The Lost Coast

by Amy Rose Capetta

  “That means Imogen knew something dangerous was happening before she disappeared,” Rush says. She presses her lips together and casts a glance at Danny, a silent apology for not believing her in Imogen’s bedroom.

  June touches the shaved side of her head, which is already growing out to a stubborn, prickly length. “It means Imogen was doing magic without us.”

  “Is that really such a big deal?” Danny asks.

  “Yes,” Hawthorn says. “It’s one of the most important rules. If you want to do little bits of everyday magic by yourself, fine. A ward for one of the girls at school to keep away an ex-boyfriend is one thing. But a spell to protect five witches from the entire world?” She shakes her head. “Way too dangerous.”

  It’s more than being left out of Imogen’s spellwork, though. If Imogen was doing magic without the Grays — if she could spin something they were supposed to do together into a secret — maybe they didn’t know her as well as they thought they did.

  The Grays push through anger, confusion, disbelief, as Danny stares into the dark sunbursts. Then she looks at her bare feet, already battered from last night’s walk in the woods. “I have to go. Sorry. You’ll be fine, I guess. Imogen is keeping you safe.”

  Hawthorn shakes her head, the blink of her eyelashes bitter. “When we used her magic to set another ward, we negated the first spell.” There is a dark silence as everyone works out what this means. And then Danny says it, because, as the Grays have noted, she can’t keep anything important inside of her for long.

  “So no one is protected.”

  At the start of senior year, when Imogen Lilly showed up without her personality and with eyes like sea glass, everyone noticed.

  And then weeks went by and friendships demanded their attention and tests annexed their brains and the fear of college tugged at their collective heart. So when Imogen actually went missing, they didn’t see it.

  Not at first.

  A day off meant nothing. The second day went equally unnoticed. But as Imogen’s absences pile up, they become officially worried.

  “How long will it take before her parents admit she’s missing?” asks a girl with an online girlfriend somewhere in Montana.

  “A month,” her straight friend says. “Maybe two.”

  “Has anyone talked to her sister?”

  They track Haven down, corner her by her locker in freshman hall, and ask her the same pointed questions that half a dozen students have already asked. She sighs, twisting red hair around her finger like string. “She ran away, I guess. I don’t know. She usually stays close to me, and then I woke up and she was just . . . gone.”

  Some of the girls with bottles of water sloshing around their necks want to believe it’s true. They text each other endless possibilities.

  Maybe she went to San Francisco

  Or LA

  The Rockies?

  Tempest was never big enough to hold Imogen. They imagine her into epic new settings, a spiral of red hair and a challenge of a smile against the background of pastel Victorian row houses, neon-laced strip malls in pink and mint, mountains that rise high enough to put even the redwoods to shame.

  No matter how many lives they brew up, they can’t quite shake another vision: a headstone with her name on it, a grave with no body. That’s what happens to the people in Tempest who walk into the woods and never come back.

  On their way home from school, as the autumn days trim down shorter and shorter, Imogen’s classmates look at the redwoods out of the corners of their eyes. They’d gotten used to coexisting with these beautiful monsters. But now the students side-eye the trees as if they might grab someone.

  In the daylight they tell themselves they’re being ridiculous. Imogen was too savvy to do something as dumb as get lost in the woods — not when GPS exists. There has to be another explanation, a finger to point. And the students of Tempest High know where to point it.

  They pull the new girl aside. They drop notes in her locker, visit her when she’s frothing milk for lattes at Coffee Gods. “Be careful,” they say, looking around to make sure they’re not being overheard. “The weird girls are at it again.”

  “At what?” Danny asks, acting stupid on purpose. The Grays already have their sparkly black nails in her.

  The girls who are going out of their way to help her really don’t need this kind of denial. “They did something to that new kid, Sebastian. They did something to Imogen. They’ll get you, too.”

  “Someone is messing with Tempest,” Danny says, handing the girls their extra-hot lattes. “But it’s not the Grays.”

