Which terrified me.
To know a girl was one, I had to sense it. Something would compel me to stop over a certain page online or in the newspaper microfiche in the library. There’d be a humming in my ears, a chorus strengthened by a new, added voice. Then the warmth, below my heart, gaining heat until I had to take off the pendant or else it would burn me and leave a lopsided almost-circle of a mark. The edges of the room would swim with shadows, and those shadows had arms and legs and mouths that opened. They had shoulder blades and they had elbows and they had knees. They came out when I discovered another, to crane their shadowy necks around corners, to see who it might be.
This was how I found Natalie Montesano, 17, of Edgehaven, Vermont, missing for the last seven years. Or, I should say, this was how she found me.
ICE STORM WREAKS HAVOC ON MOUNTAIN ROADS; LOCAL GIRL, 17, MISSING
Jan. 3, 2006—EDGEHAVEN—Friday’s heavy snow turned to ice on Saturday and left treacherous driving conditions throughout the high-elevation mountain roads. There were reports of power outages across the county. In addition, in connection to a car accident on Plateau Road late Saturday, a female Edgehaven Central High School senior, 17, was reported missing.
Witnesses say the girl had been a passenger in a car that collided with the guardrail, but she could not be located in the wreckage. “We can’t help but hope someone came along and pulled her from the car. But she hasn’t been checked into any local hospital and her family hasn’t heard a word,” Sheriff Arnold F. Wymes said in a statement to the public on Monday. “If she wandered out on her own . . . it’s not likely she’d have survived the elements.” A search is still under way.
The public is asked to report any information to the Edgehaven Police Department. The northern pass of Plateau Road is closed to nonemergency traffic until further notice.
— 22 —
THE new girl, Natalie, had inherited the eyes. The ones on her mother’s side, paler than a pair of eyes should be. They looked to be coated in a thick layer of ice, and only if you chipped through would you find the person they belonged to, the girl shivering beneath.
These eyes were exactly like her mother’s, who was serving two consecutive life sentences at a women’s correctional facility four hours away, and would never get out, not in her lifetime.
Natalie had not once gone to visit the prison to look into the frigid eyes of the woman responsible for bringing her into the world. Even if those eyes would be held back behind a wall of clouded glass lathered on both sides by the links of the metal cage that encased it. Natalie was afraid it would be like looking off into the far distance, into a future she didn’t want to see. Like mother like daughter, people always said. They assumed, but they should have asked, because looks are deceiving sometimes. Eyes can be.
I first saw Natalie’s eyes for myself on a cold January morning while I was combing out the rat’s nest of my hair. That was the first day of the new semester, and I had to get to school.
I was looking in the mirror, trying to get the comb in and the knots out, but the knots had caught themselves on the teeth of the comb, getting more tangled the more I tried to pull it through.
I’d had the dream again in the night. Fiona Burke hadn’t been there. I didn’t see Abby, either. But there’d been someone in the smoky house with me, up a set of stairs, around a corner, a shadow that leaked out from the other shadows, reaching out one beckoning, outstretched hand.
I’d woken in my bed as if I’d spent the night clawing my way up a riverbank—drenched through my clothes, muscles sore, hair tangled in sweat—though the dream had been very dry. Dry and hot, as if somewhere the fire was still burning.
I took one last look at my tangled head in the mirror and decided to do something about it. With the comb still wedged in, I found the scissors, the good ones not made for cutting paper, and I just started chopping around the comb, snipping shorter than I meant to, and then needing to cut shorter still to make up for a crooked spot. The haircut was DIY, it was daring, and it brought out my eyes.
Someone else’s eyes.
I flinched. Something had happened to my face. The mirror was showing a second face projected over my own. Her face hovered, lit up like a round and glowing moon.
I noticed a nose shorter than my nose, thicker eyebrows than mine, and arching far higher than mine could arch, the straight line of the mouth, just like in the picture, and the eyes, mostly the eyes, pale and unsettling and absolutely recognizable from that photo I’d found of her, the one used in some of the newspaper articles. Eyes so cold, they could cut your throat.
