer and the air
smelled like hot wood and burning rubber, like alcohol and spit, like sweat and
tears. It was warm because of the bonfire in the middle of the field, and
because of the stolen beers, the wine coolers bought with older siblings’ IDs,
the vodka filched from stepparents’ liquor cabinets. There was the hint of a
strange sound, that some thought might have been a trapped dog howling, but
most decided was just in their imagination.
Some kept drinking, thinking this was just another night
spent in a field at the edge of town, close to that invisible line where
suburbs become countryside.
Some noticed without really understanding what they’d lost.
Some kissed each other with cake on their tongues, rainbow icing dissolving
between mouths to make new colors. Some took their schoolbooks and threw them
on the bonfire, not caring that there were still two weeks before end-of-year
exams.
Some turned around and went back home. Some forgot things
they’d always known. Others stumbled, just for a moment, not knowing that
they’d lost more than their step.
Some hung back, nervous, torn between edging closer to the
fire and calling their parents to come get them. Some slipped small pills onto
their tongues and swallowed them with soft drinks, the bubbles tickling their
throats as it all went down. Some choked on cigarette smoke even though they’d
been smoking for years. Some gripped others’ zippers in shivering fingers,
lowered jeans or hitched up skirts. Others watched from the shadows.
By the time the fire had burned down to glowing ashes and a
pile of charred wood, when everyone was dreaming deep in their own beds or
lying through wine-stained teeth to their parents or getting sick in their best
friends’ bathrooms or continuing the party in someone else’s house, apart from
the few who’d passed out where they sat, there was nothing left in the field
but the things we had lost.
OLIVE
Sunday, May 7th
Lost: Silver, star-shaped hair
clip; jacket (light green, rip in one sleeve); flat silver shoe (right, scuffed
at the toes)
Daylight
is only just touching the tips of the trees when the bonfire goes out. I am
leaning against a bale of hay upon which someone I don’t know is sleeping.
I roll my head over to look for Rose, who I was sure was
sitting, legs splayed, on the ground beside me. The grass is mostly muck at
this point, beaten down by many pairs of shoes and feet. My own feet—bare, the nails painted a shiny
metallic green that doesn’t show up in the morning darkness—are dirty. So is the rest of me.
Rose isn’t here. I call out for her but nobody answers. Not
that I expect she’ll be able to; sometime in the night she lost her voice from
shouting over the music, from singing along to really bad songs and from all
the crying.
Getting
ready to go out last night, Rose told me, “Our plan for the evening is to get
excessively drunk and then cry.” She swiped her lashes with another layer of
mascara, which seemed fairly unwise, given the aforementioned plan.
“Can we make the crying optional?” I said. “My eyeliner’s
really good right now.” It had taken me twenty minutes, six cotton swabs, and
five tissues to get it even.
“Absolutely not.”
I sneaked a look at my best friend’s reflection. She
blinked to dry her mascara. It gave her a deceptively innocent air.
“I don’t know why you want to go to this thing in the first
place,” I said.
This thing was the town’s bonfire party. It’s held in May every
year. Until midnight it’s filled with sugar-hyper children stuffed dangerously
full of badly barbecued burgers threatening to throw up on the bouncy castle.
Their parents bop self-consciously to decades-old pop music blaring from rented
speakers while the teenagers—our classmates—sneak off to nearby fields to
drink.
“I told you why I want to go,” Rose said. “I plan to get
excessively drunk.”
“And then cry,” I reminded her.
“And then cry.”
“Well, you know what they say,” I said to the back of her
head. “Be careful what you wish for.”
We
slept in the field, which seemed like a good idea at the time. There is a
growing chill despite the slowly rising sun and I don’t know if it means that a
storm is coming or just that I’ve been in the same position for far too long.
I’m beginning to lose all feeling in my right shoulder, the one propped on the
prickly pile of hay.
When I look down, on one bare and dirty arm I see the
words: If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found. They’re blurry
because my eyes are blurry; it takes five blinks for me to make them out. They
run from shoulder to wrist and seem to be written in my own wobbly handwriting,
although I don’t remember writing them. When I lick a finger and rub at
an n, it doesn’t smudge.
For about as long as we’ve been friends, Rose and I have
written what we refer to as our mottos on each other’s arms. When we were
younger, they were things like You are beautiful or Carpe
diem. These days they’re in-jokes or particularly poignant quotes. We
both got detention for a week last year because of our matching block capitals
reading DO NO HARM BUT TAKE NO SHIT. I must have written this one
during the party, although when or why, I have no idea.
My head feels fuzzy. With a wince and a sigh, I drag myself
out of the last dregs of drunkenness and shakily stand up.
I take stock: I am missing a shoe (the other is half buried
in the muck beside me) and my jacket. My dress is covered in grass stains and
smells distinctly of vodka. I have the beginnings of an epic headache forming
and I seem to have lost my best friend.
“Rose!” I call. “Rose?”
The boy on the hay bale twitches in his sleep.
“Hey,” I say to him loudly. I poke his shoulder when he
doesn’t wake up. “Hey!”