  She waves her nails as she dismisses them. Sparkly. Black.

  She really believes she’s one of them.

  Her funeral.

  The Grays and I only have five minutes together before classes start. We gather at the end of the hallway, where it opens up into the lawn. Lelia is a walking haze of pot smoke. Rush looks too nervous to speak. June is standing on one leg and leaning the rest of her weight on Hawthorn as they frantically try to concoct a new plan to get Imogen back, to keep us safe. Nobody looks at me directly. Nobody blames me for not finding her.

  But it’s there between us, thick as fog, even if I can’t touch it.

  “Danny, when can we meet to . . . ?” June asks, letting the question dangle.

  I shake my head. When I got home after the wards failed, Mom grounded me for the detention and the skipped class. There’s not going to be enough time for spells. Not for weeks.

  “It’s fine,” Hawthorn says, lying through her supremely white teeth. “We’re all going to be fine.” June hangs her head and groans. Lelia kicks a locker, sending a horde of sophomores scattering down the hall. Rush’s silence, which is usually so deep and peaceful, turns malignant. She stares a hole into the ground, and I wait for it to open up.

  If this is a preview of how the Grays will break up when Imogen’s gone forever, I have to stop it.

  So I start searching.

  In that sliver between day and night, between school and grounded, I go out with my dowsing rod, Lelia’s raven feather set against a long redwood stick I picked up in the woods.

  I hold out the dowsing rod, the road and trees blurring into the background. I take step after step, but the rod doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe I’m just not used to it yet. Maybe it feels wrong to wield it without the Grays around me.

  They said it’s dangerous to do magic alone, but I don’t have time to care about the rules. Of course, that might be exactly how Imogen felt right before she disappeared. I push those thoughts away, focus my entire mind to a point as small as the end of the dowsing rod, and look for the truth about what happened to Imogen.

  I look for three days in a row.

  Every day, I find Rush.

  The first time, I’m passing the Tempest Diner. I feel a prickle at the back of my neck and turn. Rush is perfectly framed in the front window, waiting for an order. Like so many people do in California, she keeps her sunglasses on — aviators tinted saltwater green. I’m busy staring when she catches sight of me. Even without her eyes to give her away, I can see her face light up. But I’m afraid to be near her without the insulation of the Grays, the safe distance they create when they’re standing between us.

  I act like I didn’t see her and hurry down the row of shops.

  The second time, she’s sitting in her car in the trailhead that leads to one of the least popular redwood hikes. The car looks abandoned at first, and my heart skids. What if she went into the woods looking for Imogen and didn’t come back? But no — she’s slouched in the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette, which I’ve never seen her do. It’s like watching someone speak a language you didn’t know they knew. She tips the ash out the window. Pulls so hard that the end lights up an angry red. Then she stubs it out, somewhere out of view. She lifts a jar of honey from the passenger seat, tips her throat. Her lips reach for amber droplets that are sliding down, down, down the glass. It’s not a black-cherry lipstick
day. Her mouth is stripped, soft pink. The droplets are stuck.

  I run away fast, as if I’ve been caught staring in her window at night.

  And then I find her in the graveyard, singing for an audience of trees. Rush’s voice is a ribbon, shiny and unspooling, leading me forward. I don’t stop until I’m up against the fence, standing behind her, the dowsing rod pointed at her back. The tips of Rush’s long dark hair reach for the ground. Her music rises.

  This is a melody I’ve never heard before. Imogen’s song was powerful but trapped. This makes me think of wind and freedom. It skips through the air like a kite, brighter than anything around it.

  This time I don’t have to run. Rush is so bound up in the music that she doesn’t even notice me.

  They met in fall, not long after school started, on a day that smelled of sweetly rotting leaves. Imogen Lilly wasn’t new in Tempest, and neither was Rachel Downing, but they were new to each other.