My hand lost its grip on the scissors and then we were watching them fall into the sink, the girl and I, blades spread open, and then a mouth also opened—my mouth, hidden behind the girl’s—and a sound emerged, startling us both.
I guess I’d yelled something, because my mom came running and was soon in the doorway, one leg of her black- patterned tights on and the other dangling from her hip like a shriveled extra limb. She wore her usual button-down work shirt to cover most of her tattoos, but the buttons were gaping open to show the bare, perfectly clear skin of her chest. She had no tattoos there, so she seemed even more naked.
She buttoned her shirt quickly and said, “Way to give me a heart attack, Lauren! I thought you slipped in the tub.”
I shook my head and waited, waited for her to see the face in the mirror. Natalie’s face.
All she noticed was the haircut. “Wow,” she said. “I mean that: wow. Wanted something different for your first day back at school, huh?”
I was still waiting.
She touched my hair and fluffed it out at one side. She clucked her tongue, cocked her head, then smiled. “I love it,” she said. “It’s killer. I hope you don’t hate it, because it’ll take years to grow the length back. Is that why you screamed?”
She didn’t see the face.
“I saw . . .” My arm, threatening to give me up, was already pointing at the mirror. I saw, past tense, and was still seeing someone else’s face. I was wearing a mask made out of her skin and features and I couldn’t get it to come off.
“. . . nothing,” I finished. “I thought I saw something, but it was nothing.”
“You okay?” my mom asked.
I turned back to the mirror and realized she was gone. The new girl, Natalie Montesano, gone as she was in real life. The face staring back from the glass was my own face—and, because my reflection was clean, I saw the deep and shocking truth of what I looked like: I’d given myself a stupendously unattractive haircut.
My mom had asked if I was okay and, for the first time, I answered her honestly. “I don’t know.”
Her gaze held mine in the mirror. “What is it?” she asked my reflection, as if it would be easier to talk to than to flesh-and-blood me. And, you know, maybe it would have been. Maybe my mirror-self could have told her about the dreams, still smoking in the backmost rooms of my mind, or about the voice that sometimes sounded so much like a girl I knew a long time ago, if that could even be possible, the voice that called me names and needled at me to not tell my mom a thing. The voice that stayed hushed now, listening.
Maybe my reflection could have told her that a wriggling thought was dislodging itself in my mind as we stood in the morning-lit bathroom, and this new thought was telling me that if I opened the shower curtain and looked in the tub I’d find one of them: Fiona. Or Abby. Or Natalie. Or, worse, all three of them together, a tangle of shadowy legs and vapory arms, a huddle of heat and smoke and the dream’s deafening darkness. I’d pull open that shower curtain and show my mom and she’d be the one to scream.
Of course I wouldn’t tell my mom. Once you tuck one secret inside yourself, digging out a little pocket to hold it, you’ll find the pocket can be stretched to fit another. And another, and another . . . until you’ve got yourself a whole collection.
So, instead, I searched for an excuse and found a good one: “Jamie and me,” I said. “I think we’re
over.”
She made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat; I knew she liked Jamie, but all her loyalties had to be with me, since I was her daughter. “I figured,” she said. “I haven’t seen him around in a while. I knew you’d tell me when you were ready to tell me. So you’re nervous about seeing him in school today, right?”
I shrugged.
“All right,” she said. “We don’t have to talk about it. Just tell me one thing. Should I be mad at him? Did he do something I should know about?”
“No,” I admitted. “It’s all me.”
She kept the judgment off her face, a skill she wouldn’t even need to practice for when she finished her psychology degree and became a therapist or a school counselor or whatever she decided to do after graduation. She stepped closer to me and reached out an arm to touch the nape of my neck, playing with the chopped pieces of hair back there. “Want me to even out the back a little for you?”