The boy opens one eye and grunts. He has dirty-blond hair,
a stubbly chin, and an eyebrow piercing. I vaguely remember dancing with him
last night. He squints at me.
“Olivia?” he says hesitantly.
“Olive.” I have absolutely no idea what his name is. “Have
you seen my friend?”
“Roisín?” he says in the tone of someone who isn’t sure he’s
saying the right thing.
“Rose.”
“Olive,” he says, sitting up slowly. “Rose.”
“Yes,” I say impatiently. He’s clearly still very drunk.
“Yes, Rose, have you seen her?”
“She was crying?”
I pick up my shoe and shove it on my foot, figuring that
one shoe is still better than none. “I know. That was our plan for the evening.
Did you see where she went?”
“Your plan?”
I scan the field for any sight of her. There’s a blue denim
jacket crumpled up on the ground not far away. I take it because I’m beginning
to feel very cold.
Pale blue light spills over the trees and into the field.
My phone is dead so I don’t know what time it is, but it’s probably close to
six a.m.
I start to make my way toward the road. The boy on the hay
bale calls out to me. “Can I’ve another kiss before you go?”
I look back at him and make a face. Another kiss?
“Not a chance.”
“See you around?”
I shake my head and walk away quickly. Most of my memories
of last night seem to have disappeared with Rose.
I make my way around the field, scanning the faces of the
sleepers (trying to keep my eyes averted from the ones who clearly aren’t
sleeping). It doesn’t take long; she isn’t here. I glance behind me and see
that the boy on the hay bale appears to have disappeared, probably slumped on
the grass. I am the only person standing.
I turn around in a circle, taking in the stone wall and the
tangle of bushes surrounding the field, the fence near the empty road on the
other side, the small line of trees separating this field from the next one.
There’s someone there, almost hidden between two spindly
pines, staring at me.
It’s a boy. He’s wearing a flat cap and an old, holey
sweater that might be green or black—it’s hard to tell in the shadows. He has a lot of brown, curly hair under
that awful hat and is wearing thick, black-framed glasses. He has a hundred
freckles on his skin and a guitar slung over his back. He looks like a cross
between a farmer and a teenage Victorian chimney sweep. He is unmistakably
beautiful.
Before I have time to break his gaze, he turns and walks
away and I lose him between the trees.
I look down at myself, at my dirty dress and borrowed denim
jacket, at my one bare foot and my grass-stained legs. I could be Cinderella,
if Cinderella was a short, chubby, hungover seventeen-year-old with smudged
makeup and tangled hair. And, while I’m very glad that I don’t have a dead
father and an evil stepmother, I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to explain
my current state to my parents when I get home. I try in vain to smooth the
creases out of my dress and reach into the bird’s nest of my hair to pin it
back with the silver, star-shaped hair clip I tied it up with yesterday, but
either my tangles have eaten it or I lost it sometime in the night.
My bike is where I left it, chained to the fence by the
side of the road, but it takes me several tries to unlock it because my hands
don’t seem to want to work properly and my brain feels increasingly like it’s
trying to turn itself inside out. When I clamber on, my bare foot sticks
uncomfortably to the pedal.
I pass a grand total of three cars and one tractor on the
road into town. The clouds above me are getting very gray, almost as if the
dawn has changed its mind and wants to revert back to night. My dress blows up
in the breeze, but there’s no one around to see, so I keep both hands on the
handlebars and try to ride steadily. Under the sleeve of my borrowed denim
jacket I can see the tail end of the sentence written there: You’ll
never be found.
It comes back to me in a flash. Rose in my bedroom last night,
staring at her reflection in my vanity mirror while pouring generous measures
of cheap vodka into a bottle of Diet Coke.
She said, “If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.”
We’d drunk a fair amount of the vodka already and her words
were slightly slurred.
“At this rate,” I said to her, “the only thing we’ll lose
tonight is the contents of our stomachs.”
My prediction was accurate: Another flash of memory has me
bent over a hay bale, throwing up some unholy mixture of slightly Diet Coke–flavored vodka and the barbecued
hot dogs that we all ate on sticks, posing for pictures, holding the phallic
meat like rude children. My stomach lurches at the thought and I have to pull
over to the side of the road to retch again.
If you don’t get lost, you’ll never be found.
I cling to the low stone wall by the side of the road like
a lifeboat, and sigh. Without warning, it begins to rain. Fat drops fall on the
mess of my hair, darken my jacket, hit the dry roadside like cartoon
tears. Splat. I have to blink them out of my eyelashes. I sigh
again and drag my bike from the ditch.
I ride home through pounding rain and with a pounding
headache. Maybe it’s that I drank too much and remember too little about last
night. Maybe it’s that Rose left without me. Maybe it’s what the blond-haired
boy said about another kiss. Maybe it’s the beautiful boy I saw at the edge of
the field, looking like he’d lost something. But I feel like I might have lost
something myself, and I have no idea what it is.
Gabrielle
is a writer, teacher and designer living in Vancouver, Canada. You
can read about her books here.
She is represented by Barbara Poelle at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency.