  Imogen had outgrown childhood friends, the ones that had been chosen for her. Rachel didn’t have time for friends. She had music. Rehearsals, recitals, dreams that were shoved full of difficult runs that woke her up with aching fingers and sweat on the back of her neck.

  She was in the cemetery that day, sitting on a headstone, playing Tchaikovsky. She had always liked him, as a composer, for the obvious reasons (his work was lively and his name tasted like almonds, both bitter and sweet) and the other reason (he was gay, which made Rachel feel a kinship she didn’t fully understand when she was twelve and more focused on whether she won first chair than figuring out who to kiss). The problem was that Tchaikovsky never completed his own cello concerto, so she was actually playing the Leonovich, based on a fractured set of bars from Tchaikovsky’s papers.

  It was murder on her hands, and she wasn’t very good at it. Or she was technically good, but Rachel knew about the huge leap between mastery and the magic that comes with playing with a piece like it matters.

  Like playing it is the difference between life and death.

  She was fretting about it when a girl in a white overall dress and a black T-shirt and the big spilling tongues of boys’ work boots came wandering out of the woods and sat astride the fence, stripping the petals off flowers and watching her play. It was nice for a few minutes, and then it was irritating.

  Rachel ripped her bow away from the strings. “How long are you going to stay?”

  “Until I’m sure you’re real.” The girl stared at Rachel, and a name came to her in a sudden burst. Imogen.

  Rachel laid her bow down in the long grass and set the cello on its side, carefully, as if she were putting it to sleep. “Why wouldn’t I be real?”

  “Sometimes I hear things in the woods,” the girl said, waving vaguely at the redwoods behind them. “It sounds like the trees are talking to each other.”

  “You don’t think it’s real?” These questions were there when Rachel opened her mouth. She didn’t have to reach for them nearly as hard as she did for fifth and seventh positions. They slid out, like notes that played themselves.

  “Ummm,” Imogen said. “Trees are just wood.”

  “So is this,” Rachel said, rapping the side of her cello with her knuckles.

  “Yeah, but you’re the one making it make that sound,” Imogen argued.

  “Maybe there are people in the woods and you can’t see them.” Rush tried to sound like an expert, because for some reason she cared if Imogen believed her. “People don’t see other people all the time. I can stand right in front of my parents and they don’t see me.”

  Imogen seemed to take this problem seriously. She devoured Rachel with her dark eyes. “You look really uncomfortable in that,” she said, pointing at literally everything Rachel was wearing.

  It sounded like a challenge, so without a word, Rachel tore the taffeta bow out of her hair, working out the stiff, tight architecture of the French braid. It left her hair rippled and loose. She took off her blouse, revealing the sigh of a loose white camisole. She left the short blue satin skirt on but kicked her jeweled black flats up so high that they looked like gleaming dark birds against the October sky.

  “Better,” Imogen said.

  Rachel had to agree. “Yeah.”

  “Your music is pretty,” Imogen said.

  Rachel sighed. She didn’t want pretty. That word was bland, and she craved something better. “I want to play like my sister,” Rachel said. “She’s in an orchestra. Actually, she plays in a lot of orchestras.”

  “Does she play the cello, like you?” Imogen asked, looking less interested in Rachel’s sister than in Rachel herself. Which was rare.

  “The clarinet,” Rachel said. “She’s going to leave someday and do a tour of the whole world, and I’m going to be stuck here. Forever. Alone.”

  “What’s your name?” Imogen asked, leaning down to kiss a flower and then taking it apart two petals at a time.

  “Rachel Downing.”

  Imogen shook her head, red curls clutching sunlight. “Nope.”

  Everything about Rachel’s proper upbringing came back to her at once. “You can’t tell someone that their name is not their name.”

  Imogen wasn’t having it. She jumped off the fence and landed inside the cemetery with a decisive crash. “It’s like those clothes you were wearing,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with them. They just don’t match you.”