I nodded and let her keep touching me, even though every finger on my scalp and every brush against my neck felt wrong all of a sudden, weird. It wasn’t so much her. Again, it was me. All me. My skin was tightening against intrusions. My body was pulling in on itself like a knot tied over a knot tied over a knot that would never come undone.
It took my mom another ten minutes to fix my haircut, since she insisted on straightening out the sides and finessing the front. By the time she left the bathroom, my hair looked far more stylish than I felt, like I’d gone and gotten it cut on purpose for the first day back from winter break. But beneath the hair, the skin of my face had hardened to ice. I was alone again. At last.
I leaped across the bathroom and did the expected. It’s what you see in the movies when the heroine fears someone is hiding behind the closed shower curtain and pulls it aside in a panicked flurry . . . only to reveal an empty tub and no serial killer lurking with a glinting knife from the kitchen. The heroine will sigh in relief. She’ll laugh at her silly, overactive imagination, leave the room unharmed, and the scene will end.
But the difference was this: When I pulled aside the shower curtain, the tub wasn’t empty. Fiona Burke leaned against the far wall, her legs straddling the faucet, her glossy mouth in a small smirk. Abby Sinclair’s feet—one muddied and bare, one in a mangled flip-flop—were dirtying up the white bottom of the tub. And the newest girl, Natalie Montesano, was hiding behind a second curtain, but this one was made of her long hair.
I saw them for an extended moment, unable to react, as if my mind had been shoved full of socks. Then I blinked and the tub was empty and clean and the lost girls were gone and my mom was calling from the kitchen that I’d have to eat breakfast, now, or I’d be late for school.
— 23 —
I saw Jamie when he got to school, but he didn’t see me. I had AP Lit first period, but when I caught a glimpse of Jamie’s jacket—that sludge-green peacoat I gave him—and his dark mop of hair coming around the corner of the social-studies hallway, I took off up the stairs.
Seeing him, something caught in my throat. Regret maybe. Or confusion. I’d told my mom it was over, but we’d never officially broken up—at least, Jamie didn’t know I’d made it official.
Needing to get away from him, I made my way up the north stairwell—past another junior, who said, “Lauren, what happened to your hair?” and another who said, “It looks awesome!”—and into the safety of the north bathroom, in the hallway near the art classrooms, where I could close myself into a stall and breathe.
When I finally emerged and went to wash my hands, I realized I’d been followed. I was alone in the girls’ room, or thought I was alone, when I heard this:
I didn’t mean to do it.
That’s what I thought she said. Really what I heard were those whispered words slurred into one long word:
Ididntmeantodoit.
I doubled back. I checked all the stalls until I came to the third one from the right, the only one that had its door fully closed. I pushed on this door and it didn’t swing open; it was locked from the inside. Most stalls in our school bathrooms didn’t lock anymore. The stall doors had to be held in place while someone was inside with an outstretched leg or a wildly reaching hand.
Here I was now, outside an impossibly locked stall door, reaching to open it.
The stall was as green as a lime left to grow mold in a fridge drawer. It was cold, not warm.
“Hello?” I said against it.
What I heard was . . . a hiss. The hissing wasn’t her breathing. I knew it was only the old radiators against the far wall, the spit of the steam heat.
I tried to push the stall door again, but it held in place. I bent down, but no feet poked out below.
I climbed the toilet in the neighboring stall and balanced up on the point of one toe, bracing myself against the shared wall, to dangle over. No one was hiding inside, though the toilet looked stopped up with paper. I assumed the stall was only locked because the toilet was out of order.
The last bell rang, meaning class had started already, and I should have been in my chair getting ready to discourse on Shakespeare. I hopped off the toilet and grabbed the backpack I’d left on the sink. I was almost at the exit when I heard the voice again. Heard it distinctly. Heard it in my ears and heard its echo through my bones.
Lauren, wait.
I did. The bell stopped ringing. Again I found myself edging closer to the third stall from the right.
“Natalie?” I said softly. “Is that you?”
It was then that she knocked in response. Her knuckles rapped from the inside of the stall in quick succession.
Even though I’d willed it to happen, it startled me. I jumped backward and almost took out a sink.
She was in that stall—or something was. An entity without visible feet was trying to communicate with me. To let me know she didn’t mean to do . . . whatever it was she did.
I could sense her inside, willing me closer. I didn’t speak, and she didn’t speak, and when I took two steps in her direction, a foot could be seen dropping down, finding floor. A scuffed snow boot, once pale blue but dirtied and streaked with soot. A second boot followed, more blackened than the first.
Time distended into one long, unbreakable moment that broke anyway when the girls’ room door banged open, slamming against the wall, and a group of three freshmen clattered in, crowding me.
At the same time, the door, third from the right, slowly swung itself open, creaking as it went, revealing an empty stall. No soot-covered snow boots. No girl.
The freshmen tittered a little, bowing their heads and not making eye contact—as freshmen do around upperclassmen and I don’t even know why—and then one of them got brave and spoke up. She was the smallest of the three, brown glowing skin and shiny dark hair held tight against her head with two yellow clips, and she said, “You cut off all your hair.” She flushed when I turned and looked at her, but still stared at my head.
“Rain!” one of her friends said, admonishing her.
“I like it,” Rain said, ignoring her two friends but talking so fast it could barely be made out. “I mean it brings out your eyes or, I don’t know, something.”
“Thanks,” I said. This was the same girl who’d bothered me in the library, but now I had my eyes on the stall. I had my heart lodged in my throat and a whisper of a voice in my ear. The voice wasn’t Fiona Burke’s; it didn’t snap at me, it wasn’t cruel. And it wasn’t Abby—she was staying quiet, giving this new girl a turn to speak. It was Natalie Montesano, whose face had lodged itself over mine just that morning. I was hearing voices, seeing phantom feet. I didn’t care what some freshman thought of my haircut.
“I’m Rain,” she said patiently. “We used to be on the same bus? You look—”
“You should go,” I said. I almost growled it, and I don’t know why it came out that way, like I was one of those bullies who’d demand lunch money or an iPhone and humiliate someone simply because she was younger than me. I fit the part, maybe today, with my
asymmetrical haircut that toughened up the angles of my face and my red eyes from the thrashing I’d done in my sleep and the insistence, the deep need, to be alone again because someone was trying to tell me something important.
“Oh, okay,” Rain said, lowering her head.
“The sink’s broken in the art room, so we just needed to fill this up,” another freshman said, and I noticed now that she was carrying a bucket. “Ms. Raicht said we could. She told us to come in here. She said . . .”
“Just do it,” I said, like I ruled the girls’ room and commanded the sinks, “and hurry up.”
They filled the bucket quickly and were heading out the door when Rain turned back and held it open, pausing to say this to me: “Are you feeling okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”
I looked her in the eyes for the first time and wondered if she might be able to see the girl in the stall, too. If I pointed her out.
Then she said, “I had the flu over break and I was so dizzy and I puked and everything. Do you need me to take you to the nurse?”
I was about to tell her I was fine and she should leave me alone when a person shoved past her into the bathroom and said, “Someone said you were up here. Nice haircut.”
Jamie walked in and leaned up against the far sink.
“You’re not allowed in here,” Rain said to him. “You’ll get in trouble.”
Jamie glanced at her, then said to me: “Who is this girl?”
“Nobody.” It was true. She wasn’t even close to sixteen yet, let alone 17, so I didn’t have to bother about worrying over her. I was staring right at her and blanking on her name.
It took her a few moments to sense that she should leave. The door slammed closed, and Jamie stepped closer, as if we were alone, but we weren’t. It was impossible now to be alone with me because I was always being followed. He stepped close to me, and then I stepped away, and I think that’s when it began to dawn on him.