  Rachel pursed her lips. She picked up the cello again, spinning out a few bars of the Tchaikovsky, her fingers rushing over the dark wood, the indents in her fingertips lighting up with a fresh sting, the notes burning so hard that Rachel almost expected them to leave scorch marks on the air. “How about that?”

  “I like it. Why can’t music be your name?” Imogen asked, twirling the idea around like it was another flower between her fingers, something to admire and then take apart. She turned back to Rachel. “But I still need something to call you.”

  Rachel thought of the heady feeling she got when she was playing a favorite bit of one of her favorite songs. When the music wasn’t flowing through her like a calm river but pushing toward a destination.

  “Rush,” she said. “You can call me Rush.”

  Imogen has been missing for ten days, and whatever I feel for Rush is clouding my ability to find her.

  I can’t imagine seeing Rush again and not talking to her. Not touching her. When we sat on Imogen’s bed together, Rush’s leg rested against my arm, two parts pressed that I’d never thought to put together. That felt like a revelation. That felt like enough.

  But enough takes up more and more space, fast.

  After the last bell rings on Monday, I avoid the Grays and take out my dowsing rod yet again. I’ve been frantically trying to graduate from babywitch into serious dowser. At first, the decision to search on my own was just practical. But now I want to find Imogen myself. I want to give her to the Grays, like a present. Then I want them to unpack her. To ask their perfect, pretty witch what the hell is going on.

  I walk over the lawn and plant myself at the very edge of the soccer field, which is maybe a weird place to start, but it feels neutral to me. No Rush-related longings. I draw the dowsing rod out from my red canvas backpack, which can barely hold any books now that it’s home to an enormous stick lined with a long, delicate raven feather.

  I hold out the dowsing rod and think about Imogen. I’ve only seen her a few times, but I remember her as if she’s carved into my brain. Taller than I am by at least four inches, tall enough that it makes her seem older than seventeen. Her body scrolling with endless curves. Her white skin offset by the exclusively black-and-white wardrobe, and a rainbow of chakra stones on her fingers, her wrists, at her neck.

  Red curls, everywhere.

  My feet start to traipse over fakely green grass and white painted lines. The dowsing rod is tugging me back toward school. There are almost no students left, but the few who are are definitely staring.

  I stare back.

  I let them see exactl
y how little I care.

  The flame on my life has been turned up, and what I care about boils down to three things: Keep Mom happy. Keep the Grays safe. Find Imogen.

  The dowsing rod stops, twitches, turns me around a corner into freshman hall. I see a girl with red hair standing with her forehead resting against a locker, eyes closed, and for a second I think I did it.

  “Imogen?” I ask.

  She spins fast, her hair slicing the air, eyes panicked. They’re also perfectly clear, without the mist that clouds Imogen’s. This is Haven, Imogen’s sister. I realize I’m standing in the middle of the hall with a dowsing rod in front of me. There’s no hiding the weird right now. Haven swallows so hard that I can hear the dry, painful sound.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  I could lie to her. But it seems like she lives in a house where people tell her less than the truth all the time. Or maybe they only tell her the truth according to the Lillys, and that’s nothing like mine.

  “I’m a dowser,” I say. This is the first time I’ve said it to anyone but the Grays, and I thought it would come out sounding weak or ridiculous, but it feels solid in my mouth. “It means I find things that other people can’t.”

  Haven looks less sickly than she did the last time I saw her, some of the purple swept away from beneath her eyes. They skitter up and down the length of the dowsing rod. It’s still pointing at her. I lower it slightly. “You’re looking for my sister, aren’t you?”

  I check all around us, like admitting it in front of the wrong person might be dangerous. But we’re alone. “I need to find her.”

  Haven sinks against her locker as if she’s melting. “Why do you want her?”

  It’s a good question. One I’ve asked myself a dozen times, always finding a different answer. Because our friends are in trouble. Because it’s in my nature to find things. Because I want to kiss her maybe-ex-girlfriend. “If I was missing, that’s what I’d want someone to do for me.”